>> From New York City, it's theCUBE! Covering Automation Anywhere Imagine, brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Midtown Manhattan at the Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019. We we're here last year, it was about 1,500 people. And really, Automation Anywhere is really hot in the RPA space, Robotic Process Automation, but it's really a lot more than that, it's not just automating some processes, it's really about new ways to work, personal digital assistants, and really changing the game. We're excited to have our next guest, first time on theCUBE. He's Prince Kohli, the CTO of Automation Anywhere. Prince, great to see you. >> Thank you, Jeff, good to be here. >> Yeah, so you weren't here last year, so I'm curious to get your general impressions of the event and kind of the scene here with the Automation Anywhere ecosystem. >> Of course, I wasn't here last year, I heard a lot about it, but the sense of excitement, the sense of growth, and the sense of opportunity that is there in everyone. The number of customers who were here and were excited to be here, partners who were here and were really happy to be here, and of course, the team, my own team. It just, just the sense of excitement, and the fact that we are on a hockey stick, in terms of growth, is just palpable. >> Right, so I'm curious to get your take, you've been in the Valley for a long time, and really the RPA theme is about digital workers. In fact, they get roles, they get names, they talk about 'em on stage like they're people. And the idea is that we all have our own assistant, which has been talked about forever but maybe you kind of had an offshore person you could help dial in your laundry, nothing like what we're talking about today. So, as you look back at the evolution as to how we got here, what's your take on the role of a personal digital assistant? >> That's a great question. The way, in my view, the way it evolved was that it is similar to cloud computing. I think the idea that these things could happen. I mean, you know, Star Trek had it, right? >> Right. >> So I think those things have, as an idea, have existed, but usually it was in fantasy. But what has happened in the last five or ten years, is that computing, the need for automation across applications, the need for work to be less mundane, the need for creativity in our human jobs, those have become really important. And therefore the definition of work is evolving. What can be automated therefore must be automated. And it is not automation within an application, it is automation across applications, across processes, across whichever applications, from whichever vendors there may be, without changing the application itself. And that, with the tenurial of AI and acceptance of AI, I think has allowed people to start accepting the notion of a digital worker. >> It's pretty interesting, one of the topics of the keynote was that the people were the integration point between (laughs) a lot of these systems, super inefficient. And what I think is interesting on the AI front and the automation, the place I see it's just a little bit every day, is on Google, or an app that most people are familiar with, whether it's Google Maps, and suddenly it's got restaurants on it, and suddenly it's got reviews on it, and suddenly it's got Street View or whether it's now on the email where suddenly it's guessing my response, it's auto filling even before I start to complete my email. And it really shows that it's this ongoing continuous innovation empowered by AI and a boatload of data that lets these applications do, as you said, things that before would be considered magical. >> Absolutely, and if you look at the digital worker paradigm, right? It's not, if you look at a great example of a digital worker, for example an AP clerk, an account payables clerk. Think of an invoicing function, an invoice comes in, someone has to read it, interpret it, the (coughs), excuse me, the format of invoices are very different across vendors. Reading, interpreting, tying it to a PO, making sure the PO is correct, making sure the PO is valid, was issued at the right time, the item is not late, someone has signed up, there are so many things one has to do. And a person has to do all that today. But it is really very boring work. There is, you just follow a set of steps, there is not judgment involved, really. What an AP digital worker allows you to do (coughs) is to be able to read the document, interpret it, take all the steps that are necessary, and then be able to do that job 24 hours a day, and allow the offloading of this mundane, boring work, right, from a human. So they can be more creative, they can actually make the process better, as opposed to just following a set of simple rules. >> Right, finishing one of the earlier conversations too, and then defining that process so that you can automate it, you're going to unwind inefficiency, you're going to unwind biases, you're going to unwind a whole bunch of stuff to get it to the automated process. So there's all kinds of secondary benefits beyond simply freeing up your time to do more creative work. >> That is correct, and I think, as you said, there are biases, there are also things that must work together in enterprise and today don't. And you know, the vendors, the application vendors are not going to do that, it is not in their own interest. So someone has to, and we are the fabric that brings it together. >> Right, and just people as an integration point, I thought that was classic, that's like the worst place you want to be. And then the other concept that I think doesn't come out enough is a lot of people can be thinking about RPA as a rip and replace for the people. It's not rip and replace at all, it's really augment, just like you augment with your laptop, your phone, other software applications that you're working with every day. >> It's a great point, we have never seen any customer, even talking about ripping and replacing people. What they're trying to do is give people the tools and the augmentation necessary for them to make their own life better. And that improves the moral of the employees, that improves the company's productivity, of course, right, and probably the best output, the best of vidimation that, it improves their customer satisfaction. Because customers are able to create cards faster, are able to get responses faster, claims get adjusted faster, all these things work very well. >> Right, it's interesting, when you sit back and look at the whole technology stack, some really fundamental changes in microprocesser power, networking speed, storage, now the cloud that puts all this access together, and then you add the AL, and the machine learning on top of it, it's really kind of this crazy perfect storm of technologies that are coming together, that are enabling this, which we really couldn't do before, all those pieces weren't there. So if look forward, as CTO, what are some of the things you're excited about, how do you see this evolving, over the next little time, and mid time, I never go longtime, longtime is forever in the future we don't even guess. >> Longtime, I can predict one thing for sure about long time, that whatever we say today will be wrong, in the long-term. Short and medium-term I think we probably will be right. I think short and medium-term, what I see happening, is that AI becoming a part of pretty much every layer of every product, for us for example, as an intelligent RPA platform, AI is embedded in the interaction with the application, interaction with the screen, interaction with the person, interaction with the document, so whichever way we interact with the outside world, as well as how we get better ourselves, AI is embedded in that. And then we use many third-party AI's as our own part to add AI enabled skills, for example understanding if a insurance claim should be denied or not, a credit card should be issued or not. So all these things become part of how AI helps us in day-to-day. So I think that will be the biggest change, I think people, the example that you brought up, right, Google email. I don't think that people predicted that with the first use of AI, in Google, but it is very useful, I use it all the time, because it happens to get better all the time, it knows all my phrases, it knows how I respond, I think that'll happen again and again. >> Right, right, it's just like spell-check, the great unwashed AI that we've all been using for years, and years, and years. Alright Prince, so, the final word is really, I think that's important, is, you're talking about the intelligence. It's not just a process that we apply software to, but this ongoing iterative intelligence applied, whether it's machine learning, or AI, to make it better, and better, and better. It's not just going to be static. >> Not at all, not at all. I think it understands what it needs to be doing, and it then provides ideas on how it could be doing better, and then it integrates those ideas back. Everything gets better over time, and everything that a human finds repetitive, high volume, boring, will eventually get farmed off, to an augmentation, additional worker, additional system. >> And oh, by the way, the number of open rec's is still not going to go down, right? >> Because, you know, if you remember the ATM world, as an ATM started coming in people started worrying tellers will go away and the number of jobs will go down. Actually banks are doing really well, right, and they started hiring more people. The nature of the job changes, the value that humans provide go higher and higher, but that's what happens, eventually. >> Alright Prince, congratulations for you for jumping on a rocket ship, I'm sure it's going to be (laughs) a really fun ride, and having us here at the show. >> Excellent, thank you Jeff, thank you so much. >> Alright, he's Prince, I'm Jeff, your watching theCube, we're on Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019 in midtown Manhattan, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (energetic music)

>> From New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Automation Anywhere Imagine. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> We're in midtown Manhattan at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019. It's about 1,500 people talking about RPA which is part of the story but it's really a much broader story than RPA. It's about the ecosystem, it's about new ways to work, and really, RPA is an enabler but that's not the story in and of itself. It's really about helping people do their jobs better like a whole bunch of other tools that've come out over the years to help us out. We're excited to have a return guest who was here with us last year. He's Ankur Kothari, co-founder, another co-founder and chief revenue officer of Automation Anywhere. Great to see you again. >> Always good to see you, Jeff. >> So, it's been a year since last we spoke in June. >> We've been way less on ground, a lot on the flight. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And, you brought in a bunch of money. You got a lot of resources really to support you now. So, how has that kind of changed? You know, you guys have grown a lot. You've put $500 million in the bank. How's that changing what you're working on now? >> Well, we are deploying that capital in three major ways. One is global expansion. We have now grown into, we have offices now in more than 30, 35 countries, 30 plus countries. So we are getting closer to all our customers worldwide in all top 30 economies and major business hubs where we are now we have opened offices, so, that's one. We are using this capital to build our ecosystem with our partners and all the developers. And, obviously we have invested a lot in our product. Taking the product stack more and more broader which allows us to automate any process that can be automated. >> Yeah, I mean, it's a great resource that you have at your disposal now. And Mihir talked about a lot of kind of higher level topics which I found really good in the keynote, really reframing RPA and personal digital assistance, if you will, around it's just another tool to help people get their job better. And he had some ridiculously sad stats about how much time that people are being asked to do robotic tasks which they really shouldn't be doing those tasks. >> Yes. >> There's much higher value stuff. It's not really rip-and-replace, it's really augment and help people do better. >> Augmenting, yes, yes, absolutely, generally most of these journeys start with this goal of productivity and rightly so. There's nothing wrong with that but as you scale in this journey and you start working, as you onboard more digital workers, digital colleagues as we like to call it, you find that the conversation in your organization changes from productivity to progress because that's what any technological transformation is about. It's not just about productivity, it's truly about progressing your team, your company, your industry, your customers forward. >> Right. >> So, that's what you face. And the second big prize on that front is it allows you to make work human. The moment you start automating every process that can be automated, we start using computers what they were designed for, to process things and not just to be used as a system of records. >> Right. >> So, we can do what we are good at. Solving complex problems using our creativity and empathy. >> Right, one of the things I thought was really interesting was the launch of the community addition, which is free. Free for small businesses, free for developers. I can't remember if there's an academic component-- >> Yes. >> Or not, but, you know, you're the guy who's puttin' money in the cash register. I'm sure there were some interesting conversations about having a free community edition. I wonder if you can share some insight 'cause, you know, that's taking money out of the bank, but obviously there's a much larger strategic goal. >> There's a strategic goal. The problem that we are falling in love with is that what would it take for us to accelerate the journey of every company to become a digital enterprise? How do we share in this new bot economy? And, in order to do that, we have to have every person participate in this whole phenomenon. An idea as big as this can not be one company or a few individuals' ideas. So, we have opened up that whole thing for everyone to participate. The community edition allows students, developers, small businesses, everyone to download. They go to our Automation Anywhere University and they can get freely trained and certified. And they can work with a bot. And they can build a bot and form their own opinion. >> Right. >> And have their own point of view. And the belief behind that is that a good idea can come from anywhere or anyone. And those ideas, once they use our product, they can monetize it in our marketplace which is the Bot Store. >> Right. >> So, that it allows everyone to form an opinion, and contribute to this new bot economy. >> It's pretty interesting. One of the topics Mihir touched on in the keynote was that we often think of, you know, kind of applying new technology to today's world, but we often miss, you know, as he said, that now is not the station, it's the train, and it's moving. And by opening it up to developers now, as you said, you're expanding the width, the breadth, and the potential applications of your technology to problems that you guys have never even thought about before. >> Exactly, that's the real thing. We are automating processes that we are doing now but generally it's about automating what we have not even seen. >> Right. >> These processes were designed for people to do. How would a process look when bots are performing there? I live in Silicon Valley and pretty much a computer science guy working on cutting edge. If you asked me 10 years ago would I let any of my family member live in a stranger's house? I would say, no way. Airbnb is one of the largest hotel chains in the world right now. >> Right, right. >> What that tells you is that human brain mind thinks linearly unless you give them something that allows humans to think exponentially. >> Right >> And that's the whole idea of beauty of technology. It allows us to think exponentially, and once our brain stretch there, then it's not possible to go back. >> Well, the other thing I think is really smart on your play is the competition for developers' attention, right? The developers these days have a lot of power and they can choose of a myriad of technologies in which to apply themselves. So, by having this community edition and opening it up is one part, but the other piece that I think is interesting is the whole bot economy. And I think you opened up the store last time we were here last year. >> Yes. >> Now you're putting money behind it so people can sell. In fact, we had a customer on earlier who's developing some stuff but they can augment that investment by actually selling those bots into this store. >> On the Bot Store, yeah. >> So, I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about how that is evolving? Is it kind of matching your vision? Has it accelerated past your vision? >> It is accelerating much faster than what we imagined first. When we one year ago we launched our marketplace, that is Bot Store. We opened up our University for everyone to get freely trained online. Then we started our community online, which is eight people. And with this community edition, everyone is now participating in it. What that is doing is we believe that more, the one thing that all developers want, is to contribute. Their work to be used by others. >> Right. >> And then, in a Bot Store, it allows them to even monetize it. It allows them to productize it so that personal satisfaction of solving a problem is what the developers get. And such new, creative ideas we are getting once we did that. Yesterday we had Bot Games and more than 250 to 300 developers participated in different games. And they were building these bots on fly, and they were competing. And we believe that when we bring all these people together and we give them a problem, genius comes out. >> Right. >> And it has been true. >> (laughs) So the ecosystem is huge and that's part of why you have your own show. And we go to a lot of shows. We were at Google Cloud a couple weeks ago. So, there's really two components of the ecosystem, traditional ecosystem. You've got the devs we talked about. There's the system integrators and you've got them all here in force. And they don't come out unless they really see a big opportunity. >> Yes. >> And the other part is the ISVs, right? To add all these different components. So, how is that evolving? Where do you see it going over the next year or two? >> It's interesting, you saw today that there was IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle all went on stage with software partnerships, you know Workday. So, we are forming large partnerships with software and how our product works with theirs, and the digital workers are part of that whole equation. And all our service providers and SIs and advisories that've been on this journey with us for the last five to six years and they are ramping up their entire practices to get their customers to become a digital enterprise. So, you see these two different worlds coming together and all the three worlds are working together for the customer to become a digital enterprise. >> Right. >> And, that's the best part. The digital native companies like Amazon, Airbnb, they have got this right. But what about the companies who have been there for 50 years, 100 years? How do they become digital? >> Right. >> And that's a more interesting problem. If you look at the software, and all the service partners and we are working together to solve that problem. So, it's a very interesting mix, an interesting time. And add to that this whole bot economy of developers bringing all these new digital workers. We are seeing the consumption of bot, growing in an exponential way. We are growing multi-force in few months. It's been a great, great ride. >> Right, well, I want to close on that in the last question 'cause you are one of the co-founders. I think there was four founders, if I'm correct. >> Yes. >> And you guys did it a very different way. You basically funded it the best way to fund a company, which is with revenue. >> Yes. >> And customer funded and you didn't go out and get outside money and now you've got this huge round which is actually an A round. >> Yes, it's a... >> So, how does that change the game? I mean, it puts you in a very good spot 'cause you don't have to take that money 'cause you were operating fine. But how does it, from a co-founder point of view, change the trajectory of your journey? >> There is obviously a value that that kind of capital brings because you can grow asymmetrically as well. >> Right, right. >> But the real value, for me, is the five investors who are such tier A, top-tier investors, who are the right partners we have got on this journey. If you think about Goldman Sachs, and NEA, and SoftBank, and General Atlantic which is one of larger growth-- >> Pretty good roster. >> Right. So you get that expertise and you get those partnerships that allows you to think exponentially and grow very fast. So, that's the real value for me in addition to the capital. >> Well, Ankur, thanks for sharing your journey with us. It's really been fun to watch and we're just at another inflection point I think. >> Always great to see you, and again next year. We ought to do this every year. >> All right, very good. >> Bigger and bigger. >> Absolutely, thanks again. >> Thanks a lot. >> He's Ankur, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Automation Anywhere in midtown Manhattan. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat electronic music)

