What we can infer from UiPath’s purchase of Re:infer

UiPath’s acquisition of former HFS OneOffice Hot Vendor Re:infer broadens immediate access to communications mining and automation for customer support and customer experience teams. But longer-term ambitions focus on unstructured document processing, a differentiated offer for enterprise-wide process and task mining, and voice-driven support for attended automation.

We named Re:infer an HFS Hot Vendor in 2019. It came out of the same stable as Alphabet’s AI poster child Deepmind, namely University College London’s (UCL’s) AI lab. Re:infer mines, monitors, and extracts context and meaning from the unstructured data found in a range of business communications, including email, chat, SMS, surveys, and service desk notes, tickets, calls, and cases. It applies artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to automate the interpretation of messages in real-time.  In doing this it turns unstructured communications data into actionable, structured data to trigger process automation in application programming interfaces (APIs), robotic process automation (RPA), enterprise resource planning (ERP), content management, and customer relationship management systems, reducing the risk of errors in manual processes and accelerating response.

Re:infer-powered platform offers an opportunity to improve customer experience

Combining Re:infer with the UiPath automation platform offers the opportunity for developers to build automations focused on responding better to customer requests, concerns, and complaints identified by Re:infer’s technology while supporting operational scalability in environments such as contact centers, with UiPath’s suite.

Customers say the technology offers deep operational insights enabling them to identify the reality of procedures and process flows with significantly less training data than rival solutions. UiPath was already a technology partner for Re:infer, alongside SS&C Blue Prism and Symphony. The leadership teams already had a working relationship and deep understanding of one another’s technology, allowing them to hit the ground running post-acquisition. Re:infer had a range of professional services and consulting partners but that ecosystem is significantly boosted by becoming part of the UiPath universe.

UiPath will initially offer Re:infer as a stand-alone solution focusing on email, a huge market that UiPath’s global sales machine can immediately understand. Details will be announced in September at UiPath’s Las Vegas FORWARD event.

Unstructured data-handling capabilities set for integration in new products

It will make sense for UiPath to integrate Re:infer with its Document Understanding product, extending UiPath’s capabilities in handling unstructured data from various sources, including email, chat, and SMS.

Going forward, UiPath is ready to combine elements of its 2019 acquisition Process Gold with Re:infer, integrating communications mining with process and task mining. The resulting discovery offering could combine document, process, and task mining, extending the range of explorable customer journeys and service use cases. There is no current timeline attached to that combination.

Longer term, Re:infer’s NLP capabilities offer the opportunity to create voice-driven experiences for employees and RPA bots in attended automations. The ambition here would be for an employee to simply say out loud what they would like a bot to do for them and have it respond, much like a workplace Amazon Alexa.

Re:infer is UiPath’s fourth acquisition, following Process Gold and Stepshot in 2019 and API integration platform Cloud Elements in 2021.

The Bottom Line: Email focus makes immediate sense, but UiPath must integrate and invest wisely and at pace to deliver additional value with this M&A.

UiPath’s latest acquisition offers immediate value for customer support and customer experience leaders. Re:infer reads and understands incoming support emails and can automatically trigger the creation of a new case or add to an existing one. But it remains to be seen if enterprises need propositions such as a Swiss Army knife combination of communication, process, and tasks mining. Many businesses have already invested in process intelligence tools, and many are less than satisfied with those investments (resulting in low Net Promoter Scores (NPS) for the category in our SaaS XXV reports).

The voice-controlled attended automation offering we describe above may have legs, as it offers faster, lower effort ways of working. But here, success will depend on how quickly UiPath is prepared to go. Krista Software already offers NLP in automation solutions, and Amazon offers an Alexa for business (though it’s not aimed anywhere near attended automations… just yet).