>> From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from "theCUBE" and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> There are very few political issues that get bipartisan support these days, nevermind consensus spanning geopolitical boundaries. But whether we're talking across the aisle or over the pond, there seems to be common agreement that the power of big tech firms should be regulated. But the government's track record when it comes to antitrust aimed at big tech is actually really mixed, mixed at best. History has shown that market forces rather than public policy have been much more effective at curbing monopoly power in the technology industry. Hello, and welcome to this week's "Wikibon CUBE" insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we welcome in frequent "CUBE" contributor Dave Moschella, author and senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Dave, welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks Dave, good to be here. >> So you just recently published an article, we're going to bring it up here and I'll read the title, "Theory Aside, Antitrust Advocates Should Keep Their "Big Tech" Ambitions Narrow". And in this post you argue that big sweeping changes like breaking apart companies to moderate monopoly power in the tech industry have been ineffective compared to market forces, but you're not saying government shouldn't be involved rather you're suggesting that more targeted measures combined with market forces are the right answer. Can you maybe explain a little bit more the premise behind your research and some of your conclusions? >> Sure, and first let's go back to that title, when I said, theory aside, that is referring to a huge debate that's going on in global antitrust circles these days about whether antitrust should follow the traditional path of being invoked when there's real harm, demonstrable harm to consumers or a new theory that says that any sort of vast monopoly power inevitably will be bad for competition and consumers at some point, so your best to intervene now to avoid harms later. And that school, which was a very minor part of the antitrust world for many, many years is now quite ascendant and the debate goes on doesn't matter which side of that you're on the questions sort of there well, all right, well, if you're going to do something to take on big tech and clearly many politicians, regulators are sort of issuing to do something, what would you actually do? And what are the odds that that'll do more good than harm? And that was really the origins of the piece and trying to take a historical view of that. >> Yeah, I learned a new word, thank you. Neo-brandzian had to look it up, but basically you're saying that traditionally it was proving consumer harm versus being proactive about the possibility or likelihood of consumer harm. >> Correct, and that's a really big shift that a lot of traditional antitrust people strongly object to, but is now sort of the trendy and more send and view. >> Got it, okay, let's look a little deeper into the history of tech monopolies and government action and see what we can learn from that. We put together this slide that we can reference. It shows the three historical targets in the tech business and now the new ones. In 1969, the DOJ went after IBM, Big Blue and it's 13 years later, dropped its suit. And then in 1984 the government broke Ma Bell apart and in the late 1990s, went after Microsoft, I think it was 1998 in the Wintel monopoly. And recently in an interview with tech journalist, Kara Swisher, the FTC chair Lena Khan claimed that the government played a major role in moderating the power of tech giants historically. And I think she even specifically referenced Microsoft or maybe Kara did and basically said the industry and consumers from the dominance of companies like Microsoft. So Dave, let's briefly talk about and Kara by the way, didn't really challenge that, she kind of let it slide. But let's talk about each of these and test this concept a bit. Were the government actions in these instances necessary? What were the outcomes and the consequences? Maybe you could start with IBM and AT&T. >> Yeah, it's a big topic and there's a lot there and a lot of history, but I might just sort of introduce by saying for whatever reasons antitrust has been part of the entire information technology industry history from mainframe to the current period and that slide sort of gives you that. And the reasons for that are I think once that we sort of know the economies of scale, network effects, lock in safe choices, lot of things that explain it, but the good bit about that is we actually have so much history of this and we can at least see what's happened in the past and when you look at IBM and AT&T they both were massive antitrust cases. The one against IBM was dropped and it was dropped in as you say, in 1980. Well, what was going on in at that time, IBM was sort of considered invincible and unbeatable, but it was 1981 that the personal computer came around and within just a couple of years the world could see that the computing paradigm had change from main frames and minis to PCs lines client server and what have you. So IBM in just a couple of years went from being unbeatable, you can't compete with them, we have to break up with them to being incredibly vulnerable and in trouble and never fully recovered and is sort of a shell of what it once was. And so the market took care of that and no action was really necessary just by everybody thinking there was. The case of AT&T, they did act and they broke up the company and I would say, first question is, was that necessary? Well, lots of countries didn't do that and the reality is 1980 breaking it up into long distance and regional may have made some sense, but by the 1990 it was pretty clear that the telecom world was going to change dramatically from long distance and fixed wires services to internet services, data