>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UI path. >>We're back. You're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. This has been a great event. UI path forward three, the third North American event, and this is day two. We're just wrapping up. Brandon nod is here as a senior vice president with UI path and Kadar. Danny, who's the vice president of global accounts at UI path. So you guys got a store? >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. Britta, what's the story you guys, one was a customer and customer that is to first customer. Um, so three years ago, something like that when you iPod, we just started out with a global expansion. We'd got our seed funding round in 2015 we started expanding and building our global sales team when he's 16. I joined in the UK, responsible globally for the banking financial services industry. And one, one fine day, I get a communication, an email from a prospective customer that, Hey, I want to talk to you about your platform. And it was a Brandon over here. Brandon, do you want to tell it? Tell them what a, how you found out about your iPad. >>Yeah, you bet. I was interviewing a couple of partners and looking at the different platforms and found that yeah, you, I've had really had what I was looking for, which is the openness of the platform, the ability to do training online and start my journey kind of on my terms. And so when I reached out to it was very much how can you help me get started? I've already made the business case internally, I'm ready to go. What year was this? 2016 and it's interesting, >>Daniel Donnez last night and his keynote said, you know, we really appreciate you guys who joined us in 2016 cause you know, the product didn't have all the features that we wanted. You know, it wasn't fully baked. This was my interpretation. That's right. But, but I, but I was saying earlier in the cube, the right move, that UI path made as you bet on simplicity. And he said, okay, let's get to market fast. Yeah. Simple. And that. And you said on your terms, what do you mean by that? >>So one of the things that I love about UI path is early on there was a principle of openness. Let people download the software. Don't be afraid, don't tease people, and then say, come to our site and we'll give you a call. Right? They said, come to our site, download, try it yourself. Here's what there's free training. And as UI path has grown, that principle is, is still very much precedent. You can go online right now and download, take free courses online. So what I wanted as a customer at that time was the ability to see it for myself. I wanted to make it real before I've made the investment. That was our experience. When Bobby Patrick first started, I said, you iPad today? He goes, go to the download a >>copy of our software, start building automations. I'm like, huh, yeah to it. And then go to automation anywhere, which by the way is the sponsor of ours. We love, we're an arms dealer. We love everybody. You know, go to blue prism, get their software too. So we tried, but we couldn't, you know, it was called the reseller will do pro what's your need? We just want to play with it, you know, so, so that's what you mean by bad on your terms and so yeah, that, that's worked pretty well for you guys, hasn't it? has and uh, you know, when we started off, right, community has always been a pillar within, within UI paths, you know, kind of strategy to to make sure that RPA is available to everyone. We call it democratization of, of automation and hence, you know, availability of the community edition. >>Uh, we go to the universities, students are able to download and use it for free and now we've tied up with certain universities to expand the education system with uh, getting, um, you know, when graduates pass out they come out ready knowing you want found RPA. Yeah, we had a, the college of William and Mary on and Tom Clancy, they were talking about that. Now I did my little review of the predictions in the morning. Guys predictions. He said that the students that come out of college, you're gonna force RPA on their companies. Most college kids don't know what RPA is. I got hit, I said it's gonna take a couple of cycles here, but, but so, okay, so run. Why did you join UI path? How did that all, you know, what drove you to say, okay, this is it. I'm going to have instead of applying the technology to make my existing company better, I'm gonna. >>So I ran operations for a mortgage company and we had already automated everything that we could using the classic tools and we are winning awards. And it was, you know, people were looking at the work that we are doing and they were impressed, but I still couldn't get past a certain point in my automations. So bringing in UI path allowed me to continue that journey to keep automating. And after a while, the more that I was working with you, I path weird, uh, I was a guest of, of them at conferences, speaking with guy Kirkwood and any number of folks. I looked at the culture of the company and thought this is a place that I want to be. And I looked at the roadmap and where the product was going and what I was able to do with it as a customer. And I thought, I want to help other people do this. I want to help them on their journey, get to this next level of automation that they're currently there. They're being kept at. >>Yeah, well a lot of people hop on the bandwagon. I saw folks from AWS, you know, have joined a gentlemen I know from Google, let's join them in these early leading companies and correct. So how are you guys spending your time these days? Special >> as I, my, my title suggests, you know, I'm responsible for the global account portfolio and I'm spending most of my time with our customers trying to help them on their automation journey. So these are some of the largest >>global customers, uh, big insurance companies, uh, automobile industry, uh, you know, Titans in that industry and they've all been our customers now for the last two years, in three years with a plan to kind of change the way they, uh, they run their business right. And RPA and you wipe out basically the automation platform that we have now with our new release come out as well, is giving these customers and end Duan a transformation engine. So it is our responsibility now to make them, uh, you know, more knowledgeable on how to apply that technology and get them successful with their plans for a, you know, transformation and automation of their business processes. Right. >>How are you spending your time, bro? I'm in product and in my focus is attended automation. So classically people are implementing unintended automation. This, this was the first big wave of RPA was really robots just working on a server somewhere. You don't, you don't interact with them. They just do their thing 24 hours a day. Now there's a huge push into attended automation, which is having a, a robot on your computer and the two of you working together, collaborating in real time throughout your day. So we're looking to save time to take out the the wasteful and small processes that nobody wants to do as well as creating an entirely new opportunities for value based on what the two of you can do together. How are you guys thinking about the way in which a user or worker interacts with that? That bot? Yeah, I think it's, it's more like a dance and and less like a task manager, right? >>So you might think in classic automation, you know, click a button, go do this thing, click a button, go do that thing that the automation is happening when you want it to. The way that our platform has written, the robot can listen to what you're doing. It can monitor for when you click on a specific button or for when you move files to a folder. So think about it less like a conscious effort to, to guide the robot and more as a collaborative effort where, where the robot is seeing what you're doing and taking action to help you and do things on your behalf and then letting you know when they're done. So it's the paradigm is changing for work and when you have a robot on your computer, it's going to open up a new way of doing your, your daily content. And the enabler there is what machine learning machine intelligence. >>It's a combination of things. So think about machine learning and AI as just one tool that that robot has to use both CR as well. You know, we did a demo earlier this week where we took receipts, moved him to a folder, the robot sees that you've moved receipts into a folder, can bounce it off and end point that and break apart those receipts using OCR, load that all into Excel and help you with your expense report. So think about things like this, you, things you need to do. You do what you would normally do, put receipts in a folder and the robot takes care of the rest. What, what things can, um, humans do that machines can't? Yeah, the ability to make on the fly judgment for complex cognitive tasks is very, very hard to replicate in, in AI right now because typically models are built on a set of specific information. >>We build our, our receipt and our invoice model off a ton of receipts and invoices. Therefore the robot can make quick work of those receipts way, way faster than we can, but present an unstructured problem or an open ended problem in an AI model might really struggle. Whereas a human can instantly make a judgment on that. So we want computers to do that. Those, those compiled activities and with the AI models that make sense for what they're doing and want humans to be thinking at higher levels, at creative levels, higher cognitive, cognitive and decision making levels. So this is as Daniel and others had mentioned, elevating the humanity when you think about it, >>but you definitely see some of your customers are certainly talking about this. This is robots taking action systems of agencies. Some people call it on behalf of the human and having to essentially make certain decisions. But you're saying those decisions are well understood and safe essentially. >>Absolutely. When you deploy a robot you don't, you don't just kind of hope for the best. Right? You have a very specific use case and you've coated the robot for that use case. I love it when when people say, you know, our compliance team is worried about the robots going wild or you know, we can have it gone the system, but he can't do anything that you haven't consciously told it to do, haven't written it to do. So it turns out it's actually even more compliant because it can throw off logs and a paper trail is as complex as you want it. So if I were a compliance officer, I would say get robots in immediately because I want more visibility into what's being done. >>So where do you see your customers going? So our customers say few. As Brandon was saying earlier, you know, customers started with this unattended robots first because everyone was trying to get an efficiency in their back office. We got a Y and that that is actually the core foundation for what comes next, which is the attended automation, the robot for every person vision that we have, we have fought for the, for the entire global customer community of ours. I mean the number of use cases where a human agent would with a robot. Now with having a robot on every desktop, I mean simple things like expense reports, time sheets or even simple things like downloading emails and reports on a daily basis. You don't need to engage with multiple systems. As a, as a human agent, you can get the robot to go ahead and do that for you. And as Brandon was saying, you know, you have much better control with the robot doing it. Then a human being who has a mind who could potentially, you know, cause certain security or compliance related issues because a human agent could go easily off track, do something different. Where as the robot has a certain set of parameters within which they work. >>Well guys, we've got to wrap, but so I'm going to ask each of you, give us the bumper sticker on UI path forward three a. When the trucks are pulling away from the Bellagio, what's the bumper sticker? Safe running. Try and keep up. >>Yeah, go, go big. Go big and go big now. >>Yeah, go bigger or go home. It's kind of seems to be the theme here. Well guys, thanks very much for. Congratulations on all the success you guys got a lot of work to do still for sure and best of luck. Thank you very much. Very welcome and thank you for watching everybody. It's a wrap from a UI path forward. You watching the cube, go to siliconangle.com check out all the news. We've got a bunch of in depth coverage of this show, RPA in general. We have five shows this week, so check that out and of course go to the cube.net to see what will be next week. Another big week. October has become the new may. So thank you for watching everyone. This is Dave Volante for the cube. Thanks guys. Great job today. We'll see you next time.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. Everybody. You're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of UI path forward UI pass, third North America event and we're excited to be here. This is our second year here. Daniel DNAs is here. He's the CEO of the rocket ship known as UI path. Welcome back to the cube. Great to see you again. >>Thank you. Thank you for inviting me here. >>Oh, so it's our, it's our pleasure and it's been great to be able to document this and we've been saying all week that we see the ecosystem developing the customer base, that UI path very reminiscent of some of the very successful companies that we've seen. But we've never seen a company sort of growing this fast. I have to start with you. Our big idea person kind of go big or go home mentality. But did you really see it getting here so fast? >>Well we, we kind of see it a year ago going here. I can not say that. I've seen it five years, five years ago, I couldn't see, I couldn't see me even in front of a hundred people speaking not to talk about 3000 like can close today, yesterday. >>Well, it's gotta make you very happy. You set it up on stages. When you see your saw the software that you developed, your, you're a developer, you're a coder affecting people's lives. The way some of the examples that you gave, it was a little tear in your eye maybe out of saying, but how to tug at your heart a little bit. That's got to be as a developer and of course now CEO, that's gotta be very gratifying to see your technology have an impact on people's lives. >>Okay, well I can tell you it is a really gratifying, in the end it's, um, we, we, we've built technology, you know, to, first of all, we are proud as engineers to build the best technology that we can, but it's, uh, it makes us a lot more, it's a lot more touching seeing that you can help humans to become better, to become healthier, to even save lives, to help refugees. It's a, it's an amazing feeling. It's when >>I talk to people about robotic process automation, most people don't, don't really are connected and they'll say things to me like, really is there that much room for automation? We've been in the computer industry for 50 years, we've been automating everything back office, front office. How much more room is there? And you put forth the premise last night in your keynote essentially said technology is actually created inefficiencies that >>despite all the automation that we've had now we have all these processes that can be improved. So necessarily the first time I had heard that put forward. I guess my question is, so technology got us into this problem, can technology get us out? >> Yeah. Um, first of all, I'm a software engineer, so I didn't believe there are so many inefficiencies in within the business world. I fought the law. Gender prizes should have been automated completely. Everything should run as move, as ineffectually. But in reality, the alert is far away from this. And as I said yesterday, email and a pro plus activity tools, especially spreadsheets and line of business application has changed completely. How we perform or in front office and back office. But uh, it's, it's a lot of skit work because it's, it's work created when people build business processes, they work with different systems and they always touch the system by looking at the user interface of the, by looking at human readable interfaces of these systems and uh, and when you go and automate them it's kind of difficult to translate into a BIS. >>So where are the at the on the field. So our approach is just through replicates Q months using the same tools, the same thing. Knowledge is that thought for media to business people building and the it's the only way that can work at scale. Of course you can take one particular process, build an it project flow developers with them be successful but you cannot do it. The large scale that an enterprise has, it's the only technology that can work at the large scale. Like I believe in the transportation industry, self-loving cars are the only solution to the industry or not. It's not feasible to say I will build much larger freeways. No, you put self driving cars or self driving trucks driving in the night on the freeway and this is how you will free daily, you know, everything else for the norm of agriculture. Same sort of concept. >>Like there's nothing, I can't make more land. Right? But as you grow your company, um, you guys growing so fast, are you able to use automations to support that growth? I'm sure there are some inefficiencies in it because there's a pace of growth. Helped me understand that this is, this is our story. So way we've built initial finance processes, finance, HR, procurement processes in the very manual slides using people and then scaling up when each a point where we've become a big consumers of all our own technology. It's not, it's not about what we use the most modern systems in the world. It's not a vote that they are not integrated. It's about all the, all the words build by this business people, all the reports that we are creating or all this stuff required a lot of work. We have automated more than a hundred thousand manual hours within you iPod today. >>A mother company built on the best technology stick, all that. Do you feel, feel like that's part of the reason why you've been able to grow so fast? Maybe faster than other historical examples of software companies? Systems are one thing way we weren't able to grow as fast by couple of reasons. First of all, we went global from day one. We were not the typical Silicon Valley company that says I will win in North America and then I will replicate this model across the world because they lose about three to five years in Muslim America just Lang to perfect the machine at least at least then we just went when globally they want an hour. It helps because we can make a business case easy so we can, we can go into a lot of gentle price, show them how it works and it does not require such a huge investment. >>That list to get started and second is it's evolved our culture. We put the big emphasize in keeping our culture customer focus and we put humility as the core. Then that evolved culture and I, I know it might sounds a bit pretentious to see, we put humility, but it's a humility that gives you a, a great, great framework of how you operate. You can, it makes you listen to people, it makes you able to change your mind. It makes you actually accelerate because people that change their mind or they look to find foster better solution that people that are stuck and they need a lot of data until they make, because they are afraid of losing face in making decision. So it's something that works. So it's uh, it's this, those two things combined gave us this cake. It's very interesting you say that because there's a lot of ways to skin a cat. >>Um, many companies have succeeded with extremely dogmatic approach. I mean, I would argue Microsoft, much of its success was it was built around personal productivity, you know, or bust. Um, yet your philosophy is be more open minded. You're humble. Listen to the customers change fast if necessary. Kind of a different philosophy maybe than some others have used in the past. I believe that our philosophy is, is helping us, I don't know, maybe a Microsoft has change. Yeah, exactly that. Satya. So, so it's uh, it's not, so I think this is, this is built in the fabric of how humans operate. We talk to other humans, we learned their needs and then we address their needs. I think it's arrogance to say, I know your boss, I will do this is what you have to do. Like many more traditional software companies are doing, we were very fortunate to build these products by listening to customers. >>That's, that's luck. You don't have to find product market fit. Listen to customers. Market is big. Bring what they want. Well the funny thing is, you know, we talking about the analysts meeting and I do remember you, you're there the other day. You said that you made a bunch of mistakes early on that you got ahead a build it and they will come a mentality. You've kind of built it and then you had to go out, listen to people and figure out how to apply it. Right. Actually I've been using a lot of parallels to service now. It's kind of right. Fred Luddy did, he built, he built a platform and then the VC said, well what do we use it for? He goes, anything good? He had to go and talk to people into the route. Okay, how do I apply it? But you said, well kind of made some mistakes early on, but you recovered from those mistakes by listening. >>It sounds like the definitely in the bill. Coming from a software engineer background, I, uh, I have, uh, at least I had the tendency to don't give enough credit to sales, to marketing even to the customers it was, we clearly understand the customers in the, so we build technology for the sake of technology. So we were really fortunate to have some MALDI customers. We didn't understand how because I fought that custom was, should all to themselves to test and find the best technology out there and just go there. I was really kind of, I had a lot of blind sports, so on how this world operates, but after I've stopped it to visit customers and understand their pain points and their requests actually realize they are smarter than us in using our own technology because they use it in the real world. So then message that that completely transformed my thinking. So I went back to my engineering team, sunlight, unlike the one guys on this day, I don't want to ever hear, we don't fix bugs and we do features and we do this. When the customers say, you do this, you say, thank you, thank you for showing me the light. I will do this. That's, that makes me create a better broad your feet >>back as a gift. The feedback is a gift. So I want to ask you about the statement you made yesterday in your keynote about we are cloud first and you announced a SAS capability today. I said I signed up, took me seconds, and now I've got to do some work to invite some other people and start doing some automations. But when you were in your apartment in Bucharest or wherever you started the company, why not cloud then? >>Most of our customers are still on prem. So way we have to be where customers are with the clouds first four years ago we wouldn't be here today. Oh. So we started close to the customers way and learn a lot from really large customers that thought a bit more reluctant to go into cloud and now as I think all in all in life is about timing. I think it's the right time timing to benefit the other segments of the market and allow for automation on demand was the infrastructure. Bryce, that people that are still on prem pay are huge. Compare some in some companies only to provision a server would be like 200 K period one time on. Then you have people to maintain them. Offering a many surveys by us in our own cloud looking at the best, you know, we create the best infrastructure, most efficient. We have the best people understanding our technology. We're seeing it. I think it's a great business proposition, but now we were ready to do it. >>Well, plus it sets up potentially new pricing models, you know, consumption based pricing models. You hear a lot of, a lot of row, a lot of bots, uh, are, are sitting idle as a customer. Help just charge me when I'm using violet, thinking of, you know, the serverless and functions. But this is possible only with economy of scale. So the cloud is, you're going to your cloud, you're not going to build it on Azure or AWS or you guys may use, we'll use Bob Lee Clow shows, which is infrastructure. You just have this look Chelios. Yeah. Okay. Um, I'm going