‘Our Pioneering Agentic Process Automation Automates Mission-Critical Workflows Across Multiple Systems and Departments’: Ankur Kothari, Co-Founder and COO, Automation Anywhere

As artificial intelligence reshapes the future of work, Automation Anywhere is steering enterprises toward a new era of intelligent automation. In this exclusive conversation, Ankur Kothari, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Automation Anywhere, shares with Anannya Saraswat, Reporter (Public Sector & Leadership) at APAC Media and CXO Media, how the company’s Agentic Process Automation (APA) is helping businesses move beyond traditional RPA to AI-driven agents that can reason, adapt, and deliver outcomes at scale. 

Ankur discusses the role of AI agents, the importance of technologies like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), recent product innovations, and how Automation Anywhere is driving AI adoption in India and other emerging markets.

With AI adoption accelerating across industries, how is Automation Anywhere enabling business users to create, interact with, and deploy AI agents using natural language and low-code tools?

As AI adoption accelerates, Automation Anywhere is enabling enterprises to move beyond task-based automation toward full business transformation. Our Agentic Process Automation (APA) System—powered by the industry’s first Process Reasoning Engine (PRE)—enables business users to create, deploy, and interact with AI agents using natural language and low-code interfaces. These AI agents go far beyond static workflows. They reason across applications, learn from context, and drive autonomous decisions, helping teams scale complex, cross-functional operations with speed and precision. 

Enterprises are using our APA system to reduce manual effort, accelerate time-to-value, and build more agile, responsive organizations. Whether modernizing customer support, transforming finance operations, or streamlining IT, our agentic solutions deliver measurable impact. With enterprise-grade governance and AI embedded at the core, we’re helping customers confidently chart a path to the Autonomous Enterprise, where AI agents power growth and continuous innovation at scale.

With growing interest in AI agents and automation, how is Automation Anywhere differentiating itself in a crowded market?

Automation Anywhere is pioneering Agentic Process Automation (APA), which moves beyond traditional RPA to handle complex, dynamic processes. While AI agents like Microsoft Copilot focus on individual productivity tasks, our platform automates mission-critical workflows across multiple systems and departments.

Our key differentiator is the Process Reasoning Engine (PRE), which is built on an understanding of 400 million processes running annually on our platform. This gives our AI agents a unique ability to autonomously plan, reason through complex tasks, and continuously improve. Our comprehensive APA system helps enterprises move from 20-40% automation rates to 80%+, transforming them into Autonomous Enterprises and delivering measurable outcomes at enterprise scale.

What is your current go-to-market strategy, and how are you positioning Automation Anywhere for growth in emerging markets?

Our go-to-market strategy combines platform innovation with ecosystem-driven growth, positioning APA as the enabler for autonomous enterprise transformation. We focus on delivering tangible business outcomes through our unified automation platform while building comprehensive partner networks.

In emerging markets, particularly India, we have adopted a multi-pronged approach targeting four key segments: Global Capability Centers (GCCs), Indian corporates, IT service providers, and the public sector. This strategic focus leverages India’s position as both a major market and innovation hub, with over 60% of our workforce and core product development (including PRE) based out of India. Our growth strategy emphasizes skill, readiness, and community building through APA certifications (56,000+ completed), university programs, and Bot Games competitions (a global developer competition and learning initiative by Automation Anywhere designed to help developers, business users, and automation enthusiasts improve their skills in automation).

The approach combines platform innovation with an expanding partner ecosystem and market proximity, creating a sustainable automation landscape. By investing deeply in high-growth regions while maintaining a strong local presence for both development and delivery, we are positioning ourselves to capture emerging market opportunities while driving transformation and revenue growth.

How important are ecosystem partnerships in scaling your solutions?

Ecosystem partnerships serve as our fundamental strategy to scale APA globally. We collaborate with cloud leaders like AWS and Google Cloud to ensure seamless, scalable deployments. Strategic consulting partners, including PwC, have co-developed Agentic Solutions that integrate deep domain expertise with our platform’s capabilities. These partnerships help enterprises accelerate transformation by reducing implementation time and tailoring solutions to business-specific needs. The partners also provide access to pre-built, outcome-driven automation assets, enhancing our customers’ ROI. Beyond co-creation, our partners serve as amplifiers, helping us extend APA into new verticals and geographies. 

With shared delivery models, industry-focused blueprints, and global reach, these alliances ensure that our innovations deliver real business impact at scale. Whether it is banking, healthcare, or manufacturing, our ecosystem empowers organizations to unlock the full value of AI-powered automation.

What are some recent product innovations that showcase your commitment to making automation more accessible and outcome-driven? How does the company’s new Process Reasoning Engine (PRE) enable faster automation for enterprises?

Building on RPA, our platform now orchestrates AI agents, bots, and people to reimagine work execution. Two major innovations drive this: pre-built Agentic Solutions and our Process Reasoning Engine (PRE).

