- Release Notes
Automation Cloud release notes
November 2024
The classic left rail displays all services you have access to, depending on your user persona and role, in one single list. The new left rail categorizes the same list of available services into Build, Discover, and Operate groups, while allowing you to effortlessly personalize that list with favorites.
As such, in our continuous efforts to enhance your user experience, we have decided to remove the classic left rail, and let you benefit solely from the redesigned left rail from now on.
For a comprehensive description of the new navigation experience, refer to The left rail.
We're excited to announce that Context Grounding is now generally available (GA). Since the preview release, we have added numerous capabilities for enhanced GenAI experiences.
New UI for index management and governance
Context Grounding is now available in Automation CloudTM Admin, in the AI Trust Layer panel. The user interface allows you to create new indexes, sync data to existing indexes, or delete them. You also have more visibility across the indexes available in your tenant. You can see the data source type and location, the update time, and last query time.
Context Grounding supports folder-level permissions within tenants. The granular access control allows you to better manage information access across different teams and departments of your enterprise. This enhances data security and compliance by ensuring sensitive information is only accessible to authorized personnel.
In Automation CloudTM you can now subscribe to receive notifications from Context Grounding when an ingestion job starts, completes, and/or fails.
Context Grounding in Autopilot for everyone
Context Grounding is available as a data source in Autopilot for everyone. Configure Context Grounding indexes, then select the index to be used in your Autopilot build from the AI Trust Layer admin panel.
Support for Integration Service connections
Context Grounding supports the direct ingestion and querying of data from the most common document repositories, allowing you to preserve data governance and version control. We offer connection support for the following Integration Service connectors: Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint.
New advanced Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques
Context Grounding uses the following RAG techniques, now available per index:
- Multiple extraction methods to preserve the integrity of the ingested document.
- Topical chunking to better preserve context and ensure more relevant, efficient retrievals.
- Semantic (vector), hybrid, contextual, and query tethering search algorithms to handle the most complex, high-volume queries.
Expanded unstructured document format support
While in preview, Context Grounding offered support for three file types: PDF, JSON, and CSV. We've now extended support to include DOCX, TXT, and XLS files.
Updated GenAI activities
We've also made some changes to the UiPath GenAI activities supporting Context Grounding. Read more about these updates in the UiPath GenAI Activities release notes.
Multi-region and HA/DR support
We offer multi-geographical support for Context Grounding. The service is hosted in the European Union, Japan, and Unites States regions of Automation Cloud.
This release also includes support for High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities, data migration and deletion controls, alerting, and security tests.
HIPAA compliance
Context Grounding is HIPAA compliant. The service can support healthcare and life sciences automation use-cases with documents that may contain Personal Health Information, such as medical record summarization, ICD code matching, and claims processing.
Licensing
Now that Context Grounding is GA, this changes how AI units are consumed in the connected products. Context Grounding consumes AI units for searches or RAG as it is executed through GenAI Activities and Autopilot for everyone:
- When using Context Grounding with GenAI Activities, an additional AIU is charged. When you use the Content Generation activity without enabling Context Grounding, the run execution cost is 1 AI unit. When you enable Context Grounding, the cost is 2 AI units. For details, see the AI units section in the AI Center user guide.
- Autopilot activities are measured through Autopilot actions, not AI units. When you use Autopilot for everyone, with or without a Context Grounding query, the cost remains the same: 1 Autopilot action. For more information on Autopilot actions, see the Autopilot licensing page.
AI units consumption associated to the use of GenAI Activities is now displayed on the Consumables tab of the organization- and tenant-level Licensing page. This means that you have access to the number of AI units consumed by GenAI activities per month, as well as in total for the duration of your plan.
For more information, see the GenAI Activities documentation.
First cross-service role
We are thrilled to announce that the Tenant Administrator role in Automation Cloud is now generally available.
This new cross-service role enables greater efficiency in delegating responsibilities, as users, groups, robot accounts, or external applications can manage all resources within a designated tenant.
If you are an Organization Administrator, you can now delegate responsibilities such as role assignment, licensing management, and service provisioning to a Tenant Administrator, decreasing concerns over undesired access to other resources within your organization.
Benefits of the Tenant Administrator role
If you are curious about the benefits of the new Tenant Administrator role, here they are:
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Increased operational efficiency: This new role decreases the time necessary to set up the admin for tenant-level operations.
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Reduced workload for Organization Administrators: It reduces the pressure on Organization Administrators.
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Enhanced security: Greater control over access rights due to fewer users harboring maximum permissions.
We are excited to share that the Tenant Administrator role is just the first tenant-level role we have introduced. Our intention moving forward is to provide the ability to manage cross-service roles from a centralized location.
Known limitations
The Tenant Administrator role is currently affected by the following known limitations, which we are actively working on overcoming:
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Only the following services support the Tenant Administrator role: Orchestrator (includes Actions, Processes, Integration Service), Data Service, Document Understanding, Task Mining, Test Manager. The rest of the tenant-level services are currently not supported, and users with only the Tenant Administrator role cannot access these services.
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The Tenant Administrator cannot access organization-level menus from the interface.
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On the Admin > Tenants > Services screen, the Tenant Administrator can view enabled services, but cannot add or remove services.
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On the Admin > Tenants > Manage access screen, the Tenant Administrator can view tenants they do not administer. However, if the Tenant Administrator accesses these tenants, they cannot perform any actions.
For more details on the new Tenant Administrator role and how to assign it, refer to Tenant-level roles.
Check access, our feature for enhanced visibility and control over roles and permissions at both service and tenant levels, is now GA.
The functionality enables Organization Administrators or Tenant Administrators to easily review the roles and permissions for users, groups, robot accounts, or external applications within a tenant or service. Moreover, it is now possible to export all the details on roles and permissions to a CSV file.
To use the feature, simply navigate to Admin > Manage access > Check access. Once there, you can search for any account and review its roles and permissions.
Here are some of the key benefits you can expect from the Check access feature:
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Quick and efficient resolution of access control issues
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Streamlined auditing of roles and permissions
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Boosted overall administrative efficiency
To learn more about this feature, refer to the Checking access.
Unified profiles for audit and troubleshooting
We are happy to announce that we have introduced a unified view where you can check and manage all the necessary information about your user accounts and local groups. We refer to this view as user and group profiles.
User and group profiles are the solution you need to easily audit and troubleshoot your user or group configurations. Unlike before, you can now perform a wide array of operations from one single location: customize group memberships, handle licenses, monitor access, and update user and group info.
Currently, user and group profiles are available for Organization Admins only.
How to use user and group profiles
To access user and group profiles, navigate to Admin > Accounts & local groups, choose either the User accounts or the Local groups tab, then select the user account or local group you want to manage. A new window opens, allowing you to view or update your user or group configurations.
The following image shows some of the options you have for managing user profiles:
What's next
The new user and group profile experience is enabled by default. However, to facilitate a smooth transition, the previous user and group experience will continue to be available for a limited period, after which we will phase it out. During this period, you have the flexibility to switch between the classic and the new experience as per your comfort.
To switch between the old and new experience, use the toggle button in the upper right side of the Accounts & local groups page, as shown in the following image:
For a comprehensive list of of all the operations you can perform using the new user and group profiles, refer to Managing user and group profiles.
We recommend that you regularly check the deprecation timeline for any updates regarding features that will be deprecated and removed.