ask you about, uh, IPO. Um, what, can you share with us your thoughts? You know, the window seems to be closing a little bit different, right? You know, Uber's and now Slack, you know, not such a successful. And what are your thoughts on IPO? Well, I think that the enterprise software >>companies were actually pretty successful in IPO and this year. And they have one of the, you know, a lot of just multiples that we have. We're seeing. So you cannot compare marketplace companies like who you are or Lyft to enterprise software. So I think for a good enterprise software company, they will always be a place to land a good IPO regardless of timing. Timing is, doesn't work for us. We are still, we are still a young company in many ways. We are 40 years old company. So it will be one of the yellow most earliest IPO. Very, very, very early. We need the bit, we need more at least one year. Like we want do an IPO in 2020, but we've been here the 2021 would be a good year for that. Depends on the climate, but we have met on the client, you have them, you're very well capitalized. Right? It's not like you need to do upsell Kevin the motivation and we still have five would bribe private Gabby. The markets are very frothy so you can still raise a lot of money and very good volume. >>Right. So the motivation for IPO is, is what awareness maybe for the employee. >>Yeah. Exited for the employees. And, uh, you'll just get to a size where you cannot be prideful. And most of our customers are public and they are much more comfortable dealing with the public. >>Yeah, for sure. It's part of your transparency edict, but I mean, well a lot of companies that have raised a ton of dough at the Cloudera for example, waited and waited and waited and then, you know, they go public. It's like, then the public doesn't get to participate in the upside. So I'm sure you're having those conversations thinking about it though. You know, the little guy wants to invest too and you're like, yeah, why not, right? Yeah. So let's go this. It's very exciting times and as you say, it depends on the time and we'll see what happens with the 2020 election who can, who can predict those things. But, so I want to ask you about the Capitol because software is a very capital efficient marketplace, but, but we see companies, you know, you included raising hundreds of millions, sometimes a billion plus dollars. Why such large raises? Where do you see that going? You mentioned engineering, you'd have plenty of money to do engineering. Is it really promotion? We tried to get to escape philosophy. We >>build a big market and we have invested in a mode in order to, if you go fast, well let's take cold car. Okay, the fosters or car go, the more guess it consumes. Right, so you need, if you want to comprise the time, it's costly, but that helps you extend much faster when when large markets and build a large bill, really a large company. In the short time, we could have been much more efficient if we, instead of four years, we would have built this company in 10 years. Many companies, if they would reach our size in 10 years, I will still be happy, but we've done it in four instead of 10 and then it was if you have unit capital to grow fast, >>I think it's the right approach because I do think there's going to be consolidation in this market and I think the company that achieves escape velocity and you are the favorite to do that now, we'll do very, very well. I think the market's much larger than the market forecast suggests. I think the Tam is way, way, way under, and again, we call this on service now as well. We saw this early on at the core. People tell how the core is really not that big, but, but the, but the adjacencies and the potential market is, it's, it's, it's way more than 16 billion or whatever that number is you showed. I think it's, it's, it's, it's 30 40 you know, perhaps even even bigger. >>I think as people realize that this is the really, the only way you can achieve automation on this, a smaller type of processes, but large volume, I think they will. They will go more and more. >>Well then, I know you're super busy and you've got to go. Thanks so much for coming again. Thank you guys for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be right back. Right after this short break. You're watching the cube from UI path forward three right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> We're back, UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas at the Bellagio, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, my name is Dave Vellante. Marie Myers is here, she's the CFO of the rocket-ship known as UiPath. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So, wow. You must be under a lot of pressure to keep the ship moving in a fast direction. But I was just talking to Daniel, he said, you know, when we started the company, we had basic finance systems, kind of like every other startup, but that obviously has changed, so. Well, congratulations, I know you got a lot more work to do but how are you spending your time these days? >> Doing a lot of work, is what I would say. So, as you've kind of seen, that tremendous growth, so huge pressure to just scale the company and ensure that the company has the ability to meet the growth that we're experiencing. So right now I've been really focused on building the operational backbone and actually building a lot of robots for UiPath, actually. That's something I wasn't expecting but came into the role and really help build our own ecosystem around robotics as well. >> I was asking Daniel how much dogfooding, champagne sipping you guys have done and, if it has contributed to the growth and it sounds like quite a bit, actually. >> Absolutely, I'd say we're really hitting the gas pedal right now in terms of building out our own competency and kind of to your point, eating the dog food, drinking the champagne and starting to push the envelope on how we actually use automation and AI to really scale our own business. You asked me where I was spending my time and where I was focused, I literally moved my family to Bucharest for the summer to really focus in on helping to scale the infrastructure. >> So, CFOs usually have a philosophy, a framework, that they like to work with. Obviously you got to stay flexible. How would you describe your philosophy as to how you'd like to manage this company? >> Well clearly, for us we're at an incredible stage of momentum in the market, and the ability for us to continue to build distance in terms of being number one is critical, so in terms of strategy, supporting that number one position, being agile. Able to scale for growth and ultimately do so profitably is certainly the ambition that we have in mind. And that requires turning a lot of different dials, right? And being able to turn them at the right time but at the same time ensure that we've got enough, let's just say, cushion underneath to scale that growth, because the growth is happening very very quickly. >> So CFOs, today's CFO is definitely, I would say more strategic than when I first got into the business, we used to joke that the cheap financial officer. But, I think of CFOs that I really admire, guys like Mike Scarpelli, who was at ServiceNow, now he's at Snowflake. I think he was at Data Domain too, Tom Sweet at Dell, whole different example, they're doing crazy financial engineering. But, much more of a strategic focus. Want to throw gasoline in the fire, and drive growth, but at the same time, thinking about efficiency, so. How have you seen that role evolving and how does that apply to what you guys are doing? >> So I think your comments about the role of the CFO are really right on, I mean, what's perhaps even more interesting, I think, for CFOs that are in software and maybe in a space like we're in is that you ultimately also get involved in being an advocate for your business. In robotics process automation, almost 40% of the first use cases are in finance. So, you're out there supporting the business case with other CFOs who want to understand how does efficiency really, why they should buy from us and what's the business proposition? So you've got to balance the demands of the business with running the business and so, I think that does give you the very unique lens because you understand how this product, to your point, drives operational efficiency. And obviously all CFOs really care, that's right on the list of the top three. >> You know, that's interesting, Marie, because the tech company CIOs are always being pulled in. Because they're early users of some technology. It's not common anyway, that the CFO is one of the lead sales go-to people but it sounds like it is in your case. How much time do you spend in the field? >> I try to balance my time, because you could get pulled very heavily I feel because of the nature of our business into that but I think because robotics process automation has been a key entry point into finance, there's a lot of work for CFOs to do there. So I try to balance my time, but it is, I think, a very important part of our own learning for our company, we get a lot of feedback from our customers. And, even helps me in my role because I get use cases from customers that I apply internally to drive our own efficiency. >> Well, plus, you know, you can see what's happening in the field, you can feel the pain of the sales reps, you can tell which ones are kind of sandbagging, >> You're right, absolutely! >> 'cause they're all sandbaggers! >> You're right about that, so it's been great being at this event, I know a lot of the great reps and so you really understand, you've got a good pulse on what's happening in terms of the business and where the risks are in the quarter. So that's one advantage. >> What're the metrics that you're driving? I mean, obviously the conventional ones, throw those in, but. >> Yeah, I mean obviously productivity, very important for us, we've got a lot of folks we've hired so really understanding what that productivity looks like. The usual cast of characters, AR. Customer acquisition costs, really focused on, what is that first customer costing and then how we're managing our land and expand. What our upsell looks like, so I think the usual cast of characters. >> And then eventually, as all these M and As happen, you'll get cohort sales coming in and the like. So, is everything that you guys sell recognized on a deferred revenue basis? >> No, we're in the midst of converting to 606 right now so we're kind of like subscription one year on prem. So pretty conventional software, red rack. >> Okay, but as you move to the cloud model. >> That gives us a different model, yeah. And we have it, we're just starting that journey. >> It seems like, you see different models. You know, Adobe bit the bullet, Splunk sort of peeled the Band-Aid off very slowly and they both can work. But it seems like a lot of the, I'll call it game, maybe it's the wrong word. But that's what came to mind, is educating the street. On that metric, on that transition. You certainly see it, for instance, in Oracle's case. Putting a lot of emphasis on helping the street understand that transition. That's not your primary focus right now, I'm sure you're spending some time with the analysts, I saw many buzzing around here. >> There was a lot here in the last few days. >> Dave: Yeah, they all want your business! >> (she laughs) They all want your business! I got a lot of texts in the last 48 hours. >> Well, it's an exciting time. And you know, eventually you guys are going to do an IPO and why wouldn't they? Be smart to be here, but what are your thoughts on that? Is that something that you really don't pay attention to right now, are you preparing for that? >> I'd say we're just getting total transparency, we're just moving through 606. So we're digesting that transition first and we're just starting down the whole cloud migration path. So as we start to think that through it's going to be I'd say a priority for 2020. And it's going to be important, I mean, for this business we expect, who's to say what the uptake rate is as customers move to the cloud? But I suspect it's going to be fairly aggressive in our business just because of the nature of bots and how customers think about bots. >> Yeah, so, Daniel said on the previous segment, he said, look, IPO's in our future, probably not 2020, we need at least a year to get our act together. So we're looking at 2021 but it depends on what the climate is, et cetera. My question is, and I've talked to, I see you orange here, Pure Storage is a high flyer in the infrastructure business, they're all orange, so they paint the town orange. >> Seems orange is very popular right now. >> It's a great color, recognizable. But I was talking about, they're all about growth. Not about optimizing profit right now and that's the right play because the street's rewarding growth. You guys, clearly, all about growth. >> We've got the growth story buttoned down, yeah. >> Yeah, you've got that down. But you still want to put gas on the fire, right? So, right now you're still optimized for growth. >> Absolutely, you see what's happening here, right? So, yeah, I think that kind of-- >> And you're well capitalized, so that's not the issue. So the strategy, I presume, is keep growing, get escape velocity, because, the company that gets escape velocity and is the leader in this business, you guys are the leader right now. You're not going to rest, you're going to stay paranoid, I'm sure. But the one that leads is going to make the most money. That always happens. >> Well, extending that leadership role is part of our core strategy, right? Maintaining number one, putting distance. I think you've seen the products that we announced here the last couple of days, adding to the portfolio or giving us incremental TAM so we can grow across the space. I think growing both down the stack and up the stack is critically important for us as we think forward to the future, too, right? We just don't want to be a pure robotics process automation company. We want to look across AI, down the stack into process mining. >> How do you think about your TAM? >> That's a great question. So I've been studying up a little over the last few days preparing for the board meeting tomorrow. I mean, robotics process automation, TAM next year is about two and a half, or two and change in terms of revenue, two billion. I've been looking at it a lot more broadly because I do believe that it is defined today quite narrowly in terms of very traditional RPE. And that started very much in the back office. As we've spread automation and kind of created that platform mentality, the TAM becomes additive. You've got now the process mining TAM which I think we can clearly start to play in that space. And then also the BPMs and now, obviously, AI. So, I was just doing our own back of the envelope in the last few days and you can get, easily, I think now, above that $10 billion mark and it depends on how you start to think about AI as you go forward and that just adds incremental TAM. >> Well, and you throw in services, you're already there. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Probably be there by next year. I think generally, I'll just give you my quick opinion. I think the market's undercounting the TAM potential. And I haven't done a detailed TAM analysis of the, I don't even want to say RPA 'cause that's the core. >> Exactly. >> But I could see this thing expanding dramatically, we talked about cohort sales. Just talking to customers, you're like one to 2% penetrated and there's so many more use cases. As you bring in AI, which, I really think of AI as a horizontal. But if you start applying AI and bringing in automation as an adjacency to you guys, I think that TAM are going to be many many tens of billions beyond what you're thinking. >> That's exactly how I like to think about it, of course, I go back to my IDC friends and try to use some of their benchmarks. But I think they're somewhat conservative. And I think as the market matures and people understand the breadth of the category, I just think that when RPA started it was kind of pigeonholed as a back office opportunity. >> Yeah, I mean, I was at IDC for a long time and we were really crappy at long-term TAM analysis. And you saw it with, Craig LeClair was awesome today. >> Yeah, I love Craig. >> Love him, fantastic. >> Very witty. >> His forecast, however, and same with IDC, we were there, we used to do these linear forecasts and that's not how these markets grow. It's an ogive and a steep S-curve and I think that's my prediction. >> Marie: I couldn't agree more with you. >> We heard predictions this morning, I summarized the predictions and gave my own. And that's one that I see. I'd like to see a longer-term forecast. Maybe we'll work on that. >> Well, we'd love that, I think that's going to be important. I think, part of it's just the maturity of this category. And as folks are starting to understand the breadth of the application, if you think about it, that's why there was so much early work in finance. Now you're starting to see the business spread across the enterprise, right? And I think as it spreads across the enterprise it just adds that incremental TAM and it becomes a gateway to AI. >> I've been using ServiceNow as an example, even though a totally different business, they had a much heavier lift, they started in IT, and went on, so it took longer for adoption. But there's a lot of similarities that I see just in terms of extending beyond just the core of the business, growing the ecosystem, I think is a critical part of that but as far as the customer adoption and the applicability of your technology, I think it's got a lot of legs, so. Like you say, Marie, we'll work on that a little bit. >> I'd love that, thank you. >> Dave: Appreciate you coming on, it was great to have you and wonderful to meet you. >> Enjoyed it. You too, thank you very much. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep right there, buddy, we'll be back to wrap up UiPath Forward III right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019, brought to you by UiPath. >> Hi everybody welcome back to Las Vegas, we're at the Bellagio at UiPath Forward III, day two of theCUBE covers. theCUBE is a leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Erik Alexis here is the Vice President of Global Intelligent Process Automation at GE. Eric thanks for coming on. >> Yeah absolutely excited to be here. >> So, you guys have a COE, you're obviously heavily involved in essentially running the COE, is that right? >> Yeah that's my role at GE. I lead our Global Center of Excellence for intelligent process automation. Our journey started with UiPath a while back in 2016. So, it's been an incredible journey so far. >> And I want to get into that. So, before I do, I was struck by the Forrester analyst, Craig LeClair this morning made a statement. I don't know if you're in there, but he said, "Yeah COE, setting up a COE, "maybe that's asking too much." But I talk to a lot of people that have a center of excellence. Maybe it's definitional but what does your COE look like in terms of just it's role, size? >> Yeah it's a great question, so I think in terms of the role that we play more broadly, I mean we provide a lot of the technical expertise, the hands-on development and the operational support for our business units. And so we've really kind of developed that expertise over time, and we use our business units to really drive and identify the opportunities that come in through the COE. So, in terms of the size of the COE, we've got in total number of heads, we've got about 50 primarily technical resources there, that are supporting development as well as ongoing operation. >> Awesome, okay so let's talk about your journey. When did it start? What was the motivation behind it? How did you make the business case, and we'll get into it. >> Yeah so our journey started back in 2016, GE, we used to have a shared services organization that we had a very forward-thinking CEO at the time who wanted to really disrupt the way that we worked. And so RPA was something that was just coming out and kind of getting noticed by a lot of these shared services organizations. And so throughout the year we assessed a couple of technologies obviously landing on UiPath for a number of reasons. I would say in terms of our journey 2017 was kind of our year to prove the technology. We wanted to see if this stuff could really work long term and operate at scale. Given that I'm still here obviously, we proved that was correct and then 2018 was kind of the year of scaling and operationalizing kind of a sustainable model to support our business units across the board from an RPA standpoint. So, really building out a proper structure, building out the governance that goes along with building robots and building a kind of a resource team to continue to support the bots that we were at scale at that point, so maintaining those bots is critically important. And then 2019 has really been the year and I think the theme of this conference in general, a bot for every person I think that's the direction we're moving in 2019. We've kind of perfected the concept of the back office robot and the development of those, and running those at scale. And now we're moving towards a whole new market share when it comes to attended automation and citizen development. >> So, in '16 it was kind of kicking the tires it was almost like R&D. And then '17 was really essentially a proof-of-concept right so still a small team, a two piece kind of team kind of thing right? And then when you talked about scale, helped us understand what's involved in scale, I know it's also another big theme of this conference. What are the challenges of scaling and how did you resolve those? >> Yeah that's a very good question. I think it's a question that has been very common throughout this entire conference. I would say when I think about scaling what I've noticed over the past few years is that, the actual bot development is about 25% of the work that you need to do, right? When it comes to scale there is everything outside of the actual development is the important part. So, how are you funneling opportunities into a pipeline, how are you streamlining the entire process reengineering of fitting an RPA into an existing process, what's governance you have in place to make sure that the code of that development is clean and can be maintained long term? And then more importantly I think that people overlook, people think of scale as being able to develop a lot of bots. I think more importantly what scale is is being able to efficiently maintain a large portfolio of bots, and that's what I've realized this year. We've got now about 300 automations in production and your reputation as an organization is really on how well you maintain those bots, because if your bots are consistently failing, and you're not fixing them quick enough for your functional users to leverage them, then you lose a lot of credibility. So, I think that's been a big learning for us as we reach scale. >> That's interesting I mean I think about scripts, how fragile scripts are and you got a lot of 'em, and they almost always break. And so what is the discipline that allows you to have that quality of bot that is maintainable? Is it a coding discipline? Is it a governance? Is there other automation involved in maintaining those bots? >> No there is and I think the team that's under me, my technical team has done a phenomenal job of setting this up, but we've got some very rigorous standards that we've put in place around. We do have reusable components for example that need to be used on every single robot that goes into production, so that when I look at for example a bots login, that bots login is going to be the same across all my bots. So, every developer who's going to be maintaining that bot knows what it is and how to fix it. I think the standardized logging as well to make sure that we've got robust logging for every single robot is incredibly important because again that's going to be critical when somebody goes to try and fix the bot. >> So you are like an app store, you're enforcing rules like Apple for developers. >> Exactly. >> Okay so let me ask you a question. See now several years in if you had a mulligan, what would you do differently? >> Yeah I think that's another very good question. I think when you first start with this technology, it's unbelievably exciting, because it's something that you can immediately see the difference