>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. Welcome >>back everyone to the cubes live coverage of UI path forward. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, coasting alongside of Dave Volante. We have two guests for the segment. We have Chris career. He is the senior director of service delivery at century link. Thanks so much for coming on the show. And Kumar, he is the client partner at Infosys. Thank you so much for joining us. So show G I'm going to start with you. We're hearing so much about this automation first era and when you are partnering with a company, we hear that automation first requires this real mindset shift. So I'm wondering if you could walk us through the process of when you are partnering with a company and you are saying we will help you add more automation to your work processes. How do you do it? How do you get the company to sort of adopt that mindset shift? >>So it is basically changing the mindset of the individual contributor. So the first thing is how do we make them adapt? Those changes into the organization and making sure that the learning experience and the Cuban experience are getting tased, are adapting by the individual contributor. That is more important for Infosys as a client partner to Centrelink. We are always striving for. >>So Chris, maybe talk a little about your role. Your title is, has service delivery in it. What does that, what does that mean? So we're, we're of course we're a telecommunications providers, so of course we sell our products, we have an extensive product portfolio. Uh, once it's sold, we have to fulfill those products. And that's what our service delivery comes in. Uh, everything from order entry all the way through to activation and delivery to the customer of the final solution of whatever it is they purchase from us. All right, let's get into it. So we just had Gardner on, they were saying, Hey, you know, there's a, there's a lot of things that can be cleaned up, cleaned up in there, >> a lot of things in there. Um, if you think about technology today, telecommunications, especially as a, as a industry, um, it's an industry of aggregation at this point. >>And it has been for a number of years. So with aggregation you, you end up with is um, I use kind of a phrase where we have an aim over the front door and that's the name of how we do business. Uh, that's, that's becomes a brand behind the front door. We're still operating as many of those individual companies still. So we're trying to stitch together in the background, the various networks, delivery options, products, et cetera, in a seamless way for our customers. So to do that, of course using automation becomes a very powerful tool for us right now to do everything that we would have to stitch together with human glue. Um, that's something that we have to deal with on a day in and day out basis. An area of the I focus on is ordering. I'm ordering in our space is highly manual. You're doing a lot of transcription, so to give sales the right tools so they can sell a, you give them a very elegant front end of the house. >>And many of the discussions we've had today, uh, have centered around the front of the house, looks very elegant and very smooth. And the back of the house is where a lot of the stitch together work happens. And that's where that automation comes into play. So partnering with somebody like a shadier, uh, trying to get onto the front end of how do we smooth those things out internally. Um, we're an operations organization. What we are always challenged with is how do we provide the service and product to our customers at an efficient price point. Um, people is a, is a margin drag at the end of the day. Um, but also we want our folks to be doing things that are more interesting. Uh, which is what automation is really about is that digital transformation and how do you transform your employees with you. Uh, and I'm definitely in an area where I have an opportunity there. >>And so that is, that is, that is what you, I've had this really selling, it's this idea that here are your, your employees who are doing these mundane tasks, these dreariness, this Drudge drudgery. And we are giving them an opportunity to do more of the creative work to use their brains. And more interesting and compelling ways. Shoji I mean is, is that the value props, I mean, how much are customers buying into that? I mean, is that, and is that immediate? Is it immediately clear to them, Oh, since I don't have to do that type of data entry anymore, I can now do this. I mean, is it obvious how you'll spend your, the rest of your time? >>So it is more about the analyzing the, what is happened in the history and making sure that how their data can be used and put it into the AI and making sure that how the automations can be revealed through that. That is a way to, you know, out of power we are making as a journey in central link as well, like in, along with the, the other telco organizations we are doing here. So specifically that is what, yea and automation we are specifically into making sure that how the customers can take advantage of the practice using the tools, like a UI path. >>So where's your expertise? automation, RPA, telecommunications, ordering, all of the above. So my ex >>is telecommunication. I have been with the telecommunication companies for about 25 years now. I'm majorly going through the raw from >>push button telephones to the era now it is standing up to fighting. So that's my, uh, expedience. You sound like an old man. Yeah. So Chris, when you do a business case for doing in RPA, I mean, I know a lot of CFOs and where's the hard dollars? You know, where are we going to save money? Well, we're going to, we're going to shift people from here to here and they going to do more productive work. Where's my hard dollars? Did you go through that or is it so blatantly where the potential >>is? Talk