UiPath Maestro is an orchestration layer that runs a process end to end. It calls AI agents, RPA robots and APIs, and hands people the decisions a model should not take on its own. In September and October 2026 UiPath made Maestro Flow and Maestro Automate generally available and opened process building to coding agents: Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor and Jules. Some of this is GA and some is still in Preview, so every feature below carries the status given in UiPath’s release notes.
We start with the basics. Maestro is often confused with Orchestrator, and the choice between its three canvases decides who will maintain the process later.
What UiPath Maestro is
UiPath’s documentation calls Maestro its agentic business orchestration engine, providing governance, observability, domain logic and security as the backbone for durable process execution. The vendor’s own shorthand is: agents think, robots do, people lead.
In practice Maestro answers questions that no single robot or agent can: who performs which step, in what order, what happens on an exception, and where a given case stands right now. A process can wait days for a person and resume exactly where it stopped.
Orchestrator keeps its job. Orchestrator manages jobs: robots, queues, schedules, assets and credentials. Maestro manages processes made of many jobs and many kinds of worker, and Maestro processes are deployed to Orchestrator. If the automation is one robot that reads data and posts it to SAP, Maestro adds nothing. It pays off when a process spans several systems, includes a decision made by a language model, needs a human approval, and has to be explained to an auditor afterwards.
Three canvases: BPMN, Case and Flow
Maestro Orchestrate offers three ways to model a process. All three run on the same engine, and their instances appear in one place, Maestro instance management.
Maestro BPMN is a process drawn in BPMN 2.0: events, tasks, gateways, sequence flows and participants in lanes. The path is known at design time, even when an individual step is performed by an agent that reasons non-deterministically. It suits teams that already work in BPMN or must use it for compliance reasons.
Maestro Flow covers the same class of process, with steps and branches defined up front, but as a sequence of nodes aimed at automation developers. UiPath’s guidance is that choosing between BPMN and Flow is a matter of modelling preference rather than capability. Flow, however, has generally available support for coding agents.
Maestro Case is case management: a set of stages that a case moves through dynamically, with the route decided at runtime by rules, by a Case Manager agent, or by both. It is meant for long-running work where exceptions are routine: claims, disputes, KYC and AML remediation, customer escalations. A case can call a Maestro BPMN process as one of its tasks.
Since September there is also a separate product, Maestro Automate: a lighter runtime on the Flow canvas for short-running agent and API workflows. A single run is capped at 24 hours, up to 50 runs execute concurrently, and traces are kept for 30 days. There is no pause, no instance migration and no monitoring dashboard, but the per-run rate is lower. A project can be switched between Flow and Automate without a rebuild, because the file is the same.
What shipped in September and October 2026
Status as stated in the Maestro and UiPath for Coding Agents release notes, checked on 21 October 2026.
| Feature | Status | Since |
|---|---|---|
| Maestro Flow | GA | 17 Sep 2026 |
| Maestro Automate | GA | 18 Sep 2026 |
| Flow via coding agent | GA | 16 Sep 2026 |
| BPMN via coding agent | Preview | 7 Oct 2026 |
| Case via coding agent | Preview | 15 Sep 2026 |
| BPMN evaluations | Preview | 15 Sep 2026 |
| Case Manager Agent | Preview | 15 Sep 2026 |
| Chat and voice agents | Preview | Sep 2026 |
| BPMN patterns library | no status given | 29 Sep 2026 |
Flow in production. GA means Flow processes are supported for production use on the same engine as BPMN and Case, with no cap on duration or concurrency. You build flows in VS Code and its forks through the Maestro extension, in Studio Web, or in Studio Desktop next to RPA projects. The canvas combines agents (including third-party agents over MCP and A2A), connectors, Data Fabric entities, document processing and human steps delivered to Slack, Teams, email or Action Center. On 13 October UiPath also settled the naming: Maestro BPMN, Maestro Case and Maestro Flow replace “Agentic process” and “Case management”.
Evaluations before publishing. In BPMN an evaluation set scores each run against expected outcomes, either by exact match or with an LLM judge that assesses meaning and trajectory. That gives regression coverage to processes with non-deterministic steps. Since 13 October the Build and Evaluate switch sits in the canvas toolbar.
Case Manager Agent. The agent takes orchestration decisions on a case: starting and cancelling tasks, entering and completing stages, escalating. In rules-first mode it acts only where the rules have no answer; in agent-led mode it decides on every event, with the rules as guardrails.