Agentic Solutions delivers domain-specific automation for areas like accounts payable, allowing business users to interact with AI agents using natural language. PRE, the industry’s first engine of its kind, enables AI agents to reason through complex workflows and execute tasks based on business intent. It delivers 3x faster automation and 60% more resiliency, redefining enterprise AI.

Together, these innovations lower the barrier to automation, improve time-to-value, and help companies move from proof-of-concepts to scalable transformation, making automation intelligent and impactful.

What are the limitations of traditional automation methods? How can agentic AI/Agentic Process Automation (APA) play a role in mitigating these limitations?

Traditional automation methods like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) have been instrumental in laying the foundation for digital transformation. RPA excels at automating repetitive, rules-based tasks and has delivered significant cost and efficiency gains across industries. However, its limitations arise when processes become more dynamic, require judgment, or span multiple systems with unstructured data.

Agentic Process Automation (APA) expands RPA by introducing AI agents that can reason, adapt, and act autonomously—without needing rigid rules or constant human oversight. Powered by AI and natural language, agentic solutions can navigate complex processes, learn from context, and collaborate with humans in real time. This marks a shift from static automation to dynamic orchestration—where agents drive outcomes, not just tasks. By extending the value of automation into new frontiers, APA is helping businesses operate with more agility, intelligence, and scale—unlocking the next era of the Autonomous Enterprise. 

How important is Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in the overall context of business automation?  

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is pivotal in enabling trustworthy, context-aware AI within enterprise automation. RAG enhances AI agent decision-making by grounding responses in real-time enterprise data, reducing hallucinations, and boosting accuracy. 

With Automation Anywhere’s AI Agent Studio, part of the APA System, we’ve enabled developers to build domain-specific agents that dynamically retrieve enterprise knowledge – from supply chain data to compliance logs—before executing agentic workflows. 

Through our integration with Amazon Q Business, users can now interact with Automation Anywhere CoPilot in natural language. For example, a user might ask CoPilot to identify the fastest distributor; the agent uses RAG to retrieve relevant data, reason over it, and act. RAG also powers our Process Reasoning Engine (PRE), enabling agents to operate with greater autonomy and precision—transforming generative AI from a passive assistant into an active enterprise decision-maker.

Many enterprises complain that AI agents are flawed, expensive, and come with inherent biases. How can these issues be tackled?

Tackling AI agent limitations like bias, cost, and complexity requires robust design and governance. Our Agentic Solutions embed enterprise-grade security, including data masking and audit trails, and are pre-trained on regulatory frameworks like HIPAA to ensure trust and compliance. To control costs, our open architecture allows customers to select their preferred LLMs.

Our Process Reasoning Engine (PRE) enables AI agents to continuously improve through dynamic self-reflection and contextual awareness. By operating in both autonomous and assisted modes, our agents strike the right balance between automation and human oversight. The result is reliable, scalable, and cost-effective automation that minimizes risk and maximizes enterprise value.

Which sectors are seeing the fastest adoption of automation paired with AI? Can you share some use cases where AI agents or intelligent automation significantly transformed business processes or customer experience?

Financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing are leading the charge in adopting AI-powered automation. For example, in manufacturing, Adani deployed 220+ automation solutions to streamline financial reporting and compliance at ABEX processes. In legal services, Masin uses a Legal AI Agent to streamline case management and accelerate document review, boosting productivity and case-handling efficiency. In healthcare, APA supports patient data handling, compliance, and operational scalability.

Beyond core processes, industries are now using AI agents to enhance customer experience. Reducing ticket volume by up to 40%, enabling 24×7 operations, and ensuring faster resolution times. These are not just efficiency gains; they represent a fundamental shift, from RPA to APA, in how work is orchestrated. Agentic automation is no longer a back-office tool; it is a frontline enabler, transforming both user experience and enterprise agility.

How are you planning to increase the adoption of the APA/agentic automation solutions in India, and what will be the contribution of the top 3 sectors in this adoption?

India is core to our global growth, and we are witnessing significant interest in APA adoption across four verticals: Global Capability Center (GCC), corporates, IT providers, and the public sector. 

We have already achieved over 70% GenAI adoption among Indian customers and aim for 90% in the next two years. The top sectors fueling this growth are financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing. In banking, our solutions have reduced processing time by up to 60%, enhanced compliance, and created scalable automation frameworks. In healthcare and pharma, APA helps manage regulatory workflows, improve patient data management, and reduce manual errors. In manufacturing, APA offers distinct advantages, such as factory-ready AI Agents designed to automate dynamic, cross-functional workflows across ERP, MES, and quality systems. 

Beyond sector-specific implementations, we are building the talent foundation through specialized training programs, creating future-ready teams. With India as both a delivery and innovation hub, we are scaling adoption by combining local expertise with global capabilities.

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