about the business case. It's not always a blatantly obvious, right? So when I'm building a business case, there's a number of things as an operations leader that I have to focus on, right? I own budget for my organization. So at the end of the day, I own making sure that I hit my budget targets for the business businesses. Always you're finding those, um, based on our opportunities in the marketplace, so forth. But I also have a lot of people that work for me. So part of the bigger area for me, and it's an area that I've spent a lot of time with consultants like shot to you on, is how do I transform my workforce? How do I bring them with me? How do I make it less scary for my employees? Because the first reaction, human reaction to employees who have been doing a function for so long, we heard it today about the cognitive changes, opening up your brain path, so on and so forth. >>Um, and the first reaction to them is going to be that shortest path to, Oh my God, I'm gonna lose my job and I have to then become a salesperson in addition to operations leader in addition to a budget manager to say, no, this is an opportunity for you to do something more interesting. You have that 20 years of experience in the industry. I want to use that knowledge in a different way. I want to open up some doors and career paths for you. Uh, so for me it's interesting and trying to break a sedentary workforce into a more dynamic workforce to initiate them into the digital age. When I write a business case, mostly what I'm looking at is very some of the it classical things. How do I save those dollars? What's my payback? What's my return on investment? More and more in the automation space, we're thinking much more customer first employee experience first. >>How do I provide the customer a better experience? How do I provide an employee a better experience? So the business cases have become a little bit more challenging, uh, cause you're also have offering some soft benefits, which is our employee experiences is a really big deal. Our customer's experience is going to be how we differentiate ourselves, uh, could be in the difference between the next sale and not making the next sale. So those have to get factored into the business cases and it becomes a bit, uh, art and science on how to quantify that. So there's a lot to unpack there. I want to start with kind of the, the, the sentiment of, Hey, I'm gonna lose my job. How did you deal with that, uh, with your team? Is it carrot stick combination so they can try it. I think a lot of it is first listening. >>Um, at least my style as a leader is to listen to what my people are saying first and then address it with as many facts as I possibly can. Right. Um, most folks think emotion first. Um, and, and you can end up in an adversarial type of situation there where you really don't want to be in an adversarial situation with your employees. You want your employees to support the change, the transformation that, that shift into a digital space. So for me, I have to listen to a lot first. And depending on who I'm listening to, I'm getting a very different story. I have employees from millennials to baby boomers. So as a result, each one of them were coming from a very different place, a carrot versus stick. Interesting concept because from a carrot perspective, the companies getting the care that the employee may not necessarily see that at first where we're saying, Hey, we want you to do more interesting work. >>But to them, they feel it. It's more of a stick at first. Uh, so it's interesting. Um, in my space it's been a, I've consulted with, with other folks, I've talked to a lot of my peer leaders, um, seeking a lot of advice on how do we navigate this cause we're cutting a new path as leaders. Um, I'm more akin to a baby boomer and a Jenner in, you know, a gen X type of a person. That's who I came up under an industry. So I have to temper my own thinking. Um, so it's interesting because for instance, I looked at my people managers and maybe it's a little bit more stick with my people managers where it's very much of a, gives me ideas. How do we crowdsource that, that information, our employees are going to be the best source of our, of our ideas for automating. >>What do we automate? How do we automate the things that they really disliked doing first? Right? So you're kind of giving them a carrot with, you're giving them a little bit of quick wins. We've heard about that today as well. Um, but then it becomes a matter of what about the individual contributor developer, right? How do I take somebody today who hasn't maybe been retooled from a career perspective in many, many years and give them the ability to say, no, you're not a programmer but you can automate things and UI path gives us some of those tools to do that with the purveyors of RPA would ha would tell you that people actually love it because it's taking away that undifferentiated heavy lifting. Once they get a taste for it and they can do other things, frees up time. Having said that, they may be really good at entering data into a form. >>They may not be good at doing other strategic things, so there's gotta be some kind of retraining exercise to. My question is, are you seeing either specifically at century link or broadly in the industry some kind of notion of gain share? In other words, if you're going to save this much time slash money and your business case, we'll give you back a portion, I don't know, 30% 50% whatever, so that you can retrain people. You can actually advance their careers. So you see you having conversations like that or is it actually where I think we're having conversations akin to that. Not necessarily have that conversation. Um, conversations that I'm having are more of the nature of, you know, chicken and the egg kind of a thing. When it comes automation, you're under budgetary pressures. How do you take out your employee, retool