BPMN patterns library. Prebuilt, editable structures such as an AI decision with human review, an approval chain and failure handling, complete with gateways, variables and forms. The release notes give it no status, so we do not describe it as generally available.
A coding agent builds the process, a person approves the plan
The bigger shift is in how processes get built. UiPath ships skills for coding agents, installed with uip skills install. For Flow this route is generally available; for BPMN and Case it is in Preview.
For BPMN the documentation describes a gated sequence. You give the agent a starting point: a plain-language description, a process map, an existing PDD or a rough BPMN model. The agent drafts a plan of events, tasks, gateways and participants. It then stops and waits for your approval before building anything. Only after that does it author the model and the task implementations, validate and simulate them, and help you publish and run the process. Wrong assumptions surface at the plan stage rather than after deployment.
For an automation team the role changes accordingly: less hand-drawing and wiring, more plan review and evaluation. The video above walks through UiPath’s invoice-processing BPMN template in our demo environment: an IXP task, an AI agent, a human task and the new Evaluate mode with its evaluators.
Controlling what an agent may decide
A September change to the Flow agent node says more about control than most slide decks. For every MCP tool argument you choose where the value comes from: the agent decides at runtime, the value is bound to a variable, or it is fixed, optionally marked as sensitive.
An argument that sets the scope of an action or makes it irreversible, such as a company code, an amount or a payee, should not be left to the model. Fixed or bound to a process variable, it stops being the agent’s call. A second change is a schema refresh toggle, on by default, that checks the MCP server for the tool’s current definition before each call, so a renamed parameter does not break the process. If you prefer predictability, switch it off and the process keeps the schema you configured.
This complements the human-in-the-loop gates covered in our post on HITL gates in Maestro and the AI Trust Layer: a gate pauses the process before a decision, while a fixed argument takes the decision away from the model altogether.
Where Maestro fits
Invoice handling and purchase-to-pay with SAP. A robot reads the data, an agent assesses mismatches with the purchase order, ambiguous cases go to an approver, and the result is posted back to the ERP. The path is known in advance, so BPMN or Flow is the right canvas.
Claims, disputes and KYC. The case runs for days or weeks, goes back to earlier stages, involves several departments and carries SLAs at stage and task level. That is Case, with the Case Manager agent in rules-first mode to begin with.
High-volume, short runs. Order intake, first-line triage of requests, transaction reconciliation: the run finishes the same day and 30 days of traces is enough. That is Maestro Automate, at the lower per-run rate.
Third-party agents under supervision. An agent built outside UiPath, connected over MCP or A2A, with PII and prompt-injection guardrails on the canvas and evaluation before publishing. If the agent has to run on a model in your own data centre, the platform requirements are in our post on UiPath on-premises with a local LLM.
It helps to have the process documented before modelling it. Since September Maestro lists Cartographer as the upstream stage: a UiPath Delegate profile that turns stakeholder conversations into a PDD and an SDD. We covered Delegate in our post on its public preview.
Where to start
Do not move what already works in Orchestrator. Pick one process that involves a human or model decision and several systems, model it on the canvas that matches its shape, and let it call the robots you already run. Test Preview features outside production, as their behaviour may still change.
As a UiPath Platinum partner in the Agentic Fast Track programme, we design and implement Maestro processes, from process qualification to evaluations and agent oversight. The service is described on our UiPath Maestro page, and agent security in our AI Security offer. If you would like to check whether your process belongs in Maestro, and on which canvas, get in touch.
Sources
- UiPath, Maestro release notes, September 2026 (accessed 22 October 2026)
- UiPath, Maestro release notes, October 2026 (accessed 22 October 2026)
- UiPath, UiPath for Coding Agents release notes, September 2026 (accessed 22 October 2026)
- UiPath, UiPath for Coding Agents release notes, October 2026 (accessed 22 October 2026)
- UiPath, Choosing a Maestro canvas (accessed 22 October 2026)
- UiPath, Choosing between Maestro Orchestrate and Maestro Automate (accessed 22 October 2026)
- UiPath, Build a Maestro BPMN with a coding agent (accessed 22 October 2026)
- UiPath, How Maestro fits into UiPath (accessed 22 October 2026)
- UiPath, What you get with Maestro (accessed 22 October 2026)