UiPath Buys Peak to Bolster Agentic Automation Platform
Enterprise automation and artificial intelligence (AI) software company UiPath has acquired AI platform Peak.
“With the acquisition of Peak, we are accelerating our mission to strengthen our vertical AI solutions strategy,” Daniel Dines, UiPath’s founder and chief executive, said in a news release Thursday (March 13).
“When combined with the UiPath platform, Peak’s exceptional purpose-built AI applications will enhance our ability to provide solutions that optimize industry-specific use cases and deliver incredible value to customers.”
According to the release, Peak’s AI platform optimizes product inventory and pricing for businesses, allowing customers to develop AI workflows, process data, and provide predictions to optimize critical business processes via APIs or integrated web applications.
In addition, the platform offers a “new breed” of AI-based decisioning applications that let businesses make decisions on issues like inventory and optimizing product pricing.
As part of UiPath, the release added, Peak’s solutions can reach new industries, while Peak’s focus on accelerating AI adoption in sectors like retail and manufacturing will allow UiPath to accelerate market growth and “deliver vertical-oriented, next-generation AI-driven agentic applications with intelligence powered by LLMs.”
PYMNTS wrote earlier this year about the use of agentic AI in the retail world, with companies like Amazon, Google Cloud and Salesforce deploying AI tools to help retailers offer better customer experiences, bolster product search, improve inventory management and provide enhanced product recommendations, along with other automated tasks.
Keith Kirkpatrick, research director of enterprise applications at The Futurum Group, told PYMNTS that he projects AI agents will ultimately affect certain job functions in retail, though most of these tasks would be digital and not physical duties.
“As such, many of these functions are still marketing- or commerce-based, and retailers will be looking to companies in adjacent industries to see how well AI agents from Salesforce, Microsoft, and others are delivering value to their customers,” said Kirkpatrick.
“The biggest question is whether retailers are willing to invest in technology that is relatively new, and, in many ways, has yet to demonstrate ROI,” he added.
“Margins are thin, and I think there will need to be a fairly significant ROI examples that are directly relevant to retailers, in order to drive early adoption. I think pricing will be important, and AI agent pricing will need to be tied to specific metrics or outcomes.”
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