(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering UIPath FORWARD America's 2019. Brought to you by UIPath. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of UIPath FORWARD, here in Sin City, Las Vegas Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside Dave Velante. We have two guests for this segment. We have Kurt Carlson, Associate Dean for faculty and academic affairs of the Mason School of Business at the college of William and Mary. Thanks for coming on the show. >> Thanks you for having me. >> Rebecca: And we have Tom Clancy, the SVP of learning at UIPath, thank you so much. >> Great to be here. >> You're a Cube alum, so thank you for coming back. >> I've been here a few times. >> A Cube veteran, I should say. >> I think 10 years or so >> So we're talking today about a robot for every student, this was just announced in August, William and Mary is the first university in the US to provide automation software to every undergraduate student, thanks to a four million dollar investment from UIPath. Tell us a little bit about this program, Kurt, how it works and what you're trying to do here. >> Yeah, so first of all, to Tom and the people at UIPath for making this happen. This is a bold and incredible initiative, one that, frankly, when we had it initially, we thought that maybe we could get a robot for every student, we weren't sure that other people would be willing to go along with that, but UIPath was, they see the vision, and so it was really a meeting of the minds on a common purpose. The idea was pretty simple, this technology is transforming the world in a way that students, we think it's going to transform the way that students actually are students. But it's certainly transforming the world that our students are going into. And so, we want to give them exposure to it. We wanted to try and be the first business school on the planet that actually prepares students not just for the way RPA's being used today, but the way that it's going to be used when AI starts to take hold, when it becomes the gateway to AI three, four, five years down the road. So, we talked to UIPath, they thought it was a really good idea, we went all in on it. Yeah, all of our starting juniors in the business school have robots right now, they've all been trained through the academy live session putting together a course, it's very exciting. >> So, Tom, you've always been an innovator when it comes to learning, here's my question. How come we didn't learn this school stuff when we were in college? We learned Fortran. >> I don't know, I only learned BASIC, so I can't speak to that. >> So you know last year we talked about how you're scaling, learning some of the open, sort of philosophy that you have. So, give us the update on how you're pushing learning FORWARD, and why the College of William and Mary. >> Okay, so if you buy into a bot for every worker, or a bot for every desktop, that's a lot of bots, that's a lot of desktops, right? There's studies out there from the research companies that say that there's somewhere a hundred and 200 million people that need to be educated on RPA, RPA/AI. So if you buy into that, which we do, then traditional learning isn't going to do it. We're going to miss the boat. So we have a multi-pronged approach. The first thing is to democratize RPA learning. Two and a half years ago we made, we created RPA Academy, UIPath academy, and 100% free. After two and a half years, we have 451,000 people go through the academy courses, that's huge. But we think there's a lot more. Over the next next three years we think we'll train at least two million people. But the challenge still is, if we train five million people, there's still a hundred million that need to know about it. So, the second biggest thing we're doing is, we went out, last year at this event, we announced our academic alliance program. We had one university, now we're approaching 400 universities. But what we're doing with William and Mary is a lot more than just providing a course, and I'll let Kurt talk to that, but there is so much more that we could be doing to educate our students, our youth, upscaling, rescaling the existing workforce. When you break down that hundred million people, they come from a lot of different backgrounds, and we're trying to touch as many people as we can. >> You guys are really out ahead of the curve. Oftentimes, I mean, you saw this a little bit with data science, saw some colleges leaning in. So what lead you guys to the decision to actually invest and prioritize RPA? >> Yeah, I think what we're trying to accomplish requires incredibly smart students. It requires students that can sit at the interface between what we would think of today as sort of an RPA developer and a decision maker who would be stroking the check or signing the contract. There's got to be somebody that sits in that space that understands enough about how you would actually execute this implementation. What's the right buildout of that, how we're going to build a portfolio of bots, how we're going to prioritize the different processes that we might automate, How we're going to balance some processes that might have a nice ROI but be harder for the individual who's process is being automated to absorb against processes that the individual would love to have automated, but might not have as great of an ROI. How do you balance that whole set of things? So what we've done is worked with UIPath to bring together the ideas of automation with the ideas of being a strategic thinker in process automation, and we're designing a course in collaboration to help train our students to hit the ground running. >> Rebecca, it's really visionary, isn't it? I mean it's not