and the impact it can make, and so you want to try and apply it everywhere to everything, to solve every problem. And I think that's kind of where we got a little ahead of ourselves. We weren't as thoughtful as we should have been when we started taking in the use cases that we were bringing in and while I sit here and tell you that we've got 300 automations in production, I've also decommissioned about 90 automations as well. Because you kind of live and you learn as you go through that process on. This doesn't make sense for RPA. It's not driving the value anymore. It's not driving the right value for the company. >> And is that because the process needs to be reworked before it's automated or there are other factors? >> Yeah I think there's a couple of factors there. I think number one, some bots are intentionally just for short-term use. We look across the portfolio, some bots you design for to operate for two weeks for a massive for example document transition or something like that. So, that's a common reason for decommissioning. I would say secondly you just picked the wrong process. It's not big enough. You think this is perfect for RPA, but it's saving somebody maybe five or 10 minutes a week, which in reality do you really want to put all the effort and to continue to maintain something like that on a back office level? So, I think the size of the processes and the complexity you've got to be thoughtful about as well. >> Thinking about a bot for every worker, what does that actually look like? Is that like you get a laptop and you get a bot? How does that actually manifest itself? >> Yeah I think as I've talked to some of the teams and Daniel as well about this, it's really around I mean imagine opening it up just like any other application on your computer and Excel, you've got that sitting on your desktop and you use that for a number of different things. I think that's kind of how I envision it and everyone when they come into GE, they'll get their laptop and it's part of their kind of package of software that they get. One of them will be UiPath and I think again if GE where I see that as the future. We've got to be thoughtful about how that's rolled out because you want to make sure it's done the right way and you want to make sure that that succeeds and what comes along with that is a lot of education. There's a lot of people that need to be educated on the technology in order to roll that out effectively. >> It's part of the onboarding part, just part of the HR onboarding, and so you open up your laptop and based on your role you'll have a library of bots that are applicable for your job. Is that kind of what you envision? >> Again I think that's kind of the future state and so HR will have a common library that they can pull from and Finance will have a common library that they can pull from. And I think the announcement this weekend of or this week of our StudioX is going to make life significantly easier. So, if you need to kind of edit any of those components or make any custom steps, you can do that with StudioX, but I think having a pre-built set of bots by function would be extremely important. >> And StudioX is the citizen developer right? So, okay now how do you then enforce the edicts of the COE if Dave Vallente's writing automations. >> It's honestly a question that we haven't answered yet and I think that's the piece that we're trying to solve for now, to roll it out more broadly. And I think part of it's going to be training right? Educating the broader group, part of it is giving them access to front office robots and so you do have the code back at the orchestrator so that you can see kind of what's going on and make sure if there are massive changes that need to be made, you can make some of that centrally, so I think figuring out how to centrally maintain and store some of that code is going to be important. >> And the idea of moving beyond this what they call this morning the snowflake into the snowball. So, reusable components is something that I've heard a lot about. That's not trivial yeah right because mapping the right component for the right job is always going to be some kind of unique, not always, but there could be some unique element to put in words. So, what are your thoughts on kind of future? I mean we touched on some of them. It sounds like even though you started early, 2016, it sounds like you still got a long way to go. What's the roadmap look like for you guys? >> Well it's really never-ending because you know you see how quickly the industry is changing and how quickly these automation platforms. I think we're at the point now where these are no longer RPA platforms. They're automation platforms with all of the different features and you look at the broader ecosystem of the technologies being pulled into play. I think it's moving from robotics process automation into intelligent process automation. And that's really our goal and leveraging the ecosystem that the UiPath is built is I think what we want to do more of going forward. >> And the primary measurement of value to you, I'm inferring is time saved from doing non-differentiated tasks, is that really a key metric or are there others that you're looking at, bottom line dollars that you're saving or what? >> I think the way that we measure productivity is really in three major buckets. One is the hours saved so that employees can do other things and I would say that is far and away, the largest bucket that we have. But I think additionally you've got to think about direct cost out. I mean if my finance team comes to me and says, we're thinking about hiring a person to do this why not an RPA? Why can't we use an RPA to do that instead? So, it's not like anyone's losing their job over. It's just figuring out a better way to supplement your existing workforce. Then I would say the third way really is thinking about the compliance element of things. So, and that's often overlooked. You may not save anyone time. You may not save anyone hours or dollars, but what you can do is expand for example in your audit function, expand your testing or sampling of a certain criteria, instead of sampling maybe the top 20 risky units, you can now sample a 100% of a population, which fundamentally changes how you can get comfortable with your financial statements and other elements of the compliance. >> Talking earlier just I asked is sampling dead because of RPA right? >> It really feels like that you know. >> Dave: Eric it's super knowledgeable. I really appreciate you coming on. >> Absolutely. >> Dave: Congratulations on all your success really. >> Thank you very much Dave. I appreciate it. >> You're welcome. All right keep it right there everybody, we will be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>We're back in Las Vegas. UI path forward three. You're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Bobby Patrick is here. He's the COO of UI path. Welcome. Hi Dave. Good to see it to be here. Wow. Great to have the cube here again. Right? Q loves these hot shows like this. I mean this is, you've said Gardner hasn't done the fastest growing software segment you've seen in the data that we share from ETR. You guys are off the chart in terms of net score. It's happening. I hanging onto the rocket ship. How's it feel? Well it's crazy. I mean it's great. You all have seen some of the growth along the way too, right? I mean we had our first forward event less than two years ago and you know about 500 plus plus non UI path and people then go year later. It was Miami USY. >>There's probably a lot. Cube I think was Miami right yet and a, and that was a great event, but that was more in the 13 1400 range. This one's almost 3000 and the most amazing part about it was we had 8% attrition from the registrations. Yeah. That's never seen that we're averaging 18% of 20% for all of our, most of our events worldwide. But 8% the commitment is unbelievable. Even 18 to to 20% is very good. I mean normally you'll see 25 to sometimes as high as 50% yeah. It just underscores the heat. >> Well I think what's also great, other stats that you might find interesting. So over 50% of the attendees here are exec. Our senior executives, like for the first time we actually had S you know, C level executive CHRs and CEOs on stage. Right. You could feel the interest level. Now of course we want RPA developers at events too, right? >>But this show really does speak, I think to the bigger value propositions and the bigger business transformation opportunity from RPA. And I mean, you've come so far where no one knew RPA two years ago to the CIO of Morgan Stanley on stage, just warning raving about it. That's, we've come a long way in two years. >> Well, and I saw a lot of the banks here hovering around, you know, knocking on your door so they, they know they are like heat seeking missiles, you know, so, but the growth has been amazing. I mean I think ARR in 2017 was what, 25 million at this time. Uh, at the end of 17 it was 43 and 43 and 25 and now you're at 12 times higher now 1212 X solve X growth, which is the fastest growing software company. I think in that we know from one to 100 we were, we did that in 21 months and all that. >>And we had banks who now we're not really counting anymore and we're kind of, you know, now focus more on customer expansion. Even though we hit 5,000 customers, which we started the year at 2050 ish. We just crossed 5,000. I mean, so the number of customers is great, but there's no question. This conference is focused on scaling, helping them grow at enterprise wide with, with, with RPA. So I think our focus will be in to shift a bit, you know, to really customer expansion. Uh, and that's a lot of what this announcements, the product announcements were about a lot of what the theme here is about. We had four dozen customers on, on stage, you know, the Uber's of the world, the Amazons of the world. It's all about how they've been scaling. So that's the story now. Well, you know, we do a lot of these events and I go back to some of the, uh, when the cube first started, companies like Tablo, Dallas Blunck great service. >>Now, I mean, these you can, and when you talk to customers, first of all, it's easy to get customers to come talk about RPA. Yeah. And they're, they're all saying the same thing. I mean, Jeanne younger said she's never been more excited in her career from security benefit. But the thing is, Bobby, it's, I feel like they're, they're really just getting started. Yeah. I mean most of the use cases that you see are again, automating mundane task. We had one which was the American fidelity, which is a really bringing in AI. Right. But they're really just getting started. It's like one to 3% penetration. So what are your thoughts on that to kind of land and expand, if you will? I think, you know, look, last year we announced our vision of a robot for every person. At that point we had SNBC on stage and they were the one behind it. >>And they are an amazing story. Now we have a dozen or so that are onstage talking about a robot for every person like st and others. And so, but that, that, that's a pretty, pretty, pretty bold vision I think. Look, I think it's important to look at it both ways. Um, there's huge gold and applying RPA to solve real problems. There's a big opportunity, enterprise wide, no question. We've got that. But I look New York Foundling was on stage yesterday. We have New York Foundling is a 150 year old associate. Our charity in New York focused on child welfare, started by three fishers of charity. They focused on infants. And anyway, it's an amazing firm. Just the passion that New York family had on stage with Daniel yesterday was amazing. But what they flew here because for once they found a technology that actually makes a huge difference for them and what in their mission. >>So their first RPA operation was they have 850 clinicians every week. They spend four hours a week moving their contact, uh, a new contact data associate with child child issues from system to system to spreadsheet and paper to system, right? They use RPA and they now say for a 200,000 hours a year. But more importantly, those clinicians spend those four hours every week with children not moving. So I'm still taking, I think Daniel had a bit of a tear in his eye, hearing them talk about it on stage, but I'm still taken by, by the, by the sheer massive opportunity for RPA in, in a particular to solve some really amazing things. Now on a mass scale, a company can drive, you know, 10, 15, 20% productivity by every employee having a robot. Yes, that's true on a mass scale. They can completely transform their business, your transform customer experience, transform the workplace on a mass scale. >>And that, that is, that's a sea level GFC level goal and that's a big deal. But I love the stories that are very real. Um, and, and I think those are important to still do plug some great tech for good story. Look, tech gives, you know, the whole Facebook stuff and the fake news got beat up and it had Benny come out recently say, Hey, it's, it's not just about increasing the value to shareholders, you know, it's about tech for good and doing other things affecting lifestyle's life changing. And Michael Dell is another one. Now I've, I've, I've kind of said tongue in cheek, you know, show me the CEO misses is four quarters in a row and see if that holds up. But nonetheless, you love to see successful companies giving back. It seems to be, it's part of your, well look I've been part of hardware companies and I met you all through a few of them and others they have good noble causes but it was hard to really connect the dots. >>Yes there CPS underneath a number of these things. But I think judging by the emotional connection that these customers have on stage, right and these are the Walmarts and Uber's and others in the world judging by the employee and job satisfaction that they talk about the benefits there. I just, I my career, I have not seen that kind of real direct impact from you know, from B2B software for example on the lives of people both everyday at work but also just solving the solving, you know, help accelerate human achievement. Right. And so many amazing ways. We had the CEO of the U N I T shared services group on stage yesterday and they have a real challenge with, you know, with the growth of refugees worldwide and he would express them and they can't hit keep up. They don't have the funding, which is, you know, with everybody and, and Trump and others trying to hold back money. >>But they had this massive charter for of good, the only way they get there is through digital. The new CEO, the new head of the U N is a technology engineer. He came in and said, the way we solve this is with templates, with technology. And they decided, they said on stage yesterday that RPA and RPA has the path to AI and the greater, the greater new technologies and that's how they're going to do it. And it's just a, it's a really, it's, I think it's, it feels really great. You know, it's funny too, one of the things we've been talking about this week is people might be somewhat surprised that there's so much head room left for automation because the boy, 50 years of tech, Kevin, we automated everything. That's the other, but, and Daniel put forth the premise last night, it actually, technology is created more process problems or inefficiencies. >>So it's almost like tech has created this new problem. Can tech get us out of the problem? Well, essentially you think about all the applications we use in our lives, right? Um, you know, although people do have, you know, a Salesforce stack and sometimes in this SAP, the reality is they have a mix of a bunch of systems and then we add Slack to it and we add other tools and we add all the tools alone, have some great value. But from a process perspective of how we work everyday, right? How a business user might work at a call center, they have to interact then. And the reality is they're often interacting with old systems too because moving them is not easy, right? So now you've got old systems, new systems and, and really the only way to do that is to put a layer on top of the systems of engagement and the systems of record, right? >>A layer on top that's easy to actually build an application that goes between all of these different, these different applications, outlook, Excel, legacy systems and salesforce.com and so on and so on and, and build an app that solves a real problem, have it have outcomes quickly. And this is why, Dave, we unveiled the vision here that we believe that automation is the application. And when you begin to think about I could solve a problem now without requiring a bunch of it engineers who already are maxed out, right? Uh, I can solve a problem that can directly impact the businesses or directly impact customers. And I can do that on top of these old technologies by just dragging and dropping and using a designer tool like studio or studio X in a business user can do that. That's, that's a game changer. I think what's amazing is when you go to talk to a CIO who says, I've been automating for 20 years, you know, take up the ROI. >>Once they realize this is different, the light bulb goes off. We call it the automation first mindset. A light bulb goes off and you realize, okay, this is a very different whole different way of creating value for, for an organization. I think about how people weigh the way that people work today. You're constantly context switching. You're in different systems. Like you said, Slack, you're getting texts and you want to be responsive. You want to be real time. I know Jeff Frick who was the GM of the cube has got two giant screens right on his desk. I myself, I always have 1520 tabs open if I go, Oh you got so many tabs on my, yeah. Cause I'm constantly context switching, pulling things out of email, going back and forth and so and so. I'm starting to grok this notion of the automation is the app. >>At first I thought, okay, it's the killer app, but it's not about stitching things together with through API APIs. It's really about bringing an automation perspective across the organization. We heard it from Pepsi yesterday. Yeah, right. Sort of the fabric, the automation fabric throughout the organization. Now that's aspirational for most companies today, but that really is the vision. Well, I think you had Layla from Coca-Cola also on, right. And her V their vision there and they actually took the CDO role of the CIO and put them together. And they're realizing now that that transformation is driven by this new way of thinking. Yeah, I think, you know, look, we introduced a whole set of new brand new products and capabilities around scaling around helping build these applications quicker. I, I think, you know, fast forward one year from now, the, you know, the vision we outlined will be very obvious the way people interact with, you know, via UI path to build applications, assault come, the speed to the operate will be transformational and, and so, you know, and you see this conference hear me walk around. >>I mean you saw last year in the year before you see the year before, but it's, it's a whole, the speed at which we're evolving here, I think it's unprecedented. And so I'll talk a little bit about the market for has Crigler killer was awesome this morning. He really knows his stuff now. Last year I saw some data from him and said the market by 2020 4 billion, and I said, no way. It's going to be much larger than that. Gonna be 10 billion by 2020 I did Dave Volante fork, Becca napkin by old IDC day forecast. Now what he, what he showed today is data. It actually was 10 billion by 2020 because he was including services, the services, which is what I was including in my number as well, but the of it, which was so good for him now, but the only thing is he had this kind of linear growth and that's not how these rocket ship Marcus grow. >>They're more like an old guy for an S curve. You're going to get some steep part now, so I'd love to see like a longer term forecast because that it feels like that's how this is going to evolve. Right now it's like you've seated the base and you can just feel the momentum building and then I would expect you're going to see massive steep sort of exponential growth. Steeper. There may be, you know, nonlinear because that's how these markets go >> to come from the expansion potential, right? And none of our customers are more than 1% audit automated from an RPA perspective. So that shows you the massive opportunity. But back to the market site, data size, Craig and I and the other analysts, we talk often about this. I think the Tam views are very low and you'll look at our market share, let's just get some real data out there, right? >>Our market share in 2017 was 5% let's use Craig's linear data for now. You know, our market share this year is over 20% our market share applying, and I don't want to give the exact numbers as you don't provide guidance anymore, is substantially we're substantially gaining share now. I believe that's the reality of the market. I think because we know blue prisms numbers, we go four times faster than the every quarter automation. The world won't share their numbers. But you know, I can make some guesses, but either way I think, you know, I think we're gaining share on them significantly. I think, you know, Craig's not gonna want us to be 50% of the market two years, he's just not. And so he's going to have to figure out how to identify how to think. That brought more broadly about, about that market trend. He talked about it on stage today about how does he calculate the AI impact and the other pieces now the process mining now that now that we are integrating process mining into RPA, right? >>It's strategic component of that. How does that also involve the market? So I think you have both the expansion and the plot product portfolio, which drives it. And then you have the fact that customers are going to add more automations at faster pace and more robots and that's where the expansion really kicks in. And we often say, you know, look as a, as a, as a, as a company that, you know, one day we'll be public company, our ARR numbers. Very important. We do openly transparently share that. But you know, the other big metric will be, you know, dollar based net expansion rate that shows really how customers are expanding. I think that, I know it, our numbers, we haven't shared it yet. I know all the SAS companies, the top 10 I can tell you, you know we're higher than all of them. >>The market projections are low. And I think he knows it well. >> Speaking of Tam, and when we, I saw this with, with service now, now service now the core was it right? So the, the ROI was not as obvious with, with, with you guys, you're touching business process. And so, so in David Flory are way, way back, did an analysis of service and now he said, wow, the Tam is way being way under counted by everybody. That wall street analyst Gardner, it feels like the same here because there are so many adjacencies and just talk to the customers and you're seeing that the Tam could be enormous, much bigger than the whatever 16 billion a Daniel show, the other Danielson tangles, the guy's balls. He said, Oh that's 16 billion. That's you. I pass this data. And you know, we laugh, but I'm, I'm like listening. Say I wonder if he's serious cause this guy thinks big. >>I mean, who would've thought that he'd be at this point by now? And you're just getting started? Well, I think, you know, one thing I think is, you know, we're, we're, you know, we were a little bit kind of over a little less humble when we talked about things like valuation over the last few years. We were trying to show this market's real, you know, we want to now focus more on outcomes and things get a little less from around those numbers. And I think that shows the evolution of a company's maturity, um, that we, I think we're going through right now. Uh, you know, the outcomes of, you know, Walmart on stage saying, you know, their first robot that was, this was, this was two years ago, delivered 360,000 hours of capacity for them in, in, in, in, in HR, right? That, you know, I think those, that's where we're gonna be focused because the reality is if we can deliver these big outcomes and continue them and we can go company-wide deliver on the robot for every, every, every, every person, then you know, the numbers follow along with it. >>Well we saw some M and a this week as well, which again leads me to the larger Tam cause we had PD on, um, with Rudy