(energetic music) >> From New York City, it's The Cube! Covering Automation Anywhere Imagine, brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Hey welcome back, Jeff Rick here with The Cube, we're in midtown Manhattan at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019, we were here last year for the first time, we're really excited to be back. Since we were here, I think they raised like 550 million dollars, the RPA space is going bananas, and it's a really exciting place to be, both for the company and also for us at Cube, so we're excited to be back, and we got a return visit from last year, she's Neeti Metha, she's the co-founder, we always love to get co-founders, SVP brand strategy and culture, welcome back. >> Good to see you again, Jeff. >> Absolutely. So, first off, congratulations, I mean what a move you guys have made in only one short year. >> Thank you. The space is really taking off, and we are very excited to see the growth. >> So, excited to talk about the technology all day long but you're getting involved in some of the little higher-level discussions which are really really important, we see it in AI, and these are the conversations, I think, are much more important and that's about ethics, and how are these tools being used, what do people need to think about when they're using their tools, we don't just want to qualify bad behavior or bad bias' or bad ways of doing things in the past, that doesn't help so, what are you thinking about, how are you helping customers, what are some of the things they should be thinking about in this space? >> So, two things, one is, I think, society unfortunately has had a lot of unconscious bias in a lot of different ways, you know, it may not be intentional, it may be something that is inherent in the way we behave as a society or a community, or a race, religion, as a gender, it doesn't matter, and somehow, when we do AI and machine learning and we are training these bots, when we feed all this data to them, there are two things that AI helps us with. One is, we get to see it outside-in, so we are looking at it as how the data is looked upon by the machine, and these bias' become a little bit more obvious to us than otherwise, and then two, we can actually take that as a learning point and fix those biases so that we are not always targeting the most populous religion or the most populous race, or the most populous gender at that point, but we are looking at it absolutely gender-neutral, or race-neutral or religion-neutral and so forth, so AI really helps in those two things, one is it allows you to see it and identify it, and two, it allows you to rectify it as you're training these bots to make certain decisions using the analysis and the data that they have at their disposal. >> I'm curious how the outside-in exposes it 'cause for a lot of people, they don't see it, right, that's why the Terma Conch is bias so, is it in the documentation that you maybe never really had to write it down, what are some of the things that suddenly surfaced that, Oh, I didn't really realize we were doing that." >> So two things, one, again, in that sense, the data that we had, there was a lot of data, so having AI and machine learning actually helps us digitize that data and that means that we have a lot more data that can be analyzed, first of all, which was not possible before, and second, we can actually look at that data and cut in and dice it in any way we want to to kind of see these biases a little bit more. When you couldn't have digitized data, then how are you going to have one human brain, for example, look at all the data that was not digitized and analyze it without the digitization, and then actually find analyses around that or find biases around that? So it really does help to digitize that data and, for example, Automation Anywhere's IQ bot helps you digitize dark data or hidden data, and covert it to digitized data and then you can analyze it and do things with that data that you could never before. >> Okay, great. So, one of the things that came up in your great keynote this morning, lot of stuff, I could go on for probably 2 hours, but one of them is really re-thinking this concept of what a bot is, is it digital assistant, or even a digital employee? And thinking of it, not as something that's going to replace what I do per se, but it's just another tool in my toolbox, just like I have a laptop, I have a mobile phone, I have sales force, I have all these other systems, and really thinking of it more that way to offload some of this mundane, soul-crushing work that unfortunately takes up way too much of all of our time. Very different approach than, "This is a substitute for what I do now." >> Technology is always a human enabler, and this is extremely important. So the RPA and the digital workforce is something that we believe that every human who is working could leverage and enable themselves to get to that new level of creativity, that innovation, get rid of the repetitive and mundane and do things that you never could before or you could never get to because of a time perspective. And so, it's extremely important for people to utilize this to actually help themselves, their careers, their own teams, their divisions, their organizations and their societies to get to the next level. >> Right, and open up this productivity gate because, the other thing I think is really funny is, all this conversation about robots taking jobs and yet companies have thousands and thousands of open recs, they can't hire enough people, even with the technology and I'm always drawn to this great invite, we did a Google cloud a couple of years ago, where, when they were starting to scale, they realized they could not do it with people, they just couldn't hire fast enough and had to start incorporating software defined automation, or else they could never take advantage of that. We're seeing that here and that's really part of the whole story and why RPA is so exciting right now, is 'cause you're an enabler for productivity force multiplier. >> That's right and a lot of businesses have certain things that are inherent in their industries, for example, there might be a seasonality requirement, or there might be a requirement where they suddenly have a surge of customers and so forth, and in order to stock that many claims or accounts that they're opening or whatever their process is doing, in order to get that many humans onboard them, train them, at least give them a breathing space to get onboard and actually be responsive to that organization, you can help them by having bots to bridge that gap and allow them to be successful. >> Right. Another interesting stab in here, I got great notes, again it was a terrific keynote, he talked about only 4% of US jobs require a medium level of creativity and I was struck, I remember being in grade school and we watched a movie about people in an auto-manufacturing plant, just the worst kind of monotony they were doing, and this one guy used to load cars on a train and every once in a while he would just drop one on purpose or run the forklift through it just to kind of break up his day. >> Right. >> So, again, the purpose is not to replace, but to really enable people to start to use their brains and be more creative. >> It is to unleash the human potential, and that is what automation will do for it. >> Now, you guys have recently came out with some new research, or if you can give us some of the highlights on some of your new research? >> Absolutely. So, last year, we worked with the Goldsmith's University of London to see if automation, and we believe so, but we wanted to see and validate that automation actually did make work more human. So, did people actually free themselves of their repetitive and mundane and then become more creative and innovative and solve problems that they wanted to and they couldn't before? And the answer was overwhelmingly yes. So this year, we went the next step in that research, and we did a second research, a second wave of research, where we said, "What do organizations, what are the challenges organizations will face if they want to implement this automation and unleash that human potential?" and you should read the research, it's on our website, but it was very very interesting, 72% of people didn't believe that AI or machine learning or automation would be taking over their jobs, yet only 38% of them were exposed or had the opportunity to work with this. So the potential is enormous, technology has to be an organizational change, that's another thing that came out of the research, and corporations should work towards it, but I think this research was very insightful, please do look at it, I think it will be very useful to you. >> So one of the announcements too, that came out today was about the community addition, and I think that's a really interesting play, right, 'cause your introducing a freemium, so people, myself, individuals, educations, businesses, have access to your whole suite for free. I'm sure there was some interesting conversations internally to really make that leap, but it really supports your theme of the democratization of the automation which we hear over and over around data and a lot of pieces of the stack, and so obviously the bigger picture, the bigger opportunity far outweighs a couple of bucks of revenue from this small company or that small company. I wonder if you can kind of share some of the thought behind that? >> Absolutely. This was always part of the strategy, but it was part of the strategy to do it at the right time, when the technology was mature and robust enough one, but when we could actually allow and give that opportunity to every human who wanted to get rid of their repetitive and mundane, give them the opportunity to be better at what they do, to create more and innovate more, and so we are very excited about it, we've had such a great response from the market on it and the idea from the beginning, and I think we are very committed to it, and Automation Anywhere is to create opportunity for automation for everyone. >> That's great. So, last question Neeti, what are you working on in 2019, I mean I don't expect you to raise another half a billion dollars, great year from last time, what are some of your priorities though as we look at the balance of 2019? >> I think this industry is under tremendous growth, I think we are seeing a lot of results, for the customers and for employees, and so we are very very excited, I think it's a great time for the industry, it will create a lot more innovation, we'll have a lot more new things coming out this year, a lot more engagement from all over the world, and it's a super exciting time to be in this industry. >> Great. Well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day and for having us back here at the show. >> Absolutely, my pleasure, Jeff. >> She's Neeti, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube, where Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019 in midtown Manhattan. Thanks for watching, see you next time. (energetic music)

>> From New York City, it's theCUBE! Covering Automation Anywhere, Imagine. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in Midown Manhattan at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019. We were here last year, it's about 1,500 people who are excited to be back, the RPA space is really, really hot as evidenced by tons of investment coming into it and we're excited to have the CEO, fresh of the keynote but here Shukla the CEO and co-founder of Automation Anywhere. Great to see you and great job on the keynote. >> Thank you, great to see you too. >> Yeah, so I wanted to jump into some of the top level themes that you outlined that I think are so important and one of them was this whole concept of democratization of automation. We hear about it in Big Data, we hear about it at citizen developers and you guys are taking it really into the automation space and you had three things that were really important. One, it has to work for anyone. It's got to be available anywhere, which implies on anything. And it has to be available to any company, regardless of size. It sounds like you've really baked those concepts into a lot of the announcements that you've had today and where you're taking the company. So I wonder if you can dive a little bit deeper as to why those are guiding principles. >> Absolutely. I think what guides us there is that we believe that the power of technology lies when it impacts the lives of millions of people and makes them better. So you if you start with that premise, how do you make that possible. Now when you look at any technology that has affected, made millions of lives better, they had these three characteristics in common. Take an example of a personal computer or internet. It was available to anyone, for any kinds of people, any profile of people. It was available anywhere in any device and it was available for any sized company. So we have seen this play out a few times in our lifetime so, we have learned from that, that if our mission is to make power of RPA and AI reach millions of people and make their lives better, if that's the mission then we have to make this possible for anyone, for anywhere and for any sized company. >> And a big piece of that was the announcement of the community version which is free. So I'm sure there were some interesting discussions about moving to a freemium model and actually giving the software free for people that qualify. I wonder if you can talk about those discussions and clearly there's a bigger picture that you're focused on, versus just the revenue for one or two small customers. >> Right, so our community edition is free for small businesses, student and individual developers. And the reason why we did this is for two reasons. One is, we believe the students are our future and they will take this technology forward and we need more and more people with digital skills. So it seemed like the right place to invest and enable them with the next set of technologies. The reason to make it available free for developers is, we believe that today about 95% of processes that we automate are the processes that we do manually today. But that is changing very fast. In three to five years, 30% of things that we will automate will be the things that are not part of our lives today. It is things that we don't know yet, right? >> Right, right. >> And that happens every time. The way we use phones and everything, nobody could've predicted this. So we know that will happen like it happened in internet and other evolution. It will happen in our space as well. And developers are an amazing asset, they are the ones who will discover, find these new ways that none of us know about and they will create this new future in front of our eyes. So it makes sense to empower developers and especially developers are very picky, they want the best software available. They won't settle for anything less and because we have the complete intelligent digital workforce platform that includes the best RPA, artificial intelligence and analytics, (coughs) we thought they would love the power of this combined platform that is not available anywhere else. And true to the cause, as soon as we announced it we had an amazing success. The requests are pouring in from 120 countries worldwide and the adoption has been phenomenal. >> And you mentioned that on stage on the keynote that there's some examples out there where people are not doing automating of processes that they already did but are really starting to get creative in the uses of this tool and I think we see it over and over as you said, people miss the hype recurve, it's hard to see the future and it's hard to apply what we're doing today to what we're going to be doing in the future, because we really don't know. >> That's right. I think sometimes I describe this way to people, that when the new technology comes, people think that new technology is the train and the world is the stations. So the station remains where it is and the tain moves on, right? That's not how real world is. The real world is, the world is a train itself, that's moving forward and technology is one of the, you can say it's the first-- >> The locomotive. >> First locomotive or one of the pieces in it. But the whole world is moving as well. So we often, many of us get this wrong that, we make a mistake to think