just about using the tooling, it's about how to apply the tooling to create competitive advantage or change lives. >> I used to cover business education for the Financial Times, so I completely agree that this really is a game changer for the students to have this kind of access to technology and ability to explore this leading edge of software robotics and really be, and graduate from college. This isn't even graduate school, they're graduating from college already having these skills. So tell me, Kurt, what are they doing? What is the course, what does it look like, how are they using this in the classroom? >> The course is called a one credit. It's 14 hours but it actually turns into about 42 when you add this stuff that's going on outside of class. They're learning about these large conceptual issues around how do you prioritize which processes, what's the process you should go through to make sure that you measure in advance of implementation so that you can do an audit on the backend to have proof points on the effectiveness, so you got to measure in advance, creating a portfolio of perspective processes and then scoring them, how do you do that, so they're learning all that sort of conceptual straight business slash strategy implementation stuff, so that's on the first half, and to keep them engaged with this software, we're giving them small skills, we're calling them skillets. Small skills in every one of those sessions that add up to having a fully automated and programmed robot. Then they're going to go into a series of days where every one of those days they're going to learn a big skill. And the big skills are ones that are going to be useful for the students in their lives as people, useful in lives as students, and useful in their lives as entrepreneurs using RPA to create new ventures, or in the organizations they go to. We've worked with UIPath and with our alums who've implement this, folks at EY, Booz. In fact, we went up to DC, we had a three hour meeting with these folks. So what are the skills students need to learn, and they told us, and so we build these three big classes, each around each one of those skills so that our students are going to come out with the ability to be business translators, not necessarily the hardcore programmers. We're not going to prevent them from doing that, but to be these business translators that sit between the programming and the decision makers. >> That's huge because, you know, like, my son's a senior in college. He and his friends, they all either want to work for Amazon, Google, an investment bank, or one of the big SIs, right? So this is a perfect role for a consultant to go in and advise. Tom, I wanted to ask you, and you and I have known each other for a long time, but one of the reasons I think you were successful at your previous company is because you weren't just focused on a narrow vendor, how to make metrics work, for instance. I presume you're taking the same philosophy here. It transcends UIPath and is really more about, you know, the category if you will, the potential. Can you talk about that? >> So we listen to our customers and now we listen to the universities too, and they're going to help guide us to where we need to go. Most companies in tech, you work with marketing, and you work with engineering, and you build product courses. And you also try to sell those courses, because it's a really good PNL when you sell training. We don't think that's right for the industry, for UIPath, or for our customers, or our partners. So when we democratize learning, everything else falls into place. So, as we go forward, we have a bunch of ideas. You know, as we get more into AI, you'll see more AI type courses. We'll team with 400 universities now, by end of next year, we'll probably have a thousand universities signed up. And so, there's a lot of subject matter expertise, and if they come to us with ideas, you mentioned a 14 hour course, we have a four hour course, and we also have a 60 hour course. So we want to be as flexible as possible, because different universities want to apply it in different ways. So we also heard about Lean Six Sigma. I mean, sorry, Lean RPA, so we might build a course on Lean RPA, because that's really important. Solution architect is one of the biggest gaps in the industry right now so, so we look to where these gaps are, we listen to everybody, and then we just execute. >> Well, it's interesting you said Six Sigma, we have Jean Younger coming on, she's a Six Sigma expert. I don't know if she's a black belt, but she's pretty sure. She talks about how to apply RPA to make business processes in Six Sigma, but you would never spend the time and money, I mean, if it's an airplane engine, for sure, but now, so that's kind of transformative. Kurt, I'm curious as to how you, as a college, market this. You know, you're very competitive industry, if you will. So how do you see this attracting students and separating you guys from the pack? >> Well, it's a two separate things. How do we actively try to take advantage of this, and what effects is it having already? Enrollments to the business school, well. Students at William and Mary get admitted to William and Mary, and they're fantastic, amazingly good undergraduate students. The best students at William and Mary come to the Raymond A. Mason school of business. If you take our undergraduate GPA of students in the business school, they're top five in the country. So what we've seen since we've announced this is that our applications to the business school are up. I don't know that it's a one to one correlation. >> Tom: I think it is. >> I believe it's a strong predictor, right? And part because it's such an easy