and you can start to see how, okay now we're going to actually move into that vision that the guy from PepsiCo laid out this, this fabric of this automation fabric across the organization. So M and a is, is a part of that as well. That starts to open up new Tam. Opportunity does. And I think, you know, a process mind is a great example of a market that is pretty well known in Europe, not so much in the U S um, and there are really only a few players in that, in that market today. Look, we're going to do what we did in RPA. We're going to do the same thing. You're process mining. We're going to just say anything we're doing in it, not as democratization, you'll our strategy will be to go mass market with these technologies, make it very easy for accessibility for every single person in the case of process mining, every business analyst to be able to mind their processes for them and, and ultimately that flows through to drive faster implementations and then faster, faster outcomes. >>I think our approach, again, our approach to the business users, our approach to democratization, um, you know it's very different than our competitors. A lot of these low code companies, I won't name a number cause I don't remember our partners here at our conference. They're IT-focused their services heavy and, and you know, their growth rates I'll be at okay are 30% year over year in this market. That shouldn't be the case at all. I mean we're a 200 plus a year. We are still and we've got big numbers and we have a whole different approach to the market. I don't think people have figured it out yet, Dave. Exactly, exactly. The strategy behind which is, which is when you have business users, subject matter experts and citizen developers that can access our technology and build automations quickly and deliver value proof for their company. And you do that in mass scale. >>Right. And then you will now allow with our apps for your end users, I get a call center to engage with a robot as part of their daily operation that none of the other it vendors who are all kind of conventional thinking and that's not, our models are very different, which I think shows in our numbers and and, and the growth rates. Yeah. Well you bet on simplicity early on. In fact, when you join you iPad, you challenged me so you have some of your Wiki bond analysts go out. I remember head download our stuff and then try to download the competitors and they'll tell us, you know how easy it as well we were able to download UI path. We, we built some simple automations. We couldn't get ahold of the other other, other companies products we tried. We were told we'll go to the reseller or how much did you have to spend and okay so you bet on simplicity, which was interesting because Daniel last night kind of admitted, look, he tracked the audience. >>He said thank you for taking a chance on us because frankly a couple of years ago this wasn't fully baked right and and so, so I want to talk about last, the last topic is sort of one of the things Craig talked about was consolidation and I've been saying that all week and said this, this market is going to consolidate. You guys are a leader now you've got to get escape velocity cause the leader makes a lot of money and becomes, gets big. The number two does. Okay, number three man, everybody else and the big guys are starting to jump in as well. You saw SAP, you know, makes an announcement and you guys are specialists and so your thoughts on hitting escape velocity, I wouldn't say you're quite there yet. I want to see more on the ecosystem. There's maybe, who knows, maybe there's an IPO coming. I've predicted that there is, but your thoughts on achieving escape velocity and some of the metrics around there, whether it's customer adoption penetration, what are your thoughts? >>Yeah, I mean we definitely don't have a timetable on an IPO, but we have investors, public investors and VCs that at some point are going to want, this is the reality of how, of how it works. Right. Um, you know, I think the, uh, you know, I think the numbers to focus right now are on around, you know, customer outcomes. I think the ecosystem is a good one. Right? You know, we have, I'd say the biggest ecosystem for us to date has been the SAP ecosystem. When we look at our advisory board members, for others, that's really where, where the action is. Supply chain management, ERP, you know, certainly CRM and others, we don't have a view that, so our competitors have, but we have chosen not to take money from our, from ecosystem companies because we don't, our customers here are building processes, all the automation across ecosystems. >>Right? So you know, we don't want to go bet on say just one like Salesforce or Workday. We want to help them across all the ecosystem now. So I think it's a little bit of a different strategy there. Look, I think the interesting thing is the SAP is the world. They bought a small company in France called contexture. They're trying to do this themselves. Microsoft, Microsoft didn't in Mark Benioff and Salesforce are asked on every earnings call now what are you doing for RPA? So they've got pressure. So maybe they invest in one of our competitors or maybe they, you'll take flow in Microsoft and expanded. I think we can't move fast enough because you know, I don't know if Microsoft has, I mean they're a great sponsor by the way. So I don't want to only be careful we swept with what I say. But you know, strategically speaking, these larger companies operate in 18 months, 12 1824 months kind of planning cycles. >>If he did that, he will never keep up with us. There's no one at any of our traditional large enterprise software companies that ever would have bet that we would come out and say that the best way to build applications right to solve problems will be through RPA. Either there'll be a layer on top of all their technologies that makes it easier than ever for business users to build applications and solve problems, that's going to scare them to death. Why? Because you don't have to move all your legacy systems anymore. Yes, you've got tons of databases, but guess what? Don't worry about it. Leave him alone. Stop spending money on ridiculous upgrades right now. Just build a new layer and I'm telling you I there. As they figured this out, they're going to keep looking back and say, Oh my God, why didn't we know? >>Why did we know there's it looked I hopefully we could all partner. We're going to try to go down that route, but there's something much bigger going on here and they haven't figured it out. Well, the SAP data is very interesting to me that I'm starting to connect the dots. I just did a piece on my breaking analysis and SAP, they thank you. They, they've acquired 31 companies over the last nine years, right? And they've not bit the bullet on integration the way Oracle had to with fusion. Right? And so as a result, there's this, they say throw everything into HANA. It's a memory that's not going to work from an integration standpoint, right? Automation is actually a way to connect, you know, the glue across all those disparate systems, right? And so that makes a lot of sense that you're having success inside SAP and there's no reason that can't continue. >>Why there's, you know, there's a number of major kind of trends we've outlined here. One of, uh, we call human in the loop. And you know, today, you know, when each, when an unattended robot could actually stop a process and instead of sending the exception to a, an it person who monitoring, say, orchestrator actually go to an inbox, a task and box of that business user in a call center or wherever, and that robot can go do something else because it's so, so efficient and productive. But once that human has to solve that problem, right, that robot or a robot will take that back on and keep going. This human and robot interaction, it doesn't exist today and we know we're rolling that out in our UI path apps. I think you know that that's kind of mind blowing and then when you add a, I can't go too far into our roadmap and strategy or when you added the app programming layer and you add data science, that's a little bit of a hint into where we're going because we're open and transparent. >>Our data science connection, it's, it's this platform here, this kind of, I'd like to still call it all RPA. I think that that's a good thing, but the reality is this platform does Tam. What it can do is nothing like it was a year ago and it won't be like where it is today. A year from now you've got the tiger by the tail, Bobby, you got work to do, but congratulations on all the success. It's really been great to be able to document this and cover it, so thanks for coming on the cube. Thank you. All right. Thank you for watching everybody back with our next guest. Right after this short break, you're watching the cube live from UI path forward three from Bellagio in Vegas right back.

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. This is day two of UiPath Forward III, the third North American conference that UiPath-- The rocket ship that is UiPath. Clemmie Malley is here. She's the Enterprise RPA Center of Excellence Lead at NextEra Energy. Welcome. Great to have you. And Mariesa Coughanour, who is the Managing Principal of Intelligent Automation and Technology at Cognizant. Nice to see you guys. >> Nice seeing you. >> Nice to see you. >> Thanks for coming on. How's the show going for you? >> It's been great so far. >> Yes. >> It's been awesome. >> Have you been to multiple... >> This is my third. >> Yep. >> Really? Okay, great. How does this compare? >> It has changed significantly in three years, so. It was very small in New York in 2017 and even last year grew, but now it's a two-year event taking over. >> Yeah, last year Miami was-- >> I don't know. >> It was nice. >> Definitely smaller than this, but it was happening. Kind of hip vibe. We're here in Vegas, everybody loves to be in Vegas. CUBE comes to Vegas a lot. So tell me more about your role at NextEra Energy. But let's start with the company. You guys are multi billion, many, many, tens of billions, probably close to $20 billion energy firm. Really dynamic industry. >> Yeah, so NextEra Energy is actually an awesome company, right? So we're the world's largest in clean renewable energy. So with wind and solar, really, and we also have Florida Power and Light, which is one of the child companies to NextEra as a parent, which is headquartered out of Florida. So it's usually the regulated side of power in the state of Florida. >> We know those guys. We've actually done some work with Florida Power and Light. Cool people down there. And we heard, one of the keynotes today, Craig LeClaire, was saying, "Yeah, the Center of Excellence, "that's actually maybe asking too much." But there are a lot of folks here that are sort of involved in a COE and that's kind of your role. But I was surprised to hear him say that. I don't know if you were in the keynote this morning, but was it a challenge to get a Center of Excellence? What is that all about? >> So I think there's a little bit of caution around doing it initially. People are very aggressive. And we actually learned from this story. So when we started, it was more about showing value, building as many automations as possible. We didn't really care about having a COE. The COE just happened to form. >> Okay. >> Because we found out we needed some level of governance and control around what we were doing. But now that I look back on it, it's really instrumental to making sure we have the success. So whether you do a hybrid development to automation, which you can have citizen development, or you're fully centralized, I think having the strong COE to have that core governance model and control and process is important. >> Mariesa, so your title is not, there's not RPA in your title, right? RPA is too narrow, right? >> Yeah. >> In your business you're trying to help transform companies, it's all about automation. But maybe explain a little bit about your practice and your role. >> Sure, so Cognizant's been on the automation journey now for three years. We started back in 2014 and right out the gate it was all about intelligent automation, just not RPA. Because we knew to be able to do end-to-end solutions you would need multiple technologies to really get the job done and get the outcomes they wanted. So we sit now, over 2,500 folks at our practice, going out, working cross-industry, cross-regions to be able to work with people like Clemmie to put in their program. And we've even added some stuff recently. A lot of it actually inspired by NextEra. And we have an advisory team now. And our whole job is to go in and help people unstuck their programs, for lack of a better way to say it. Help them think about, how do you put that foundation? Get a little bit stronger and actually enable scale, and putting in all this technology to get outcomes? Versus just focusing on just the pure play RPA, which a lot of people struggle to gain the benefits from. >> So Clemmie, what leads you to the decision to bring in an outside firm like Cognizant? What's that discussion like internally? >> So, I'll just give you a little bit of backstory, because I think that's interesting, as well. When we started playing with RPA in late 2016, early 2017, we knew that we wanted to do a lot of things in-house, but in order to have a flex model and really develop automations across the company, we needed to have a partner. And we wanted them to focus more on delivery, so developing, and then partner with us to give us some best practices, things that we could do better. When we founded the COE we knew what we wanted to do. So we actually had two other partners before we went with Cognizant, and that was a huge challenge for us. We found we were reworking a lot of the code that they gave us. They weren't there to be our partners. They wanted to come and actually do the work for us, instead of enabling us to be successful. And we actually said, "We don't want a partner." And then Cognizant came in and they actually were like, "Let's give you somebody." So we wanted somebody around delivery, because we said, "Okay, now that we centralize, "we have a good foundation, a good model, "we're going to need to focus on scale. "So how do we do that? "We need a flex model." So Cognizant came in and they said, "Well, we're going to offer you a delivery lead "to help focus on making sure "you get the automations out the door." Well, Mariesa actually showed up, which was one of the best hidden surprises that we received. And she really just came in, learned the company, learned our culture, and was able to say, "Okay, here's some guidance. "What can you instill? "What can you bring?" Tracking, and start capturing the outcomes that she's mentioned. And I know that was a little bit more, but it's been quite a journey. >> No, it's really good, back up. So Mariesa, I'm hearing from Clemmie that you were willing to teach these guys how to fish, as opposed to just perpetual, hourly, daily rate billing. >> Yep. And that's really what our belief is. We can go in, and yes, we can augment, from resourcing perspective, help them deliver, develop, support everything, which we do. And we work with Clemmie and others to do that. But what's really important to get to scale was how do we teach them how to go do this? Because if you're going to really embed this type of automation culture and mindset, you have to teach people how to do it. It's not about just leaning on me. I needed to help Clemmie. I need to help her team, and also their leadership and their employees. On how do you identify opportunities, and how then do you make these things actually work and run? >> So you really understand the organization. Clemmie was saying you learned the culture. >> Yeah. >> So you're not just a salesperson going in and hanging out in theCUBE. So you're kind of an extension, really, of the staff. So, either of you, if you can explain to me sort of, where RPA fits into this broader vision. That would really be helpful. >> Sure, so maybe I can kick a little bit off from what I'm seeing from clients like Clemmie, and also other customers. So what you'll find is RPA tends to be like this gateway. It's the stepping stone to all things automation. Because folks in the business, they really understand it. It's rule-based, right? It's a game of Simon Says, in some ways, when you first get this going. And then after that, it's enabling the other technology and looking at, "Look, if I want to go end-to-end, "what do I need to get the job done? "What do I need around data intake? "How do I have the right framework "to pick the right OCR tool, "or put analytics on, "or machine learning?" Because there's so much out there today and you need to have the stuff that's right-fit to come in. And so it's really about looking at what's that company strategy? And then looking at this as a tool set. And how to use these tools to go and get the job done. And that's what we were doing a lot with Clemmie and team when we sat down. They have a steering committee that's chaired by their CIO, Chief Accounting Officer, and senior leaders from every business unit across their enterprise. >> So you mentioned scaling. >> Yep. >> We heard today in the predictions segment that we're going to move from snowflake to snowball. And so I would think for scaling it's important to identify reusable components. And so how have you, how has that played out for you? And how's the scaling going? >> Yeah, so that's been one really cool component that we've built out in the COE. So I had my team actually vote on a name and we said, "We want to go after reusable components." They decided to call them Microbots. So it's a cool little term that we coined. >> That's cool. >> And our CIO and CAO actually talk about them frequently. "How are our Microbots? "How many do we have? "What are they doing?" So it's pretty catchy. But what it's really enabled us is to build these reusable snippets of code that are specific to how we perform as a company that we can plug and play and reduce our cycle time. So we've actually reduced our cycle time by over 50%. And reusable components is one of the major key components. >> So how do you share those components? Are they available in some kind of internal marketplace? And how do you train people to actually know what to apply where? >> Right. So because we're centralized, it's a little bit easier, right? We have a stored repository, where they're available. We document them-- >> And it's the COE-- Sorry to interrupt. It's the COE's responsibility, and-- >> Exactly. So the COE has it. We're actually working with Cognizant right now to figure out how can we document those further, right? And UiPath. There's a lot of cool tools that were introduced this week. So I think we're definitely going to be leveraging from them. But the ability to really show what they are, make them available, and we're doing all of that internally right now. Probably a little manual. So it'll be great to have that available. >> So Amazon has this cool concept they call working backwards documents. I don't know if you ever heard this. But what they do is they basically write the press release, thinking five years in advance. This is how they started AWS, they actually wrote. This is what we want, and then they work backwards from there. So my question is around engineering outcomes. Can you engineer outcomes, and is that how you were thinking about this? Or is it just too many unknown parts of the process that you can't predict? >> So I think one of the things that we did was we did think about, "What do we want to achieve with this?" So one of the big programs that Clemmie and the team have is also around accelerate. And their key initiatives to drive, whether it's improve customer experience, more efficiencies of certain processes across the company. And so we looked at that first, and said, "Okay, how do we enable that?" That's a top strategy driven by their CEO. And even when we prioritize all the work, we actually build a model for them. So that it's objective. So if any opportunities that come in align to those key outcomes that the company's striving for, they can prioritize first to be worked on. I actually also think this is where this is all going. Everyone focuses today on these automation COEs and automation teams, but what you will see, and this is happening at NextEra, and all the places we're starting to see this scale, is you end up with this outcomes management office. This is a core nucleus of a team that is automation, there's IT at the table, there's this lean quality mindset at the table, and they're actually looking at opportunities and saying, "All right, this one's yours. "This one's yours and then I'll pick up from you." And it's driving, then, the right outcomes for the organization versus just saying, "I have a hammer, I'm going to go find a nail," which sometimes happens. >> Right, oh, for sure. And it may be a fine nail to hit, but it might not be the most strategic-- >> Exactly. >> Or the most valuable. So what are some examples of areas that you're most excited about? Where you've applied automation and have given a business outcome that's been successful? >> Yeah, so we are an energy company. And we've had a lot of really awesome brainstorming sessions that we've held with UiPath and Cognizant. And a couple of key ones that have come out of it, really around storm season is big for us in the state of Florida. And making sure that our critical infrastructure is available. So our nursing homes, our hospitals, and so on. So we've actually built automations that help us to ping and make sure that they're available, so that we can stay proactive, right? There's also a cool use-case around, really, the intelligent automations space. So our linemen in their trucks are saying, "Hey, we spend a lot of time having to log on the computer, "log our tickets, "and then we have to turn our computers off, "drive to the next site, "and we're not able to restore as much power "or resolve issues as quickly as possible." So we said, "How can we enable them?" Speech recognition, where they can talk to it, it can log a ticket for them on their behalf. So it's pretty exciting. >> So that's kind of an interesting example. Where RPA, in and of itself's not going to solve that problem, right, but speech recognition-- >> It's a combination. >> So you got to bring in other technology, so using, what, some NLP capability, or? >> Yeah, so that's one we're currently working on. But yes, you would need some type of cognitive speech recognition, and. >> So you sort of playing around with that in R&D right now? The speech [Mumbles]. >> Yeah. >> Which, as you know, is not perfect, right? >> It is not. >> Talk to us. We know about it all. Because we transcribe every word that's said on theCUBE. And so, there's some good ones and there's some not so good ones. And they're getting better, though. They're getting better. And that's going to be kind of commodity shortly. You really need just good enough, right? I mean, is that true? Or do you need near perfect? >> So I think there's a happy medium. It depends on what you're trying to do. In this case we're logging tickets, so there might be some variability that you can have. But I will say, so NextEra is really focused on energy, but they're also trying to set themselves apart. So they're trying to focus on innovation, as well. So this is a lot of the areas that they're focusing on: the machine learning, and the processing, and we even have chat bots that they're coining and branding internally, so it's pretty exciting. >> So NextEra is, are you entirely new energy? Is that right? No fossil fuels, or? >> So it's all clean energy, yes. Across the enterprise. >> Awesome. How's that going? Obviously you guys are very successful, but, I mean, what's kind of happening in the energy business today? You're sort of seeing a resurgence in oil, right, but? >> Yeah, so I think we had a really good boom. A couple years ago there were a lot of tax credits that we were able to grow that side of our company. And it enabled us to really pivot to be the clean energy that we are. >> I mean, that's key, right? I mean, United States, we want to lead in clean energy. And I'm not sure we are. I mean, like you say, there was tax incentives and credits that sort of drove a lot of innovation, but am I correct? You see countries outside the U.S., really, maybe leaning in harder. I mean, obviously we got NextEra, but. >> I mean, I think there's definitely competition out there. We're focused on trying to be, maybe not the best, but compete with the best. We're also trying to focus on what's next, right? So be proactive, and grow the company in a multitude of ways. Maybe even outside the energy sector, just to make sure that we can compete. But really what we're focused on is the clean renewables, so. >> That's awesome. I mean, as a country we need this, and it's great to have organizations like yours. Mariesa, I'll give you the final word. Kind of, the landscape of automation. What inning are we in? Baseball analogy. Or how far can this thing go? And what's your sort of, as you pull out the binoculars, maybe not the telescope, but the binoculars, where do you see it going? >> I think there's a lot of runway left. So if you look at a lot of the research out there today, I heard today, 10% was quoted by one person. I heard 13% quoted from HFS around where are we at on scale from an RPA perspective? And that's just RPA. >> Yeah. >> So that means there's still so much out there to still go and look at and be able to make an impact. But if you look, there's also a lot of runway on this intelligent automation. And that's where, I think, we have to shift the focus. You're seeing it now, at these conferences. That you're starting to see people talk about, "How do I integrate? "How do I actually think about connecting the dots "to get bigger and broader outcomes for an organization?" and I think that's where we're going to shift to, is talking about how do we bring together multiple technologies to be able to go and get these end-to-end solutions for customers? And ultimately go, what we were talking a little bit about before, on outcome-focused for an organization. Not talking about just, "How do I go do AI? "How do I go put a bot in?" But, "I want to choose this outcome for my customer. "I need to grow the top line. "I'm getting this feedback." Or even internally, "I want to get more efficient so I can deliver." And focus there, and then what we'll do is find the right tools to be able to move all that forward. >> It's interesting. We're out of time, but you think about, it's somewhat surprising when people hear what you just said, Mariesa, because people think, "Wow, we've had all this technology for 50 years. "Haven't we automated everything?" Well, Daniel Dines, last night, put forth the premise that all this technology's actually creating inefficiencies and somewhat creating the problem. So technology's kind of got us into the problem. We'll see if technology can get us out. All right? Thanks, you guys, for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're welcome. >> Thanks. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this short break. UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Day one of UiPath Forward III, hashtag UiPathForward. Elena Christopher is here. She's the senior vice president at HFS Research, and Elena, I'm going to recruit you to be my co-host here. >> Co-host! >> On this power panel. Jean Youngers here, CUBE alum, VP, a Six Sigma Leader at Security Benefit. Great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Dave: And Amy Chandler, who is the Assistant Vice President and Director of Internal Controls, also from Security Benefit. >> Hello. >> Dave: Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Alright Elena, let's start off with you. You follow this market, you have for some time, you know HFS is sort of anointed as formulating this market place, right? >> Elena: We like to think of ourselves as the voice-- >> You guys were early on. >> The voice of the automation industry. >> So, what are you seeing? I mean, process automation has been around forever, RPA is a hot recent trend, but what are you seeing the last year or two? What are the big trends and rip currents that you see in the market place? >> I mean, I think one of the big trends that's out there, I mean, RPA's come on to the scene. I like how you phrase it Dave, because you refer to it as, rightly so, automation is not new, and so we sort of say the big question out there is, "Is RPA just flavor of the month?" RPA is definitely not, and I come from a firm, we put out a blog earlier this year called "RPA is dead. Long live automation." And that's because, when we look at RPA, and when we think about what it's impact is in the market place, to us the whole point of automation in any form, regardless of whether it's RPA, whether it be good old old school BPM, whatever it may be, it's mission is to drive transformation, and so the HFS perspective, and what all of our research shows and sort of justifies that the goal is, what everyone is striving towards, is to get to that transformation. And so, the reason we put out that piece, the "RPA is dead. Long live integrated automation platforms" is to make the point that if you're not- 'cause what does RPA allow? It affords an opportunity for change to drive transformation so, if you're not actually looking at your processes within your company and taking this opportunity to say, "What can I change, what processes are just bad, "and we've been doing them, I'm not even sure why, "for so long. What can we transform, "what can we optimize, what can we invent?" If you're not taking that opportunity as an enterprise to truly embrace the change and move towards transformation, that's a missed opportunity. So I always say, RPA, you can kind of couch it as one of many technologies, but what RPA has really done for the market place today, it's given business users and business leaders the realization that they can have a role in their own transformation. And that's one of the reasons why it's actually become very important, but a single tool in it's own right will never be the holistic answer. >> So Jean, Elena's bringing up a point about transformation. We, Stew Bennett and I interviewed you last year and we've played those clips a number of times, where you sort of were explaining to us that it didn't make sense before RPA to try to drive Six Sigma into business processes; you couldn't get the return. >> Jean: Right. >> Now you can do it very cheaply. And for Six Sigma or better, is what you use for airplane engines, right? >> Right. >> So, now you're bringing up the business process. So, you're a year in, how's it going? What kind of results are you seeing? Is it meeting your expectations? >> It's been wonderful. It has been the best, it's been probably the most fun I've had in the last fifteen years of work. I have enjoyed, partly because I get to work with this great person here, and she's my COE, and helps stand up the whole RPA solution, but you know, we have gone from finance into investment operations, into operations, you know we've got one sitting right now that we're going to be looking at statements that it's going to be fourteen thousand hours out of both time out as well as staff hours saved, and it's going to touch our customer directly, that they're not going to get a bad statement anymore. And so, you know, it has just been an incredible journey for us over the past year, it really has. >> And so okay Amy, your role is, you're the hardcore practitioner here right? >> Amy: That's right. >> You run the COE. Tell us more about your role, and I'm really interested in how you're bringing it out, RPA to the organization. Is that led by your team, or is it kind of this top-down approach? >> Yeah, this last year, we spent a lot of time trying to educate the lower levels and go from a bottom-up perspective. Pretty much, we implemented our infrastructure, we had a nice solid change management process, we built in logical access, we built in good processes around that so that we'd be able to scale easily over this last year, which kind of sets us up for next year, and everything that we want to accomplish then. >> So Elena, we were talking earlier on theCUBE about you know, RPA, in many ways, I called it cleaning up the crime scene, where stuff is kind of really sort of a mass and huge opportunities to improve. So, my question to you is, it seems like RPA is, in some regards, successful because you can drop it into existing processes, you're not changing things, but in a way, this concerns that, oh well, I'm just kind of paving the cow path. So how much process reinvention should have to occur in order to take advantage of RPA? >> I love that you use that phrase, "paving the cow path." As a New Englander, as you know the roads in Boston are in fact paved cow paths, so we know that can lead to some dodgy roads, and that's part of, and I say it because that's part of what the answer is, because the reinvention, and honestly the optimization has to be part of what the answer is. I said it just a little bit earlier in my comments, you're missing an opportunity with RPA and broader automation if you don't take that step to actually look at your processes and figure out if there's just essentially deadwood that you need to get rid of, things that need to be improved. One of the sort of guidelines, because not all processes are created equal, because you don't want to spend the time and effort, and you guys should chime in on this, you don't want to spend the time and effort to optimize a process if it's not critical to your business, if you're not going to get lift from it, or from some ROI. It's a bit of a continuum, so one of the things that I always encourage enterprises to think about, is this idea of, well what's the, obviously, what business problem are you trying to solve? But as you're going through the process optimization, what kind of user experience do you want out of this? And your users, by the way, you tend to think of your user as, it could be your end customer, it could be your employee, it could even be your partner, but trying to figure out what the experience is that you actually want to have, and then you can actually then look at the process and figure out, do we need to do something different? Do we need to do something completely new to actually optimize that? And then again, line it with what you're trying to solve and what kind of lift you want to get from it. But I'd love to, I mean, hopping over to you guys, you live and breathe this, right? And so I think you have a slightly different opinion than me, but-- >> We do live and breathe it, and every process we look at, we take into consideration. But you've also got to, you have a continuum right? If it's a simple process and we can put it up very quickly, we do, but we've also got ones where one process'll come into us, and a perfect example is our rate changes. >> Amy: Rate changes. >> It came in and there was one process at the very end and they ended up, we did a wing to wing of the whole thing, followed the data all the way back through the process, and I think it hit, what, seven or eight-- >> Yeah. >> Different areas-- >> Areas. >> Of the business, and once we got done with that whole wing to wing to see what we could optimize, it turned into what, sixty? >> Amy: Yeah, sixty plus. Yeah. >> Dave: Sixty plus what? >> Bot processes from one entry. >> Yeah. >> And so, right now, we've got 189 to 200 processes in the back log. And so if you take that, and exponentially increase it, we know that there's probably actually 1,000 to 2,000 more processes, at minimum, that we can hit for the company, and we need to look at those. >> Yeah, and I will say, the wing to wing approach is very important because you're following the data as it's moving along. So if you don't do that, if you only focus on a small little piece of it, you don't what's happening to the data before it gets to you and you don't know what's going to happen to it when it leaves you, so you really do have to take that wing to wing approach. >> So, internal controls is in your title, so talking about scale, it's a big theme here at UiPath, and these days, things scale really fast, and boo-boos can happen really fast. So how are you ensuring, you know that the edicts of the organization are met, whether it's security, compliance, governance? Is that part of your role? >> Yeah, we've actually kept internal audit and internal controls, and in fact, our external auditors, EY. We've kept them all at the table when we've gone through processes, when we've built out our change management process, our logical access. When we built our whole process from beginning to end they kind of sat at the table with us and kind of went over everything to make sure that we were hitting all the controls that we needed to do. >> And actually, I'd like to piggyback on that comment, because just that inclusion of the various roles, that's what we found as an emerging best practice, and in all of our research and all of the qualitative conversations that we have with enterprises and service providers, is because if you do things, I mean it applies on multiple levels, because if you do things in a silo, you'll have siloed impact. If you bring the appropriate constituents to the table, you're going to understand their perspective, but it's going to have broader reach. So it helps alleviate the silos but it also supports the point that you just made Amy, about looking at the processes end to end, because you've got the necessary constituents involved so you know the context, and then, I believe, I mean I think you guys shared this with me, that particularly when audit's involved, you're perhaps helping cultivate an understanding of how even their processes can improve as well. >> Right. >> That is true, and from an overall standpoint with controls, I think a lot of people don't realize that a huge benefit is your controls, cause if you're automating your controls, from an internal standpoint, you're not going to have to test as much, just from an associate process owner paying attention to their process to the internal auditors, they're not going to have to test as much either, and then your external auditors, which that's revenue. I mean, that's savings. >> You lower your auditing bill? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Well we'll see right? >> Yeah. (laughter) >> That's always the hope. >> Don't tell EY. (laughter) So I got to ask you, so you're in a little over a year So I don't know if you golf, but you know a mulligan in golf. If you had a mulligan, a do over, what would you do over? >> The first process we put in place. At least for me, it breaks a lot, and we did it because at the time, we were going through decoupling and trying to just get something up to make sure that what we stood up was going to work and everything, and so we kind of slammed it in, and we pay for that every quarter, and so actually it's on our list to redo. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> That's a really good point. >> So we pay for it in maintenance every quarter, we pay for it, cause it breaks inevitably. >> Yes. >> Okay so what has to happen? You have to reinvent the process, to Elena's? >> Yes, you know, we relied on a process that somebody else had put in place, and in looking at it, it was kind of a up and down and through the hoop and around this way to get what they needed, and you know there's much easier ways to get the data now. And that's what we're doing. In fact, we've built our own, we call it a bot mart. That's where all our data goes, they won't let us touch the other data marts and so forth so they created us a bot mart, and anything that we need data for, they dump in there for us and then that's where our bot can hit, and our bot can hit it at anytime of the day or night when we need the data, and so it's worked out really well for us, and so the bot mart kind of came out of that project of there's got to be a better way. How can we do this better instead of relying on these systems that change and upgrade and then we run the bot and its working one day and the next day, somebody has gone in and tweaked something, and when all's I really need out of that system is data, that's all I need. I don't need, you know, a report. I don't need anything like that, cause the reports change and they get messed up. I just want the raw data, and so that's what we're starting to do. >> How do you ensure that the data is synchronized with your other marts and warehouses, is that a problem? >> Not yet. >> No not yet! (laughter) >> I'm wondering cause I was thinking the exact same question Dave, because on one hand its a nice I think step from a governance standpoint. You have what you need, perhaps IT or whomever your data curators are, they're not going to have a heart attack that you're touching stuff that they don't want you to, but then there is that potential for synchronization issues, cause that whole concept of golden source implies one copy if you will. >> Well, and it is. It's all coming through, we have a central data repository that the data's going to come through, and it's all sitting there, and then it'll move over, and to me, what I most worry about, like I mentioned on the statement once, okay, I get my data in, is it the same data that got used to create those statements? And as we're doing the testing and as we're looking at going live, that's one of our huge test cases. We need to understand what time that data comes in, when will it be into our bot mart, so when can I run those bots? You know, cause they're all going to be unattended on those, so you know, the timing is critical, and so that's why I said not yet. >> Dave: (chuckle) >> But you want to know what, we can build the bot to do that compare of the data for us. >> Haha all right. I love that. >> I saw a stat the other day. I don't know where it was, on Twitter or maybe it was your data, that more money by whatever, 2023 is going to be spent on chat bots than mobile development. >> Jean: I can imagine, yes. >> What are you doing with chat bots? And how are you using them? >> Do you want to answer that one or do you want me to? >> Go ahead. >> Okay so, part of the reason I'm so enthralled by the chat bot or personal assistant or anything, is because the unattended robots that we have, we have problems making sure that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing in prep. We have some in finance, and you know, finance you have a very fine line of what you can automate and what you need the user to still understand what they're doing, right? And so we felt like we had a really good, you know, combination of that, but in some instances, they forget to do things, so things aren't there and we get the phone call the bot broke, right? So part of the thing I'd like to do is I'd like to move that back to an unattended bot, and I'm going to put a chat bot in front of it, and then all's they have to do is type in "run my bot" and it'll come up if they have more than one bot, it'll say "which one do you want to run?" They'll click it and it'll go. Instead of having to go out on their machine, figure out where to go, figure out which button to do, and in the chat I can also send them a little message, "Did you run your other reports? Did you do this?" You know, so, I can use it for the end user, to make that experience for them better. And plus, we've got a lot of IT, we've got a lot of HR stuff that can fold into that, and then RPA all in behind it, kind of the engine on a lot of it. >> I mean you've child proofed the bot. >> Exactly! There you go. There you go. >> Exactly. Exactly. And it also provides a means to be able to answer those commonly asked questions for HR for example. You know, how much vacation time do I have? When can I change my benefits? Examples of those that they answer frequently every day. So that provides another avenue for utilization of the chat bot. >> And if I may, Dave, it supports a concept that I know we were talking about yesterday. At HFS it's our "Triple-A Trifecta", but it's taking the baseline of automation, it intersects with components of AI, and then potentially with analytics. This is starting to touch on some of the opportunities to look at other technologies. You say chat bots. At HFS we don't use the term chat bot, just because we like to focus and emphasize the cognitive capability if you will. But in any case, you guys essentially are saying, well RPA is doing great for what we're using RPA for, but we need a little bit of extension of functionality, so we're layering in the chat bot or cognitive assistant. So it's a nice example of some of that extension of really seeing how it's, I always call it the power of and if you will. Are you going to layer these things in to get what you need out of it? What best solves your business problems? Just a very practical approach I think. >> So Elena, Guy has a session tomorrow on predictions. So we're going to end with some predictions. So our RPA is dead, (chuckle) will it be resuscitated? What's the future of RPA look like? Will it live up to the hype? I mean so many initiatives in our industry haven't. I always criticize enterprise data warehousing and ETL and big data is not living up to the hype. Will RPA? >> It's got a hell of a lot of hype to live up to, I'll tell you that. So, back to some of our causality about why we even said it's dead. As a discrete software category, RPA is clearly not dead at all. But unless it's helping to drive forward with transformation, and even some of the strategies that these fine ladies from Security Benefit are utilizing, which is layering in additional technology. That's part of the path there. But honestly, the biggest challenge that you have to go through to get there and cannot be underestimated, is the change that your organization has to go through. Cause think about it, if we look at the grand big vision of where RPA and broader intelligent automation takes us, the concept of creating a hybrid workforce, right? So what's a hybrid workforce? It's literally our humans complemented by digital workers. So it still sounds like science fiction. To think that any enterprise could try and achieve some version of that and that it would be A, fast or B, not take a lot of change management, is absolutely ludicrous. So it's just a very practical approach to be eyes wide open, recognize that you're solving problems but you have to want to drive change. So to me, and sort of the HFS perspective, continues to be that if RPA is not going to die a terrible death, it needs to really support that vision of transformation. And I mean honestly, we're here at a UiPath event, they had many announcements today that they're doing a couple of things. Supporting core functionality of RPA, literally adding in process discovery and mining capabilities, adding in analytics to help enterprises actually track what your benefit is. >> Jean: Yes. >> These are very practical cases that help RPA live another day. But they're also extending functionality, adding in their whole announcement around AI fabric, adding in some of the cognitive capability to extend the functionality. And so prediction-wise, RPA as we know it three years from now is not going to look like RPA at all. I'm not going to call it AI, but it's going to become a hybrid, and it's honestly going to look a lot like that Triple-A Trifecta I mentioned. >> Well, and UiPath, and I presume other suppliers as well, are expanding their markets. They're reaching, you hear about citizens developers and 100% of the workforce. Obviously you guys are excited and you see a long-run way for RPA. >> Jean: Yeah, we do. >> I'll give you the last word. >> It's been a wonderful journey thus far. After this morning's event where they showed us everything, I saw a sneak peek yesterday during the CAB, and I had a list of things I wanted to talk to her about already when I came out of there. And then she saw more of 'em today, and I've got a pocketful of notes of stuff that we're going to take back and do. I really, truly believe this is the future and we can do so much. Six Sigma has kind of gotten a rebirth. You go in and look at your processes and we can get those to perfect. I mean, that's what's so cool. It is so cool that you can actually tell somebody, I can do something perfect for you. And how many people get to do that? >> It's back to the user experience, right? We can make this wildly functional to meet the need. >> Right, right. And I don't think RPA is the end all solution, I think it's just a great tool to add to your toolkit and utilize moving forward. >> Right. All right we'll have to leave it there. Thanks ladies for coming on, it was a great segment. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We'll be right back from UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas, right after this short break. (technical music)

>>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.

