>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>It's the Q we are live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio. Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante, we're covering UI path forward for this is our second day of coverage. We've had a lot of great conversations with customers at UI path partners, their senior leaders. And next up, we're going to be talking to, I'm going to say the queen of citizen developer nests. We're not just going to create that title for you. Sydney, Madison Prescott. She's the global head of intelligent automation at Spotify Sydney. Welcome to the program. I >>Am so excited >>To be here. We're excited to have you. So one of my, as we were talking before we went live, we both are big fans of Spotify. I don't know what we would do without it in our personal lives. But talk to me a little bit about Spotify automation, UI path. And I don't want to get into you your book, what you've done for citizen developers. >>Perfect. So Spotify is on a very interesting journey. Uh, we began the journey during the pandemic and we were speaking about this a little bit earlier. And so our journey began with trying to understand how we would tackle, uh, still wanting to upskill our employees, despite the fact that we were in the middle of this kind of global crisis. And so through that endeavor, we decided to actually split out our different, uh, automation capabilities into citizen developer and unattended automation. And we did all of this through a center of excellence. So a centralized, uh, COE, which would facilitate the growth of the automations, uh, whether on the citizen developer side or the unattended side. And through this programs, we set up, uh, several different trainings where we could facilitate the growth of the citizen developer community through five day, what we call bot boot camps and the bot boot camp is in essence, um, five day training, about four and a half, five hours a day, where we take anyone at Spotify who would like to upskill in this type of automation. And we teach them everything from the basics of robotic process automation, all the way to, you know, what are all of the Spotify specific things that you have to do in order to maintain a robust, uh, citizen developer footprint within your team. And so through that, uh, that entire journey, it's been quite amazing. We started with a very small footprint in our accounting team, and we have scaled now to over 100 citizen developers, uh, in a variety of functions within Spotify. >>And what was the role that you came to Spotify to do? Cause you came there, went there right before the everything happened. >>Yes. So I was actually, uh, brought into Spotify to stand up and scale out our intelligent automation center of excellence. >>So the center of excellence is, is sort of the main spring of knowledge, training innovation. And then the, the citizen developer piece, it sounds like you're pushing out distributing that knowledge. Right. And so I'm interested in that sort of architecture of automation is that you've got a combination of centralized expertise and decentralized innovation. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. So it's very interesting actually. So we facilitate the citizen developer program through the center of excellence. So you can think of the center of excellence as the foundation of that knowledge. And our goal is to democratize that knowledge throughout the enterprise. And the way we do that is through the training. Uh, we facilitate the governance of the program. So making sure that all of the infrastructure is properly set up, uh, enabling the citizens, if they need support, just talking about ideation, uh, even so far as up-skilling as well. So upskilling all the way to a power user, uh, whereby those users could become true innovators and facilitate a wide variety of automations within their teams. And was it >>The events of the last 18 months? It really catalyzed this and kind of led you to really become a big advocate for citizen led development. >>It did. So we initially were starting with just the center of excellence and an unintended footprint, and we quickly pivoted and realized that we needed to in order to scale, uh, significantly given the, the situation working virtually, uh, we are a distributed team around the world that it was critical for our success that we could, uh, really distribute to this workout. And we felt that the best way to do that was through standing up a citizen developer program. >>The things that I'm trying to understand is the relationship between automation and data. And I look at Spotify in many respects is a data company, at least a company who really understands data. And I see you building all these awesome data products. I'm a subscriber as well, but you know, you've added podcasts, you've got contributors to those podcasts. You've obviously got artists and you know, these people obviously have to be paid. You have this sort of interesting ecosystem and these are all data products, if you will, that you guys build. And it's very cool sort of business model. What's the relationship between data and automation? >>Well, it is a big relationship. I would actually say it is probably the pivotal relationship because in order to tell that compelling story of digital transformation, we have to understand the data behind all of the automations that we're generating. Um, and this is whether it says in developer or COE built. Um, and so for us, it's, it's a critical component of our success that we can pinpoint those key metrics that we are looking at and tracking, you know, what does success mean for our center of excellence? What does it mean for our citizen led program? And this is everything from, you know, increased data quality to risk mitigation of different internal regulatory risk. Uh, it could be something as simple as our saved on automation. So it's, uh, a wide variety of attributes that we're looking at to really pinpoint where the successes are coming from and where we can improve maybe where we need to improve our automation footprint in a given business. >>Why did you write this book? >>Great question. So I believe in citizen development, I think it is a very unique approach to spreading out the way that you can transform your business. And so I saw a lot of struggles as I've gone through I'm in the industry with understanding citizen development, uh, the premise of it, and also understanding the technology behind it. Um, I am a big fan of studio X. And so the book specifically focuses on studio X. Um, it really introducing users to what is studio X and how really teaching individuals, how to upskill themselves, um, just through the use of the book, very intuitive and hopefully taking away some of the fear that the users may have about walking through a platform like studio S >>So what do I have to know to actually, can I read your book and then start coding? Is it by >>That is the goal. Yes. So the goal for the book is very hands-on. So it is, it is a book for, um, the novice business user, uh, someone who is not familiar with RPA, someone who may not even be familiar with UI path, they would be able to pick up this book, go through the set of exercises. It's very robust out over 400 pages. So it really packed a lot of knowledge in there, but the goal would be by the time you walk through every single exercise and complete the book, you would not only understand RPA. You would also understand UI path as a, as a service provider platform. You'd also understand