services, wireless services and all of these things that we're going to restructure the industry anyways. But AT& T one to me is very interesting because of the unintended consequences. And I would say that the main unintended consequence of that was America's competitiveness in telecommunications took a huge hit. And today, to this day telecommunications is dominated by European, Chinese and other firms. And the big American sort of players of the time AT&T which Western Electric became Lucent, Lucent is now owned by Nokia and is really out of it completely and most notably and compellingly Bell Labs, the Bell Labs once the world's most prominent research institution now also a shell of itself and as it was part of Lucent is also now owned by the Finnish company Nokia. So that restructuring greatly damaged America's core strength in telecommunications hardware and research and one can argue we've never recovered right through this 5IG today. So it's a very good example of the market taking care of, the big problem, but meddling leading to some unintended consequences that have hurt the American competitiveness and as we'll talk about, probably later, you can see some of that going on again today and in the past with Microsoft and Intel. >> Right, yeah, Bell Labs was an American gem, kind of like Xerox PARC and basically gone now. You mentioned Intel and Microsoft, Microsoft and Intel. As many people know, some young people don't, IBM unwillingly handed its monopoly to Intel and Microsoft by outsourcing the micro processor and operating system, respectively. Those two companies ended up with IBM ironically, agreeing to take OS2 which was its proprietary operating system and giving Intel, Microsoft Windows not realizing that its ability to dominate a new disruptive market like PCs and operating systems had been vaporized to your earlier point by the new Wintel ecosystem. Now Dave, the government wanted to break Microsoft apart and split its OS business from its application software, in the case of Intel, Intel only had one business. You pointed out microprocessors so it couldn't bust it up, but take us through the history here and the consequences of each. >> Well, the Microsoft one is sort of a classic because the antitrust case which was raging in the sort of mid nineties and 1998 when it finally ended, those were the very, once again, everybody said, Bill Gates was unstoppable, no one could compete with Microsoft they'd buy them, destroy them, predatory pricing, whatever they were accusing of the attacks on Netscape all these sort of things. But those the very years where it was becoming clear first that Microsoft basically missed the early big years of the internet and then again, later missed all the early years of the mobile phone business going back to BlackBerrys and pilots and all those sorts of things. So here we are the government making the case that this company is unstoppable and you can't compete with them the very moment they're entirely on the defensive. And therefore wasn't surprising that that suit eventually was dropped with some minor concessions about Microsoft making it a little bit easier for third parties to work with them and treating people a little bit more, even handling perfectly good things that they did. But again, the more market took care of the problem far more than the antitrust activities did. The Intel one is also interesting cause it's sort of like the AT& T one. On the one hand antitrust actions made Intel much more likely and in fact, required to work with AMD enough to keep that company in business and having AMD lowered prices for consumers certainly probably sped up innovation in the personal computer business and appeared to have a lot of benefits for those early years. But when you look at it from a longer point of view and particularly when look at it again from a global point of view you see that, wow, they not so clear because that very presence of AMD meant that there's a lot more pressure on Intel in terms of its pricing, its profitability, its flexibility and its volumes. All the things that have made it harder for them to A, compete with chips made in Taiwan, let alone build them in the United States and therefore that long term effect of essentially requiring Intel to allow AMD to exist has undermined Intel's position globally and arguably has undermined America's position in the long run. And certainly Intel today is far more vulnerable to an ARM and Invidia to other specialized chips to China, to Taiwan all of these things are going on out there, they're less capable of resisting that than they would've been otherwise. So, you thought we had some real benefits with AMD and lower prices for consumers, but the long term unintended consequences are arguably pretty bad. >> Yeah, that's why we recently wrote in Intel two "Strategic To Fail", we'll see, Okay. now we come to 2022 and there are five companies with anti-trust targets on their backs. Although Microsoft seems to be the least susceptible to US government ironically intervention at this this point, but maybe not and we show "The Cincos Comas Club" in a homage to Russ Hanneman of the show "Silicon Valley" Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all with trillion dollar plus valuations. But meta briefly crossed that threshold like Mr. Hanneman lost a comma and is now well under that market cap probably around five or 600 million, sorry, billion. But under serious fire nonetheless Dave, people often don't realize the immense monopoly power that IBM had which relatively speaking when measured its percent of industry revenue or profit dwarf that of any company in tech ever, but the industry is much smaller then, no internet, no cloud. Does it call for a different approach this time around? How should we think about these five companies their market power, the implications of government action and maybe what you suggested more narrow action versus broad sweeping