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering you. I pat Forward America's 2019. Brought to you by you, I path Welcome >>back to Las Vegas. Everybody's is Day two of the Cubes coverage of you AI Path forward. Three. This is the third year of North American Conference, and second year the Cube is covered. This Anthony at Batista's here, Cuba. Lami was on last year from from Deloitte. He's a principal there, Anthony. Good to see again. >>Great to be here. Great. >>Yes. So it is. I mean, we've seen the growth of our P A. Generally you AI path, the whole automation were starting to talk about intelligent automation. A. I has its wings, and it's starting toe sore. But give us the update from a year ago. We talked about, you know, accelerating last year. I think it was you had a really good statements around looking, Yes, go on Fast is good, but you wanna accelerate the right things, you know, speeding up for bad processes. Paving the cow path, as I sometimes call it, is really not the way to go. But what's new? >>So I do think there's still some issues around getting programs t to scale and thinking about automation at scale, which has been a major theme here. The conference is still in front of us. People are still figuring out how the climate that curve well, I think is new is way Thought about automation before it was, it was a whore statement was that humans or automation is about going to replace the human on. I really think we've no lights. Always had a campaign about I t a. I that that we kicked off a couple of years ago and said, How do we have automation and humans interact with each other? And I don't just mean attended, attended bots, But how do we actually start to use automation as sort of the glue that hang together a much more rich experience to start to put the components there? So that leads us to the age of with, which is how we how we use technology along with humans, to change their role in there been some great talks. One of my partners earlier they was here with Walmart's, his client on. They talked about how they're redefining the HR processes at Wal Mart on that was That was a really good presentation because they changed the workers work. They didn't replace workers. >>So how was this concept of the age of with how is that different than attended? Boss, can you maybe talk about a possible use case or example? >>So if you think about a call center way, know who's coming in? We used to just look them up and say, Hey, do we know who's calling? Now we can say that we know is calling. Do they have a history with us? Way can use data, and that's another part of the width. Is Dave plus analytics with automation? And we could say, Well, what else do we know about this person to have a history of calling us? They have an open ticket. Have they had some issues or complaints in the past that we can deal with or get in front of on and basically start to put the intelligence in the front end? And that could be unattended, right? That could just be some screen pops around automation way start to introduce natural language. We start to introduce some advanced analytics, and that would be a simple, simple way of enhancing that process. >>So let me double click on that so normally what you would get this year in the other end of the line of the call center. And it's like, Hold on, I'm just reading the notes and you know, they're scanning these notes. It's like an eye test, you know, and they can't. They can't ever get to see. It's a faster for you to just explain. Let me tell you what what I'm imagining is in a different experience where this is happening in near real time, getting pop ups or some other messaging. Is that absolutely experience on how real is this today? >>This Israel. And you know, I I always like to say all them anything. All the main thing is easy if you just take the process, repave the cow path. But it's very real because the natural language components they work up front. Now you can ask some questions you could start to do pre searches on which materials might might help with that type of question. You also can train the process over time. So daily overtime. What's the call satisfaction? Did you actually complete what it was? The call got started about on how quickly you do that so you could train these models and start to use machine learning to actually improve that experience even further. So I think that's left again, back to the whip. It's adding these components. >>I like talking to folks with a consulting background because you know, when you're talking to the vendor community, they get very excited about our why and how you know, lack of disruption to install some software, right? And so that's one of the advantages, I guess, of our P A. As you can pop it into an existing process, good or bad, and get going right away. We've seen this time and time again in the industry. When you have when you have a big force people to change, you know it's slow When you can show Immediate Roo. I start to see these rocket ships at the same time as a consultant, you really want to have a bigger impact on business you don't want to just repeat in automate Bad process is. So how do you work with clients to sort of manage that that insatiable desire for quick R A y, and then the transformative components that. You know, I could maybe defend you from disruption or allow you to be an incumbent disruptor. >>So I think what's interesting is transformation. Use the word we were really good transformation program. So starting to say how that we think of automation first as we do a traditional transformation program is is very near and dear to us now. And instead of saying, Hey, we're gonna bolt the ear piece system and then figure out if we can get some improvement by automating later. We're saying, you know what? Let's sort of double go backwards. Maybe it's a little fashion, but what is this whole process look like? And can we put automation and launch not is a process improvement after lunch? So I think we think of these transformation programmes, But AARP programs for ready and they're doing at automation is now on the tip of the front end of the program rather than afterthought. Reporting used to be >>right, so I mean, >>you guys >>have to be technology agnostic in your business. I mean, we happen to be a U IE path conference, but there, you know, if our p a generally you iPad specifically, it's not a panacea for all problems. I mean, we've talked about a I we talked about other automation process automation capabilities. You've got existing systems. All this stuff has to work together. So so and people always say technology last people process first. You guys lived that, Um So how are you seeing automation evolved in in terms of adoption of the how people are dealing with existing systems and some of the other technologies that you're having to bring together. >>So I think the first thing is, the technology has to work. It has to be bulletproof, resilient. If you're going to put it in these processes and make it make it part of your work life reserving clients or that sort of thing. So first it needs to be bulletproof. That's becoming a given second. I'd like to think that's, well, architected more. Maura's. You bring in a I or other advanced components. You need thio. Be ready to have a changing ecosystem. You know, the best document processing right now might not be the best in six months. So starting to think of your automation solution is that the technical glue and this is allow you to swap out the trade components as you as you refined processes going forward or something new hits the market. So now we're working ecosystem, I think, for the r p a. Vendors that are having great success in a market like you have have they sort of give you that platform, and they give you the off ramps and the on ramps to integrate the other technologies. And like I said, I think that's table stakes in addition, being bulletproof. But the next piece of that is how we get various people involved in the value proposition of creating automation. So various tools and studios, some for the business user that might not be as technical, maybe self designed about it, eh? Process description level on, then maybe a more technical work bench for the technical body builder. So I'm starting to see that in the product suite and somebody announcements here this week. Hallie, we tailor the tools to different users and engage them in that process from one into the other. >>So you mentioned scaling before what the blockers, what's the challenges of scaling? Why's it seemed to be so hard? It's clearly an area of focus here at this event. >>So I think first of all, the technology is is still new to some areas. They're still back and forth with the business or I t led initiative. I think there are some scars and wounds over the last few years of automation where people might have gotten started on the wrong foot. There's even some reduced to learn from. So I think people are looking for the business case. They're getting more comfortable with it. So the job sizes, deal sizes, air getting bigger for the FDA vendors and for us. But I think it's just an evolution. And, like I said, there a lot of stubbed toes early on a nomination. >>What are >>some of the big mistakes that you've seen? People make >>people thinking that it's only a business tool, or only a technology tool or technology to the point that they get started on something that becomes either a real technology problem, a real business problem? Maybe you told the body out in the business, and you attach it to your ear piece system and you cause performance problems or you have security problems on. Then it becomes a real I t problem also seeing the reverse where you know, when I t group will start and say Let's do some automation And they pushed into some departments it might have a fully big business case, might now have good support, and it becomes a technology science project rather than delivery in the real value. >>I was tryingto a week sort of Think about analogies. Analogous ascendance sees in software. I use service now a little bit, but that was kind of a heavy lift. It started an I t. It was very clear. You know, I t You're seeing this massive rapid growth of you ai path fastest growing probably the fastest growing software segment in history and striking to me that we're just now starting to see Cloud come into the play here. If we just you iPad that big announced this week. It's got this new SAS capability, which you would think you would, you know, be born in the cloud. But people have explained why that is. Do you have concerns about the pace of growth and a company like you I path and its competitors their ability to sort of keep up and continue to deliver quality. I mean, a big part of what you guys do is sort of risk management. Well, so how do you manage that risk? >>So I think what you look for if you're going to be in the lion's partner, if you're going the work together and pursue things together first you have to have the basics. It has to be bulletproof. It has to work. When you hit bumps in the road, you have to have escalation pass. That makes sense. And there's growing pains in any firm, or any company that grows grows as quickly as you tap. On the other hand, the question is, your culture is the line. Do you know the fix problems? Do you put your customers first? I think that's what we look like. Look at in the lions, which is how we have a partner with. People have similar DNA about customers first, and you put everything else aside, roll your sleeves up and do the right thing. So that's what we look for in lines like This >>Way. Always talked about the buzzwords of digital transformation, which conferences like this, it is kind of buzzy, but when you talk to customers, they're actually going through digital transformations. And then a couple years ago, they started experimenting. They bought one of everything and they'd run things in parallel with, you know, legacy systems. But now they're starting to place their bets, saying, actually, we've got some use cases that are working. We're gonna double down on the stuff that, you know, we think works. Our p a in some cases fits there. We're gonna unplug some of the legacy stuff and try to deal with our technical debt. But I guess my question is, where do you see our P? A fitting in to that whole digital transformation? Major, I like to think of a matrix where you've got different sets of service is and you've got different industries that are tapping, you know, all data centric that that are tapping these new capabilities and formulating new businesses. News industries. That's how you see this disruption happening. And then the incumbent saying, Hey, we've got assets to we're gonna tap that same matrix and whether it's open source software or cloud or new security paradigms or data and analytics. So where do you see our P? A fitting into that matrix? >>So I think at the glue level. At the architectural level, it can be the orchestrator of the experience of taking a variety technologies integrating them, providing again on ramps and off ramps, doing with a human canoe, looking at screens, analyzing content so it could be the glue that orchestrates those processes orchestrates. Maybe some of the so it was used to be a void between legacy systems and new systems on darky A helps take all that away or level the playing field on. That s So that's has another set of eyes and ears for process integration, our technology integration. And I think that's what it's probably it's best place now. Are there good process tools there? Can we get, you know, community developments? A big discussion right now. I think some people have been successful at it, but it requires a lot of care and feeding and planning to have your community hand the rails or stay between the curbs and do useful things. So I think we're in the beginning of how far can we go with community development? I think the technology is really the glue. >>So community of elven terms of best practice sharing >>and users have developing their own bots. You know, what are the guardrails? Does the process? They're automating matter. Does it introduced a risk? Eyes going to perform. How do you make sure your bots are an evil that people are creating? It's a pretty powerful technology. >>Is their I p in there that you don't want it? We talked about this last year that you don't want to necessarily share with others. So, um, now your role used to have focused specifically in financial service is now you're more horizontal. But how does the light look at this opportunity? Is there is it an automation practice? Is it you cut across all industries with automation, or is it sort of broader than that? >>So my colleague here runs the offering, which is Do we have the people, the training, the tools that delivery centers in the know how to go out and do this kind of work? And we've scaled tremendously in the automation space. The second part is, how do we look to the Jason sees? So we work very closely with our colleagues in a I and ML when we say how we go do the next generation of this out of the gate, How we experiment, how we say, Do you want fries with that as we as we do some of this work. But then we look for the industry in the intersection, and that's where a firm like Lloyd we've got deep, deep industry expertise, way say, well, those intersections where we can go make something happen way come work with our partners are lions you know, partners in making making something happen at an industry specific level, or can we go solve a specific problem? So I think that's what we bring that unique. But we do it both ways. >>It's kind of off off the topic here, but I was talking about that matrix before and again. I'm envisioning technology, horizontal technologies and then vertical industries, and it used to be for decades if you were in it. And if you're in financial service is, you are pretty much stuck in financial service is you had a value chain that was specific to financialservices, and you knew it inside and out, whether it was product development or marketing or sales distribution, whatever it was. That same thing for automobiles on manufacturing, an education on and on and on, and you develop these industry areas of expertise and domain experts with in there. And you guys have built up a global powerhouse doing, But you're seeing a CZ digital. It's cos. Become digital. What's the difference in the business in a digital business? That's how they use data. Data is at the core, and you're now seeing organizations Company's tech company specifically traverse different industries. You're seeing Amazon, you know, in content you're seeing Apple and financialservices other companies getting into health care. >>How is >>that? First of all, you see that and what do you think it was driving that? And how does that affect your business? Or your clients asking youto help you traverse new new industries, get into new industries or defend against others? You know, these big tech companies tryingto with a duel, disruption agenda, trying to take him >>over, and the center of all that you mentioned a little. But the center of that is who the ultimate customers, and we'll experience that they want how they want that experience integrated, so it's not channel by channel anymore. It's which pieces fit together and how I want to buy things and how I want to be serviced. You're getting whole crossed economies around what the consumer wants, unable by technology. I think the other thing that plays into that is you start thinking of the Internet of things and how connected people are. And how do you use monetize and integrate data about particular people and how they want to be served to make that a better experience? I think the consumer ultimately is driving. A lot of that technology is in the billions. >>Yeah, is you think about that picture again. You'd like to use a metaphor of a matrix. I mean, I see our p a is just, you know, one piece of that. You know, there's so many others you mentioned. I o t We talk about a I all the time we talk about Blockchain. It's how you put those different capabilities together and apply them to your business. That really makes the difference. Not that RPG right now feels very tactical, but it's part of a much more strategic agenda. >>Absolutely on again. It could be the glue in an ecosystem of emerging technologies. I do see there's the eyes and ears. The fact that what you get out of the box from regular p. A vendor. Really? Integrate some really, really painful things. Looking at spreadsheets and thinking the guys with green visors column numbers. It's really good at that stuff as, ah, base task. >>Yeah, nothing wrong with tactical and quick. Roo, I So, Anthony, thanks very much for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Great to be here >>to welcome. All right, Keep right, everybody. We're back with our next guest. Day two from you. I path forward in Las Vegas. You watching the cue?