that, how will this new technology fill in a stationary world where that's not the case, the world is moving. >> The other thing you brought up I thought was pretty interesting is that, this is not to displace workers, it's to enable workers to do better and I couldn't help but think of, just like my PC helps me do my job better, the internet helps me do my job better, my phone and my ERP system all help me do my job better. So, of course, why wouldn't I want a powered AI assistant to help me do my job better. >> That's absolutely true. Look, I have a very extraordinary privilege of seeing this transformation through the eyes of thousands of people who use our platform every day, and I've visited about, of the 2,800 plus customers we have, I have visited hundreds of them and talked to thousands of people on the ground who use this technology. And there is not a single one of them who would go back. And I invariably ask that, after a few discussions I would say "Would you ever consider going back?", and the answer is universal across any country, any verticle. People do not want to go back to, why would you, why would you do a robotic job? And so, it is more clear than ever before that this transformation is certainly not about us, certainly not about bots. It is about empowering people so that they're more productive unlike any other time in human history. Taking it a step further, as you said, compared to where PCs brought us. >> You said, again I could go on your keynote all day long, another great thing you brought up which was just crushing, I think you said that 4% of people have jobs that need some degree of creativity. That is horrible! >> Is it not? Is it not? >> That is horrible. And again to personalize it, you talked about your kids and this world that they're going to be coming into, why would we want to put them into a robotic job? >> Right. So the data shows that only 4% of US jobs require medium creativity. And as a parent that is, I'm troubled by it because we, like all parents, we tell our children they can do anything. What do we mean by they can do anything? If they get one of those 4% jobs, that's still a medium level of creativity so probably we hope they get 4.1% of those jobs that require full human capacity, yeah? >> Right, right. >> That's not anything they can do. They don't have as many opportunities that they should have. And I think we need to create a better world with more opportunities for our children. I'll settle at 40% but 4% isn't acceptable. >> So a little bit about the business, cause the deeper stuff I think is more interesting, but the business is doing well, again. Since we last met you had this huge A round, I think someone said "The largest A round ever.". You put over half a billion dollars into the bank. A, what is that show in terms of validation from the marketplace, for the opportunities you guys are addressing? And then B, with great resources comes great responsibility, you know? So what are you doing next as you look into 2019, what are some of your top priorities? >> So we have been very fortunate to get the, as you mentioned about 550,000,000 in our series A round and it is, if not the largest, one of the largest series A round ever. I think it shows, first of all it's a validation of our market leadership and the growth of the category both. We continue to invest heavily in three areas. First is our RND investment continues to grow, especially in AI and making RPA accessible to millions. So those investments continue. We are significantly investing in the global expansion across, now we have offices in about 30, 35 countries worldwide. And the third is, we will carefully look at acquiring maybe new technologies and new acquisitions to make our digital labor platform more complete and offer customers more similar solutions. >> Right. So last question before I let you go, I know they got you flying back to back to back all day. It's really about the ecosystem. The Partner Ecosystem, you've got obviously a bunch of system integrators here which validates that they see a huge opportunity, but talk about how you're developing an ecosystem to extend the reach beyond just the people that work at Automation Anywhere. >> So we have two important pillars to our ecosystem. We have our site system integrators. We bought 700 plus partners who provide invaluable experience in various domains all over the world. Many of them provide the bots and the bot store that are domain specific, process specific, ready to tax and audit and finance and accounting and supply chain and oil and gas and telcos, across all industries. So they bridge the gap between technology and the customer specific, domain specific process. That's one very important pillar. The second important pillar is the software companies. So we have a great deal of partnerships with many of them, for example we have a continued partnership with IBM, with their digital business automation group. We recently announced partnership with Workrave that is very important to us. It has an enormous potential of how when you combine best in class, HR and cloud finance with best in class intelligent digital workforce. The possibilities of value creation is enormous. We today announced our partnership with Oracle and we extended our partnership with Microsoft on multiple fronts, and there are many more as well. So the two key pillars to our creating an ecosystem. Again, all of this is, almost everything that we do comes down to a single mission statement which is, how do we take the power of RPA and AI to millions of people and make their life better? >> Great, great mission. So again, thanks for having us. Congratulations on a great event and we look forward to watching the next year unfold. >> Thank you, I look forward to it (laughter) >> Alright he's been here, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCube. We're at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019 in Midtown Manhattan, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> From New York City, it's the cube, covering automation anywhere, Imagine brought to you by automation anywhere. >> Hey welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We're in midtown Manhattan at the automation anywhere, imagine 2019 event we were here last year, it's grown quite a bit and we're excited to be back. Our very first guest of today is Kashif Maboob, he is the VP Product Marketing and Global Head of our PA at automation anywhere. Great to see you. >> Nice to be here. >> Yeah so a year ago, in June I looked up the date and since June you guys have had a very exciting year, you raised like a half a billion dollars the RPA space is blowing up and this conferences I think outgrowing the venue so it's been quite a years. >> It certainly has been quite a year, yes we did have the largest Series A for a enterprise software company ever we are still on the Series A which is quite significant in our industry at the moment, the growth has been phenomenal, last year when you and I met here we had nine offices we have 35 offices today we have... we are looking at exiting 2019 with about 3,000 employees the numbers just speak for themselves. RPA that category itself has been at a growth space that I certainly have never seen before. >> So here had a great keynote a little bit earlier and he touched on a couple of really key topics and he did this last year too when he talked about, truly transformational technology shifts. And he talked about mobile before and personal computing and some of these things and he had three kind of things, it has to work for everyone it must be available anywhere and it must work for any size company and you guys are making real concrete moves into that area and one thing he talked about, is this concept of community edition. So i wonder if you can give us a little bit more flavor what is community edition, why is it important automation anywhere? >> Absolutely the concept, the vision that we are driving towards, is automation for all. For all types of users, by that we mean business user, IT user, developer. You don't have to be somebody who is proficient at coding you don't have to be somebody who is doing just one part of the business. Anybody in the business should be able to pick up the software and start using it. So with that concept in mind, we then thought about all types of businesses. Because until not too long ago RPA was a realm for the largest of the large companies. So last year fourteen fifteen hundred of our enterprises that number has grown to about 2,800 now. Still some of the largest companies in the world. Now taking it further is also talking about the various channels through which we deliver our software. so not just on premises which is most of RPA today but going forward enabling cloud delivery models. So with all that combined what is the fastest way to get people started on it and that is to remove all barriers to remove all friction and that's where community Edition comes in. It's a free product, it is the entire digital workforce platform. So not just RPA but RPA with AI and with analytics all combined, with a mobile app ready system. So when you when you sign up or download, whichever way you want to call it. You are actually signing up into a very robust, very comprehensive the most complete digital workforce platform that enables business users, students, educators, but perhaps most importantly developers to start developing their own bots, their own software robots. A community edition is just one piece of a larger ecosystem strategy that we have, that includes the community edition. So download the software or sign up into it and start building, but where do you learn how to build bots? well, we have Automation Anywhere University. We have about 175,000 students signed up already. We're fast becoming the world's largest University as well and then... So you have free courses available, you can get certifications as a trainer as a developer, as a business user. Once you have that training you can start developing bonds. Let's say you have questions that you want answered or you feel like the expert who should be sharing his or her knowledge for that we have the A people community, it's again RPA's largest community in the world, seventy-five thousand plus users already so that's piece number three and last but not the least, you've downloaded the Community Edition, you've become proficient in building boards, you're sharing knowledge and your expertise what's the next step? The next step is to build bots that the rest of the world can use so we are we have bought stores that we launched last year >> right >> so you can actually upload your bots and you will start monetizing the bots so it isn't a virtuous cycle, it's an ecosystem of free software, free education, free community, in a marketplace that lets you share your knowledge your expertise with the world. So that's our vision that's what we are very much into it and more than a vision it's in practice today. >> Right it's an interesting play right because we always hear about the democratization of data, and the citizen developer, so you guys are really talking about the democratization of automation and I'm sure there were some interesting conversations we're going to have the CFO on later, about you know taking some revenue off the table to enable kind of this community outreach to go out and offer really a full stacks almost like a freemium, classic kind of freemium play, to let people and as you said developers, schools, small businesses get involved in this. What if you could talk about kind of the strategic reason that you're giving up some short-term revenue for obviously a much potential bigger gain down the road. >> So a great point , if you look at the vision, the vision is to automate any process that can be automated right. Is to automate any process any organization that should be automated so what does that mean? That means an enormous workforce that is RPA ready. RPA educated that has knowledge of RPA and not just RPA but any automation per se because AI is included in here. >> Right >> So the only way we can reach that goal, of having millions and millions of users using not just our product, but any RPA product is to educate them to get products in their hands and so we can't think short term in that way. Our our vision is multi-decade vision. And its enormous vision as you as you heard also you mentioned so it's automation for all. For any business size and through any delivery channel >> Right >> And that's where the strategy is that's why we launched Community Edition and you will see a lot more coming down the pipeline as well >> Right So the next big theme is cloud right, we were both at the Google cloud show, last week there you got an announcement here about Oracle cloud and then here talked about, your guys own cloud so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about kind of the cloud strategy and then some of these different options that you guys are enabling for a cloud enabled version of automation anywhere. >> Absolutely so that's a big step just like freeing up our software, through community edition, we need to open a channel through which anybody can have software available so so you don't have just the option of on-premise software, but cloud ready web ready software so for that we announced today, the intelligent automation cloud. The the focus is simplicity, security and scalability. Those three things are critical for any business should be simple enough for anybody to use the software without having to download and install and maintain and so they're big huge cost IT costs for maintaining and price of it >> Right >> So removing that cost, that's what we mean by a zero footprint software it's simple but simple does not mean it's weak or its anything like that. Simple mean is powerful, easy enough to use, intuitive enough to use for a business user >> Right >> Who is who's expertise lives in the process, not necessarily in the coding and scripting environment >> Right >> On the other hand giving the the developers a very robust and IDE you know development environment so that all users, the business user the developer and the IT manager they all get the capability. Security is built-in. We cannot have robust security if you're dealing with world's largest financial organization nine out of ten largest banks, are already in business with us so security is paramount. Audit compliance is paramount >> Right >> Audit ease is paramount and last but not the least is the scalability. So cloud provides us and our customers infinite scale. So simplicity, security, scalability, delivered through cloud and an intelligent cloud not just a cloud that is basic, but cloud where AI is built in >> Right >> Where cognitive capabilities are built in so that's that's a vision that's the goal >> Right but it's and even more of that it's just choice right depending on what the customer needs what their particular application is, within a within a single customer or a single entity pick a large bank, they may have some implementations behind the firewall, on prem they might have some, on your cloud they might have some on some of these big public clouds. You're really offering now the choice it's not necessarily a locked in delivery strategy. >> So we are certified with the five largest cloud platforms available today. Whether it's Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Azure, you will see Microsoft talking here today you will hear from IBM executives here today. Very close partnerships with these organizations >> Right >> So not only that we are technology partners, but we are certified with their cloud platforms which makes which gives our customers the peace of mind. >> Right >> That if we are certified, say with AWS Amazon Web Services, the security that's built into Amazon Web Services, the scalability that comes out of it, the 99.99% uptime and all of those amazing things that amazon has invested in >> Great >> Over the years and now available to our customers as well >> Right >> So that's that's an important factor. >> A lot going on since we last that down a year ago but let's let's look at forward again and I think I asked you last year, you know what are we going to be talking about 2019? So what's coming next? I mean you guys have a huge war chest, you're in a very hot space, you have a lot of momentum Like how you said you doubled your offices in a year, hiring like mad, so what's next? what are you what are you working on in the near term, and the mid term? >> So we started with Community Edition a month ago so in a month we have about 12,000 signups and downloads which is very significant for our enterprise business. It's from throughout the world but in a month's time we are coming out with one of our most the biggest releases if you will ever and that's where we introduce the cloud, that's where we introduce for the business user, a completely web-based interface, which is what we call bot sketch, that gives you the ability, to drag and drop and build your process and in the backend we will develop the bot the software robot for you so it's sort of a bridge between a business user, and she might be on the accounting side or billing side but she's the expert in knowing her own process but she's not a scriptor, she's not a coder she's not a developer, her area of expertise is is the process itself >> Right >> It could be a logistics process , it could be an HR process and she can sketch out their process just like building a workflow and once she finishes her work and she's complete with her workflow or her process end to end, the the development side can take over and the code is already written for them at that point the developer can bring in their own Python code, can run it on Linux, in IT is the third user of course and they can see the entire environment so we are launching an environment that is ready for business that's robust enough for for the developer and secure and gives peace of mind to the IT so that's a major release it of course comes with our built-in security, cloud management and all of that so >> Right >> That's what we are rolling up to and Community Edition is there and you will see more and more talk about digital worker, you earlier you saw me here and it described the digital worker, bot store is there, it's the first-ever automation marketplace so there are lots of firsts >> Right >> And there are lots of the biggest and the largest so we are running out of you know superlatives to use here. I'm in marketing of course, so I have to be careful what I what I come up with >> That's right there's people playing bingo probably so we have to careful that they don't fill up their card. I just want to give you the last take you know when we talk a year ago you talked about three things, about RPA by itself, no kind of cognitive automation and in incorporating you know machine learning and artificial intelligence and then smart analytics and as you're talking and I'm listening, you know I don't even necessarily need to build the body, I mean you just kind of built around the bot but now I can I can get somebody else's bot, now you're talking about actually building the bot for me so you you're leveraging a lot of these, core technologies to power the compute and cloud to actually help me build the bot, taking me one step further where I just need to know my process to be able to start to implement my own digital assistants and and add automation to my world. >> Absolutely so the story is not the bot, the story is always the customer, looking at the customers pain point and what can we do to solve that pain point. How can we make the process more efficient, better faster cheaper right so the bot is a vehicle for us to really enable our customers, to really simplify their lives so that as Mahir mentioned, we as humans can do more cognitive more intelligent work >> Right >> That's the vision >> Right >> and everything that we are announcing today, everything that we have done in the past 15 years that we've been business and our vision is all about you know a fanatical customer focus, we have a large partner base as well we work with largest advisories over 700 partners so if you look at the overall picture it's again building an ecosystem for our customers where they are not tied to one thing >> Right >> We are not we are trying to open it up it's an open platform, we work with best-of-breed, at the same time we provide our customers readiness with AI and security right out of the box as well if they already have a Best of Breed system installed, we will work with that, if they would like to work with our systems, we will work they have capability there so it's a it's a very open approach, it's a very flexible approach because there's no way we you cannot tie down your customer and expect them to stay with you. We want to enable them to automate their process in the most efficient way possible. >> Yeah well congratulations, it's quite a ride and I think the real fun stuffs just getting started. >> Yes absolutely thank you. >> All right thanks again. >> All right, he's Kashif I'm Jeff you're watching the cube were on a mission anywhere, imagine 2019 in midtown Manhattan. Thanks for watching, see you next time (upbeat music)