changes. >> Yeah, and there's a lot there. I mean, if you go back to the old days IBM had what, 70% of the computer business globally and AT&T had 90% or so of the American telecom market. So market shares that today's players can only dream of. Intel and Microsoft had 90% of the personal computer market. And then you look at today the big five and as wealthy and as incredibly successful as they've been, you sort of have almost the argument that's wrong on the face of it. How can five companies all of which compete with each other to at least some degree, how can they all be monopolies? And the reality is they're not monopolies, they're all oligopolies that are very powerful firms, but none of them have an outright monopoly on anything. There are competitors in all the spaces that they're in and increasing and probably increasingly so. And so, yeah, I think people conflate the extraordinary success of the companies with this belief that therefore they are monopolist and I think they're far less so than those in the past. >> Great, all right, I want to do a quick drill down to cloud computing, it's a key component of digital business infrastructure in his book, "Seeing Digital", Dave Moschella coined a term the matrix or the key which is really referred to the key technology platforms on which people are going to build digital businesses. Dave, we joke you should have called it the metaverse you were way ahead of your time. But I want to look at this ETR chart, we show spending momentum or net score on the vertical access market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. We show this view a lot, we put a dotted line at the 40% mark which indicates highly elevated spending. And you can sort of see Microsoft in the upper right, it's so far up to the right it's hidden behind the January 22 and AWS is right there. Those two dominate the cloud far ahead of the pack including Google Cloud. Microsoft and to a lesser extent AWS they dominate in a lot of other businesses, productivity, collaboration, database, security, video conferencing. MarTech with LinkedIn PC software et cetera, et cetera, Googles or alphabets of business of course is ads and we don't have similar spending data on Apple and Facebook, but we know these companies dominate their respective business. But just to give you a sense of the magnitude of these companies, here's some financial data that's worth looking at briefly. The table ranks companies by market cap in trillions that's the second column and everyone in the club, but meta and each has revenue well over a hundred billion dollars, Amazon approaching half a trillion dollars in revenue. The operating income and cash positions are just mind boggling and the cash equivalents are comparable or well above the revenues of highly successful tech companies like Cisco, Dell, HPE, Oracle, and Salesforce. They're extremely profitable from an operating income standpoint with the clear exception of Amazon and we'll come back to that in a moment and we show the revenue multiples in the last column, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, just insane. Dave, there are other equally important metrics, CapX is one which kind of sets the stage for future scale and there are other measures. >> Yeah, including our research and development where those companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars over the years. And I think it's easy to look at those numbers and just say, this doesn't seem right, how can any companies have so much and spend so much? But if you think of what they're actually doing, those companies are building out the digital infrastructure of essentially the entire world. And I remember once meeting some folks at Google, and they said, beyond AI, beyond Search, beyond Android, beyond all the specific things we do, the biggest thing we're actually doing is building a physical infrastructure that can deliver search results on any topic in microseconds and the physical capacity they built costs those sorts of money. And when people start saying, well, we should have lots and lots of smaller companies well, that sounds good, yeah, it's all right, but where are those companies going to get the money to build out what needs to be built out? And every country in the world is trying to build out its digital infrastructure and some are going to do it much better than others. >> I want to just come back to that chart on Amazon for a bit, notice their comparatively tiny operating profit as a percentage of revenue, Amazon is like Bezos giant lifestyle business, it's really never been that profitable like most retail. However, there's one other financial data point around Amazon's business that we want to share and this chart here shows Amazon's operating profit in the blue bars and AWS's in the orange. And the gray line is the percentage of Amazon's overall operating profit that comes from AWS. That's the right most access, so last quarter we were well over a hundred percent underscoring the power of AWS and the horrendous margins in retail. But AWS is essentially funding Amazon's entrance into new markets, whether it's grocery or movies, Bezos moves into space. Dave, a while back you collaborated with us and we asked our audience, what could disrupt Amazon? And we came up with your detailed help, a number of scenarios as shown here. And we asked the audience to rate the likelihood of each scenario in terms of its likelihood of disrupting Amazon with a 10 being highly likely on average the score was six with complacency, arrogance, blindness, you know, self-inflicted wounds really taking the top spot with 6.5. So Dave is breaking up Amazon the right formula in your view, why or why not? >> Yeah, there's a couple of things there. The first is sort of the irony that when people in the sort of regulatory world talk about the power of Amazon, they almost always talk about their power in consumer markets, whether it's books or retail or impact