the nuances of studio X. >>So in theory, someone like myself could get your book, download the community edition, start building automations, right? >>Yes, exactly. Exactly. >>You have to Google a few things, but yeah. >>Yes. And it comes with a very robust code code set up. They're able to actually look at the code and review, uh, examples of the code, uh, in a source code repository. So again, it's very novice users it's meant for, to help facilitate just the learning of someone who is maybe curious about RPA, curious about UI path, or just curious about studio app. >>I already have the use case. >>You do have these guys I'm interested in doing it too. I mean, I can tell that it's a passion project of yours that you fundamentally believe in. You know, we saw this morning data from IDC and we've seen lots of different data sources that talk about, oh, automation taking jobs, people being fearful, organizations, not being ready at the same time. We've had such a tumultuous last 18 months that organizations that weren't digital are probably gone and organizations that aren't, how did there was this massive uptake in automation because suddenly you couldn't get bodies into buildings. So tell me about how this book is a facility, first of all, tell us the name of it. And then as a facilitator of those employees who might be worried about their jobs being taken by bots, >>That is a great question. So the, the name of the book is robotic process automation, a citizen developers guide to hyper automation using UI path studio X. And I would say I've heard a lot of the conversation surrounding the loss of jobs, the potential fear, uh, we all we know as humans, we are generally unfortunately, a little resistant to change and, you know, the, I'll say the digital revolution that we're going through, uh, within the workforce, whether it is hybrid work, whether it is completely virtual work, it is a bit daunting. And I understand that fear, I think in alignment with the conversation that we had heard about earlier at forward there, RPA has the ability to generate a massive amount of not only improvements within different industries, but jobs as well. Right? And for someone who is looking at this kind of ever changing landscape, and they're wondering, where do I fit in? >>Am I going to get pushed out of a, of a general, you know, uh, industry? I would say that that fear turned that into power, turned that into ambition. Um, the level of upskilling that you can do on your own, whether it's using UiPath academy, whether it's reaching out to your center of excellence, it's incredible. Um, there's a wide variety of different ways that you can upskill yourself. And in essence, you become, um, a powerful player in your environment because not only do you have the business acumen, you now have the technical acumen, and that is everything. I mean, when we talk about transformation, we talk about where our industry's going. Um, there's a saying that, you know, every company now must be a technology company, right? And so this is the key, even as workers, even as employees, we all must be technologists. And so the real question is, think of yourself and think of this concept. I like to call human augmentation. How can you augment yourself through UI path, through the use of RPA to become that up-skilled worker, that next level worker who will be integral to the success of any company moving from, >>We talk a lot about upscaling. Now, of course, part of that upskilling I presume is learning how to use robotic process automation and the tooling, but it seems that there's more to it than that. And, and you just strike me as a person that's creative, you have a power persona. So what are these sort of intangible skills that, that I need to succeed in this new world? And can I learn them? >>That's a great question. I think one of the biggest skills, being able to think outside of the box, that is huge. Uh, and again, this goes back to at least question about what does it take and what should you, you should really think outside of the box about your own career, about your team, about your company, um, how you can improve upon what is already there, um, or how can you build something completely new that has never been thought of before. And so I think that's the biggest skill. The ability to, um, innovate, think, think innovatively and think outside of the box. Um, I believe it's, it's something that is maybe a little intuitive to some individuals, but you can also learn, you can learn to, um, get out of your own way, so to speak, uh, so that you can actually start to come up with these really creative ways to address, uh, whether it's complex business problems, uh, whether it's at an industry level or even just within your internal enterprise. >>And creativity is actually one of the attributes. And I guess it might not be in your DNA, but if you, you know, it's like humor, humor, right? If you hang out with funny people, you know, if you hang out with creative people, you can, you can learn about apply. >>That's right. That's right. But in the beginning of the pandemic, you know, one of the things that I think we all want, you seem to have a ton of motivation and ambition as Dave was saying. And, and I'm someone that normally has that too, but in the first year of pandemic, that was hard. It's hard to get motivated. It was hard to know where do I fit in? How do you advise? And now of course, when you publish the book six months ago, we're about a year into the pandemic. Things are looking better because here we are in Las Vegas at an in-person event with humans. But how do you, how do you see, how do you recommend to folks that are, that don't have technology backgrounds like you don't, I don't to motivate themselves to go, you can take the control, take it. And everybody don't, we all want control as people and take control of your career path. There are a lot of opportunities out there. How do you advise people navigating this challenging sort of mental state with there's so many opportunities sitting right here? Yes >>That's so I think it, it goes back to the getting out of your own way. It also goes back to really taking a look at assess assessing your own skillset, um, assessing your own personal drivers. What motivates you, uh, whether that is in your personal life, whether that is in your professional life, and then taking a look also at those motivators, how can I look at those and what use can I get out of those to help me to transform my own personal skill set and really grow out, uh, my, my capabilities, right, as a professional it's, it's all about really thinking through, uh, your, I'll say your professional background or role as ever-changing ever-growing. And as long as you approach it with a mindset of constantly growing constantly upskilling, I mean, honestly, the sky is truly the limit. >>I a weird question. If, if, if, if mastering word is a one and let's say learning, um, learning how to use Excel, macros is let's call it a three. Uh, all in the spectrum goes out to a, be a building, a complex, uh, you know, uh, AI model, data science kind of ML model. If that's a 10, where does learning how to code RPA as a citizen developer fit on that spectrum? Good question. >>Oh, that's a great question. I would say somewhere between, Hmm. I would say somewhere between maybe three and four around there, because you there. So again, we, we have so many tools that we can use to help upscale the set of sense at this point that we can really walk them through the nuances, uh, at a pace