the problem people are trying to achieve is how to become a digital enterprise not just to automate but how do you create a digital enterprise you cannot become a digital enterprise unless your operations are digital you cannot make your operations digital unless your processes are digital and you cannot do that and let us say workforce is digital process automation helps get rid of the mundane and repetitive tasks but the ultimate goal is so that you can enable the humans to do more to enable a lot more creativity you're outside the box thinking we'll come up with new service models come up with new ways to solve things and this is only possible if you get rid of the repetitive mundane tasks which often block bounce down humans [Music] many more jobs we technically enable then will be eliminated by by technology there's gonna be some that are that are that are impacted more dramatically than others but I would I would actually say for most people the ability to have technology to help them do the day-to-day job is gonna have a much higher technology get adopted when you have to go and invest in it it takes passion you got to get people who believe people are committed people who want to go to do something come around like they have for all other things when computers came people had the same concern and Internet and ever I write I think in many ways this will help us help us improve our standard of living and take us to her [Music]

>> From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Manhattan at the Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018. 1100 people milling around looking at the ecosystem, looking at all the offers that all the partners have. And we're excited to have one of the strategic advisors from the company, he's Bill Raduchel. Strategic advisor, been in the industry for >> 50 years, 40 years, 50 years, whatever. Forever. >> So Bill, thanks for takin' a few minutes. >> My pleasure. >> So how did you get involved with Automation Anywhere? >> Oh the way most things happen in life, friends, right? You get involved, and got to talking to Mihir, and we got, we see the world much the same way. And see the importance of bots and bringing productivity back to the economy. And no other way to do it. So just ya know, it grew. >> It grew. So it's interesting right? Cause I though ERP was supposed to have rung out all the efficiency that, and waste in the system, but clearly that was not the case. >> I won both CIO of the year and CTO of the year, and I put in an ERP system, and I understand it. It also failed three times going in. It was incredibly painful, but it produced over a billion dollars in cash saving. So it did. The problem is the world changes. And the world changes now at a pace far faster than you can possibly change your ERP system. >> Right. >> I mean ERP systems are built to be changed every I don't know, 15 to 25 years. And the world in 25 years is gonna look very different than the world does today. So we just have a huge disconnect between how fast we can create and deploy software, and how fast the world is changing to which that software has to relay. >> Right. And still so many of the processes that people actually do in their day job, are still spreadsheet based, you know, my goodness. How much of the world's computational horsepower is used on Excel on stand alone little reports and projects? >> Another question to ask is how many errors are in those spreadsheets? >> That's right. Not enough copy paste. >> I mean, I was on a study for the National Academy of Sciences, and we looked at why productivity growth wasn't happening. And one answer, which we just talked about, is Legacy software. I mean, you just couldn't change it, you couldn't, you know when you had to rewrite the software all productivity growth just slowed to a crawl. The other thing is something that economists call lore. And lore is basically oral tradition. But it's the way the company really works. >> Right. >> You have all these processes and all these procedures but when you get down and you start talking and sort of like, what is it the secret boss show? I mean, you learn the little things that the people down at the bottom know. Well, so far, Automation has never really penetrated that. And yet that becomes the barrier to almost all change. So what RPA does, is RPA actually begins to go after lore. RPA allows companies to begin to understand lore, and understand how to optimize it. Understand how to record it. I mean, you know, it's not written down. It's below the level that people bother to document and yet, if you don't change the lore, you're not gonna matter. >> You're not changing anything. >> You're not changing anything. So this is why this is so exciting because for the first time, companies, organizations, people, I mean we see all this stuff coming out just to help us in our everyday lives. You get to go at the lore. I mean, you know that, well you don't put that field in, no you wait 20 seconds after you filled in this field before you go and do that, because it takes that long for that and you get an error over here. That's how things really work. And this is the kind of technology that can actually address that. And so for that point of view it's really revolutionary because we've never been able I mean, oral tradition has never been subject to a whole lot of scientific studies. >> Well the other thing is just so impressive when you've been in the business a long time, you know we're talking about AOL before we turn on the cameras and shipping CDs around. >> Right. >> As we get closer and closer to ya know, infinite compute, infinite storage, infinite networking, 5G just around the corner. At a price point that keeps absutodically getting closer and closer to zero, the opportunity for things like AI, and to really apply a lot more horsepower to these problems, opens up a whole different opportunity. >> Two comments to that. One is, about 15 years ago the National Science Foundation funded Monica Lamb at Stanford to do a project on the open mobile internet, POMI. And one of their conclusions was that at some point in the future, which may be happening now, we would all have a digital butler. And everybody would have, basically a bot. They would be living 24/7 operating on our behalf, doing the things that help make our life better. And that is you know, really what's gonna happen. Now you see AI, and if you saw there was a report that got a lot of news from the speech given at the Federal Reserve Bank at Dallas, I think. Where the guy said well productivity is fine, it's just that the AI technology hasn't been able to find a way to be effective, or made real. Well the way it's gonna be made real is these bots because you still got your ERP system. Now granted I can have AI over here, but if it doesn't talk to the ERP system, how is the order gonna get placed? How is the product gonna get mailed? How is it gonna get shipped? So something has to go bring these together. So again, you're not gonna have impact from AI unless you have an impact from bots. Because they're the interface to the real world. >> Well the other huge thing that happened, right, was this mobile. And the Googles and the Amazons of the world resetting our expectations of the way we should be interacting with our technology. And you know, it's funny but there's little things that are in our day all the time. I mean, Ways is just a phenomenal example, right? And auto fill on an address. You know, this is the address you typed in, this is the one that USPS says is the official address from your home. So it's all these little tiny things that are just happening >> Spell check. >> Without even, spellcheck. >> Spell check, I mean, the inventor of spell check is John Seely Brown. And he was giving a speech at the University of Michigan 15 years ago and the graduates weren't pleased. Here was a computer scientist gonna come talk to them and it's at the Michigan stadium, and they're throwing beach balls and no one's paying any attention. And the person who introduced him said and I wanna introduce John Seely Brown, the man who invented spell check. And he had a standing ovation from 100,000 people because that got their attention. They all knew that that was really important. No you're right. I mean, the iPhone is 10 years old. Well I mean smart phones are 20 years old. The iPhone is 10 years old, 10 and a half now. I mean, it's changed how we live our lives, how we do business, how everything goes. Anybody who thinks that the next 10 years is gonna be less change >> No, it's only accelerating. >> There's so many vectors. I mean a year ago, a friend coined the Cambric Extinction, basically a play on words on the Cambrian Extinction. And it's Cloud, AI, mobile, big data, robotics, Internetive things, and cyber security. And he pointed out that any one of those would be incredibly disruptive, they were all hitting at the same time. The thing that's amazing is that's a two year old comment. Block chain wasn't around. >> Right. >> And today, block chain may be more disruptive than any of those. And yet, how do all of those connect to the Legacy systems for some long period of time? It's what's going on in this room. >> Right. Well cause I was gonna ask you, cause you advise a ton of companies, so you've seen it and you continue to see it across a large spectrum. What's special about this company? what's special about this leadership team that keeps you excited, that keeps you involved? >> It's the people side of this, right. I mean, I have been to more computer related conferences in my life than I can count. I've never seen as much enthusiasm as there is here. Maybe, at a Mac conference. But I mean it's that same level of enthusiasm, it's passion. How does technology get adopted when you have to go invest in it? It takes passion. You gotta get people who believe. People who are committed. People who wanna go and do something with it. And that's what they've been able to do. That's what Mihir has done. And it's been brilliant in bringing that on board. >> Yeah, you can certainly feel it here in the room. Especially when it's still relatively intimate. >> Right. >> You know, people are sharing ideas, you know they're excited. It's really not kind of a competitive vendor fair, it's more of a community that's really trying to help each other out. >> Well that, I mean, they're at that stage. It may get a little bit, you know this, well no I'm not gonna tell you about my bot. It's a great bot and it does great things, but nope, I'm not gonna tell you how it works. >> Right. So just last parting word, you know as you see kind of the bot economy. We've seen they got the bot store, I guess they have a hundred bots, they've only had it open for a very short period of time. You can buy, sell, free. What do you see kind of the next short term evolution of this space? >> I think that bots are probably worth somewhere around a point in productivity growth. Well, a point >> Not a basis point, but a point point. >> A point. That's what Makenzie says, that's what, I mean because this is allowing you to capture benefits that you should of and you haven't. A point in global productivity is about a trillion dollars. So then your question for the bot economy is okay, if the value of the bots is a trillion dollars, what portion of that can the bot economy capture? And that you know, I mean 20 30 percent is certainly a reasonable number to go look at. The real world lives over here, all this technology change lives over here, and bots are gonna be the bridge by which you bring those two things together. So yes, it should be big and growing for a long time. >> Well Bill, thanks for taking a minute. I really appreciate the conversation. >> Great, thank you. >> Alright, he's Bill, I'm Jeff. You're watchin' theCUBE from Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we are at Automation Anywhere in midtown Manhattan, 2018, excited to have our next guest, he's Kevin Kroen, he's partner of financial services, intelligent automation leader at PWC, Kevin, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> So financial services seems to be a theme, we're here in Manhattan, why is financial services an early adopter or maybe a frequent adopter or an advanced adopter of the RPA technology? >> Sure, so I think as we see our financial services clients and their agendas, there's been a huge focus on productivity and simplifying their overall operating model over the past couple of years. Banks in particular have gone through several years of having to focus their spending on non discretionary manners like regulatory compliance and risk management. And what that's generated is a need, as they started looking towards the next generation to really start thinking about what they're gonna look like in a post regulatory environment. And automation has quickly risen to the top of the agenda. >> What they're gonna look like in a post regulatory environment. >> Yes. >> Why a post regulate? >> Well I mean if you look through, you know what banks have had to deal with in term of Dodd-Frank, in terms of CCAR, you know, the regulation from federal reserve, these are things that took a lot of spending both on implementing operational processes and on implementing technology. A lot of that work is starting to you know, the banks are putting that behind themselves and so as they look forward and look at how they're going to gain more profitability in the future, the challenge becomes, there's not necessarily a new set of product innovation coming in, and so you have to really look at the expense line. >> Right. >> And so because of that automation has risen to the top of that agenda and so this continues to be one of the top areas of interest that we're getting from our clients. >> Right, so when you say post regulatory, you mean like a new regulation that they have to respond to, not that they're suddenly not gonna be regulated. >> There's not a lot of new regulations coming in right now, especially- >> That pesky one last week, GDRP. >> Yeah but in the US we're in an environment right now, there was just, you know, the revisions to the Dodd-Frank bill that were passed a lot of regulatory rules were actually being loosened so you don't necessarily have an increase in dollars that are going to be going into that. >> Right right, so it just always fascinates me, right, I thought ERP was supposed to wring out all the efficiency in our systems but that was not the case, not even by a long shot and now we continue to find these new avenues for more efficiency and clearly this is a big one that we've stumbled upon. >> Yeah, you know I think it's interesting, when you look at big technology investment over the last decade or two, you could argue a lot of efforts been focused at what I call the kind of core infrastructure and core plumbing so you know, how do I consolidate data into a single location? How do I make sure that data reconciles into different parts of my organization but that like kind of last mile of what someone does as part of their day to day business process was never really addressed, you know or is only addressed in pieces, and so I think as you start looking at the productivity term and how you actually start getting efficiency, we have very few clients that are saying, I want to take on that next big ERP type of limitation or I'm ready to spend 300 million dollars on a new project, they're looking to try to get the most value out of what they already have and they're actually looking to look at that last mile and how can they actually gain some benefit off it so the RPA technologies I think we're one of the catalysts of just being the perfect technology in the right place at the right time from a current business environment, a current technology spend perspective. >> Yeah it's pretty interesting Mihir was talking about, you know one of the big benefits is that you can take advantage of your existing infrastructure, you know, it's not a big giant rip and replace project but it's, again, it's this marginal incremental automation that you just get little benefit, little benefit, little benefit, end of the day, turns into a big benefit. >> Yeah, and I think that's, you know, it's quick, it's fast, it's, you know it can be implemented in an agile manner and you know, our clients are continuously telling us over and over again, they're willing to invest, but they wanna invest where they're gonna see a tangible payback immediately. >> Right. >> And I think when you start to talk the concept of digital transformation, it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people but there are big picture changes that could be made, those may be longer term trends but they're more immediate things and more immediate benefits that could be gained and I think that's really the sweet spot of where RPA and Automation Anywhere fall into. >> I was just looking up Jeff Immelt in his key note said this is the easy fountain money of any digital transformation project, I think that was the quote, that you'll ever do. That's a