on malls or main street shops or whatever and as you say that they make very little money doing that. The interest people almost never look at the big cloud battle between Amazon, Microsoft and lesser extent Google, Alibaba others, even though that's where they're by far highest market share and pricing power and all those things are. So the regulatory focus is sort of weird, but you know, the consumer stuff obviously gets more appeal to the general public. But that survey you referred to me was interesting because one of the challenges I sort of sent myself I was like okay, well, if I'm going to say that IBM case, AT&T case, Microsoft's case in all those situations the market was the one that actually minimized the power of those firms and therefore the antitrust stuff wasn't really necessary. Well, how true is that going to be again, just cause it's been true in the past doesn't mean it's true now. So what are the possible scenarios over the 2020s that might make it all happen again? And so each of those were sort of questions that we put out to others, but the ones that to me by far are the most likely I mean, they have the traditional one of company cultures sort of getting fat and happy and all, that's always the case, but the more specific ones, first of all by far I think is China. You know, Amazon retail is a low margin business. It would be vulnerable if it didn't have the cloud profits behind it, but imagine a year from now two years from now trade tensions with China get worse and Christmas comes along and China just says, well, you know, American consumers if you want that new exercise bike or that new shoes or clothing, well, anything that we make well, actually that's not available on Amazon right now, but you can get that from Alibaba. And maybe in America that's a little more farfetched, but in many countries all over the world it's not farfetched at all. And so the retail divisions vulnerability to China just seems pretty obvious. Another possible disruption, Amazon has spent billions and billions with their warehouses and their robots and their automated inventory systems and all the efficiencies that they've done there, but you could argue that maybe someday that's not really necessary that you have Search which finds where a good is made and a logistical system that picks that up and delivers it to customers and why do you need all those warehouses anyways? So those are probably the two top one, but there are others. I mean, a lot of retailers as they get stronger online, maybe they start pulling back some of the premium products from Amazon and Amazon takes their cut of whatever 30% or so people might want to keep more of that in house. You see some of that going on today. So the idea that the Amazon is in vulnerable disruption is probably is wrong and as part of the work that I'm doing, as part of stuff that I do with Dave and SiliconANGLE is how's that true for the others too? What are the scenarios for Google or Apple or Microsoft and the scenarios are all there. And so, will these companies be disrupted as they have in the past? Well, you can't say for sure, but the scenarios are certainly plausible and I certainly wouldn't bet against it and that's what history tells us. And it could easily happen once again and therefore, the antitrust should at least be cautionary and humble and realize that maybe they don't need to act as much as they think. >> Yeah, now, one of the things that you mentioned in your piece was felt like narrow remedies, were more logical. So you're not arguing for totally Les Affaire you're pushing for remedies that are more targeted in scope. And while the EU just yesterday announced new rules to limit the power of tech companies and we showed the article, some comments here the regulators they took the social media to announce a victory and they had a press conference. I know you watched that it was sort of a back slapping fest. The comments however, that we've sort of listed here are mixed, some people applauded, but we saw many comments that were, hey, this is a horrible idea, this was rushed together. And these are going to result as you say in unintended consequences, but this is serious stuff they're talking about applying would appear to be to your point or your prescription more narrowly defined restrictions although a lot of them to any company with a market cap of more than 75 billion Euro or turnover of more than 77.5 billion Euro which is a lot of companies and imposing huge penalties for violations up to 20% of annual revenue for repeat offenders, wow. So again, you've taken a brief look at these developments, you watched the press conference, what do you make of this? This is an application of more narrow restrictions, but in your quick assessment did they get it right? >> Yeah, let's break that down a little bit, start a little bit of history again and then get to Europe because although big sweeping breakups of the type that were proposed for IBM, Microsoft and all weren't necessary that doesn't mean that the government didn't do some useful things because they did. In the case of IBM government forces in Europe and America basically required IBM to make it easier for companies to make peripherals type drives, disc drives, printers that worked with IBM mainframes. They made them un-bundle their software pricing that made it easier for database companies and others to sell their of products. With AT&T it was the government that required AT&T to actually allow other phones to connect to the network, something they argued at the time would destroy security or whatever that it was the government that required them to allow MCI the long distance carrier to connect to the AT network for local deliveries. And with that Microsoft and Intel the government required them to at least treat their suppliers more even handly in terms of pricing and policies and support and such things. So the lessons out there is the big stuff wasn't