Daniel Dines, founder and CEO of UiPath/Image: Supplied
Enterprises across the Middle East and beyond are accelerating investments in automation and artificial intelligence, yet many continue to struggle with a familiar challenge: converting promising pilot projects into sustained, enterprise-wide return on investment. According to Daniel Dines, founder and CEO of UiPath, the problem is rarely a lack of ambition or technology capability. Instead, it stems from how organisations approach scale, governance, and orchestration across the enterprise.
“One of the biggest challenges in scaling automation comes from approaching automation as siloed, point deployments rather than an opportunity to orchestrate complex systems all over the organisation,” Dines said. While individual departments may focus on optimising their own workflows, he noted that many processes across finance, operations, customer service, and compliance share common, repeatable steps. “Focusing on only one deployment can solve a single problem, but misses the opportunity to automate similar ones across the business.”
Another common pitfall is the selection of low-impact use cases. “Another common mistake is picking a use case with low impact or diluted, unsustainable ROI, making it hard to see the value of automation,” Dines said. This can leave automation initiatives vulnerable to budget scrutiny, particularly in uncertain macroeconomic conditions.
As organisations move beyond traditional robotic process automation towards agentic AI, these challenges become even more pronounced. “There’s a crucial factor needed to truly unlock scale—orchestration, the coordination of all these processes and workflows across the organisation,” Dines said. With AI agents increasingly introduced into enterprise environments, the need for orchestration grows. “Ensuring that employees, robots, and AI agents each operate on the types of work they are best suited to handle” is becoming central to enterprise automation strategies.
UiPath’s response has been to focus on a unified platform approach rather than fragmented deployments. “UiPath helps organizations solve these challenges by providing a unified platform for agentic automation, orchestration, and governance,” Dines said. “Instead of managing automation in fragments, you can orchestrate AI agents, robots, and humans end-to-end using a centralized control plane.”
The platform’s ability to support complex, high-value workflows has been a key differentiator, particularly in industries with heavy regulatory and operational demands. Dines pointed to pre-built agents and orchestration for processes such as claims, loans, disputes, and investigations as examples of where automation can deliver measurable business impact at scale.
These capabilities were highlighted during GITEX and UiPath’s FUSION Dubai event, where the company showcased regional customer success stories, including Etihad Airways, e&, and RAKBANK. According to Dines, these organisations are moving beyond experimentation to elevate their automation programmes with agentic AI.
CFO-led approach
As automation matures, Dines sees a shift in executive ownership, with the CFO increasingly emerging as a central sponsor. “CFOs are natural champions of automation because they think in terms of end-to-end outcomes that deliver bottom-line impact, not isolated tasks,” he said. Finance leaders also tend to operate in highly regulated environments and are often at the forefront of digital transformation initiatives, making them well positioned to drive enterprise-scale automation.
A clear example of this CFO-led approach can be seen in UiPath’s work with Canon. The company was facing a significant operational challenge driven by an influx of up to 5,000 vendor invoices each month, many of which were paper-based and contained complex data such as date ranges, serial numbers, meter readings, and variable charges. Processing these invoices manually was both time-consuming and inefficient, particularly given their low individual value.
“In less than nine months after deploying the UiPath Platform, Canon processed about 40,000 invoices, or about 4,500 monthly,” Dines said. While the initial goal was to achieve 75% straight-through processing, the results exceeded expectations. “The team initially had a goal of processing 75 per cent without human intervention, but achieved about 90% straight-through processing during that time period.”
For Dines, the significance of the Canon case extends beyond a single customer success story. “Their story is impactful, but the challenge they faced is not unique to only their business,” he said. “Every global or large organization has a paper-driven, operationally intensive process like invoicing, procure-to-pay, or claims processes where the sheer amount of manual work involved has real revenue impact.”
This insight has shaped UiPath’s product strategy. “This is what drove us to create purpose-built solutions for automating large-scale, end-to-end processes that dominate the CFO’s world,” Dines said. By combining agents, workflow automation, and full orchestration, UiPath aims to simplify the application of agentic automation across specific industries and business workflows, accelerating time-to-value.
The Middle East presents both opportunity and complexity for automation at scale, with many enterprises operating large, legacy environments alongside modern digital platforms. Dines said UiPath has made targeted investments to support regional requirements. “The Middle East is a strategic growth region for us, and we are investing accordingly,” he said.
Automation Cloud
At GITEX, UiPath announced the expansion of its UAE footprint with the launch of Automation Cloud integrated with Microsoft Azure, a move designed to strengthen in-region access to agentic AI, UiPath Test Cloud, and other platform capabilities. “This move also reinforces our commitment to meeting data residency and sovereign policy requirements, which are critical for both public- and private-sector customers,” Dines said.
The company has also opened an office in Riyadh to support Saudi Vision 2030, ensuring local presence for enterprises and public-sector institutions. “The UAE and Saudi Arabia are among our fastest-growing markets globally,” Dines said, adding that UiPath’s regional infrastructure complements its global footprint across the US, Europe, Japan, India, and Singapore.
As AI-driven automation becomes more intelligent, Dines emphasised that UiPath’s strategy remains firmly human-centric. “Agentic automation is not just about efficiency; it’s about restoring meaning to, and elevating the impact of, human work,” he said. While customers are realising productivity gains, the broader objective is to free employees to focus on higher-value, more fulfilling tasks.
In the region, UiPath has partnered with the UAE AI Office to advance national AI objectives and launched the Saudi Digital Academy Bootcamp to build local automation and AI skills. “Change management and workforce development isn’t an afterthought; it’s built into how we deploy, train, and scale,” Dines said. “For us at UiPath, technology should amplify human potential, not replace it.”
Trust and governance are also becoming decisive factors as enterprises deploy AI in sensitive workflows. UiPath’s partnership with NVIDIA focuses on delivering “trusted agentic automation for sensitive workflows” through a new integration service connector. The collaboration enables enterprises to integrate generative AI features into applications while extending automation into on-premises and air-gapped environments — a critical requirement for regulated industries.
“In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which are exciting growth markets for us, the demand for secure, in-region infrastructure is accelerating adoption, especially in government, BFSI, and healthcare,” Dines said. He added that the combination of UiPath’s UAE data centre, NVIDIA’s trusted AI infrastructure, and UiPath’s ISO/IEC 42001 certification for AI management systems provides enterprises with the confidence to scale responsibly.
“This isn’t just about faster adoption,” Dines said. “It’s about responsible adoption at enterprise scale.”