pretty nice endorsement. >> Yeah and it's, as we go out, we talk to CFOs, COOs, CIOs, you know, it's, the value proposition is really attractive because, you know, there have been, there's a track record of failed, technology projects failed big transformation projects and, you know, no one wants to necessarily risk their career on creating the next big failure and so I think using technology like RPA almost as an entry point or kind of like a gateway drug into the digital world, see the benefits, start to understand what are some of the business problems and historical kind of, you know, things you're trying to untangle in your infrastructure, attack that and then, you know, start to layer on additional things on top of that, once you get good with RPA and then you can start figuring out, okay, that's they gateway to artificial intelligence, okay how do I start to apply AI across my organization? As you get beyond AI, okay, how do I get into, more advanced state infrastructure and you can start thinking about this world where you can, you know, rather than do the big, five year project where you're gonna try to solve world hunger, it gives you a chance to kind of incrementally go digital over time and I think that's definitely the direction we see a lot of our clients wanting to go in. >> Right, Kevin I want to get your feedback on another topic that came up again in the keynote, was just security, you know it was like the last thing that was mentioned, you know, like A B C D E F G and security, financial services, obviously security is number one, it's baked into everything that everyone's trying to do now, it's no longer this big moat and wall, but it's got to be everywhere so I'm just curious, from the customer adoption point of view, where does security come up in the conversation, has it been a big deal, is it just assumed, is there a lot of good stuff that you can demonstrate to clients, how does security fit within this whole RPA world? >> You know with security and I would just say the broader kind of risk management pieces to the operator infrastructure are one of the first questions we get asked and a highly regulated environment like financial services, you know, the technology is easy and powerful with RPA but you also have to take a step back and say okay, I can program a bot to go do anything in my infrastructure, and that could mean running a reconciliation or it could mean going to our wire system and trying to send money out the door. And so there's a lot of concern around, not only understanding the technical aspects to you know, how the tools work with different types of security technologies, but more looking at your approach to entitlements and your approach to how you actually manage who has access to code bots, deployed bots in production, the overtime, understand what happens, you know we did a presentation to a board of directors a couple months ago on kind of automation more broadly and you know this is, you know, senior level executives the first question we got was, you know, okay, how do I prevent the 22 year old kid that just came off of campus from building a bot that no one knows about, setting it loose in our infrastructure and it going rogue, right? And so I mean this group was pretty savvy, they caught onto it very quickly and you know, the CIO of this client was sitting next to me and she kind of didn't have an immediate answer to that and I think that was kind of the a-ha moment, this is something we really need to put some thought into around you know, who are we gonna let build bots, what policies are gonna be set around how bots get deployed into our production environment, how are we gonna monitor what happens? You know how are we gonna get our auditors, our operational risk folks, our regulators, how are we gonna get all our different stakeholder groups comfortable that we have a well controlled, well functioning bot infrastructure that exists? >> Right, cause the bots actually act like people, they're entitled as like a role right, within the organization? >> We have clients that have literally had to set bots up as new employees, like they get onboarded, they have a, you go to the corporate directory and you can see a picture of R2D2, right like and it's the way they get around how they get a bot intel to a system but it's still, it's not a human right, so you still have to have a policy for how you actually will get code that uses that bot entitlement to function right and so that has to be done in a well disciplined, well controlled manner. >> Right, because to give them the ability to provide information to help a person make a decision is very different then basically enabling them to make that decision and take proactive action. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, it's funny we talked to Dr. Robert Gates at a show a little while ago and he said the only place in the US military where a machine can actually shoot a gun is on the Korean border, but every place else they can make suggestions but ultimately it's gotta be a person that makes the decision to push the button. >> And we're seeing, you know, trying to equate that to financial services, you see a similar pattern where there are certain areas where people are very comfortable playing this technology, you know you get into accounting and reporting and you know more back office type processes, you got other areas that people are a little less comfortable, you know anything that touches kind of wire systems or touches things that, you know, going out the door, touches kind of core trading processes, things like that there's a different risk profile associated with it. I think the other challenge is too is RPA is getting the gateway drug into this going back to my previous point, as you start to layer additional technologies into this, you might have less transparency over understanding clearly what's happening, especially as artificial intelligence takes a much broader role in this and so there's gonna be a lot of scrutiny I think over the next couple years put into like how do I understand the models that are created by artificial intelligence technologies and those decisions that are being made because you, if your regulator says, okay, why did you make this decision, you have to be able to explain it as the supervisor of that intelligent bot, you can't just say, oh it's cause what the machine told me to do, as so, that'll be one of the interesting challenges that's ahead of us. >> Yeah it's good, I mean it's part of the whole scale of conversation, I had interesting conversation with a guy, talking about really opening up those AI boxes so that you have an auditable process, right, you can actually point to why it made the decision even if you're not the one that made it in real time and it's doing it really really quickly so. >> Exactly. >> Really important piece. >> Yeah and as PWC, it's one of our challenges, as a consultant I'm helping clients implement this, my colleagues in our audit practice are now grappling with that same question because we're increasingly being asked to audit that type of infrastructure and have to prove that something did what it was suppose to have done. >> Right, right, alright Kevin, well nothing but opportunities for you ahead and thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. >> Okay, thank you for having me. >> Alright, he's Kevin, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Automation Anywhere, Imagine 2018 in Manhattan, thanks for watching. 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>> From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering, Imagine 2018. Brought to you by, Automation Anywhere. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Manhattan at Automation Anywhere, Imagine 2018. Eleven hundred people buzzing all around us here. The eco system is hot, everybody's looking at all the various solutions, all the various bots, all the various activities going on. And we're excited to have relatively newcomer to the company. He's Kashif Mahbub, the VP, Product Marketing for Automation Anywhere. Kashif, welcome. >> Thanks for having me. >> So you said you've been here, we've had all the founders on I think, so you've been here about a year. So, first impressions, I imagine this is your first show, what do you think? >> It's actually my third show. >> Oh it is your show. >> Things are moving. >> Oh, were you a customer before? >> Company standard, yeah by company standards I would say I'm a veteran. (Jeff laughing) So we are doing these shows, all of these marketing activities at a very rapid pace. >> Very good, so one of the topics we haven't talked about so much today is this kind of digital workforce concept. And you guys have a really specific idea of what makes, kind of taking these things to actually be considered a digital workforce. So what are those three things that you guys combine, to have something that's unique in the market place? >> So we pioneered the concept of digital workforce. And in our parlance, in our definition, a digital workforce, especially at enterprise scale, comprises of three key components. RPA, which is robotic process automation. Cognitive automation, which is the ability of using AI and machine learning capabilities with the RPA. And last but not least, smart analytics. So, the combination of these three make up what we call a digital workforce. If any of one of these elements is missing, we feel that's not really a true digital workforce. So it is the workforce platform that we call enterprise, combines all of these capabilities together to really deliver a true enterprise class, digital workforce platform. >> Now how long have you guys been baking in the AI component of it, in the cognition piece. 'Cause there's a lot of talk about cognitive computing, and it's a big theme that IBM has had for a long, long time, and we're seeing AI work itself in to all kinds of interesting applications. Now kind of, where was your guys' AI journey, how long have you been at it, and where are you seeing kind of the break through to get to this digital workforce concept? >> So automation anywhere has been around for about 15 years now. So we have a very mature product. I look after the enterprise platform, and we just released version 11. So it makes it the most mature platform in the industry at the moment. Now to answer your question about AI, and bringing AI into it, that's fairly recent. But we are based in the heart of Silicon Valley, Google is one of our customers, so is Tesla, so is LinkedIn. These are three big AI companies, with their own AI Technology, yet they use Automation Anywhere platform as well. So, there is AI, and then there is AI with RPA. So think of it as purpose built AI capabilities that are infused through our digital workforce platform, to enhance our RPA capabilities. And you bring in analytics, then we talk about predictive analytics. So overall again, it's building a digital workforce that is enhanced by AI, that is enhanced by cognitive capabilities, so that RPA is not just RPA. It's RPA to the next level. >> Right, and really RPA that's gonna evolve. RPA that's eventually gonna write itself right, or write new versions of itself based on new things. And process improvement, new discoveries in terms of better ways to get things done. Using those other two legs of the spool. >> Yes, so you will see a lot of publications out there that talk about RPA evolving into AI, or AI taking over RPA. The fact is, there is again AI, and then there is AI combined with RPA. So if you take Google's example. Google uses us in the back end, yet it is one of the largest AI companies in the world. So AI, think of it as a big hammer. It has to be used very carefully, and we have purpose built AI into our product to make sure that we extract all the unstructured data. And then we, as Mihir mentioned, our CEO mentioned earlier in the key note, it is feeding this RPA monster that needs more and more data. And all of that data comes through our AI and cognitive capabilities. >> Right, and we know right, and for the machines to learn, they need more, and more, and more data so they get better and better. It's just the way computers do learn. It's very different from the way humans learn, it's a slightly different model. >> It's about building a digital map. You know, we use Waze and Google Maps and all of these different GPS driven capabilities to find our way around, Manhattan for example. Or Bay area for that matter. (Jeff laughing) Think of our digital workforce platform with AI capabilities and with analytics capabilities, as a digital map of an enterprise. We touch so many different infrastructure components. From CRM systems to ERP systems to HRIS systems, that the amount of data that we capture that passes through our system, gives us perhaps the best look that anyone can have into how data flows through an enterprise. And what's the best way to use it. >> Right, so I'm curious in terms of those vertical applications that you described, where have you seen the biggest impact now that you've started to bring the AI in? Are there certain verticals that are just ripe for significant positive change, and some that are less so? >> Yeah absolutely. So, there is a lot of data locked in documents still. So banking, finance and insurance. Those are the three verticals, three industries where our first step with our IQ Bot, which is our cognitive product. We have seen a lot of traction there. The reason for that is again, when we decipher these documents, when we decipher and capture all the data, we then use it very intelligently in automating the processes. So the first step to answer your question would be, organizations, industries that use unstructured data that is locked into their documents, all this dark data of methodology. We unlock that data, and then we use RPA and we feed this RPA monster to really automate the various processes. >> Every time you guys talk about all the data locked in these documents, I can't help but think of the old OCR days, when I got my first $1000 flatbed scanner to try to read a couple documents. It never worked back then, the era of a different place. >> Funny that you mention that because the OCR technology that got built into a lot of scanners later on, a lot of that technology we use under the covers, but at a much more enhanced level. So we partner with some of the best OCR technologies out there, but then we put AI on top of that to really take it to the next level. So when the data comes out of a simple OCR process, it's no longer just some data that you can, like we used to see. Now it's data that is structured, that can be automated in a few clicks. >> It has context right. And most importantly it has context, which makes all the difference in the world. Okay, so what are some of your priorities for next year, before I let you go. What are some of the things you're working on? If we sit down a year from now, what are we gonna be talking about that's new? Don't tell me any secrets, no NDA's have been signed here. (Jeff laughing) >> At Imagine, we come with an approach of an open book. Open kimono if you will, and we share all that we are working on. And all that we are working today, but also going forward. So AI is a big element of that. Automation, combined with any sort of automation, especially RPA combined with AI and machine learning capabilities, that's already, we have a product, as opposed to just an idea. It's a working product with dozens of organizations using it. But then we are infusing that AI into RPA, and making it intelligent RPA. Making it an intelligent digital workforce platform. That's the ultimate goal, and we are already well on our way. >> Alright well Kashif, thanks for a taking a few minutes of your time and congrats on a great show. >> Thank you, thanks for having me Jeff. >> Alright he's Kashif, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018 in New York City, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> From Times Square in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Manhattan, actually midtown Manhattan, at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018, 1100 people talkin' about bots, talkin' about Robotics Process Automation, or RPA. And we're excited to have the guy that counts the money at the end of the day; it's important part of any business. He's a co-founder, Ankur Kothari, Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Founder, Automation Anywhere. Ankur, great to see you. >> Great to be here, Jeff, thanks for having me. >> So, first off, as a co-founder, I think you're the third or fourth co-founder we've had on today. A little bit of reflection since you guys started this like 14 years ago. >> Yeah. Here we are, there's 1100 people, the room is packed. They had the overflow, they're actually all over us out here with the overflow for the keynote. Take a minute and kinda tell us how you feel about how this thing has evolved over time. >> It feels like a great party to be part of. Always, you're always happy. >> Right. >> One of the traits that you'll find a lot of co-founders is that they are always happy, never satisfied. They're always looking for the next big one. >> Right. >> But it's amazing to be part of Imagine because we learn so much from our customers and our partner as well. It's not just that we bring them together and we're talking. We're learning every time. It's becoming a big ecosystem. >> Right. >> And, an idea as big as a bot or a future of work is too big an idea for one company to continue. You want as many people to come. >> Right. >> So, our idea of Imagine was a little bit like Field of Dreams, you build and they'll come and they'll collaborate and it'll become bigger and bigger. >> And look all around us. I mean, we're surrounded by people and really, the ecosystem. >> And the bots as well, there are bots on the walls and everything else. >> Bots on the walls, partners everywhere. So let's dive into it a little bit. I mean, one of the ways that you guys participate in the ecosystem, and the ecosystem participates, is the Bot Store. >> Yes. >> So it's just like any other kind of an app store. >> Exactly. >> You've got people contributing. I assume you guys have contributed stuff. But we saw earlier in the keynote by Accenture, and EY, and Deloitte. And all types of companies are contributing bots into this ecosystem for lots of different functions or applications. So really, an interesting thing. How's that workin' out? Where'd you come up with the idea? And why's that so important? >> At Automation Anywhere we like to ask ourselves hard questions, as the leaders in this space. And we asked ourselves this question, "What can we now do to further accelerate our journey of all our customers to become a digital enterprise?" The answer came that we are to share in the new bot economy. Now once that answer was clear, every economy requires a marketplace. >> Right. >> And that's where the Bot Store came. It's a marketplace where producers meet the consumers, and you connect them. All we do is, we curate and make sure that the right things go up. But other than that, it's just like any other marketplace. And