that is conducive to really retaining the knowledge. So I don't think it's, it's definitely not the level of, let's say, building out a complex, like machine learning model or something of that nature. It may be a little bit more in alignment with, um, if someone is up-skilled and macros, or you may be up-skilled in some other type of scripting, uh, language similar to that, I might even say sometimes a little bit, maybe a little bit less difficult than that, uh, depending on what you're trying to automate, right. The process you're trying to automate the company, >>But inside of a day, I can do something fairly simple, right? Yeah. >>Yes. So we actually, the, the training that we have at Spotify, we train our users from novice. Absolutely no understanding, no knowledge of RPA to building able, being able to build a bot in five days. And those are five half days sessions that the citizen developers attend. And by the morning of the fifth day, they actually have built a bot. And so it's, and it's very powerful, uh, being able to, to upskill someone and show them, I can take you from, you know, absolutely no understanding of RPA to actually having something, a bot that you can showcase that you can run within as little as five half days. I mean, it's very compelling to any business user, right? >>The business impact. Soon as you guys are too young to remember, but there's this thing called Lotus 1, 2, 3, we used to have to go to Lotus class slash file retrieve for you folks who remember this was all keyboard based, but it was game changing in terms of your personal productivity. And it sounds like there's a similar but much, much larger impact with RPA >>Impact. Talk to me about the impact of the program, especially in the last, this year, here we are in October, you mentioned started small, and now there's about a hundred folks. Talk to me about the appetite of that as we've seen this massive acceleration and the need to automate for everyday things that we expect as consumers, whether we're ordering food or buying something online. >>Hmm. So it really is a different mindset in terms of thinking through the way that we work differently. And so we really approached it with, if you're an accountant, think of what is the future role and responsibility of an accountant in this new digital, uh, I'll say environment. And through that, we have been able to really push this idea or this concept of up-skilling as a key element of personal professional success and also team success. Um, and that has been a game changer. So there's a lot of value that comes out of the cohesiveness between the personal desire to upskill and continue to, uh, be a, you know, a consummate professional in whatever role you're in, but also to help your team right, to be, to be, you know, a standout, uh, team player in terms of the skills that you're bringing to the table as both an accountant and someone that has now the power of automation within your skillset. Okay. >>And ask you one more question. And that is something that Dave brought up yesterday as we were, he was sitting on a panel with, and he was the only male, which is not common in our industry. How have you seen the role of females in technology changing? And I'm imagine you do work in stem. Imagine you're a motivational speaker you should be if you're not. Um, but how have you seen the role of females in technology changing in since there's so much opportunity there? >>Yes. That is a great question. I believe that RPA specifically, uh, is an incredible driver of women and influencing more women to enter into stem fields, primarily because it is such an innovative technology. There are so many roles he said that are open, just opening up. Uh, probably I've heard different numbers in terms of acceleration of growth over the next five to 10 years. So we're looking at a plethora of opportunities and these are brand new roles that women who are curious about stem, curious about being a technologist can dive right into from wherever they are. So whether they are a tax professional today, whether they are working within, you know, uh, counting, whether they're working with an internal audit, they have the opportunity now to test the waters. Um, and quite often it is such a, it's such a fascinating field. And as I said, there's so much potential around it and for growth and just for changing, uh, different industries, that it's a great driver for women to actually enter into, uh, stem technology, uh, and really drive change, facilitate change, and have more women at the table, so to speak. Okay. >>And you didn't, you didn't start in tech, in stem, right? I did not. Do you have a law degree or no, you have a Ms. >>So yes, little studies and then I actually, I'm a philosopher. So I started by my degree is in philosophy. I love >>This logic. Yes. I love how you've applied that to >>Yeah. Yes. I was not initially in stem and it was actually through an internship at a technology firm, uh, while I was in college that I don't first open to technology. And it just immediately captivated me just in terms of working, you know, that the speed, the pace, uh, just being able to solve these complex business problems at scale around the world. It was absolutely fascinating to me, obviously still is, but I think testing the waters in that way, um, as I was just talking before, it helped me to understand, I had never envisioned a career in technology, but having an opportunity to test the waters really enabled me to see that, wow, this is something where I have a skillset and it brings out a passion within me that I didn't know that I had. So it was a, it was a win-win. >>That's awesome. No worries. Last question. Where can folks go to get your book? >>Yes. So anywhere books are sold, uh, definitely on Amazon. Uh, we, if you are here at forward, we also are, have a book signing, so you can come find me. I'll be on the patio signing books and, uh, yeah, it's, it's everywhere. And I would love to hear feedback. And we're thinking about a second one. So please let us know how you like the, uh, the activities that are in there. >>Thank you. Congratulations. And Dave's going to pick one up so he can start. >>Yeah. The use case. I'm dying to dig >>In, do a breathing analysis on it, and he was great to have you on the program. Your energy is fantastic. You really open up opportunities for people. I hope that more people will watch this and understand that while the really the sky is really the limit. And, uh, thank you for your time. Absolutely. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure >>For Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. We are live in Vegas at the Bellagio UI path forward for you right back with our next guest.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to the queue. We are live at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante UI path forward for it is so great to be sitting in an anchor desk next to Dave and with guests in person, we're going to be talking about automation workforce of the future. I've got two guests here with Dave and me. Kevin crone is here intelligent automation and digital upskilling leader from PWC. Kevin. Welcome. Thank you. Can't wait to talk about upskilling and Bettina Koblick is here the chief people officer at UiPath. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. So, as I understand that PWC has embedded UI path into a couple of product offerings. One of them we're going to talk about today, Kevin that's pro pro edge. Talk to me about that. What is that? >>So, um, as we look at, uh, challenges that C-suite leaders are facing, I think one of the biggest emerging challenges right now is around the topic of upscaling. There's the number of jobs that are being displaced, um, is growing by automation. But on the flip side, the number of jobs that are emerging is actually greater and there is a consistent challenge that gets cited there. All of our research through our CEO survey, their work we've done with the world economic forum and other sources around the need to fill that gap. And most leaders feel like they're not doing a good job to, to fill that. So, um, we at PWC have invested in developing a, a new software product called pro edge, which is really focused on, um, identifying the skills needed for the future, teaching those skills and helping to scale the usage of the skills and the organization. And one of the key skills as we look at the digital space is UI path. And we really think that, you know, teaching non technologists around the use of tools like robotic process automation is going to be one of those critical kind of must have skills in the future. >>And patina, you guys are using pro edge. Why, why, why? I mean, you're like the automation pros, what do you need? >>We need it because we have the same, um, challenges that every other company has that introduced us automation, right? People, um, people's time, their tasks that they have been doing are basically displaced. Um, and we're trying to figure out how do we up-skill re-skill how do we position people who now no longer are work working on maybe 50% of what they've done in the past for their next role? Um, so it's incredibly important for us, >>You know, you know this well, Tina and Kevin, you as well, when, when the automation trend RPA first hit, it was like, oh yeah, the trade press, come on. It's going to take away jobs, blah, blah, blah. Now we're working perpetual workdays, right? We all weekend all night, you never stopped working. You're always on. So I think people will brace automation, but as the chief people officer, first of all, how, how was it getting through the pandemic? And have you seen, I presume that UI path folks embrace automation, of course it's in your DNA, but have you seen others sort of, is that narrative done in, is COVID effected that >>I think COVID has affected it, um, for a number of reasons, because so many things shifted in how we do work. Number one, and I can talk about that a little more, but I yesterday I was in a customer advisory board meeting actually with Kevin. And the biggest conversation was not about the technology. It was around what happens when automation is introduced to a company and what happens with people, um, as to whether they want, they're willing to adopt, embrace, have an automation mindset. So that conversation isn't done at all. And it's probably one of the biggest conversations after, you know, adopting the technology, trying to introduce it as how do you drive adoption. And a lot of that is people's people's ability to understand how it will make their life easier, but then not be afraid about what's next. Uh, so I think it's absolutely still a conversation. I don't know if you feel the same. Yeah, >>Yeah. It it's been interesting. I think during the pandemic cause peoples, you know, day to day work lives have gone up ended and he start to think about, um, you know, the, the mixture between what I'll call kind of transaction oriented type work versus analytical type work. And if it just, you know, historically everyone's always said we should do less transaction work and more analytic work. But I think the pandemic was almost like forced that conversation on steroids and people's lot. You I've had to figure out that, like, I don't want to do this type of work and I'm being, I have more demands on me and I'm being asked to do other things, how can I do this more effectively? And so part of this becomes learning these skills to automate the things in front of you right now, the part of this becomes, I need to be able to, to actually have that analytical skill set in the future. And I think that is almost a precursor for what we see happening. And that was, that was the fun part of the conversation yesterday is thinking about, okay, well, what is the, you know, what is the, uh, the accounting analyst role five years from now and what someone does today versus what someone does in five years and how do you actually plan for that, >>The patina, where in your organization, like who's using it and talk to me about the adoption and their willingness to embrace it. >>Yeah. So we are, we've introduced it to our finance organization. One of the reasons we did that is because our finance organization is also a big user of automation, right? So, um, what's been really interesting is that because the technology or because pro edge kind of takes biases out of mapping, what a person can do, um, what learning paths there are for them and what their job will look like in the future, in which job do they go to or could be a potential path. I think it actually motivates people much beyond having work shifting because of automation. Because in addition, you also get to see a path, right. And everywhere you turn, just want to know what's the possibility for the future. So, um, while I'd like to say it was genius for us to envision that it's, it's a pleasant surprise and something, we should talk about more, >>I'm sensing a journey. It's always the case where I know I call it the force March to digital. We were thrown into this. And so, so much was unknown. And I know our team, I mean our producers and it's death by a thousand paper cuts in any one individual thing is not that bad, but yeah, the Moffitt, it's just, that's what kills your work day, your work week and your mental health. And so maybe it's, that's kind of the starting point is, are pigs a band-aid for, for, for, for that fundamental, but then it's wow. I can see the light bulb goes off. I can see the potential, that's where the digital upskilling comes in. I mean, maybe that's oversimplifying it, but how do you see that journey? Yeah. >>Yeah. I think there's a couple of different pieces with this cause, you know, and it goes back to the divide between the things you need to do now. And how do you think about making your life easier, but then it really goes to what you need to do in the future. And that journey to actually get there is tough because it's not just a question of, Hey, I need to pick up a textbook or pick up an online training module. And I'm just going to become an expert. It's really thinking about what are the, what's the combination of different skills. I need to learn. Some of that's going to be hands on technical skills. It's going to be platforms like UI path. It may be other complimentary platforms in the analytics space and other things. Um, some of this may also be on the kind of softer side. >>How do I learn how to work in a more agile way and have a design thinking mindset, have a product mindset, but then it's really how's that going to change my role in the future. And how do I actually, for lack of a better word, start to embed these practices in my job in a way that I'm actually learning these skills and it will stick. And how do you actually manage that co culture change? Um, for lack of better word over time. That was probably the biggest thing I picked up from yesterday was just some of this talk around change management and culture, uh, which is, you know, we, we have a lot of, for lack of better word techie. Cause if