really necessary, but the little stuff actually helped a lot and I think you can see the scenarios and argue in the piece that there's little stuff that can be done today in all the cases for the big five, there are things that you might want to consider the companies aren't saints they take advantage of their power, they use it in ways that sometimes can be reigned in and make for better off overall. And so that's how it brings us to the European piece of it. And to me, the European piece is much more the bad scenario of doing too much than the wiser course of trying to be narrow and specific. What they've basically done is they have a whole long list of narrow things that they're all trying to do at once. So they want Amazon not to be able to share data about its selling partners and they want Apple to open up their app store and they don't want people Google to be able to share data across its different services, Android, Search, Mail or whatever. And they don't want Facebook to be able to, they want to force Facebook to open up to other messaging services. And they want to do all these things for all the big companies all of which are American, and they want to do all that starting next year. And to me that looks like a scenario of a lot of difficult problems done quickly all of which might have some value if done really, really well, but all of which have all kinds of risks for the unintended consequence we've talked before and therefore they seem to me being too much too soon and the sort of problems we've seen in the past and frankly to really say that, I mean, the Europeans would never have done this to the companies if they're European firms, they're doing this because they're all American firms and the sort of frustration of Americans dominance of the European tech industry has always been there going back to IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and all of them. But it's particularly strong now because the tech business is so big. And so I think the politics of this at a time where we're supposedly all this great unity of America and NATO and Europe in regards to Ukraine, having the Europeans essentially go after the most important American industry brings in the geopolitics in I think an unavoidable way. And I would think the story is going to get pretty tense over the next year or so and as you say, the Europeans think that they're taking massive actions, they think they're doing the right thing. They think this is the natural follow on to the GDPR stuff and even a bigger version of that and they think they have more to come and they see themselves as the people taming big tech not just within Europe, but for the world and absent any other rules that they may pull that off. I mean, GDPR has indeed spread despite all of its flaws. So the European thing which it doesn't necessarily get huge attention here in America is certainly getting attention around the world and I would think it would get more, even more going forward. >> And the caution there is US public policy makers, maybe they can provide, they will provide a tailwind maybe it's a blind spot for them and it could be a template like you say, just like GDPR. Okay, Dave, we got to leave it there. Thanks for coming on the program today, always appreciate your insight and your views, thank you. >> Hey, thanks a lot, Dave. >> All right, don't forget these episodes are all available as podcast, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, "Breaking Analysis Podcast". Check out ETR website, etr.ai. We publish every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @davevellante. Comment on my LinkedIn post. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Michelle for "theCUBE Insights" powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (slow tempo music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of UiPath Live, the Release Show. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Every body welcome back, to this special presentation, theCUBE has been covering the RPA space for quite some time. UiPath just had recently a huge launch, and Daniel Dines, as the CEO and founder of UiPath, has set forth the vision, of a robot for every person. (Giggles) pretty substantial goals that he has. And Brandon Node is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Product at UiPath. Brandon, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> So that is a really ambitious goal. And, we're going to poke at that a little bit, and ask you to sort of defend it. Give us some proof points and help us understand sort of why you guys are so confident in this vision. You guys obviously the leader in RPA, growing like crazy, you've shared some metrics, very transparent. So we'd love to have these transparent and open honest computation. So I'm going to start with just sort of the basic, I mean, people understand RPA, just as in terms of automating a lot of mundane tasks, these tasks, you know, are often very repetitive or rules based. They're sort of interacting with existing applications. Now, in the early days of RPA, these are stable legacy apps with people sitting in front of a screen. So I guess my first question to you is, you know, some of the criticisms of RPA have been that if the app changes, you know, the robot breaks. So, first of all, is that the correct way to be thinking about the state of RPA. Today, is that an outdated view? And let's get into it so we can understand how we achieve robot for every person. >> Your thought sure. So I think it's a fair point in that RPA, by definition is built on top of applications. And it's always been the case that you need to be in coordination with your release teams with the application teams to understand what's happening there. Do I think it's a fair statement on where the industry is? I don't think so I think that is a small component of what the center of excellence looks at. And when you look at RPA, at scale today, there are many