Workato partners with OpenAI to facilitate enterprise automation

Workedan enterprise automation platform, announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI to integrate multiple AI models and future releases of Open AI in Workato’s low-code/no-code platform. This partnership aims to streamline the process of building automation and integrations using Generative AI.

Through the new collaboration, Workato has announced that it will introduce a range of new features.

These include Workato Copilots, which allows users to build automation and application connectors using simple descriptions. The integration of AI connectivity will allow users to incorporate generative AI capabilities into their automations through Workato’s OpenAI connector.

Another feature, WorkbotGPT, will allow users to interact with business apps and data conversationally through popular chat apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

“Built using OpenAI templates, Copilot is like a fellow Workato expert generating recipes and connectors through natural conversation. It was trained on millions of data points from Workato’s public recipe community,” Gautham Viswanathan, founder and head of product and engineering at Workato, told VentureBeat. “We believe Workato Copilot will further lower the barrier of who can build at ‘within an organisation’.

Viswanathan added that Copilot will assist users by providing onboarding support, learning about new features, figuring out what to build next, offering recommendations, and providing immediate troubleshooting help.

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Workato’s business automation tool already incorporates RecipeIQ, its own AI/ML models, which provide data mapping, logic, and next-step recommendations. By incorporating OpenAI templates, Workato aims to further streamline automation and integration development, making it easier for enterprises to adopt its technology.

The company also said this partnership ensures robust security and governance capabilities, enabling secure collaboration between IT and business teams, and driving efficient operations at scale.

Simplify business automation using OpenAI templates

According to Viswanathan, the integration of OpenAI’s models into the Workato platform resulted in the consideration of numerous use cases requested by its end users from various departments and industries.

These use cases include features such as generating highly personalized emails/sequences, summarizing meetings/recordings, and creating virtual assistants.

As customers are currently building automations on the Workato platform, the company selected LLMs by evaluating these automations and envisioning how they can be enhanced through Generative AI. The team then explored OpenAI models to determine which ones fit each use case best.

“This led us to handpick several LLMs and then train them with our proprietary models to best serve those specific use cases,” Viswanathan told VentureBeat. “We’ve seamlessly integrated these templates into our platform so that our customers can experience them while building their own application automations, integrations, APIs, or connectors.”

Workato introduced RecipeIQ in 2018, using proprietary ML techniques to offer recommendations to users for the next steps in their workflow. The company said the Copilot will expand on this functionality, allowing it to build complete recipes through conversational interactions with the builder.

Viswanathan said the WorkbotGPT feature will facilitate real-time automation in business workflows, eliminating the need for pre-built components.

“WorkbotGPT is conversational automation for Slack and Teams. You can give it suggestions in natural language and it will generate the action item summary for you by searching recording transcripts in Zoom, your email and CRM, all in real-time,” he said.

Ensure safe automation development

Workato said its platform incorporates a robust governance framework, making it easier to manage federated workspaces for different lines of business through AutomationHQ.

The company also gives its customers full control over their assets, data and logs. The platform implements robust role-based access controls and provides granular permissions, allowing customers to determine who is allowed to use AI services.

Customers can also mask sensitive data, audit all changes to user activity, stream logs for centralized monitoring, and customize log storage duration.

“For our international and multinational customers, we have multi-region data center support for customers who need to meet stringent data residency and sovereignty requirements. Our co-pilots adhere to the strictest data privacy standards and do not use customer data from these interactions to train any models,” explained Viswanathan. “These features are built on a strong security foundation with multi-layered encryption, hourly of keys, EKM/BYOK, and zero-trust policies.”

What’s next for Workato?

Viswanathan revealed that the company is currently training its models using metadata from user automations, integrations and internal APIs. The company aims to develop other powerful tools similar to Copilot and WorkbotGPT through this training.

He believes that as companies increasingly embrace the power of AI, their confidence in sharing data with external LLMs will increase.

“This will open up a number of exciting possibilities – some we can think about, some that will remain unknown until we fully understand the breadth and depth of available data,” he said. “We aim to solve this challenge by bringing AI, automation and integration into a single platform and creating new products and solutions that our customers can use to harness the power of these technologies.”