this conference would like to think about all the cool stuff that technology doing, but the big lesson learned is really, you know, you actually have to make the stick inside an organization. >>And in the last year, Kevin, I'm curious about the adoption because you know, everything we've seen so much acceleration in the last year that digital acceleration, the acceleration in automation, we've also seen tremendous, uh, people and from a cultural perspective, I'd love to, for you to shed some light on what you've seen since you've rolled this product out, how is the pandemic, has it been an enabler of that change management and that cultural change, which historically is very hard to do. >>It's very hard. And I think this, if, if I want to CFO or COO two years ago and talked about the skills gap in what was happening, the organization, I would probably get someone that would be on and say, okay, yeah, that, that, that is happening. We need to think about this, but I got 50 other things I need to worry about. You know, I think over the past year a while, things like, you know, TA TA, well, time is a big, uh, luxury or having excess time is a big luxury that most people don't have. I think there's a recognition that, um, it's a challenging work environment right now. We're trying to get more done. People are not in person. Um, people have, you know, there's issues with, with mental health and other challenges and there's, uh, almost like a renewed focus on how do we make employees lives better and better can mean different things. >>But when I think about it, it's, it's giving people a hope that they have a future career path, that their job is not going to be eliminated, that they're developing the right skills and they're being given the capacity to actually do that now. And so a lot of the discussions have really been are around that fact. And I would say probably more so than the traditional just cost saving discussion than most automation, um, threads in with RPA begin with this really, you know, became, um, we need to do this and we need to, you know, send a message to our employees that we really care about you. And this is something that is really going to be us investing in you as a perk in the future. >>What's the role of the head of human capital management in the context of automation? Is she the champion? Is she the therapist? Is she the change agent? Well, how do you see that? >>Well, clearly he should have been talking to the head of people, um, two years ago. We even, because, uh, the way I think about it, and I think a lot of people in my role think about it is, you know, a CFO really looks after the financial health of the company. Um, the focus for us is looking after the people, health of the company, right? And so I think, um, in my career, what I've learned is that change is constant. We all know this and, um, change for people is difficult. So the way I think about introducing new technology, introducing automation, introducing anything that changes or being forced to change because of something like a pandemic, um, what I really ended up thinking a lot about is how does that impact people and how do we, how do we help them through it? Um, so that's my lens. And I think that's a chief people officer lens to all of this, but makes a perfect partnership with platforms that make this easy for us. Because if you can imagine, uh, a C-suite person comes to, uh, comes to an HR department and says, tell me what we should do here. How do we develop all our people? And it's, it's an overwhelming task. What pro edge does is just beautifully delivers this on a platter, um, in a way that we could never do manually. So it's >>Talk to me a little bit Bettina about the last year and a half. And obviously as being the chief people, officer, you came in, you said about five months ago, but obviously during a very, very challenging time, I always think that the employee experience is directly related to the customer experience. I see them as inextricably linked, how have you been able to foster a good employee experience in your time here in a very strange world so that the customer experience, I mean, you guys are a fast moving company, 8,000 plus customers. So that, that customer experience is a stellar as UI path has always had to be. >>Yeah, I think for us, it came down to just some simple things. Um, one is just being flexible. Uh, there was not a one size fits all. We had to recognize that we have to meet people in a place that works for them, everybody, uh, dealt with a different reality and the same for our customers. Um, and I agree with you. I think employees that feel enabled that feel safe, that feel they have a future, um, have a much different relationship with their customers, um, then employees that are worried about their safety and security and whatnot. So we really took an approach of flexibility, safety, um, meeting people where they are jumping in when there were big crises in India and whatnot to really, really take care of our people and help them understand that we're here for >>Big impact on mental health. Did you see that, um, there was an insert in the wall street journal. I think it was last week, uh, women at work. Um, and it was a stat in there. I don't know if you're a working mom, but it said that, uh, 30, it was Qualtrics was the source. 30% of working moms said their mental health had declined since the pandemic. Interestingly only 15. I said only 15% of working dads. Um, so that was sort of interesting, uh, and notable, uh, but you know, to your point, CFO, financial health of the company, the chief people officer, the, the human capital health. Yeah. >>Um, very much so. And by the way, I'm not surprised by that stat as a woman. >>I thought it was, I thought it was low. I was talking to my wife about it the other day. She's not a working mom, but she's like my mental health, even though I'm not a working mom, I have my mental health. I'm a working dad, but, but I got it easier than she does, but, but, and I'm not surprised at the disparity. I'm surprised that the only 30% and 50%, I think it's a lot higher than that. And people may be just like, I don't know if that's actually, maybe some people like working at home and that's, I could see that both sides of that equation. Yeah. >>There's also a stigma around mental health that we've, that's been addressed in. So even during the Olympic coverage this last summer, but having your team be really focused and enabled and knowing that they took to your point, Kevin, from an upscale perspective, that they have a path where they can go, they can increase their own value to the company. >>I completely agree. And I think, uh, other studies show that what people really want is a future at work. And, and this is what I think privilege dresses. Beautiful. >>Yeah. It's interesting. Right. Cause I think when you talk about some of the mental health challenges, I think it can get down very quickly to a cab just on this crazy schedule or I'm on zoom for 14 hours a day. And I, I don't have the time to breathe in my time commuting where I may have had time to decompress. It's just been replaced with more meetings. And I think that that may be the, like the surface issue, but I actually think if you go below the surface, not being in the office, not having some of the in-person networking, not having some of that creates anxiety about the future. And you're not really sure around, okay, what does my career path look like? I may not be getting the amount of career counseling that I used to get