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to UI path forward three. This is UI pass. Third North American conference. We're here at the Bellagio hotel. You are watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we pick the brains of experts. Kevin crone is here. He's a financial services intelligent automation leader at PWC. Kevin, thanks for coming on the cube Bexar Avenue. You're very welcome. So financial services has always been kind of a leading indicator of technology adoption. I presume that automation is, is no difference, but you know, you're in the New York area, you're belly to belly with the financial services companies, the big whales, what's going on in Fs these days? Sure. >>So as we look across the financial services industry, they were one of the leaders with automation more because the overarching business environment really forced them. As we looked at, um, the regulatory burden that a lot of our banking clients we're under over the past decade kind of post crash that really, um, has kind of forced two things. One, it's limited the amount of um, discretionary spend that they have to spend on really big technology transformation projects. It's also forced a lot of margin pressure and having to think about, uh, differently how they could run their business at a much lower and more effective price points. And so that's, um, driven automation to the top. And we've seen tools like U I path and kind of the broader RPA ecosystem becoming kind of, you know, the right technology at the right time of being able to, um, really kind of embrace that, that, that, that rightsizing agenda and financial services sector. >>Yeah. And furniture at the macro level, they're a little bit out of favor right now you've had this, what we thought was this rising interest rate environment and that's reversed. And so that's not necessarily good for them. So they got to look for other ways to sort of drive the bottom line. So maybe you could talk a little bit about, you know, gen generally where you're seeing automation, um, back office, front office. Think about the maturity curve. What are the leaders doing? What, >>what's the sort of best practice right now for intelligent automation RPA? Sure. So as we looked at intelligent automation right now, I think one of the interesting things, vital services was an early adopter. So a lot of, a lot of the big banks and asset managers and insurance companies really start investing in this, this class of technology four, five, six, seven years ago. And so we're actually seeing the, the early returns from, from those, which is informing how this, you know, this topic goes to other industries. But I think as we look at those returns, we see a couple of major challenges. Um, there's challenges with getting the scaling technology, there's challenges with, so that's interesting. Okay. So the, the ladder changing, the nature of work is, as you're saying, largely automating existing mundane processes, kind of paving the cow path as I sometimes say. >>However, if, if it's a, if it's not the most efficient processy to begin read process to begin with, they need to sort of re look at that and that may be falls into the, to the, to the former category of enterprise life. And so where people investing in boat or they are they just hitting the low hanging fruit where we're seeing an investment in both. And then PWC is used that a while fucks your mission program should have both channels and each channel should be informing the other. So if citizens are coming up with ideas of things that they can automate themselves, that's great, but those should also be contributed into the kind of broader ecosystem. And there may be, um, what's called grander ways to, to, to solve that problem, both from a technology perspective and from a process reengineering perspective. Is there a, is there an automation ex-officio is there a chief who's sort of looking at all this stuff or is it more organic? >>It's, you know, one of the, I think interesting things we've seen and learned from our clients over the past couple of years is the con, you know, we thought there'd be an emergence of a chief automation officer or something like that. But really the automation agenda's owned in so many different places within our clients. And it's not consistent client decline in some cases. It's really a CIO own topic. A lot of cases it's more of a chief operating officer, chief digital officer, chief transformation officer. We're also seeing a push at the chief HR officer level because this is really, you know, there's a, there's a big question straight in terms of thinking about kind of skills and how you equip your workforce with the right digital skills for the future, which is now putting HR at the table for this, which is the place where I think traditionally with big technology transformations, they've never really sat. >>So, in thinking about, um, ROI, you know, you've laid out this sort of bifurcated, you know, paths to vectors the hard sort of end-to-end problems and then the sort of low hanging fruit changing the way to work. I would presume the second one gives you the quick hit, you know, faster break even, but probably lower net present value. Um, and, and so maybe you could talk a little bit about the ROI equation and how people are looking at that. Yeah. It's interesting cause I think yeah, to your point, I think an enterprise led initiative, you're going to want to define a business case and say this is why we're doing it and what we're looking to achieve going down to SIS and let channel, that's a harder thing to do because you don't want to stifle innovation. The organization, one of our views is that the people that sit closest to the business process are the ones that should be coming up the right ideas, if they're given the right upscaling and the right tools at their disposal. >>Um, but you know, it's bottoms up exercise. And so again, going back to the concept of having a kind of an ecosystem with both an enterprise channel and a citizen channel is important because you're at the enterprise level, you're going to need to understand what type of benefits are actually being created at the, you know, at the micro level and figure out two things. One, are there things that, you know, do, have we built enough that we can start to release capacity from organization? Um, or is there something else that if I put in, will allow us to really think about transforming our business? So it's a, it's a lover. It's not that the end solution, right? When I tell people about you that don't know what RPA is, I say it's a lot of back office stuff and it is. Um, but we heard today that from one of the keynotes that, you know, we gotta move from the back office to the, to the front office. >>How much is that happening in financial services and how much of a sort of a holistic end to end strategy are you seeing? I'm sure you guys are promoting that are fans of that because you're going to get a much bigger business impact. It's transformational. But where are we at in the maturity of that? Yeah, it's interesting, right? So we, you know, staying on this theme of the enterprise and citizen light innovation levers, you know, the enterprise. Um, and you know, innovation levers tend to be focused more in the back office, high transaction volume type processes. I think when we look at the citizen led channel and a lot of the ideas that have been coming out in our cotton with our clients are starting to embrace this. They tend to be more front office oriented processes. There's lots of things, especially client servicing or that are tasks that are done are somewhat mundane. >>And um, you know, it's the business case and LOC isn't necessarily back capacity. It's about client experience and customer service. So, you know, you can take the, um, you know, the, the, the wealth advisor that has to log into five different systems to answer a simple client question. That's a, you know, that's a process that being able to actually have an automated way to generate that same thing at their fingertips, um, you know, could be really powerful. And so there's a big push there. I think the interesting part on the, um, going back to your bet, your business case question from before is that, um, you know, the, the business case for a lot of those types of automations, um, it's not just a factor of um, you know, have we built enough that we think that there's benefit, it's also about adoption. So if I build a robot to automate that wealth advisor process that I just noted, if 50 wealth advisors can adopt that rather than one wealth advisor, it's going to be a much greater business case. And that's a much, that's a different way of thinking about business case in the RPA sense. Because most people tend to think, here's a process, this process, I have five people that run this on a day to day basis. Um, and here's, here's my business case. In this case it's, I built something really innovative. If I can get a a hundred people to use this because it's, it takes 10 minutes out of their day, there's real, there's, there's real time there, but it is causing a lot of our clients to think differently. >>So you talk about three things as challenges scaled the business case, which you just talked about and change management. Is that part of the, and they're interrelated? Is that part of the challenge with scale? It is far as the channel. >>I mean just building on the last point around adoption, you know, that what we're doing, what we're talking about here with RPA, I think people that live in the RPA space day to day, this does this almost become second nature. And like, yeah, the technology is not that complicated. This is very basic, but you start going out to the entire organization and especially outside of technology. Um, it's, it's new. And so the change management's really important. Um, and it's important we, we view from two lenses. One is really thinking about how do you, um, upskill your workforce at a minimum so they know what technology is actually out there. It doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna make everyone a bot builder in your organization. But knowing what RPA is and knowing that, Hey, I have some tools to go help solve a given business problem is really important. But, uh, you know, the, the uh, the second point that we think is really important in here is the ability to, um, really think, sorry, really think about the, um, you know, what the longterm impact of kind of, um, you know, the overall organizational model and how that actually adopts to using automation over time. >>And that ties into change management, which is the other thing and people don't like change. Um, the other thing we heard this morning, um, Craig LeClaire Forrester analyst talked about how a lot of robots are idle sitting around ill, you know, then though at the orchestrator. And so I was, I was thinking, well, we're seeing sass models emerge, you know, UI path announced their cloud product and I would expect you're going to see new pricing models as well, kind of usage base pricing, which is kind of generally not how things are priced today. But is that something that customers are pushing for >>or definitely. I mean I think there's, um, there's two, two things we hear from customers in this space. I think as RPA, as a product is developed and you know, I think there was a push, uh, with most, with all the vendors towards kind of what's priced for bot. But the concept of a bot is a somewhat ambiguous concept to a lot of our clients. And what our clients really want is to price and value, right? And understand, um, if I'm building bots that are, you know, covering this part of the organization, I'm appropriately paying for this, um, rather than worry about how much workload did I put onto one bod versus another. I think with, uh, with the mass adoption of cloud and the fact that the RP ecosystems quickly moving from an on prem solution to a cloud based solution, I think a lot of this is just gonna happen naturally. Um, over time. I think the other, I think the other really important part in there is not to just make this a technology question about the kind of the pricing. It's also a question on value delivered and realize the benefits case and can you actually tie what those realized benefits are to what the actual price that's actually going to pay for the software is >>all right. You ready for some curve balls? Sure. Okay. So you're, you know, thought leader you worked for one of the largest consultancies on the planet global scale. You guys do some really great work disruption. We talk about digital transformation, automation obviously plays in there, blockchain, AI, RPA, et cetera. Do you, do you think that banks will lose control of payment systems? >>I'm not sure. I would say the pro, the biggest problems that banks are facing, um, with regards to that isn't necessarily whether they control the payment system or not. I actually think it's how effective they can run the system internally. I mean, I'm a, I'm an automation guy, right? And my goal is to make clients run as efficiently and as effectively as possible. And I look at a lot of the legacy debt that sits within a lot of our clients infrastructure. I think that's the biggest problem to tackle. I think if they don't tackle that and are not successful topics like RPA and automation, it, it's going to create the forces of nature that allow some of the broader disruption to happen. So it's, you know, to me, at least in my mind, it's one of these things that you, you have your agenda in what'd you can control. These are the things that you actually shouldn't be focusing on. So you're set up to compete with some of the big disruptors in the future. >>Yeah, interesting. I mean that's one industry, there's a disruption all around us, but that's one industry along with healthcare and defense that it hasn't been highly disrupted yet because it's very high risk. Not only that they're, you know, they've got very strong relationship with the government. So this, and they're big and they're well funded, but, but it seems like that disruption scenario is coming to financial services. When you talk to people in the industry, they certainly see it, but there's also a lot of complacency. It's like, Hey, we're a big, big Fs. We're doing really well. Um, dots on that. >>Um, you know, there is, you know, when we looked across and I'll just say kind of technology investment in the banking sector, big banks and asset managers, insurance companies are some of the biggest spenders on technology out there. And in your view, look at a lot of the commentary that comes out of analyst calls. There's pretty consistent, um, push a to talk about, um, you know, Becky organization as a technology company or some form of that. And there's also a big push to talk about how much money they're spending. That's great. But we've also, yeah, I think when you, you kind of look under the covers, there's been a lot of historical challenges with um, with implementing big technology projects and things. There's a lot of legacy debt that's been built over the past 25 years and complexity really thinking about this from a front to back perspective. >>Like from the point, you know, taking a, the trading side of a bank, looking at the point of trade entry through post-trade processing through finance processing through kind of every step in the life cycle. It's still run from a technology perspective, probably not as efficient as possible. And I think especially when you get outside the front office area and some of the training areas and look at that. So there's a ton of opportunity for improvement and, and you know, kind of building on the last theme, I think to the extent that technologies like RPA and automation are embraced, it helps think about that problem a little bit differently and gives us a chance to tackle some of these big meaty legacy problems that had been around for a while. If we're successful at this and we can force the ROI to be proved, we can force the change management exercise to happen. I think it sets our clients up for, again, for success to avoid some of these disruptive factors. >>Yeah. So huge opportunity then for a UI path than some of its competitors, you know, penetration wise, adoption wise, what inning are we in? >>Uh, adding to we're, we're in early days. I mean, I think we've seen a ton of interest. It's under the excitement from our clients. But you know, our surveys of, of, of the financial services industry, um, most clients will acknowledge their past the pilot and proof of concept phase and there may be even past the first 10 bought phase, but they're not at scale. Right. And I think until three things happen, I think until we can prove that the technology is being used, um, you know, from an organizational coverage across a much wider swath than it is today. I think when we can prove that there's actually a real demonstrable benefit happening from a, from an organizational operating model perspective, and to the extent that the workforce is actually embracing this and I'm posing it, I think we'll, you know, >>be in a much better position to say, Hey, we're working now getting to ending five or six and, and this, this picture's becoming more complete. But it's still early. A lot of opportunities. Kevin, thanks very much to come into the Q was great to have you. Thank you for having me. Hi, and thank you for watching. We're right back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the cube live from UI path forward 2019 at the Bellagio right back.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. Everybody, you watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Ahmed Zion, he is here, he's the chief automation officer at accelerate a specialist service provider in this area of RPA in Armando Lambert is the vice president of enterprise optimization governance and risk guys. Oh sorry. At Bayview asset management in Miami. Welcome to the cube criminal. Thank you for that. So Bayview, you've got a good view of the Bay and Miami, is that kinda where the name comes from or the beautiful place to work happening with UI path forward to was in Miami at the Fontainebleau back here in Vegas. But um, so let's get into it. I met um, chief automation officer. That's kind of a cool title. I don't see that a lot. What's that entail? And tell us about accelerate. >>So accelerate at accelerated where one of the largest nice providers is the only thing that we do a process automation and AI company. And our sole focus has been process automation since our inception and our past lives were generalists. We did well and wanted to do it again. Uh, so when we started accelerate, we wanted to make sure that we focused on a very specific vertical niche and process automation was just starting up the uptick about mid 2016 ish. >> So there's gonna be some interesting conversations around process automation is like had an analyst on yesterday, they predicted RPA is dead, you know, process automation lives. You know, it's kind of a tongue in cheek thing. So maybe we can talk about that a little bit, but Amando tell us about your role and a little bit about Bayview. So Bayview is an asset management company, primarily whole loans, mortgage back securities, mortgage servicing rights. >>We offer service advisory as well as investment vehicles. My role basically is to strategize, innovate, look at new technologies, new ways of streamlining the business. Um, and you know, about in 2016, you know, we were faced with the challenge and the challenge was we have a lot of road swiveled to chair type work, back office, operational work. Um, and I went in there just trying to look at people, processes and systems and trying to figure out a way to make things more efficient. And you know, RPA is one of those vehicles. Okay. So smart. You started with people in process, you didn't start with the technology. Yeah, absolutely. Right. So what did you learn? I mean, take us back to 2016 when you started to do the investigation, you started unpack the processes and the people. What did you see and then what led you to RPA? >>Yeah, I mean, I think inherently you're, you're, there's a lot of business processes that are just brought down through years of just being kind of entrepreneurial and doing a lot of business. So a, of these prices of processes early on we felt like we can just go in and automate and we realized that just needed a level of process optimization first. Um, so in doing that, it just kind of directs the vehicle right into what type of automation you need to do. It's not always RPA. RPA is big, a big component for us. Um, it works for us. Early on we wanted to put a strong governance structure. I strongly believe that, you know, and it's worked out so far for us. >> So you, you brought in accelerate, you brought in an outside firm to help you with that process automation, is that right? Absolutely. >>So tell us more about how that all went down. So that was, that was an interesting, um, interesting time, right? The, these products were coming up. Nobody really knew how well they work. And so we went in and we actually did proof of value, right? We said, Hey, this is all well and good. Let's do a proof of concept that a proof of value at that time, proof of concepts really were a thing. I don't, I don't think we should do them anymore. We should only do proof of values. But we went in, looked at the various systems they had, tried it out so he could demonstrate it to his management that this thing works. And as soon as that was over, I think I'd given to her, Armando, here we went all in, right? We said, all right, let's look at the highest value things. >>Let's deliver this. Um, let's figure out a governance model. Let's, let's not, let's not hold it back like we, like we have done in the past. It project spinning up. So let's get the infrastructure up and running very quickly. Let's get, let's get a few automations out there. Some of the business sees the value right away, right? Crawl, walk, run. We can do this. You know, what are we going to automate and what do we need from it and how are we going to govern this? These are the three pillars that I see that I suggest everybody look at it. And we did that in parallel parallel streams and all three of them. And within a few months he was able to return a significant value back to the business, which has led to adoption. I think, I think that has been a very big reason why he's been able to scale because he was able to show early value back to the business very quickly focusing on value rather than the technology or the underlying solution. >>Right? It's um, a lot of times we see folks going into RPA saying, what can RPA do for me? I think that is the wrong question. Um, the question really is what do you do? Let's classify what you do in manual mechanical work, intelligent work and wasteful work, right? And then look at your toolbox. I have RPA, I have AI, I have other technologies that within an enterprise folks are working on, and then apply those to it. RPA becomes the glue for most of these things. You have API as SDKs. You have AI technologies, be it cloud or on prem. RPA becomes the glue and it becomes easy to deploy once you figured out what all the different pieces are. But it's important to look at the process first and say, what? What do you do? So when the business comes back and say, what can you do for me with RPA? >>I said, no, I don't know. What can you do for, with the, I don't know. Tell me what you do and then I'll tell you what the solution is. So mono, given that you started with the value, did that ease some of those potential friction that you sometimes see with change management or change in general? Or did you still see that resistance? And I'm interested in where you started, what were some of those high value areas that you attack but, but the cultural piece first if you will. Yeah, I mean a lot of marketing, you know, it's really what it comes down to trying to prove to the Csuite and managing director areas. Like this is a value proposition. You know, early on, you know, we did a lot of presenting roundtables, luncheon learns with the business. You know, because there is some resistance early on. >>I think everybody has a misconception that it's going to take their jobs where I believe it's gonna create a lot more jobs in the future. Um, for me it was always a scalability play. You know, how can our business do more for less? And that's really what we really wanted to get to. Throughout that journey. We realized there's a lot of benefit, especially for companies that have a heavy back office operations. Um, and we just started, like I mentioned there, we started slow. I didn't want to boil the ocean. I knew I needed to prove to leadership that this works. And I think about three years ago, we all kind of felt, is this going to stick? You know, we've seen technology, I've been in technology for over 20 years and you know, some things fly, some things don't. Right? So we wanted to prove that it worked. >>And you know, the industry just kind of surrounded itself around that. And look where we are now. I think everybody's putting a lot of money in their budgets for, you know, intelligent automation, not just RPA. So the initiative was kind of middle up to the C suite and then top down. Is that how it, absolutely. I'm a firm believer the tone needs to come from the top. It has to come from the top. And you know, luckily for me, I have great leaders in our company. Um, they understood the vision, they understand what, what it could potentially mean for their business. They just needed someone to help execute it. So what kinds of things did you start with? There was a lot of sort of manual form filling out or some of that, uh, you know, data extraction from PDFs using, utilizing OCR, you know, RPAs great to gather and collect data so that they can put it in their models and make more informed decisions. >>Uh, claims processes, you know, dealing with different agencies. So, you know, early on in adopting UI path, there were some limitations. We worked around that. Now it's pretty much limitless and they could touch any system, any technology, any process. So yeah, it's growing tremendously. And