GeekWire recognizes this year's boldest AI and automation breakthroughs by UiPath customers

The most meaningful AI breakthroughs are not technology demonstrations. They are business improvements: a 10-day process reduced to minutes, a dispute resolved in hours instead of days, or employees freed to focus on work that requires their judgment.

Those are the kinds of results recognized by this year’s AI Breakthrough Awards, presented by UiPath and GeekWire. The winners are innovating with business orchestration and automation, bringing AI agents, systems, and people together to rethink how work gets done.

But technology is only part of the story. As UiPath CMO Michael Atalla explained on stage at UiPath FUSION in Las Vegas:

"These achievements are not just technology milestones. They represent business leaders challenging conventional thinking, teams turning ambitious ideas into reality, and employees using innovation to create better outcomes for their customers and their organizations."

Leaders challenging conventional thinking

Some of this year's biggest breakthroughs started with someone refusing to accept "that's just how long it takes."

One New Zealand took the top honor this year for exactly that reason. A process that used to take ten days now takes five to ten minutes, using the same systems the company already had, without ripping anything out. That single process is already generating $2 million in ROI on its own.

What would traditionally require massive investment and multi-year transformation, we delivered in weeks."

Jason Paris, CEO, One New Zealand

USI Insurance Services is projecting roughly $7 million in annual savings from automating certificate of insurance issuance. The rollout is expected to reduce the cost of one of the insurance industry’s most repetitive processes by 80%.

Pegasus Airlines, Turkey's leading low-cost carrier, is using agentic AI to validate tens of thousands of invoice line items each month. The result is a more scalable way to manage a high-volume process as the airline grows.

These examples illustrate that truly innovative leaders are less focused on adding another tool and more on changing the operation around a business need.

Teams turning ambitious ideas into reality

These Gold Award winners didn’t attempt to transform everything at once; they got the best results by starting with a specific problem and building from there.

United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM) IT governance team didn't wait for a company-wide AI mandate. They built an agent for one problem: contract review. It's now cutting manual review effort by up to 70% and saving UWM an estimated 1,500 hours a year.

Banco Azteca reduced its customer dispute resolution time from 97 hours to 4.8 hours per case. That increase in speed creates capacity equivalent to automating more than 3,300 full-time employees’ worth of work.

Raben Group is now running nearly 560 automated processes across its logistics operations on just 60 unattended robot licenses, work equivalent to almost 600 full-time employees every month.

Coronis Health tripled how many claims its team can process each day, from 10-12 up to 35-40, while cutting the cost of handling a denied claim by more than three-quarters.

Omega Healthcare reduced handling time by 75%, increased first-pass approvals by up to 20%, and achieved approximately 90% document extraction accuracy—improving operational and financial performance.

Each organization took a different path. But the pattern is consistent: identify where work is constrained, connect the systems and intelligence needed to improve it, and create a more resilient way to operate.

What people did with the time back

For some Gold Award winners, the clearest measure of success isn't a process metric; it's what employees accomplished with the time freed by AI, business orchestration, and automation.

Beko's finance shared services team used to need 15 people to run invoice allocation. Now it takes six, without losing quality, and the rest of the team has pivoted to other high-value work.

BJ's Wholesale Club built AI-driven automation directly into its product safety review process, catching risks earlier and freeing the team to focus on what matters most to members. In the words of VP of Own Brand Quality and Technical Development Amy McLester, it "marks an important step forward in modernizing product safety."

That combination of business performance and employee empowerment is central to the breakthroughs recognized in this year’s AI Breakthrough Awards. The value of agentic business orchestration and automation isn’t that the technology completes a task faster. The bigger value is realized when they help an organization serve customers better, respond to change, and give people more room to do their best work.

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This year's Silver winners

This year's Silver Award winners span telecom, healthcare, consumer goods, and beyond:

• Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison

• PLDT Smart

• McCormick & Company

• Continental Resources

• Medline

Honorable mentions

We also want to recognize the following organizations for their work:

• Johnson Controls

• Endava

• SunExpress

• IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)

• SMU

• AGS Health

What these breakthroughs have in common

Technology is the enabler. The breakthrough comes from the decision to question an accepted way of working, the discipline to redesign it, and the people who turn that idea into measurable results.

Congratulations to all of this year’s AI Breakthrough Award winners and honorable mentions; their innovation in reimagining how work gets done through agentic business orchestration and automation is inspiring.

Their stories show that meaningful transformation rarely begins with a sweeping mandate. It begins with a business problem someone is willing to solve differently.