just by impromptu conversations or, you know, just by more traditional ways. Um, but I think the reality is when we look at the way most companies are thinking about their future work models. It's not going to go back to the way the world operated two years ago, it's, we're going to be in some sort of hybrid model. And so it really becomes more important to actually dig below where maybe some of the challenges were in the passengers, not surfaced. And I think upskilling and thinking about, um, kind of role skills and roles, it just becomes a much more important conversation. >>Absolutely. Last question, Bettina for you, we're almost out of time, but you started this in the, in financial, in the finance organization. What do you see over the next couple of years in terms of being very much UI path land and expand with your customers? Where do you see it rolling out across two iPads. >>We're already talking to our sales enablement group. Um, for a couple of reasons we want them to experience it. We want them to have also, we want them to have the conversations with our customers much like what we learned yesterday, right? It's a multi-dimensional conversation. It's not just a financial ROI, it's a people journey, change management. So we'll, we're taking it to our sales enablement group. We're absolutely gonna use it in HR, uh, obviously. Um, and I, I would just think we'll use it in two years. It'll be enterprise wide >>Different is pro edge in the marketplace. And just in, particularly in terms of its business impact. >>Yeah. I take a stab. So when we think about the challenge in a topic like digital upskilling, I think in traditional approaches to learning, it would be okay, we're going to enroll someone in a learning program. You know, you're going to go through, do certain amount of self study. Maybe there's a class, the some classroom based training. And that's it. I think for us, we saw two different challenges on both sides of that. One was trying to identify who needs to learn, what, and what part of the organization, why is that important? What an executive may need to learn is going to be different from what someone who does the transaction processing, uh, for their, their full-time job needs to learn and learning kind of from basic digital acumen through kind of hands-on skills. What are the different, um, pieces? I think probably the more interesting part is the back end of that. >>And thinking about, you know, how do you actually put these skills into practice and how do you put scale? One of the buzzwords that's thrown around at this conference a lot is the concept of citizen led automation as a topic. And really how, how do you have your, does this users building bots or creating data dashboards or doing other things that is, um, that's challenging. So as we design the product, what we really wanted to think about was that end to end journey from kind of the point of identifying skills through the point of scaling a citizen led effort. It's one of the things we're really excited to be working with UI path on is one of the core technologies that we, that we view in this ecosystem is really thinking about how do you make that happen? And if the outcome is not just people are new things, but the outcome are, people are actually creating solutions that are, that are having an impact on their job on a day to day basis. We think that's a really powerful concept. >>It's really important work, what you guys are doing. Thank you both for joining David me on the program today, talking about this very interesting symbiotic relationship partners, PWC UI path customers. Really interesting, great work that you're doing. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having us for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from Las Vegas at the Bellagio UI path forward for it. We'll be right back, stick around.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Everybody, this is Dave Vellante and we're here day two of UI path forward three. The third North American event is the cubes, second year covering UI path. The rocket ship that is UI path. PDC is here, he's the vice president of AI at UI path and Rudy Coon who is the chief marketing officer and co founder of process gold UI path. Just announced this week, the acquisition of process gold. So Rudy, congratulations and you may as well PD. Thank you. So that's cool. Um, process gold is focused on process mining. You guys may or may not know about them, but really maybe, maybe you cofounded the company. Why did you co-found you and your founders process gold and tell us a little bit about the problems that you're solving. Yeah, right. You know, um, many years ago I started my career with IBM and I used to be a business consultant. >>And typically if you try to implement any kind of technology like RPA, but back then we didn't have the LPA. But if you try to figure out what the real process and the company are and you ask people, please tell me how does the process where it looks like. Usually people cannot tell you. They say yes we have a documentation but it's outdated the moment you print it. So the idea was um, actually I came across process mining more than 10 years ago and I met the guy in, at the university of and he had this bright idea to reconstruct business processes solely based on digital footprints from any kind of it system. I mean, think about it. You, you use SAP, you use any kind of other it systems and you take the data that is left behind after the execution or the support of a process. >>You take it, you push the magic button and you see what the process really is, like an extra races and from business processes. But we, we saw that in the demo at the a analyst event. I thought it was like magic. I mean I think it's actually, I think of a small company like ours easement even though the number of processes we have and the relative complexity and by the way, half the time people aren't following them and but you were able to visualize them. So. So first of all, why did you acquire process gold? What was the thinking there? So you know, just to pop one level up the stack, what exactly are we trying to do as a company? And you are about as we are building this whole new set of platform capabilities, right? We used to have product lines in studio, orchestra and robot, but now when we look at the whole customer journey and all the elements that need to be there in that customer journey, we essentially have to weld something, what I call the operating system called a self improving enterprise. >>And what that means is that our three elements you need to combine. You need to have a measurement system in place, which can quantify the ROI of your automations. Of course you need a really solid RPA platform like ours to do the automation itself, you have to be able to bring in pieces for doing complex stuff, cognitive stuff using AI. And then you need a scientific way of planning those automations using tools like process board because you have to do process mining. Once you complete this, watch your cycle, you can keep doing more and more of the automation. Essentially you're feeding the beast of efficiency in your organizations. So essentially the way this worked, we can't do, don't, don't have the means to do the demo here, but you essentially pointed your system at a process and it visually showed me the steps and laid them out and in great detail. >>Um, and I said, wow, that's like magic. Um, but this stuff actually works. You got no real customers using this if you do. Yeah. Okay. >> So