Intelligent Agents usher in a new age of automation at Groupe UpCoop

UpCoop is the brand behind services that millions of people use every day—from employee benefits and meal vouchers to digital payment solutions and social programs. 

Supporting this scale of activity requires accuracy, reliability, and traceability. As transaction volumes increased and reporting cycles became more demanding, finance teams spent significant time on manual administrative work, particularly during peak reporting periods.  

Automation has become a genuine strategic asset within Groupe UpCoop, both for operational performance and for the experience of our employees.

Catherine Jaffrennou, Director of Finance / CFO, UpCoop

Working with EY and UiPath, UpCoop began automating these key processes. What followed was the development of an enterprise-wide automation program that continues to expand through AI-powered capabilities and Intelligent Agents. 

The partnership with EY and UiPath has been critical in helping us structure our approach and scale rapidly.

Catherine Jaffrennou, Director of Finance / CFO, UpCoop

From finance initiative to enterprise capability 

The objective was straightforward in finance—reduce repetitive work, improve reliability, and ease the pressure created by reporting-period workload peaks.  

The success of those early automations changed the conversation. Employees began identifying opportunities to automate repetitive work, improve data quality, strengthen compliance, and respond more quickly to customers. Workshops across the business uncovered more than 300 automation opportunities across 13 departments. 

What began as local automation initiatives evolved into a program spanning 12 departments and three subsidiaries.  

To support this shift, UpCoop built the foundations needed to scale. 

A national Center of Excellence (CoE), governance committees, BI dashboards, and development standards helped transform automation from a series of projects into a true enterprise-wide capability. The model proved sufficiently successful that it was subsequently taken up by other subsidiaries of the Group in Italy, Romania, Spain, Slovakia, and Mexico. 

Beyond technology, success has been driven by people and culture. Strong executive sponsorship, a focus on continuous improvement, and close collaboration between business teams, IT, and automation specialists have all played an important role.   

UpCoop also established a clear vision of automation as a tool that supports employees rather than replaces them. This approach helped drive adoption and encouraged teams to embrace automation over time. 

Today, the organization operates more than 90 automations in production, maintains a backlog of more than 300 identified opportunities, and achieves payback on automation investments in just eight to nine months. 

Transforming proposal creation with Intelligent Agents  

As the program matured, UpCoop expanded beyond traditional RPA. Technologies including UiPath Autopilot™, Document Understanding™, Process Mining, and Intelligent Agents enabled the organization to automate increasingly complex and knowledge-intensive work. 

These capabilities can understand complex documents, analyze processes, and interact more naturally with users. As a result, automation became broader in scope, more strategic in nature, and more deeply embedded in business operations. 

One example is UpCoop's Intelligent Agent for generating technical proposals in response to requests for proposals (RFPs). 

Responding to tenders is a key commercial activity for the organization. Teams handle around 1,000 RFPs each year. Preparing a response could take five to six days and relied heavily on manual research, document review, and specialist expertise. 

Using UiPath Autopilot™, Intelligent Agents, and AI-powered capabilities, UpCoop introduced a solution that can analyze tender documents and identify requirements. It reviews supporting information, generates draft proposal content, and prepares executive summaries. 

Employees remain responsible for validating and refining the final submission, but much of the preparation work is now completed automatically.  

The solution is expected to improve productivity by approximately 30% through shorter proposal preparation times, greater consistency across responses, reduced workload for specialist teams, and improved proposal quality. 

More importantly, the project demonstrated how Intelligent Agents can tackle work that previously depended heavily on specialist expertise and manual effort. 

Building the next phase 

The impact of automation now extends well beyond individual processes. UpCoop now saves more than 6,400 hours of work every month through automation, alongside improvements in productivity, reliability, responsiveness, and operational risk reduction. Added to which, the organization has also experienced a cultural shift. 

Today, automation is increasingly viewed as a day-to-day partner rather than simply an IT project. In an internal user survey, 89% of respondents said robots were useful or indispensable to their work—evidence of how widely automation has been adopted across the business. 

UpCoop continues to expand its use of automation. Current initiatives include extending Intelligent Agents into new business use cases and increasing the use of data-driven automation. The organization is also strengthening the integration between automation, generative AI, and collaborative workplace tools. 

With Intelligent Agents, we are entering a new era of automation that is much closer to the needs of the business.

Catherine Jaffrennou, Director of Finance / CFO, UpCoop

For UpCoop, the journey has evolved from solving a workload challenge in finance to building a business capability that supports teams across the organization. The next phase is focused on applying intelligence to a broader range of processes while maintaining the operational rigor required to support its millions of beneficiaries.