sell. And so, when we talk to those alums and friends in DC and said, tell us why this is, why our students should do this, they said, well, if for no other reason, we are hiring students that have these skills into data science lines in the mid 90s. When I said that to my students, they fell out of their chairs. So there's incredible opportunity here for them, that's the easy way to market it internally, it aligns with things that are happening at William and Mary, trying to be innovative, nimble, and entrepreneurial. We've been talking about being innovative, nimble, and entrepreneurial for longer than we've been doing it, we believe we're getting there, we believe this is the type of activity that would fit for that. As far as promoting it, we're telling everybody that will listen that this is interesting, and people are listening. You know, the standard sort of marketing strategy that goes around, and we are coordinating with UIPath on that. But internally, this sells actually pretty easy. This is something people are looking for, we're going to make it ready for the world the way that it's going to be now and in the future. >> Well, I imagine the big consultants are hovering as well. You know, you mentioned DC, Booz Allen, Hughes and DC, and Excensior, EY, Deloitte, PWC, IBM itself. I mean it's just, they all want the best and the brightest, and now you're going to have this skill set that is a sweet spot for their businesses. >> Kurt: That's the plan. >> I'm just thinking back to remembering who these people are, these are 19 and 20 year olds. They've never experienced the dreariness of work and the drudge tasks that we all know well. So, what are you, in terms of this whole business translator idea, that they're going to be the be people that sit in the middle and can sort of be these people who can speak both languages. What kind of skills are you trying to impart to them, because it is a whole different skill set. >> Our vision is that in two or three years, the nodes and the processes that are currently... That currently make implementing RPA complex and require significant programmer skills, these places where, right now, there's a human making a relatively mundane decision, but it's sill a model. There's a decision node there. We think AI is going to take over that. The simple, AI's going to simply put models into those decision nodes. We also think a lot of the programming that takes place, you're seeing it now with studio X, a lot of the programming is going to go away. And what that's going to do is it's going to elevate the business process from the mundane to the more human intelligent, what would currently be considered human intelligence process. When we get into that space, people skills are going to be really important, prioritizing is going to be really important, identifying organizations that are ripe for this, at this moment in time, which processes to automate. Those are the kind of skills we're trying to get students to develop, and what we're selling it partly as, this is going to make you ready of the world the way we think it's going to be, a bit of a guess. But we're also saying if you don't want to automate mundane processes, then come with us on a different magic carpet ride. And that magic carpet ride is, imagine all the processes that don't exist right now because nobody would ever conceive of them because they couldn't possibly be sustained, or they would be too mundane. Now think about those processes through a business lens, so take a business student and think about all the potential when you look at it that way. So this course that we're building has that, everything in the course is wrapped in that, and so, at the end of the course, they're going to be doing a project, and the project is to bring a new process to the world that doesn't currently exist. Don't program it, don't worry about whether or not you have a team that could actually execute it. Just conceive of a process that doesn't currently exist and let's imagine, with the potential of RPA, how we would make that happen. That's going to be, we think we're going to be able to bring a lot of students along through that innovative lens even though they are 19 and 20, because 19 and 20 year olds love innovation, while they've never submitted a procurement report. >> Exactly! >> A innovation presentation. >> We'll need to do a Cube follow up with that. >> What Kurt just said, is the reason why, Tom, I think this market is being way undercounted. I think it's hard for the IDCs and the forces, because they look back they say how big was it last year, how fast are these companies growing, but, to your point, there's so much unknown processes that could be attacked. The TAM on this could be enormous. >> We agree. >> Yeah, I know you do, but I think that it's a point worth mentioning because it touches so many different parts of every organization that I think people perhaps don't realize the impact that it could have. >> You know, when listening to you, Kurt, when you look at these young kids, at least compared to me, all the coding and setting up a robot, that's the easy part, they'll pick that up right away. It's really the thought process that goes into identifying new opportunities, and that's, I think, you're challenging them to do that. But learning how to do robots, I think, is going to be pretty easy for this new digital generation. >> Piece of cake. Tom and Kurt, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE with a really fascinating conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, you guys >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Velante, stay tuned for more of theCUBEs live coverage of UIPath FORWARD. (upbeat music)