you know, we worked for companies like, like portion Germany, maybe you have heard about them. They, they build cars and they are using process code for part of the production process. Today in today's world, every process, no matter how offensive is a physical process like production or purchasing or whatever it's used or it's supported by it and at least a lot of data behind. And this is exactly that, the goldmine for us. So we extract this data and again, you know, we have a lot of algorithms in the, in the software. It's, it's sort of magic as it is a lot of mathematics, which is magic for me. But um, it works. Yeah, just take the data, you pushed a button and just see the process with all the details. >>As you mentioned, like stupid times, bottlenecks, compliance issues and this three, the, the, the source, you know, if he wants to see the process, you can then decide is it, is this process now suitable for automation or maybe should we first optimize the process and then vote for automation. And this is key for, for RPA. >> Well, I think, you know, I'm talking a lot of customers this week and last year offline as well. A lot of times we'll tell us the mistakes they made is they'll, they'll automate a crappy process. Yup. This presumably allows me to sort of highlight the shine a light on some of the weaknesses and the weak links in the chain. >> So process optimization is a big deal, right? Both in the pre automation phase and in the post automation phase. Once you automated a process, you need to know what are the bad things that are happening there, what are the blockers, what are the nonconforming steps that you're taking? >>So that's in the post automation but also in the pre automation phase where you haven't even decided what exactly are you going to automate. It's really hard to quantify what are the high ROI processes, right? I can go in our bottle, automate something which is not useful at all for the users, right. And so we want our users to a wide making those mistakes. And that's why we are exposing these powerful, powerful set of tools where you can use all these tools to easily document your processes, manage your processes, use process mining to look deeper into how our people and the different entities in your organizations working together. You know, historically if you look at stuff like all of in all of human history, there have been certain processes, but as computers came on and stuff, you look at it on in, in scifi movies, everyone has always, as Rudy says, the X way for the enterprise. >>You always wanted to have this Uber system that can understand everything that we are doing and tell us, you know, how can we improve stuff? Or what can we do better? Because as a species that fuels our evolution. And so this is, it's, it's, it's fundamental to a lot of things that people do in every day and almost in every action that they did. >> So the in the secret sauce is math, right? So again, please, the secret sauce. Yeah, it's math, but you've got to have some kind of discovery engine as well. I mean this is, it's a system. So maybe can you give us a little bit more idea as to what's under the covers? Well, you know, it all starts with data and the data we need in the beginning, it's very, very simple. We need only three different attributes. The first attribute is what we call the case ID. >>So the case ID is a unique identifier for a case and it depends on the process. If we talk, for example, a very simple invoice approved process in the case that it would be the invoice number. When we talk about claims management or with a claims number or a purchase number, whatever the second attribute we need is the timestamp. And every time we find the timestamp in a system like SAP or lock file or database, this time subsume a timestamp actually represents some sort of activity. So we need a case ID, timestamp and activity and solely based on this data we can already show you how the process looks like. And then we enrich this data with other attributes like let's say supplier or invoice amount to give you some more ideas and some statistics. So this is the data we need. We, you know, we transformed this data, we access directly the database. >>So there is no, there's no need to extract the data. We directly access to data and we transform it and then it will be represented in our application. So you get rid of full transparency of what's going on. So when you were a consultant, you mentioned you're a consultant at IBM, you would sit down with a pen and paper and talk to people about what they did. Maybe time and motion studies and studies, you know, you know, this process mapping workshops, everybody comes out and just allows it. So you sit together with people in the room and at the end of the day you have more processes than you have people there. And everybody's telling you a different story and you know exactly that. Not everything is totally true. So a lot of gray area. Yeah. And the maps that you had to build and people simply don't know what the processes are. >>It's not that they don't want to tell you, they simply don't know. Or as I said before, different people have different processes and they don't follow those. There's no standard to follow. She's pretty, what's the vision for how, how process gold fits into UI path. So as a problem was talking about in his keynote, and Daniel talked about this too, um, a lot of our customers came to us, uh, to automate the processes that they already know about for the processes that they don't know about. We have this whole set of tools, the Explorer set of rules that we are releasing. Process world is a part of that. But essentially now you don't need to know what processes to automate. You can use an automated set of tools to do that process scored, as Rudy was talking about, can go in and look at these log files, uh, ordered logs that are generated by your systems of record. >>Um, and then be able to visualize, optimize our process. But the technologies are really complimentary because these guys, uh, used to work in the backend systems. That's why, you know, that's where most of the process mining works works in the back end looking at the audit logs, but you have as has, you know, we have really strong background in understanding the gooey in the front end, uh, understanding of apps, controls and the control flows that the users have using our computer vision technology. When you combine these technologies, there's a magical effect that happens. Like if your backend does not contain the audit, log off some actions that people are taking in the front end. Let's say it's a small application which does not generate that are the, once you combine these two data points, this is one of the first in the industry on the wonderful kind system that can look across all the different spectrum of applications and be able to understand the processes at a deeper level. >>Technically when you make an acquisition, you obviously looking at the technology and how it's going to integrate, how challenging will it be for you to integrate? What have you done any sort of, when you did the due diligence, you know, a lot of companies are really dogmatic about integration. Others frankly aren't that let's buy the company up by another one. What's your philosophy? It >>was kind of a match made in heaven. I remember the first time I talked to Rudy on the phone and uh, you know, are at the end of the day our philosophies aligned like almost a hundred percent because at the end of the day process goal and UI bad