considerations governance, change management training, things that make these companies successful and these companies that are embracing it as part of their strategic plan for digital transformation. So for sure, it's a part of the story. But I would say, it's just a small part, the bigger part of the story is really about how you bring RPA into the culture. And that's what I think we'll talk about some more with the robot for every person. >> Yeah, definitely. You know, and I want to get back into that sort of how you make RPA strategic but before we get there, so a lot of people have said. Okay, you know're your interacting with existing legacy applications stable. There's no problem, you kind of sort of refuted that. But a lot of people also talk about a point into the API economy that API's are really a way that your platform or other your competitors platform can interact with applications. And that begins to sort of widen the opportunity, sort of modernize both infrastructure and applications. Where do where does the API economy, the whole equation? >> Sure. When you look at RPA, we shouldn't look at it as just a narrow set of implementations. RPA is capable of connecting directly to API's directly to it interfaces to you know, mouse and click style integrations as well as deeper levels, connecting directly to the lower levels of the application bypassing the mouse and keyboard entirely. So think about RPA, not just as keyboard and mouse automations, but also benefiting from all of those API's that exists, also being able to span the full spectrum of automation. >> So I want to talk sometimes I joke, you know, tongue in cheek, it's sort of a pejorative, I say, hey, RPA sometimes paves the cow path. But you know, what if my cow path works, and I can pave it and allows me to go faster and automate. So what? There's other opportunities I can I can attack. So my question is, where are you seeing people really applying RPA today, and how rapidly are they going forward? You know, really transforming. You mentioned digital transformation. And you guys announced a ton of product getting into it where do you see them in terms of glomming on to some of those more strategic areas >> Yeah, absolutely. So we've had lots of conversation around what the right methodology is for RPA, kind of like you said, should I just automate the process as it is? Or should I break down the process, assess it, re-engineer it and then automate? And the answer is, we have customers all over the spectrum. And there's a lot to be said for automating the process as is, if a robot can do it in a minute and a half as is. But if I re engineer it, it can do it in a minute flat. Where's your time best spent? And I think the biggest consideration that companies need to have right now with regard to automation is just really around opportunity costs. If I can automate a process as is and put my re-engineering team on to a bigger problem, that's going to get a bigger lift for the organization. ploy those people there, right? So what you end up having is this kind of mosaic of opportunities. How much does it cost to automate? How much does it cost to re engineer? What's my benefit going to be from that automation or from that re engineering, and now you have different tools that you can apply to your backlog. So, for sure, RPA can automate things as it is as is as well as do take that re-engineering approach and make sure that you are getting the most out of that automation. In terms of the strategic nature of it. Again, all over the map. You know, we've always said automate the mundane automate the repeatable. I was a customer before I was an employee, some of my automations were actually my most critical things, the things that I couldn't let fall through the cracks under any circumstances. So while they were maybe relatively easy for a human To do the compliance pick up that I had the guaranteed delivery pick up that I had, to me made it worth it. >> How does artificial intelligence address some of this in terms of, of making RPA more strategic. In one hand, it is going to inject some, simplicity into the process. On the other hand, you know, people cerned about AI, where does it fit? In? What form does it take? Is it natural language processing? Is it? Is it actually taking actions like systems of agency? How should we think about that? >> Sure. I think about it as, again, a spectrum. You know, so many of these questions, there's not a single answer. There. It's really about what you want to accomplish and how you're going to approach it. So for instance, let's say I'm a company and I want to build the next best action AI model or ML model. right, I'm going to start with the data that I have from my operation. So I may want to use RPA. To help extract data out of processes the build repository that I'm going to build my, my model off of, or let's say I, you know, we have customers that are implementing complex models to help with with their customers. And they have those models being surfaced through RPA. So now I have the model, but I want a human to review it before it takes action. I can surface that in an attended automation in a form or something that's pre built that gives the agent guidance on what to do. And then at the fully autonomous side, you have AI and ML models attached to chat bots that are hooked into RPA processes that can service customers in real time. >> You know, I want to ask you about sort of Product versus platforms in their, their book, the second Machine Age Andy McAfee and Erik brynjolfsson MIT professors years ago sort of laid out, they said products or platforms beat products. And I think a lot of the criticisms of EA around point products, you guys made a big deal. In your your last release, you didn't really talk specifically about this. But to me, my one of my takeaways is, you're building out a platform, you talked about a spectrum. You know, you've got, you know, studio x versus low