them and train them on how to automate something using UI pads, tool suite, um, and then re-invest that same knowledge, right? >>Because if you automate something, you free up somebody else you can train to do more automation. Um, a lot of our, our employees who are first adopters, if you will, the willing hands that are going up. Some are millennials, some are many other generations. Um, but it's, it's been there very interesting because it's very powerful for those who have learned the tools and is very powerful and a peer to peer solicitation of, look what I can do for you. We've been complaining about this manual step for 20 years. How come it, we're still having to do it. So it the becomes a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, right? You get those who evangelize it based on learning the new technology and then they train into their peers. Um, retooling employees is something that you brought up or at least that's what a little bit of what I heard. >>Um, you know, many areas, Hey, I've been doing data entry for a long time. What else am I good at? And a lot of that just becomes creativity. Who else? Who do you interact with the most? Who are the employees or who are the customers, who are the sales organizations, et cetera, where you end up, they know your name, they're going to call you because you know that answer. Well guess what? You're a knowledge base for them. And that often becomes where I ended up retooling and re shifting employees. They see new opportunities that they never seen before. One of the most interesting things I think I hear constantly is I never expected to be in sales, uh, from an operations type of person. They always think of a salesman as that salesperson kind of personality. And they don't see themselves in it, but they never think of themselves as sales support, which is that, that's what they end up becoming. Um, and they always were to begin with. They just never thought of themselves that way. So we're moving a lot more of my customers or my employees, if you will, closer to the customer than they ever saw in themselves. And RPA is enabling that. So that's, that's kind of a, a knowledge revolution. It's a self actualization change. It becomes a skill add that they never thought they had. Um, they're all interesting concepts, but they all, you know, I'm learning something new every day as a leader. >>Well, and you're bringing up so many interesting points that, that what this revolution actually means for people's careers. I mean, the really the re rebooting of work and really changing how we spend our time at the office and changing what we do during the course of our day is shadier. I mean he, he, Chris has been talking about how people are now closer to the customer and therefore the human, the soft skills are becoming increasingly important. So how are you helping companies think through those challenges to make sure that their people do have the appropriate skills? And as Chris said, it can be the difference of not making a sale versus making a sale. >>So it is about, uh, it's about learning. Learning can make, uh, the people transform as well as the company's transformed. So while we are adopting technology, we needed to ensure that how do we ensure the learning platforms are brought in to ensure the, that is part of their curriculum. Like what we have done in four school or colleges in the organization, make it live enterprise for the every organization to move into a live organization. It is always about learning. So what emphasis does is about, it's about the knowledge, what we carry. So we have created platforms like legs for internal to our organization. And wingspan is an AR is an external customized version for all of our external customers that is plugging into all the transformation programs. What we do to ensure that the learning is Paladin for the transformation, why you are path, you look it up. >>There's um, um, we have looked at, looked at others and I think in my career you're always going to have multiple partners. Um, so when it comes to the UI path, it's one of those UI path invested very early. You know, they wanted to be that partner. I think today part of the message we heard, uh, from some of the UI path executives were that, uh, we want to be humble. Um, and therefore it's not always about, Hey, how do I win this dollar so much as I, how do I educate on technology? Um, and how do we help you transform and pull you forward to a certain degree. Um, so I think UI path has a lot of, um, very human possibilities and human traits and how it, it educates its clients. >>Judge generally just a question as a, as a buyer and a practitioner, if you have a choice between best of breed, um, and you know, a suite, right? Let's say, I don't know if you're an ERP customer, but some ERP vendor all of a sudden bolts, you know, RPA on to their solution. How do you decide the convenience of Oh yeah. All in one versus the best of breed? >>Um, I think it depends on the size of your firm because throughout my career I've seen many different answers to the same question. Um, shadier is probably had a relationship with me for a number of years, uh, in various forms if you will, as a consultant and a partner. Um, what he often hears from me is both I'm gonna do both. Um, because some way I'm going to learn something from each of those engagements. So more often than not, the answer is you do a lot. You do both. You don't just pick a single partner. Um, the smaller you are, the more likely you are to do a single partner. The larger you are, the less likely you are to do a single partner. Diversity is a good thing. And so was competition >>where it's still live by Chris shot. Thank you so much for coming on the Kiva. Great conversation. That's going. Sorry. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Volante. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of UI path forward.