Unlock deeper insights into your AI units consumption

Increasingly, organizations are leveraging the full-suite of AI and GenAI capabilities that UiPath offers to extend their automation capabilities, especially Document Understanding. So, gaining a clear understanding of your AI Units consumption becomes paramount for effective resource management and cost optimization.

Fortunately, UiPath provides powerful AI Units Consumption Dashboards within UiPath Insights, offering you detailed visibility into this crucial aspect of your automation landscape. This technical article will delve deeper into these dashboards, particularly the Document Understanding and AI Center consumption dashboard (In Preview as of this writing), empowering you to make data-driven decisions about your Document Understanding initiatives – and ‌avoid a surprise bill that makes you say "oh dear!".

Why monitoring AI Units consumption is critical

Understanding your AI Units consumption related to Document Understanding provides several key advantages:

• Budget control: Accurately track usage to stay within allocated AI Unit budgets. Think of it as keeping your digital piggy bank happy. 

• Optimization opportunities: Identify high-consumption workflows or models that may benefit from optimization. Because sometimes, even the smartest robots can be a bit… inefficient. 

• Resource planning: Forecast future AI Unit needs based on historical trends and planned deployments. Like predicting how much coffee you'll need for a coding marathon. 

• Cost allocation: Gain insights into which projects or teams are utilizing the most AI Units. Helpful when someone asks, "Where did all the AI Units go?". 

• Performance analysis: Correlate consumption patterns with the performance and throughput of your Document Understanding processes. Are your high-consuming processes delivering the expected results, or are they just… enthusiastically consuming? 

Available dashboards

UiPath Insights offers dedicated dashboards to provide comprehensive visibility into AI Units consumption. All you need to do is enable Insights. The two primary dashboards relevant to Document Understanding are:

• AI Units consumption—consumption overview of products utilizing AI Units: This dashboard offers a broad perspective, showing the total AI Units consumed across all UiPath products that utilize them. This provides a high-level understanding of your overall AI consumption. This is your "30,000-foot view" of AI Unit usage.

• Document Understanding and AI Center consumption dashboard: This is your go-to dashboard for granular insights into the AI Units specifically consumed by Document Understanding and AI Center activities. Being in preview indicates ongoing development and potential future enhancements – think of it as the insightful cousin of the overview dashboard.

Deep Dive into the "IXP (Document Understanding, CM) AI Unit consumption dashboard" (formerly the "Document Understanding & AI Center dashboard")

This dashboard is designed to offer a detailed consumption view at the tenant level, broken down by various key parameters. While the sources explicitly mention its overview capabilities, it's implied that this overview is supported by underlying data that can be filtered and analyzed. 

Key features and expected insights

1. Comprehensive overview: Visual representation of your total AI Units consumed by Document Understanding and AI Center over a selected time period. This includes trend lines and comparisons to previous periods. You'll see the ebb and flow of your AI Unit usage, hopefully more of an "ebb" after some optimization! 

2. Granular breakdown by project: A crucial feature is the ability to filter and view consumption data specific to individual Document Understanding projects. This allows you to identify which automation initiatives are the primary consumers of AI Units. Time to see which projects are the "AI Unit gourmands". 

3. Model-specific consumption: Understanding which models (both pre-trained and custom-trained) are consuming the most AI Units is vital for optimization. The dashboard should provide insights into the consumption patterns of different ML Packages used within Document Understanding. Knowing if your "Invoice Extractor v3" is thirstier than your "Passport Reader" can be quite enlightening. The sources list a wide variety of out-of-the-box models available. 

4. AI Center analysis: If you are utilizing AI Center to deploy Document Understanding models as Classic AI skills, the dashboard will likely provide a breakdown of AI Unit consumption by specific skills. This helps in understanding the cost associated with different deployed AI capabilities. See which skills are putting in the most "AI effort." 

What's new in Document Understanding 25.6 for AI Units dashboards

 The latest 25.6 release brings some serious firepower to your AI Units monitoring arsenal. UiPath has listened to user feedback and delivered three major enhancements that significantly expand your visibility and control.

1. API key-based activity tracking: No more blind spots

One of the biggest gaps in previous versions was tracking AI Unit consumption from API key-authenticated activities. That's now history. The enhanced "Organization level overview dashboard" now captures AI Units consumed through.

• Machine learning extractor activities: Finally, see the true cost of your ML-powered extractions 

• Form extractor operations: Track consumption from automated form processing 

• Other API key-authenticated activities: Complete visibility across all authentication scenarios

2. Communications Mining integration: The missing piece

Communications Mining was the elephant in the room—a significant AI Unit consumer that wasn't reflected in your dashboards. Not anymore. All three AI Units dashboards now include Communications Mining consumption, giving you:

• Project-level insights: See which Communications Mining projects are your biggest consumers 

• Data source tracking: Understand consumption patterns across different data sources 

• Operation-level detail: Drill down to specific Communications Mining operations 

• Dedicated widgets: The newly enhanced IXP Dashboard (formerly the "Document Understanding & AI Center dashboard") includes specialized Communications Mining widgets for deeper analysis 

3. Broader coverage, greater transparency

When AI Unit consumption entries are marked as ‘unknown’, the dashboard will now display possible causes for the missing data points—making it easier to troubleshoot and identify where the usage is coming from. We have also prepared this troubleshooting guide for you to better understand where the unknowns come from and how to act on them.

Accessing and using the dashboards

To leverage these powerful insights, ensure you have enabled Insights in Automation Cloud™ . Subsequently, you will need to enable and access the specific AI Units consumption dashboards as detailed in the "Document Understanding Modern Projects User Guide" within the Automation Cloud documentation.

Best practices for monitoring and optimization

• Regular monitoring: Establish a routine for reviewing the AI Units Consumption Dashboards to stay informed about your usage patterns. Think of it as your regular "AI Unit health check." 

• Identify consumption drivers: Pinpoint the projects, models, or skills that contribute the most to your AI Unit consumption. Find those "heavy hitters"! 

• Optimize workflows: Analyze high-consumption workflows for potential areas of optimization, such as improving document quality or adjusting processing parameters. Sometimes, a little workflow "tidying up" can go a long way. 

• Evaluate model efficiency: Compare the performance and AI Unit cost of different models to identify the most efficient options for your specific use cases. Choose the model that's both smart and economical. 

• Plan for scalability: Use historical consumption data to forecast future AI Unit needs as your Document Understanding deployments scale. Don't let your AI Unit usage grow faster than your budget! 

UiPath AI Units Consumption Dashboards, particularly, provide invaluable visibility into your AI resource utilization. By proactively monitoring and analyzing the data presented in these dashboards, you can gain crucial insights to optimize your Document Understanding processes, manage your AI Unit budget effectively, and drive greater efficiency in your intelligent automation journey. We encourage you to explore these dashboards within your UiPath environment and harness their power to make informed decisions and unlock the full potential of UiPath Document Understanding — without accidentally breaking the AI Unit bank!