we thought that if we'll build the right marketplace where the producers meet consumers, we have thousands of customers and large companies looking at it. It will allow perfect place where all the right ideas get converted into product. >> Right. >> We have tons of partners who have domain expertise, functional expertise, vertical expertise; they can prioritize their expertise, they can convert it into IP. >> Right. >> They can do it for free, they can monetize it. So there's lots to gain for producers of all these bots. And if I am a consumer, now suddenly my time clock to make further shrinks, because instead of creating these bots all from scratch, I can download them from this Bot Store and snap them together like a Lego block. >> Right. >> So that's how the whole idea came. We launched it just two months ago and we have hundreds-- >> You just launched it two months ago? >> Yeah! And we have hundreds of bots in it. More than 80-100 partners have participated. We are getting at least 20-30 more submissions coming every day, and we have few hundred submissions coming every week. So, just like any free marketplace, it has an exponential nature. And that's the thing we are counting on. >> That's amazing, that you've got that much traction in such a short period of time. >> Thousands of downloads on a daily basis. Thousands of users just in two month's time. >> You know, we go to a ton of shows. We do over a hundred shows a year. And once shows get to a certain size, it starts to change a little bit. But when they're small like this, it's a very intimate affair on a couple floors here at the Sheraton, everyone is still really involved. They're really sharing. >> Yes. >> There's so much sharing of information. Not so much, you know ... Because they're not really competitors. Within their own companies, they're all part of this same team that are trying to implement this new thing. >> Exactly. >> And you really feel it. >> Exactly. >> So, the store's cool, but the bot economy. When you talk about the bot economy, we talk about API economy a lot. >> Yes. >> How do you see the bot economy? What are the factors that drive the bot economy, and how's it gonna evolve over time? >> We look at it as a few elements. The current version, we think that bot economy, like any economy, has a marketplace, which is our Bot Store. We have a program which we call Bot Games, because any good economy, any new economy, one of the trait is that the good idea can come from anyone. >> Right. >> It can come from anyplace. Like, any customers, any partner, anyone can bring. A good economy, what it does is it brings that idea from anyone, and it gives these vehicles for good ideas to take flight. If the idea is good, it becomes viral, and it has vehicles where those ideas can go to market. What we did was, we created a program called Bot Games. Yesterday on May 29th, we had the 1st Inaugural Bot Games. We invited developers, people who are part of these programs and their companies. And we gamified and created different games. And we thought that if we bring all these champions and pioneers and like-minded people in the same room, give them certain same problem, and then gamify it, put a clock on it, a lot of great ideas will come out of it. >> Right. >> And that came. And some of those ideas will make it to the marketplace, like a Bot Store, like an Imagine. >> Right. >> So that's where all the ideas connect to the customers. And the people who bring those ideas, they also come up. So that's the other aspect. So the Bot Games is where the ideas, you can crowdsource from places. Bot Store is where they go to the market. In between there is a gap. And we are trying to remove that gap by creating a stimulus package for this new bot economy. Like any economy time and again requires a stimulus pack, and we have created one. What we have done is that if you want to learn Automation Anywhere, right? If you want to understand, because that gap is you're to understand Automation Anywhere. We have created Automation Anywhere University a year ago. And now anyone can take courses for free to learn how to create bots. Whether they are customers or partners. And then, if you purchase these bots through one of our certified partners, the first three bots in year one are free. So we are removing the friction in between. If you have not started on this journey, your learning is free, you get ideas from different places, we can get these prebuilt bots, and the first three bots, if you purchase it through our partners, they are free. So we are removing that friction. And then, we are supporting that whole economy with the industry's largest customer success program. >> Right. So I'm curious if you know, maybe you don't know, of the bots in the bots store, how many are free and how many are paid, as a percentage? >> Interestingly, I don't have that stat because we don't actually worry about that. We let all our partners and people who are contributing to this Bot Store decide that. >> Right. >> Some bots they may decide to monetize, some they may not. It's listed on the Bot Store. Offhand, I would say-- >> Take a guess. Is it 50/50? A third? Two-thirds? >> The nature of it looks like 50/50. >> That's a good guess. Full caveat, it's a guess. We didn't do the analysis. >> Exactly. But here is the unique aspect. Yesterday we had a Bot Game, and the winner had an amazing idea that none of us had ever think of. He created this bot that automates the COE of all these programs. Now, we are talking. He is thinking of putting that on Bot Store. That's the power of bringing multiple people together. >> Right. >> That's the power of free economy, where the exponential nature of it is what we are counting on. And we are getting on a daily basis these new bot ideas, these new bots that are making it to the Bot Store. Just like your App Store. I go to App Store to get ideas what I can do on my phone. >> Right, right. >> Just like that, now we are finding our customers are going to Bot Store to figure out what else can they automate. >> Right, right. >> And that's been another amazing part of it. >> You know, it's so consistent. All these shows we go to, right? How do you unlock innovation? There's some really simple ways. One is, give more people the power, give more people the tools, and give more people the data. >> Exactly. >> And you'll get stuff out of it that the small subset of people that used to have access to those three things, they never found. They just didn't think of it that way, right? >> Exactly. And then we firmly believe that any technology, anything, once you democratize it, you give it in hands of everyone-- >> Right, right. >> You can't have a thriving economy unless everyone forms their own point of view. Unless everyone creates their own perspective. And that's our vision of this bot economy. We are bringing everyone and giving them these vehicles to try it out. Look, the technology has reached a stage where it's cheaper to try it out than talk about it. >> Yes. >> And we are doing that so that everyone forms their own unique point of view, and then they express that point of view and we connect those points of view to these thousands of customers worldwide. >> Right. >> Good ideas take flight, and all we have to do is create vehicles for those good ideas to take flight. >> Alright. So, Ankur, I gave you the last word before we wrap up here. If we come back next year, a year from now, inspired 2019, what are we gonna be talking about? What's on your roadmap? What're some of the priorities that you guys are workin' on over the next 12 months? >> We are talking about ... The next 12 months, we are looking at how to further accelerate this journey. Because what people are in this, the real problem people are trying to achieve is how to become a digital enterprise. Not just to automate, but how do you create a digital enterprise? You cannot become a digital enterprise unless your operations are digital. You cannot make your operations digital unless your processes are digital. And you cannot do that unless your workforce is digital. So we are trying to create technologies, vehicles, platforms, so that everyone can scale their program. Where pretty much everyone should have a digital colleague. Everyone should be able to create a bot. Everyone should be able to work with a bot. Every process, every department, every system should have a digital workforce working in it and that can allow you to create a digital enterprise that can scale up and scale down with the demand and supply. >> Alright-- >> That's what we are trying to start. >> Well, we look forward to gettin' the update next year. >> Exactly. >> Alright, Ankur, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day with us. >> Thanks for having me here, and I appreciate and enjoy the conversation. >> Alright, he's Ankur, I'm Jeff. We're at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. See you next time.

>> From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Manhattan at the Automation Everywhere Imagine 2018. About 1,100 people talking about RPA, Robotics Process Automation, bots, really bringing automation to the crappy processes that none of us like to do in our day to day job. And, we're excited to have a practitioner. He's out in the field. He's talking to customers all the time. It's Weston Jones, and he's the global intelligent automation leader for EY. Weston, great to see you. >> Yeah, thank you, good to be here. >> Absolutely, so it's funny, you said you've been with these guys for a number of years, so when did you get started, how did you see the vision when nobody else saw it, and here we are five years later, I think, since you first met 'em. >> Oh, I know, it's just funny. I mean, years ago I saw Automation Anywhere at conferences. They were one of the small booths, just like everybody else was, talking about automation. I watched them for several years, and then I decided one year when we were looking at some of our offerings to bring in RPA and talk to our leadership about it, and kinda the light bulbs went off. So, from five, six years ago 'til today we've been working with them, and it's really amazing to see kind of how things have changed, and how the adoption has taken place. >> You know, it's such a big moment in a startup, especially software company, when you get a big global integrator like you guys to jump in, you know, advisory service. It's really hard to do. I've been in that position myself, and you guys don't make the move unless you really see a big opportunity. So, what did you see in terms of the big opportunity that made you, you know, basically bet your career on this vertical? >> Well, so when I went to our leadership, in the meeting I had our global shared services leader. So, we have 7,000 plus people on our shared services, and he was very skeptical. We had to do 20 plus proof of concepts with him, and HR, IT, finance, et cetera, to get him excited about it. Now, he's our biggest fan, and actually we promoted him to run our global internal automation team where now we think we're one of the largest users of automation. We're one of the biggest users within tax. We use Automation Anywhere within tax. We have over 750 bots working, and we have a goal to have 10,000 plus by 2022. So, we're really pushing the bar in scaling. >> From 750 to 10,000, what are we, 2018, in four years. >> In four years. That's our goal. >> So, where did you find the early successes, what kind of bots specifically, what type of processes are kind of right for people that are interested, see the potential, but aren't really sure kinda how to get started, or to get that early success? >> Yeah, I mean, it's just almost like anything else, the quick wins, you know. Start with things that are very rules-based, that have a lot of people, FTs associated with them. You know, our thing wasn't that we were actually eliminating FTs, we were just developing capacity, 'cause we're a company that's growing, so instead of hiring more and more people, we took all that mundane work out of people's jobs and allowed them to focus on things that were more value-added. So, the block and tackle stuff-- >> Like what? Like, give me a couple of, you know, just simple stuff-- >> well, we have like HR onboarding, you know, we onboard 60,000 people a year. HR onboarding is something that's very repetitive activity, logging in and out of multiple systems. And, it was something where we were hiring HR professionals that knew how to do talent management, that knew how to do all these things we really wanted them to do, but we had 'em focused on doing a lot of very transactional type activities. So, we said why don't we use the technology for that. Let's free these people up so they can then focus on developing talent, career ladders, other things that we really wanted them to focus on. Other things like, you know, payments, matching, and payment application, things like that, password resets, you know, a lot of stuff that you, I mean, you can just think of in your head. A lot of stuff in finance, a lot of stuff in HR and IT. Even our supply chain, too. We're doing like T and Es, we're doing a lot of automation in our T and E area. But, that to say, I mean, I've mentioned all back office things. We're also doing a lot of front office. So, for example, in our tax department we use almost exclusively Automation Anywhere to do tax returns for clients. And, we have, I think, over a million plus hours that we've eliminated using Automation Anywhere. >> Now, how do you Automation Anywhere a tax return? >> Well, tax return is a very complex set of rules, and you basically, once you kind of load the rules in for certain activities, it's stuff like pulling data from one system into another, you know, doing multiple taxed jurisdictions. >> Is it just like particular steps within that, you just kinda pick off one little process at a time, one little process at a time? >> True, and then you can also put in, you can do a nice interface in the front, and you can have people giving you the data, and then you let the automation then get the data to the right parts within the tax return. >> So, I'm curious in terms of the people that create the bots. Who are they, kinda what skill sets do they have, and do you see that changing over time as you try to go from 750, whatever it is, a 20x multiple, over four years? Do you see kinda the population of people that are able to create and implement the bots growing? How do you, kinda, managing the supply side on on that? >> We have a philosophy that 70% of it's process, 30% of it's technology. We're fortunate that in our advisory area across all the major functional areas, supply chain, HR, finance, et cetera, we have process experts. So, we use those process experts to get the process down, and then what we do is we have core development teams around the world. We have a big team in India, a big team in Costa Rica. We have a team in China, and elsewhere. And, those are the developers. And, so our process people map out the process and then hand that off to the developer. So, developers, you know, we basically, I mean, with Automation Anywhere's help, we've trained them to do the work and they've made it more and more, as time goes on, they made it easier and easier for them to develop bots. And, so We've been able to take people almost right out of college. We've hired some high school students. We take people that, you know, two thirds of the American population doesn't have a college degree, so we hire non-college degrees and teach them how to do this. Not that it's easy, and to be really good you have to have time and experience, but we can teach them to do these types of activities for us. >> That's amazing. So, I wonder if you can share what are some of the biggest surprises, you know, kind of implementation surprises, or ROI types of surprises that you found in implementing these 750. >> Yeah, so one thing I tell people about is if you talk about the Gartner Hype Curve, you go up and you fall into the valley of disillusionment, and, you know, there's gonna be four or five of those valleys that are gonna happen, and you just need to power through them because the technology is so compelling, and the benefits are so compelling. I mean, there's over a dozen benefits whether it's cost savings, improved security, better accuracy, whatever. So, some of the surprises were scaling. Like, when I talk about the DIPSS, the D-I-P-S-S, DIPPS, the first one is gonna be data. People are gonna realize that their data isn't quite there in order to do the more intelligent activities. The integration, so integrating the RPA with the more intelligent pieces of the IQ bot, and other things, how do you do those integrations, how do you take other tools outside of that and integrate them. The third is penetration. I mean, penetration is very small right now. What happens is people tend to look at a whole process that needs to be automated when what you need to do is you need to think about breaking those processes apart. Like FPNA, for example, may have a couple dozen steps to it, but there are pockets of steps that are very automatable. For example, pulling data, structuring it, normalizing it, getting it into some kind of report, that can all be done by automation, then hand it off to someone to do more cognitive activities. So, the penetration is very small right now, but will continue to grow. The savings, you know, have realistic expectations on savings. When this first came out of the door a lot of people were talking very, very high numbers. I mean, you can get it every once in a while, but, the saving numbers, just be realistic about that. And, the last part is scaling. We found scaling to be something that, you know, at the time when we were doing it, very few people had done it. So, to figure out how do you scale, and how do you develop a bot control room, how do you manage the bots, how do you manage the bots interfacing with people, how do you manage the bots interfacing with other technologies. It's a lot more to it than just putting the bot up and letting it work, because they need care and feeding ongoing, because it's not related to the Automation Anywhere technology, it's more of the other things it touches, like website changes, like upgrades to different systems that the bot has to execute with. Those are gonna constantly change and you just need to make sure you're adjusting the bot to actually work in those environments. So, those are kinda the four or five things that we've seen. And, when we go from 750, to 1,000, to 10,000, I mean, we think we're gonna see much more orchestration type things. You know, how do you orchestrate in a more automated way across the bots, the people, and then the other technology. >> Right, it's funny on the scale issue 'cause they were talking about, you know, how do you go from 10 bots, you got 750 to 10,000, and there's been a concept under it that they are a digital workforce, implying that you have to manage 'em like a workforce. You gotta hire 'em, you gotta train 'em, you gotta put 'em in place, you gotta kinda keep an eye on 'em, you gotta review 'em every now and then, and really it's an active management process, it's not just set and forget. >> Yeah, we're hoping that we'll have, I mean, we have some of this already, but we'll have bots managing bots. Well, bots auditing bots. We'll have bots orchestrating bots. That's all gonna eventually happen. I think we can do some of it today, but it's gonna be more and more common. The orchestration piece is really the thing that is gonna be new, that is gonna drive a lot of people this hard to scale. >> The other two consistent themes that you just touched on that we talked a little bit before we turned the cameras on, is Amara's Law, my favorite. You know, we overestimate the short term, which Gartner might call the Hype cycle, but we underestimate in the long term. Really, the other one is kinda just DevOps, and there's DevOps as a way to write code, but I think, more importantly, is DevOps as a culture, which is just look for little wins, little wins, little wins, little wins, little wins, and, before you know it, you've automated a lot and you're gonna start seeing massive returns on that effort versus the, oh, let's throw it in, we're gonna get this tremendous cost savings on day zero, day one, or day 10, or whatever it is. That's really not the strategy. >> Well, I think a lot of people maybe don't like to hear this, but it's a journey. I mean, you start out using the technology where you can. So, it's not a technology play, it's solving your biggest, most complicated problems, that's the key. And, whatever technology you need to do that, use that. So, you do the RPA, then you get more benefit when you add the IQ bots, and the intelligent stuff, and you get more benefit when you start adding, you know, technologies that are even ancillary, like Blockchain, IoT, and things like that. You'll get more and more kind of benefits from this technology. >> All right, Weston, well, thank you for sharing your stories. It's good to get it from the front lines. And, good luck on making 20,000 bots in four years. >> Thank you, thank you. >> He's Weston, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by, Automation Anywhere. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Manhattan, New York City, at Automation Anywhere's Imagine Conference 2018. About 1,100 professionals really talking about the future of work bots, and really how automation is gonna help people do the mundane a little bit easier, and hopefully free us all up to do stuff that's a little bit more important, a little higher value. We're excited to have our next guest, he's Craig Le Clair, the VP and Principal Analyst from Forrester, and he's been covering this space for a long time. Craig, great to see ya. >> Yeah, nice to see you, thanks for having me on. >> So, first off, just kind of general impressions of the event? Have you been to this before? It's our first time. >> Yes, I did a talk here last year, so it was a little bit smaller then. There's obviously more people here today, but it's pretty much, I think it was in Brooklyn last year. >> It was in Brooklyn, okay. >> So, this is an upgrade. >> So, RP Robotic Process Automation, more affectionately, probably termed as bots. >> Yeah. >> They're growing, we're seeing more and more time and our own interactions with companies, kind of on the customer service side. How are they changing the face of work? How are they evolving as really a way for companies to get more leverage? >> Yeah, so I'll make one clarification of your sentence, and that's, you know, bots do things on behalf of people. What we're talking to in a call center environment is a chat bot. So, they have the ability to communicate or really, I would say, attempt to communicate with people. They're not doing a very good job of it in my view. But, bots work more in the background, and they'll do things for you, right? So, you know, they're having a tremendous effect. I mean, one of the statistics I was looking at the other day, per one billion dollars of revenue, the average company had about 150 employees in finance and accounting ten years ago. Now, instead of having 120 or 130, it's already down to 70 or 80, and that's because the bots that we're talking about here can mimic that human activity for posting to a general ledger, for switching between applications, and really, move those folks on to different occupations, shall we say. >> Right, right. >> Yeah. >> Well it's funny, Jeff Immelt just gave his little keynote address, and he said, "This is the easiest money you'll find in digital transformation is implementing these types of technology." >> Yeah, it's a good point, and it was a great talk, by the way, by Jeff. But, you know, companies have been under a lot of pressure to digitally transform. >> Right. >> You know, due to really the mobile, you know, mobile peaked around 2012, and that pushed everyone into this gap that companies couldn't really deal with the consumer technology that was out there, right? So then you had the Ubers of the world and digital transformation. So, there's been a tremendous focus on digital transformation, but very little progress. >> Right. >> When we do surveys, only 11% are showing any progress at all. So, along comes this technology, Robotic Process Automation that allows you to build bots without changing any of the back end systems. There's no data integration. You know, there's no APIs involved. There's no big transformation consultants flying in. There's not even a Requirements Document because you're gonna start with recording the actual human activity at a work station. >> Right. >> So, it's been an elixir, you know, frankly for CIOs to go into their boss and say, "You know what, we're doing great, you know, I've just made this invoice process exist in a lot better way." You know, we're on our path to digital transformation. >> And it's really a different strategy, because, like you said, it's not kind of rip and replace the old infrastructure, you're not rewriting a lot of applications, you're really overlaying it, right? >> Which is one of the potential downfalls is that, you know, sometimes you need to move to that new cloud platform. You don't want, to some extent, the technology institutionalizes what could be a very bad process, one that needs to be modernized, one that needs to be blown up. You know, we're still using the airline reservation systems from 1950s, and layers, and layers, and layers and layers built upon them. At some point, you're gonna have to design a new experience with new technology, so there's some dangers with the seduction of building bots against core systems. >> Right, so the other thing that's happening is the ongoing, I love Moore's Law, it's much more about an attitude then the physics of a microprocessor, but you know, compute, and store, and networking, 5Gs just around the corner, cloud-based systems now really make that available in a much different way, and as you said, mobile experience delivers it to us. So as those continue to march on and asymptomatically approach zero and infinite scale, we're not there yet, but we're everyday getting a little bit closer. Now we're seeing AI, we're seeing machine-learning, >> Yes. >> We're seeing a new kind of class of horsepower, if you will, that just wasn't available before at the scale it's at today. So, now you throw that into the mix, these guys have been around 14 years, how does AI start to really impact things? >> It's a fascinating subject and question. I mean, we're, at Forrester, talking about the forces of automation. And, by the way, RPA is just a subset of a whole set of technologies: AI, you mentioned, and AI is a subset of automation, and there's Deep Learning, is a subset of AI and you go on and on, there are 30, 40 different automation technologies. And these will have tremendous force, both on jobs in the future, and on shifting control really to machines. So, right now, you can look at this little bubble we had of consumer technology and mobile, shifting a lot of power to the consumer, and that's been great for our convenience, but now with algorithms being developed that are gonna make more and more decisions, you could argue that the power is going to shift back to those who own the machines, and those who own the algorithms. So, there's a power shift, a control shift that we're really concerned about. There's a convergence of the physical and digital world, which is IOT and so forth, and that's going to drive new scale in companies, which are gonna further dehumanize some of our life, right? So that affects, it squeezes humans out of the process. Blockchain gets rid of intermediaries that are there to really transfer ideas and money and so forth. So, all of these forces of automation, which we think is gonna be the next big conversation in the industry, are gonna have tremendous effect societally and in business. >> Right. Well, there's certainly, you know, there's the case where you just you can't necessarily rescale a whole class of an occupation, right? The one that we're all watching for, obviously, is truck drivers, right? Employs a ton of people, autonomous vehicles are right around the corner. >> Right. >> On the other hand, there's going to be new jobs that we don't even know what they're gonna be yet, to quote all the graduating seniors, it's graduation season, most of them are going to work in jobs that don't even exist 10 years from now. >> Correct, correct, very true. >> And the other thing is every company we talk to has got tons of open reqs, and they can't get enough people to fulfill what they need, and then Mihir, I think touched on an interesting point in the keynote, where, ya know, now we're starting to see literal population growth slow down in developed countries, >> Yes. >> Like in Japan is at the leading edge, and you mentioned Europe, and I'm not sure where the US is, so it's kind of this interesting dichotomy: On one side, machines are going to take more and more of our jobs, or more and more portions of our job. On the other hand, we don't have people to do those jobs necessarily anyway, not necessarily today, but down the road, and you know, will we get to more of this nirvana-state where people are being used to do higher-value types of activities, and we can push off some of this, the crap and mundane that still, unfortunately, takes such a huge portion of our day to day world? >> Yeah, yeah. So, one thought that some of us believe at Forrester, I being one of them, is that we're at a, kind of, neutral right point now where a lot of the AI, which is really the most disruptive element we're talking about here, our PA is no autonomous learning capability, there's no AI component to our PA. But, when AI kicks in, and we've seen evidence of it as we always do first in the consumer world where it's a light version of AI in Netflix. There's no unlimited spreadsheets sitting there figuring out which one to watch, right? They're taking in data about your behavior, putting you in clusters, mapping them to correlating them, and so forth. We think that business hasn't really gotten going with AI yet, so in other words, this period that you just described, where there seems to be 200,000 people hired every month in the ADP reports, you know, and there's actually 50,000 truck driver jobs open right now. And you see help-wanted signs everywhere. >> Right, right. >> We think that's really just because business hasn't really figured out what to do with technology yet. If you project three or four years, our projections are that there will be a significant number of, particular in the cubicles that our PA attacks, a significant number of dislocation of current employment. And that's going to create this job transformation, we think, is going to be more the issue then replacement. And if you go back in history, automations have always led to transformation. >> Right. >> And I won't go through the examples because we don't have time, but there are many. And we think that's going to be the case here in that automation dividends, we call them, are going to be, are being way underestimated, that they're going to be new opportunities, and so forth. The skills mis-match is the issue that, you know, you have what RPA attacks are the 60 million that are in cubicles today in the US. And the average education there is high school. So, they're not gonna be thrown out of the cubicles and become data scientists overnight, right? So, there's going to be a massive growth in the gig economy, and there's an informal and a formal segment of that, that's going to result in people having to patch together their lives in ways they they hadn't had before, so there's gonna be some pain there. But there are also going to be some strong dividends that will result from this level of productivity that we're gonna see, again, in a few years, cause I think we're at a neutral point right now. >> Well, Amara's Law doesn't get enough credit, right? We overestimate in the short-term, and then underestimate the long-term needs affect. >> Absolutely. >> And one of the big things on AI is really moving from this, in real time, right? And all these fast databases and fast analytics, is we move from a world where we are looking in the rear view mirror and making decisions on what happened in the past to you know, getting more predictive, and then even more prescriptive. >> Yes. >> So, you know, the value unlock there is very very real, I'm never fascinated to be amazed by how much inefficiency there still is every time we go to these conferences. (Craig laughs) You know we thought we solved it all at SAP and ERP, that was clearly-- >> Clearly not the case. Funny work to do. >> But, it's even interesting, even from last year, you mentioned that there the significant delta just from year to year is pretty amazing. >> Yes, I've been amazed at the level of innovation in the core digital worker platforms, the RPA platforms, in the last year has been pretty amazing work. What we were talking about a year ago when I spoke at this conference, and what we're talking about now, the areas are different. You know, we're not talking about basic control of the applications of the desktop. We're talking about integration with text analytics. We're talking about comp combining process mining information with desktop analytics to create new visions of the process. You know, we weren't talking about any of that a year ago. We're talking about bot stores. They're out there, and downloadable robots. Again, not talking about last year at all. So, just a lot of good progress, good solid progress, and I'm very happy to be a part of it. >> And really this kind of the front end scene of so much of the development is manifested on the front end, where we used to always talk about citizen developers back in the day. You know, Fred Luddy, who was just highlighted Service Now, most innovative company. That was his, you know, vision of Citizen Developer. And then we've talked about citizen integrators, which is really an interesting concept, and now we're talking about really citizens, or analysts, having the ability via these tools to do integrations and to deliver new kind of work flows that really weren't possible before unless you were a hardcore programmer. >> Yeah, although I think that conversation is a little bit premature in this space, right? I think that most of the bot development requires programming skills today, and they're going to get more complicated in that most of the bot activities today are doing, you know, three decisions or less. Or they're looking at four or five apps that are involved, or they're doing a series of four or five hundred clicks that they're emulating. And the progression is to get the digital workers to get smarter and incorporating various AI components, so you're going to have to build, be able to deal statistically with algorithm developments, and data, and learning, and all of that. So, it's not.... The core of this, the part of it that's going to be more disruptive to business is going to be done by pretty skilled developers, and programmers, and data scientists, and statistical, you know, folks that are going through. But, having said that, you're going to have a digital workforce that's got to be managed, and you know, has to be viewed as an employee at some level to get the proper governance. So you have to know when that digital worker was born, when they were hired, who do they report to, when were they terminated, and what their performance review is. You gotta be doing performance reviews on the digital workers with the kind of dashboard analytics that we have. And that's the only way to really govern, because the distinction in this category is that you're giving these bots human credentials, and you're letting them access the most trusted application boundaries, areas, in a company. So, you better treat them like employees if you want proper governance. >> Which becomes tricky as Mihir said when you go from one bot to ten bots to ten thousand. Then the management of this becomes not insignificant. >> Right. >> So Craig, I want to give you the last word. You said, you know, big changes since last year. If we sit down a year from now, 2019, _ Oh. >> Lord knows where we'll be. What are we gonna talk about? What do you see as kind of the next, you know, 12-month progression? >> You know, I hope we don't go to Jersey after Brooklyn, New York, and-- >> Keep moving. >> I see Jersey over there, but it's where it belongs, you know, across the river. I'm from Jersey, so I can say that. You know, I think next year we're gonna see more integration of AI modules into the digital worker. I think with a lot of these explosive markets, like RPA is, there's always a bit of cooling off period, and I think you're going to see some tapering off of the growth of some of the platform companies, AA, but also their peers and compatriots. That's natural. I think that the area has been a little bit, you know, analysis and tech-industry loves change. If there's no change, there's nothing for us to write about. So, we usually over-project. Now, in this case, the 2.8 billion-dollar market project five years out that I did is being exceeded, which is rare. But I expect some tapering off in a year where there's not a ceiling hit, but that, you know, you end up with going through these more simple applications that can be robotized easily. And now you're looking at slightly more complicated scenarios that take a little more, you know, AI and analytics embedded-ness, and require a little more care, they have a little more opaque, and a little more thought, and that'll slow things down a bit. But, I still think we're on our way to a supermarket and a lot of productivity here. >> So just a little less low-hanging fruit, and you gotta step up the game a little bit. >> I guess you could, you said it much simpler then I did. >> I'm a simple guy, Craig. >> But that's why you're the expert on this panelist. >> Alright, Craig, well thanks for sharing your insight, >> Alright. >> Really appreciate it, and do look forward to talking to you next year, and we'll see if that comes true. >> Alright, appreciate it, take care now. >> He's Craig Le Clair and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018.