code, you've got your studio, which is for RPA developers, you got Studio Pro, for hardcore, you know what to do quality assurance, so you've really got a spectrum of capabilities. So it strikes me that one of the ways in which you get to a robot for every person is that you've got a platform that can evolve, you know, with the market. And I wonder if you could sort of talk about that and really try to plug it into that vision that Daniel set out a couple years ago. >> Absolutely. You know, to be honest, this always been a blessing and a curse for us, right? When you install UiPath, you have all of these tools, all of these capabilities. And you've got some places that you can start immediately we place a number of pre existing code bases and modules up on our marketplace. For instance, we have sample code that you can use that we provide. But still, you need to take the platform and customize it for your applications for your business. And when we talk about the platform mindset, really what our primary goal is, is to build something robust enough, flexible enough, reliable enough that any company can use it within their operations. And you see that that's borne out on our customer list that we publish. And we talked about, you have every industry covered, every region covered, and and that's our Challenge is really to make something robust enough to be everywhere, but intuitive and understandable enough that anyone can pick an entry point and begin to use that platform. >> So when we talk about a robot for every person, I want to know better definition around a person we talking about every worker, or is it even more sort of ambitious. >> More ambitious, because it's not just a worker, an employee, it includes students, teachers, take the broadest definition. And think about how taking advantage of automation or being able to write your own automations is beneficial. There's, there's no limit my son is in first grade. He's taking a class right now as part of his curriculum, on the basics of coding. He's doing loops and retries and step based algorithm. Islamic teaching, this is something that's ubiquitous, this applies to everybody. >> That's awesome. Scary at the same time. [Laughter] So I'm talking about this idea of bringing your own AI to the equation. You guys referenced that a little bit of your kind of fabric approach. But can you clarify sort of how you see that playing out? >> This goes straight back to the platform concept, right? If it's the case, that you already have an existing model, and I talk to customers almost daily, who have some form of intelligence existing within their platform today, right? It could be a model that helps with payment processing. Could be that next best action model, right? Data science has been on its own rocket ship for the past couple decades. And by now, most enterprise companies already have models that they're using. Or somewhere or something, we don't want to come in and say, rebuild that model with us. We're not a takeout company. We're an integration company. So we want you to be able to use those existing models, connect them directly to orchestrator. And once it's connected to orchestrator, that means that your developers can access those models directly within the automations that they're writing. So the ability to attach what you already have, those assets that you've already been working on, and make it one click, one drag and drop accessible to your developers is huge. >> It is huge. I mean, I think that's you can observe markets, the ones that have less friction in terms of, you know, their deployments tend to have greater adoption, you're not asking people to rip and replace. This is really sort of additive and you can get some quick wins. I want to come back to mentioned, you know, security, you mentioned that you've got to be in sync with your your teams. What's the right regime? I'm particularly interested in the security and compliance piece because a lot of times users when they hear it security, compliance governance, they go slow me down, say no. How do you help square that circle? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And it's funny because the narrative has changed so much. A year and a half ago, we were educating people on you know, the fact that robots won't go rogue, they won't. All of a sudden just start doing things that you haven't told him to do or haven't programmed in. Right. It was very much a fear of the unknown. I don't have those conversations anymore. Now the conversations with customers are really around. I will enable people to build around automations. I wanted to democratize RPA but I don't want people to automate things. That I don't want them to, for instance, I have a legacy database, it has a limited amount of bandwidth of capacity. So if all of my developers hit that database at once, I could slow down the the access to that database. So maybe I want to blacklist that from my development environments, because that's off limits for automation. And from our standpoint, we're completely okay with this. We want customers to use RPA for the right tools for their organization and give them the ability to build governance into the development tools and into the overall framework, so that it's very much in line with what their expectations. >> Brandon, I really appreciate you helping me wrap up this sort of RPA market analysis, the post UI path, Folks, you can you can DM me @DaveVellante or hit me on Twitter, and you know, love to hear your comment. UiPath as I've said, very open and transparent in the organization, go hit them up, challenge them as I have. Brandon again, thanks so much for for coming on theCUBE and helping us with this program. >> Great. Thanks for having me. It's always great to be here. All right, you're welcome. And thank you everybody for watching Dave volante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. 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