is all about that customer obsession, delivering the value to our customers. And the values are saying we want our customers to get out of this mundane tasks to automate the tasks as optimally as possible. And so both the companies, the, the, the outcomes aligned pretty well. Now the mechanics of the integration, um, I think both do. Both the companies are, these aren't you know, dot com era companies where you know, somebody came over the an idea and did this take Rudy and the team had been working in this area for 10 years. They have organization knowledge, they have the expertise and so does you have adults. >>And so we will take what I'm, what I call a loosely coupled approach where we can choose common customers, we can choose comments that are features that we are going to work on and that's how we will integrate. But again, the focus of all this is to deliver the value to our customers. Not think about the mechanics of what the integration would look like. I think one of the most exciting things that I'm hearing is this notion of the processes that are not known. Um, because so many processes today are unknown, especially as we go into this new digital world. We used to know what processes we want to automate your point, some technology at it. Okay great. We're going to automate now with this digital disruption that's going on. You actually may have no idea. You may be making processes up on the fly, so you need a way to identify those processes quickly and then those ones that are driving our ROI. >>Um, I'm interested in your thoughts on AI and ROI and how to measure that, how those things fit together. So, you know, AI, this is I think the biggest problem in the AI right now. There's a lot of hype in this space. We are tracking close to 3000 different AI startups in the world and uh, nobody can actually put a number to the revenues or the valuation, the real valuation because of this ROI quantification problem, right? Um, let's say I have a company, we'd say, Oh, we are the best in class. And understanding faces short, how is it going to be useful to an enterprise if you cannot measure what well you official recognition system is adding to your enterprise, it's not good enough for the business people. Because at the end of the day, my, I can have the world's brightest PhDs telling me I have the state of the art model in the world, which does law, but in fact cannot translate it into business value. >>It doesn't really work. And so that's why ROI quantification is so in parking and you have to make sure you align them econometrics of the AI, uh, measures and the business KPIs so that if, for example, so your data science team should be able to know what metrics they have to improve in order to get a better ROI for the business. So you have to align those two things. And that is part of research that is not really prevalent in academic circles. Interesting. I mean, you've seen some narrow successes in I'll call AI, you know, things like a infrastructure optimization. Okay, great. Makes sense. What I'm hearing from you is identify the KPIs that are going to drive your voice of the customer defines value first to take away, identify what those KPIs are. And this every business has thousands of KPIs, but there's really like three or four that matter, right? >>So identify those top ones and then you're saying measure on a continuous basis how your system affects those metrics. So in economics this is called the treatment effect. Uh, so for example, if you water my term sales and marketing processes, the KPIs that matter to you is what is your conversion rate from when the leads hit your system to when the revenue is realized or what is the total revenue that you're making? Right? As you said, there's only two or three top level gave you as that really matter. And now if for example you put an AI system in place that treats your leads differently, you should see an increase and uptick in revenue. And so that's what I mean by the Ottawa quantification. So if you instrumented the system properly, put it in the right quantification measurement system in place and have the auto optimization mechanism, that's how things should work. >>You know, with with cross mining we can even add additional KPIs to the picture KPIs you usually don't have because if you ask a company, nobody can tell you how many different variations of the process you actually have. And with process mining we can exactly measure how many variations there are. So if you are up to streamlining to simplifying the process to speed it up, we can actually tell you if your optimization effort is successful or not because we can show you how the number of very our variations is going down over time. Even if we, you know, we can also measure the, the success of RPA implementation. So it really pros we use process code and pro money not only for identification of processes but also for the monitoring of processes after an successful RPA implementation. I can see so many use cases for this. >>I mean it's like my mind is just racing. I mean sales guys in one region and sales gals in the other region doing things differently. You've got different country management doing things differently. If I understand you correctly, you can identify the differences in those processes, document them, visualize them and identify the ones that are actually optimized or help people optimize and then standardized across the organization to drive those metrics that matter. It's very powerful. It is really powerful. You know, as I said, we are living in the golden age of this system that can self-improve your companies. I mean this, this was the Holy grail of all of computer science work with technologies like process score with RPA, with AI. I think we are at that inflection point where we can realize that. So we got to go. But I'll, I'll give you guys sort of the last, last word, each of you. >>So actually first of all, Rudy question, how large can you tell me how large the process gold team is? How many people? We have grown with 60 people. 60 equals zero. We are based, our headquarter is in the, is in the, in from the Netherlands. Um, so this is where we are very close to university. This is where our developers basically are located. And uh, I'm based in Frankfurt in Germany, but for now, let's see what the future will be. So what's a home run for you with this marriage? The home run, you know, since we are in Las Vegas, I was wondering if you hit the jet park Jack photo, if we hit the jackpot. But I actually think of the customers, our customers get the Jaguar because this combination of, of your technology, of our technology, this is really, you know, good answer. So that as I was gonna ask you the same question PD is, I can't even tell you, um, almost every one of the UI path customers has expressed interest in process glow, right? >>Because right now we have a portfolio of products, but the interest that we are getting in process board with the process mining offerings is unparalleled. So Rudy is right. Our customers are the ones which are driving this inhibition and the integration. And I'll be able to actually acquire this solution. I forget, I have my notes with relatively near term, right? Yes. We are gonna make it available to our customers as soon as possible. Awesome guys, congratulations. Really great to have you on the cube. Thank you. All right, and thank you everybody for watching. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the cube alive from the Bellagio UI path forward three. We were right back.