>> From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering IMAGINE 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Manhattan, New York City, at Automation Anywhere's IMAGINE 2018. We've never been to this show. Pretty interesting, about 1,100 people talking about Bots, but it's really more than Bots. It's really how do we use digital employees, digital programs, to help people be more efficient, and take advantage of a lot of the opportunities as well as the challenges that we're facing as we keep innovating, I'm really excited to have our next guest. Jeffrey Immelt, the former chairman and CEO of GE, great to see you Jeff. >> Good to see you. >> Absolutely, last I saw you I think, was at Minds and Machines, and we're huge fans, >> A couple years ago, yep. >> Beth Comstock, I loved Bill Ruh, so you know, what a fantastic team. >> A great team. >> But here you are talking about Bots, and it's interesting because at GE you guys have been involved in big industrial equipment, as well as a huge software business, so you really figured out that you've gotta have software and people to really work with these machines. >> So you know Jeff, I really am a big believer that productivity is the key, and that we, we're seeing a bow wave of technology that's really gonna impact the workplace in a meaningful way. The reason why I like RPA, what we call Bots-- >> Right, RPA. >> Is because it can happen so quickly. It can happen across the organization. It has great productivity associated with it. So I kinda view RPA as being really one of the uh, let's say early wave technologies in terms of how to drive more automation and productivity in the workplace. >> That's funny, because people ask me they're like, what's the deal with some of these stock evaluations, is it real, and think back to the ERP days right, ERP unlocked this huge amount of inefficiency. That was a long, long time ago, and yet we still continue to find these huge buckets of inefficiency over and over. >> I think it's, I mean I think to your point, the early days of IT, really if you look at ERP manufacturing systems, even CRM. They were really more around governance. They were kind of connecting big enterprises. But they really weren't driving the kind of decision support, automation, AI, that companies really need to drive productivity. And I think the next wave of tools will operate inside that envelope. You know, ultimately these will all merge. But I think these are gonna get productivity much quicker than an ERP system or an MES system did. Which are really, at the end of the day, driven by CFOs to drive compliance more than operating people to drive productivity. >> Right, but what's driving this as we've seen over and over, that consumerization of IT, not only in terms of the expected behavior of applications, you know you want everything to act like Amazon, you want everything to act like Google. But also, in terms of expectations of feedback, expectations of performance. Now people can directly connect with the customer, with companies like they never could before, and the customers, and the companies can direct with their customer directly. Where before you had channels, you had a lot of distribution steps in between. Those things are kind of breaking down. >> I think that's for sure. I mean I think that's sure. I would say beyond that is the ability to empower employees more with some of these tools so you know, an employee used to have to go to the CIO with a work ticket, hey here's what I need. You know these Bots grow virally inside organizations. They're easy to implement. They're easy to see an impact very quickly. So I just think the tools are becoming more facile. It's no longer kind of a hierarchical IT-driven technology base. It's more of a grounds-up technology base, and I think it's gonna drive more speed and productivity inside companies. >> Right, so really it's kind of, there's always a discussion of are the machines gonna take our jobs, or are they? But really there's-- >> Jeff, I'm not that smart really I mean-- >> Well, but it's funny because they're not right? I mean, everyone's got requisitions out like crazy, we need the machines to help us do the jobs. >> Nobody has, nobody has easy jobs. The fact of the matter is, nobody has easy jobs. You know, a company like GE would have 300 ERP systems right? Because of acquisitions and things like that. And the METs not a complexity, manual journal entries, things like that. So to a certain extent these, this automation is really helping people do their jobs better. >> Better. >> More than thinking about you know, where does it all go some day. So I think, I think we're much better off as an economy getting these tools out there, getting people experience with them and, and uh, seeing what happens next. >> Right, it's funny they just showed the Bot store in the keynote before we sat down, and when you look closely, a lot of them look like relatively simple processes. But the problem is, they're relatively simple, but they take up a lot of time, and they're not that automated, most of them. >> One of my favorites Jeff, is doing a quote for a gas power plant would take eight weeks. Because now we have Bots, that can draw data from different data sources, you can do it in two and a half days right? So that's not what you naturally think of for an automation technology like this. But the ability to automate from the different data sources is what creates the cycle of time reduction. >> Right, and you're fortunate, you've sat in a position where you can really look down the road at some interesting things coming forward. And we always hear kind of these two views, there's kind of the dark view of where this is all going with the automation, and the robots. And then there's the more positive view that you just touched on you know, these are gonna enable us to do more with less and, and free people up to actually be productive, and not do the mundane. >> I think productivity, productivity enables growth. The world needs more productivity. These tools are gonna be used to drive more productivity. I think many more jobs will be technically enabled, than will be eliminated by technology. Clearly there's gonna be some that are, that are, that are impacted more dramatically than others. But I would actually say, for most people, the ability to have technology to help them do their day-to-day job is gonna have a much higher impact. >> Right. What do you think is the biggest misperception of this of this combining of people and machines to do better? Where do you think people kind of miss the boat? >> Oh look I mean, I think it's that people wanna gravitate towards a macro view. A theoretical view, versus actually watching how people work. If you actually spent time seeing how a Service Engineer works, how a Manufacturing person works, how an Administrative person works, then I think you would applaud the technology. Really, I think we tend to make these pronouncements that are philosophical or, coming from Silicon Valley about the rest of the world versus, if everybody just every day, would actually observe how tasks actually get done, you'd say bring on more technology. Because this is just shitty you know, these are just horrible, you know, these are tough, horrible jobs right? A Field Engineer fixing a turbine out in the, in the middle of Texas right, a wind turbine. If we can arm them with some virtual reality tools, and the ability to use analytics so that they can fix it right the first time, that's liberating for that person. They don't look at that and say, "Oh my God, if I use this they're gonna replace me." >> Right, right. >> They really need me to do all this stuff so, I think not enough people know how people actually work. That's the problem. >> It's a tool right? It's as if you took the guy's truck away, and made him ride out there on a horse I mean-- >> It's just a, it's just a, you know look-- >> It's just another tool. >> I remember sitting in a sales office in the early 80s, when the IT guy came out and installed Microsoft Outlook for the first time. And I remember sitting there saying, who would ever need this? You know, who needs spreadsheets? >> Right, right. >> I could do it all here. >> Yeah, little did you know. >> So I just think it's kind of one of those crazy things really. >> Yeah, little did you know those spreadsheets are still driving 80% of the world's computational demands. >> Exactly. >> Great, well alright I wanna give you a last word again. You're here, it's a very exciting spot. We call 'em Bots, or robotic process automation for those that aren't dialed in to RPA stands for. As you look forward, what are you really excited about? >> Oh look, I mean I always think back to the, to kind of the four A's really, which is uh you know, kind of artificial intelligence, automation, additive manufacturing and analytics. And I think if everybody could just hone in on those four things, it's gonna be immensely disruptive, as it pertains to just how people work, how things get built, how people do their work so, when you think about RPA, I put that in the automation. It's kind of a merger of automation and AI. It's just really exciting what's gonna be available. But this, this bow wave of technology, it's just a great time to be alive, really. >> Yeah, it is. People will forget. They focus on the negative, and don't really look at the track, but you can drop into any city, anywhere in the world, pull up your phone and find the directions to the local museum. Alright, well Jeff, thanks for uh taking a few minutes of your time. >> Great. >> Alright, he's Jeff Immelt and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Automation Anywhere IMAGINE 2018. Thanks for watching. (jazz music)

>> From Times Square in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018 in downtown New York city. We're really excited to have our next guest, the CEO is Mihir Shukla, the co-founder and also CEO. Great to see you. >> Thank you. >> So you're just coming off your keynote, there was so many great themes. Before we jump into the keynote, for people who aren't as familiar with Automation Anywhere, give 'em kind of the short history. Why did you guys start this, when did you guys start it, and where are we today? >> Sure, Automation Anywhere started about 14 years ago. The goal was to bring the power of automation to every businesses and every desktop. We have been true to our vision all along. This one took longer for all to realize that this is the right way to go about it. But now, it is virtually adopted by every business across every industry. >> So its RPA, Robotic Process Automation, for those people who aren't familiar with-- >> That's right. >> Or more commonly referred to, I guess, as bots. >> That's right. So the RPA refers to the Robotic Process Automation, as you said. What it does is it simulates human behavior on a computer. So it can type on a computer, it can read a computer screen, it can apply set of rules, and often it can make basic cognitive decisions as well, if it is as sophisticated RPA as our is. So with combination of this, it can operate any application like people can and run lots and lots of things on a computer in an autonomous way. >> Right, but the scale and power of compute, of storage and networking, not only for your internal systems, but for the customer systems coming in to interact with these, has changed quite a bit in the last 14 years. >> That is absolutely right. I think one of the things that, as you said, with the compute power, network, bandwidth, everything increased. But the way we operated for a long time is everything comes to this manual operation, and the everything slows down because human beings can process only at so much speed. >> Right. >> Now with RPA coming in, you can have end-to-end digital where things that are coming digitally can get processed digitally and don't get bogged down. >> We go to a lot of shows and the consumerization of IT is something that comes up all the time. People expect now, their work behavior, their work applications to act like Amazon or act like Google or act like the things that they're familiar with on their phone. You really nailed it though, into instant gratification. That's really the thing that is driving businesses to have to perform at the level of say, an Amazon e-commerce application or a Google search application. They're not quite there yet but that is this driver that's just incessant and people need to perform for their customers. >> That's absolutely right. I think, as you said, this, what I call, digital native companies, the Amazons, Googles, Netflix of the world, they've created this standard, and it is such a wonderful experience that we all begin to expect it everywhere else we go. >> Right. >> And that expectation continues to increase. And with more and more millennials and generation Z coming in, they don't know of any other way to begin with. It is a must have if you want return of customers. >> Right, now you touched on one of my favorite numbers, a number of times in the keynote, the 80/20 rule. And you touched upon the fact that really only 20% of the processes in most enterprises now are automated, 80% are still not, and really that that's the endgame. That's your mission and where you see the opportunity. >> That is right. The idea is to rate, as you said, 20% of the processes are automated and 80% is manual. And the only way to get to 80% automation is to consumerize automation. So you touched upon that too. The consumerization of automation is the only way we'll get there. If we keep it limited, it will take us too long. >> Right. >> And the other things we offer in Automation Anywhere is a product that is so intuitive to use, that anybody can create a bot. Our customer base, now there are thousands of people trained. Last year we had 35,000 people trained. This year will cross 100,000. And this could be any business user, anyone could automate it. One interesting fact is that we had bot games yesterday. This was the idea where we had lots of people come together and compete to create the smartest, best performing bot, and people from all of the companies and world came to compete against it. The person who won was a business user. >> Right, right. >> That kind of attested to the fact that how easy it is to be used by everybody. >> Right, well, you made an interesting comment again, one of the most popular breakout sessions, if it's not already sold out, is the Build-A-Bot. >> Yes. >> And you specifically called out business executives, business leaders to take an hour out of their day and learn how to build one of these things so they realize how easy it is, how simple it is and the power so that you really get this kind of top level down drivers to drive more automation. >> That's right, that's right. My experience has been that if this is such a large transformation, if business leader experience it themselves, be the transformation you want to bring. >> Right, right. >> And I've learned that from other leaders, in one of the previous sessions, I had one of the CFO who sat down, a very large, fortune 100 CFO to Build-A-Bot. And when the bot ran, he was so excited about it. He said Mihir, we just beat our forecast 10-person last quarter 10 days ago, and I was not this excited. This is doable! If I can do it, anybody, I don't do this for a living, and if I could do it, anybody could do it. >> Right. >> And I think it's great for people to experience it >> So another interesting thing, kind of the consumerization of the automation, if you will, is that you guys have a bot store. It's funny, in the keynote, again, you showed a lot of different bots in there, organized by integration to different SAS applications or functions or a number of things. What struck me is that they all look relatively, the processes are relatively simple, but these are the crazy, boring tasks that unfortunately take up so much of our time. But you're basically building out a store. I don't even need to build my own bot. I can go in and use best practices. >> That's absolutely right. So, there are so many things everybody does in finance, accounting, HR, and many, many other areas, and all of that is available. But there are vast kinds of bots. So, there is a bot that is coming out which is called a 606 Bot. This is the new standard on how revenue recognition must happen. And that's a complex thing, usually done by Big Four and many others to kind of help you work this through. So, there are bots available for that kind of a high-intellectual capacity work as well. I mentioned in my keynote that in healthcare, in diagnostics, in the research, finding new drug treatments, a vast amount of things bots are being used. So, I think its an all spectral for our work style, whether it is routine, mundane or very high-valued work. As long as it can be automated, why not? >> Why not? So, another interesting topic that comes up at all the shows we go to is this whole debate between machines and people. Are machines taking the work of people? But you've actually identified your bots, you call 'em out as a digital workforce. So, you're really saying that its the people plus the machines 'cause what we really need to do, even just to maintain the growth for our economy to continue on the path that its been on. >> That is absolutely correct. I think that the bots act like your digital colleagues, right, and they work with you. I know there has been lots of discussions on this topic and lots of books on it and what not, but I'll share with you my experience, which is, I must have visited over 1,000 large customers, I must have visited with over 500 of them, walked on the floor of those companies and talked to people who use bots. There is not a single person, Jeff, in my encounter in last 14 years, I have come across who would go back to doing it manually. (Jeff laughs) If you are a 20 or 30 plus year person doing this job, would you do that? Would you not work on the most cutting-edge technology so that you are more employable? What we see is that companies who adopt these bots have three times more resume. Now, that's also understandable. When you walk on the floor of some of these companies, there is a sense of excitement. On Friday, they have bot parties, they cut a cake because bots are being born. They have names for it. Many of them are attached to it, right? Almost like a pet, I would say. >> Right, right. >> That is the closest I can think of. When you see all of this excitement, and how excited people are, it's hard to reconcile between what you hear on one side and the other side. I think people will come around like they have for all other things. When computers came, people had the same concern, the internet and everything else. >> Right, right. >> I think in many ways, this will help us improve the standard of living and take us to a higher level. >> So, this is interesting, you talked in the keynote about the difference between just kind of a interesting technology and really transformative technology. You identified mobile phones and internet, search, I think there was one more. >> E-commerce. >> E-commerce, and what really were the factors that make that so transformative. You know, reducing friction and 80% of the value at 20% of the cost in real time. >> That's right. >> You've been at this for 14 years, but you seem pretty damn excited, if you excuse my French. >> Right. >> So as you look out, I'll give you the last word, how are things changing from when you started to today, and as you look forward, I would never ask you to look ahead 14 years, that's like forever and ever and ever, but over the next couple, how do you see the adoption and ramp of this technology going forward? >> I think for us, we have always been on an exponential curve, but the way world is built, you, you know, the first part of the exponential curve looks linear, although it is exponential, and now we are on the hottest part of the curve where everybody can see it, right? I think the next couple of years or even more are gonna be most fascinating. The world has realized that this is the next large productivity driver. There are very few left now and so it is being adopted worldwide, I mentioned in the keynote that 70% of the largest organization in the world are now engaged with us, right? So, to see the world transform through the lens of a software and these amazing stories the customers tell. It is very rewarding. >> All right, well Mihir, thanks for taking a few minutes, thanks for having us here to the event, and congratulations to you and the team. >> Thank you, it was nice to talk to you. >> All right, he's Mihir, I'm Jeff here at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018 in Manhattan. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)