in terms of just ensuring governance and compliance as you scale, you have robots doing that. Um, how do you tell me what we're working more and more. I mean, I think regulators now realize, okay, you're removing the human element, right? So, you know, that's a big value as well. Or sampling. Now you're not limited to what you can sample. You can sample 100%, you know, so those are big values and when you speak to regulators, they really understand that I would say five years ago, I'm not so sure. Um, but now they welcome it. And I think a lot of the government agencies now are, are adopting RPA. >>Uh, so it's, it's a good story. Well, automation kill sampling is that I think it is absolutely right. The point actually interesting point that you made, right? Uh, the regulators or the auditors or for that matter, the security and the compliance guys inside the enterprise have this. So this term of the bot, right has this connotation of Terminator and I keep telling him, no, this is that thing. You buy a target that does this. I press the right button, it goes right up, press the left button, mil goes left. It just doesn't think on its own. And I think that conversation is very important, right? Once you have that conversation with the security and the compliance guys to say, this is a bot, it only does what you ask it to do. You could put a social security number in front of this guy all day long in front of this user ID all day long. >>It just doesn't know what to do with it. Won't ever read it. And once they realize that they, the, the conversation changes, um, you know, especially when it in compliance and audit, right? Uh, the compliance officers would love this. Once you tell them there's a lot of decision making that happened in people's heads or Excel spreadsheets that never made it to systems and was never logged. So you'd get something in you massage that, you did that, and you put that in the system. That decision making is now auditable. So you can go back and say, here was the input, here was the massaging of it. Here's what went into the system of record after it came in. So that I think, I think those conversations early on really helped this scale in an age old problem and tribal knowledge. Exactly. You know, Joe has his spreadsheet and Fred knows the Joe has the spreadsheet. >>So when Joe leaves, he has to get the spreadsheet back. And that's kind of this perpetual thing. How much of what you guys did, Armando was processed re-engineering versus just applying automation at some low hanging fruit. Um, I think looking back now it's about a 50, 50 split. Um, you know, there are some areas that have robust processes and that makes our life easier. We can just kind of go in, map it out, look at the automation future state and deploy, develop and deployed. Uh, you know, some areas, you know, they inherit processes and they don't always just so busy doing their day jobs and they don't always realize there's, there's room for efficiency in their process. So, you know, early on when we priced out how much this would cost, how much development it would be, we didn't always factor in that it would be a 50, 50 split and doing a lot more process improvement in the beginning. >>Um, we've now counted for that. So absolutely. It's about a 50, 50 split. Craig LeClaire this morning said something that, you know, I was an analyst and he says, very, you know, very analyst's sort of savings. You've got to stop worrying about the ROI, you know, focus on the more strategic stuff. Every analyst sort of says that. But yeah, there weren't a lot of CFOs too. And they're like, where's the ROI? So you know, you're in the services business, you know, you have to have ROI dollars matter. Absolutely. So you obviously measure ROI. How do you look at it? You know what you said earlier, you're not cutting jobs, right? But so what do you tick? How do you measure kind of the, the value, the ROI? I mean, you know, giving the end user a little more to think about, right? Giving them the opportunity to, you know, do more, be more thoughtful in what their day to day job is rather than doing the swivel chair type work. >>So, you know, the measurement, the beauty around RPA is it's very quantifiable. You know, unlike some traditional it systems, you really can, the data doesn't always kick back. You know, all our, our, our own bots, all our processes kickback, they give us data that we can quantify, um, metrics on, on, on volume versus man hours. This is all information you capture early on. You need to do this at the discovery stage and we train. We have a robust training program for our business analysts and program managers and developers and they're always, that's the question they ask every time. It's not just about what is your process, your cute future, current state, future state, and it's like, how many limit? Let me look at your historical trending. What are their volumes look like? You know, our business is very cyclical. It goes up and down, and when I mentioned I want them to be scalable and have more capacity, that's really the play for me. >>For me, it's never been an FTE. I get it. It may come from the Csuite, but like I said, the tone from the top has been solid. Their vision is more about, Hey, when it's cyclical and it goes up and down, we need to be able to do more. We need to be able to scale. Have you been able to measure productivity improvement? Absolutely. Absolutely we have. If you had a Mulligan, what would you do differently? A good question. I mean, I think we factored early on, I mentioned this early on how much process improvement was needed. I think we undervalued that. And um, you know, every business faces the same challenges, right? They, you know, everyone feels like they're doing the right thing. These processes are inherited. You know, regulations change, investors change. There's new business rules every day, you know, and you kind of need to sit back as a business user every now and then and refresh that. >>And um, you know, we didn't account for that early on. We're helping the business do that. Our business is fantastic. They bought into the program and it's like having additional workforce working on your side. You know, Daniel Dienes in his keynote last night, basically sending them pick up on something you guys said is, is, um, he really appreciates those customers who took a chance early on. He goes, because frankly, our product wasn't, you know, fully, fully baked out. And I was like, wow, what an honest statement from a CEO. You don't usually hear that. My sense is that they got it right. You path. And I'd love your comments. In the sense that they attack, they went after simplicity and said, okay, make it easy to adopt and then we'll figure it out. And then, you know, bringing in the functionality is that, is that kind of what happened or picking up on Daniel? >>And by the way it was, it's amazing. Humility really comes through, right? So I saw him 2016 standing on stage and when my partner came to us for the idea of saying, Hey, we're going to do, we should do this RPA thing. Now I'm giving away my age. But 1998, my first job, I was sitting in front of the computer and Prudential and they put this software in front of me. It was called SQA robot. It was a test automation tool. It was called SQL robot. Uh, why that relates to Daniel is he's had a, came on the stage in the IRPA conference in 2016 if remember, I love this presentation just to blues black thing and few words on it. He goes, let's not kid ourselves. We have this very traditional, you know, QA automation technology that we think can do something really super. >>And I have built a product on top of that, but there's, there's not a lot of magic in here yet. Right. So that's, but, but I think the, the, the great thing about you I've had has been the vision, right? The vision has been, and if you saw yesterday they started with the core and unlike some of the other vendors, they said, we're just going to do RPA really well. We're not going to go into the OCR market. We're not going to try to build AI things. Let's make sure that our core RPA, so you know, you want to go, you're an enterprise, you want to do OCR, you're not going to buy it from an RPA company. You want to buy it from somebody who's been doing it for 30 years or we just has that sole focus. I think you'll have had had that sole focus. >>But as I've seen in the past three, four years, they've just done a great job with the, with the full vision, right. Starting from, they started with the middle of the core of the product and they said, okay, let's go towards the business and see what the business needs with, you know, planning of their, um, of their automations on and so forth and going further to the right to say, let us enable the technology guys who actually implement this to give them the tools and the integrations they need to, to actually make this routed to full product. Um, I think it's a very good question when people say, what can you do with RPA for me? So I said that answer was very different three years ago than it is today. Right? Some of the things are coming out of the box with these. So I, I, I predict that in the next few years, document understanding and natural language and all of that will just be built in today's still very sort of clunky in terms of how you do it. >>But I think those things are coming, coming together. So looking at processes that way is really important. It's a lot of runway for this. Margaret, Armando, I'll give you the last word. Where do you see are RPA or intelligent automation going in, in your organization? Is it still early days you had a lot more adoption or you're pretty much, you know, settled? No, definitely not settled. Um, I think it's, you know, RPA is just one of the tools in the spectrum of intelligent automation. So more integration, more API APIs, a lot of machine learning, uh, eventually some AI. Um, so yeah, we are not slowing down. There's a lot of opportunity. My mandate as I mentioned before, is just scale, scale, scale. So you know, the process is working. We have a good program in place. We'll continue marching forward. Great guys, thanks so much for coming. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for watching. From right back with the cube. Live from UI path forward three in Las Vegas. Right back.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to the Bellagio, everybody. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, this is Day 2 of UiPath's Forward III Conference and Kourtney Bradbeary is here R&D specialist at American Fidelity. She's joined by Michael Setticasi, who's the senior director of business development at Boston-based DataRobot, but Michael's from Seattle. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Kourtney B.: Thank you. >> Kourtney, let's start with you. I know you guys, you kind of do benefit solutions, but maybe talk a little a bit about the company and some of the big trends that are driving what you guys are doing. >> Kourtney B: Absolutely. So I work with American Fidelity, it's an insurance company based out of Oklahoma, but our main focus is providing solutions to our customer pain points. So we're a niche-based organization that focuses mainly on education, so the public sector, so education in municipalities in providing solutions and benefits to our employers and our employees that we work with. >> Cool, and Michael, you guys, obviously data science is your thing, but describe a little bit more about what you guys do. >> Yeah, we're an AI enterprise company. What we're really trying to do is democratize the use of AI machine learning within organizations, and we really appeal to both data scientists and business users that understand their business and data and want to do more. >> So Kourtney, you're title is really interesting. R&D special projects, so you got this little sandbox that you get to play with, RPA is on the hype cycle and now it's in the trough of disillusionment, but it's kind of an early play around with things. How did you get in to RPA? Where you guys at? What's this R&D thing going on? Right, so with research and development, I guess there's a lot of space to work with emerging technologies, and AI, and RPA, and how those two things come together and anything new that we see and exciting we're able to apply that technology. It's one thing to think, "Oh, AI, that's cool. Let's do that." But if it doesn't benefit your customer at the end of the day, if it's not driving decisions in your organization, then we don't want to do AI just 'cause it's cool. We really want to do AI because it's what benefits our customer. So we got into RPA because when we saw a demo, and it was like, whoa. If that's real, if that's what we think it's going to be, that's a game changer. So you have RPA, and you have AI kind of coming up at the same time and whenever it was, first coming out a few years ago, they're silo, they're separate. What we've started to do recently is to bring the two industries together and really bring together the RPA component and the AI component to really become IPA, or Intelligent Process Automation, so that way we can really start to transform businesses. >> So this is interesting to me, Michael, because as Kourtney was saying, most people think of these things as separate and more aspirational down the road. You guys are AI experts, what are you seeing in terms of these two domains coming together? >> You hear about intelligent automation everywhere, right? We are pushing it hard, and we're seeing a lot of customers and potential prospects look at it, but I have to give credit to American Fidelity. They are ahead of the curve. They're combining this ability to use an RPA process and a machine learning model to really automate things and provide better customer service and get to the endpoint faster and more efficiently. So I think they're ahead of the curve, but you're going to see more and more of this in the marketplace. >> So Kourtney, a lot of the customers that we talk to, this is kind of my observation, is they're automating obviously mundane processes but frankly really crappy processes. They're really screwed up in a lot of ways. And they're throwing RPA at the problem, it sounds like you have a little different philosophy around how to apply automation. Can you explain that? >> Right, so you don't want to automate something that's bad because then it's going to break a lot, and it's just not a good idea. So what we've tried to do is whenever we get request in the door, there's always a stopping, if somebody has to make a decision, in the past, it's been "Okay, well we can automate the first part and the last part", but it's kind of have to stop in the middle for you to make a decision. And what DataRobot has allowed us to do, in the past, it was really hard to actually apply machine learning, 'cause you had to have these data scientists and they'd have to spend months trying to figure out what model for the data, and is it, you know, retraining a model is really difficult. DataRobot makes a data scientist's job so much easier and actually applicable to the workplace where you could scale, enable scaling, because without DataRobot or without a service like that, it's impossible to scale. So it allows us to implement AI with our RPA to then not just automate the mundane processes, but the small decisions that we make everyday, just 'cause we do our jobs everyday and we know how to do our jobs, AI enables us to automate those processes, as well. >> And you're doing that in an unattended way, or is it an attended automation? >> Both, both. So there's some processes that we have to have a human select things and make certain decisions along the way, or there's some processes that are completely unattended. With any automation, your goal is always to automate 100%, but in reality, you're usually going to get about 80% of a process automated. So what we try to do, we go for the hundred percent, rarely get that, but then you can take out the 20% for human review. And so maybe of the 20% that's not fully automated, maybe we can make stop points for human interaction there, but there have been some processes that we have been able to fully automate. >> So Michael, the data scientists complain that 80% of their time is spent in wrangling data and getting the data ready to actually build a model. I presume that's what you guys do, you solve that problem, right? >> We definitely solve some of that, right? If you get the data all in one place, DataRobot takes care of a lot of the data preparation that's involved in data science. We've also have ways to kind of manage the best places you store your data, so that if other people use the platform, they can see where to get it to. But overall, I would just say, when you look at UiPath and the way it's growing, it's such an exciting growing company like we heard Daniel yesterday mention their growth from customer from year to year, how they're the fastest enterprise software growing company out there. So you combine that RPA market with this growing machine learning market, and there's a ton of excitement. I mean, that's what you're seeing at the conference today. >> So you guys have data scientists on staff, is that right, or-- >> Correct! >> Okay, and so what does this mean for them? Does it mean you just need less of them, or they spend more of their time doing productive work? >> It means they spend more of their time doing productive work, instead of trying to figure out what model to fit, 'cause if you're a data scientist, or an actuary, or any, data analyst, or any of those things, you might know five models that you try to fit everything to. What DataRobot enables us to do is not be stuck to those five models that we know. It enables us to combine models, and choose models based on that data, so it really helps us with the modeling. >> Are you, I should've asked this before, are you still in R&D? Or are you in production? Or where are you at in terms of majority? >> Oh no, we're in production. We have two IPA processes in production today, and we're working on increasing that as we go. We have over a hundred an fifty RPA processes in production, as well as, many many just machine learning, so we're working on combining those now. So we have many machine learning, we have many RPA, and we're working on increasing our IPA. >> What have you seen as the business impact? Do we have enough data yet to sort of-- >> Absolutely. We don't try to focus on ROI. What we try to focus on is how is this impacting our customer, and how is this impacting employees' lives. There's obviously a lot of fear around automation but at American Fidelity, what we try to do is show how this is going to improve our employees' lives and we're by no means trying to cut jobs. We're actually going to have a net increase of jobs over the next five years. We're re skilling our workforce. We're really focusing on how it improves our employees, rather than focusing on ROI. >> So you're not on the ROI treadmill? So how did you get your CFO to sort of agree to all of this? >> So we do track ROI. It's not something we share publicly. But we focus more on our humans and our employees than our ROI. >> Is that because, I mean you're not, virtually every customer I've talked to says, "Well, we're not firing people. We're just getting more productive, or shifting them to more interesting tasks, et cetera, et cetera," and if you do the ROI calculations, you say "Oh, I don't need as many humans to do this anymore", and so you'd say, "Okay, FTE cost" and then you apply that, it's kind of a BS number, 'cause it's not like you're cutting people, so it's not a hard ROI. Is that why you don't focus on ROI? Or you just think it's worthless metric? >> No... >> Actually, I'm sorry. You said you do have it, you just don't share it publicly. >> Right, we just don't share our ROI publicly. And I don't think it's made up, or it's fake. I've never met an organization that says they have more people than they have work for people. There's always work. I really enjoy the first video opening of UiPath, it's, "since the beginning of time, humans have worked", and everyone thinks that automation is going to get rid of jobs, there's a lot of controversy over that, but realistically, if you think about the first industrial revolution, that was, after the first industrial revolution hit, that was the biggest economic upturn that had seen since that time. We're in that same space now. It's just hard to see it with where we're at. It's only going to increase, work is only going to increase. It's definitely going to change. I think it's naive to think that jobs won't change. And there will be jobs that will be eliminated, job functions, but I don't think there's elimination of humans needed, if that makes sense. >> Well yeah, it does. You guys sound like you're pretty visionary about how to apply technology to your business. And Michael, I mean, Kourtney's right, machines have always replaced humans, this is nothing new, first time ever that it's in cognitive function, so that scares people a little bit, but what else are you seeing in the marketplace that you can share with us? >> We're just seeing increased use of automation. So like, you might think when you talk DataRobot, you're using us for the top 1% things that a company might do, right? If you're a bank, you might use us to help out, figure out, how you can more efficiently lend customer's money, and make sure that you're making good investments, but what we're finding is, automation and machine learning models are being used everywhere. They're being used in marketing now, right? An example could be this show. We'll get leads from this show. Let's run some machine learning to understand what leads to follow up on first, because we'll get the best result. We're seeing machine learning in HR, right? Making sure their employees are happy, tracking employee churn through machine learning, so I think what we're seeing is it's being adopted more broadly, which means you need more people. We're not replacing people. >> So, why UiPath? >> Whenever we started the vendor process and started looking at several vendors, the UiPath product just was unmatched, frankly. There was a lot of vendors that had more code base, and there was then UiPath that anyone can learn. And that's what we really liked 'cause in American Fidelity, we've chosen to go with, we have a COE but we've also chosen to go with a democratized model where everyone in the organization will be able to build robots. We're training people to build robots. We have, each department has people that are dedicated. A certain portion of their time is building robots and UiPath really made that available with their products for anybody to be able to learn. >> So you have a COE. >> Kourtney B.: Yes. It was interesting, Craig LeClaire this morning, I don't know if you saw his keynote, but he kind of made this statement, it was sort of a off-handed statement, he said, "COE, maybe that's asking too much". He didn't use term tiger team, but I inferred, it's like, rather just kind of get a tiger team of some experts, but talk a little bit more about your COE. >> So, we kind of go with a hybrid model. If you think about, typical, it's weird because RPA is only a few years old, and we're thinking typical RPA, but people usually either go with a COE or completely democratized. We've really gone with a hybrid model, so we have a COE with governance where we've set a loose framework of what to follow, and we have code standards, when you say, follow these things. We have a knowledge library that we share. But we only have a handful of full-time RPA developers, and everyone help, those developers help, teach and help grow that knowledge throughout the organization, so that way we have people in every area that can also develop. So our developers are not our own key developers. Our developers are focused on the IPA, on the AI, whereas our other people throughout the organization are focused more on RPA so we can really make a big difference more quickly. >> Do you have a software robot that automates auditing and checks for compliance? >> Yes, so we have, one of our robots, the function that it does is audit one of our inputs, so we do have robots in almost every area that, yeah, we do have audit robots. >> Has it cut the auditing bill? Is that part of the ROI? You don't have to answer that. (giggles) >> Michael, our last question for you is where do you see this all going? This is very interesting to me because I've inferred from a lot of the conversations that, like that PepsiCo guy was up yesterday, talking about an AI fabric throughout the organization, not just tactical projects, and that kind of interested me, but I expected it's much further off. I'm hearing from Kourtney that it's actually real today. What's your sort of prediction or forecast for the adoption of this more advanced intelligent process automation? Is it kind of just starting now and it's going to explode? Or am I just missing the mark here? >> No, I think you're a hundred percent on. I mean, first off, I think, like I mentioned earlier, RPA and machine learning separately, are in these incredible growth stages. Right, and we think our message to customers now is if you're not thinking about how you're doing AI and machine learning, you're already behind 'cause your competition is. And so you better get thinking about it. I think we're going to get to that level with intelligent automation, with RPA plus machine learning very soon. I do think right now we're in that infancy stage where people are looking for used cases, and they want to hear great stories, and so I do think American Fidelity is ahead of the curve, but they're not going to be ahead of the curve for long. It's catching up. If you're not doing it, we're going to eventually get to that point where you'll have someone like Elon Musk or Masayoshi Son, say, if you're not thinking of intelligent automation, you're already going to be left behind. >> All right, congratulations on the work that you've done. >> Kourtney B.: Thank you. >> It's a really awesome story. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, yeah, thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back from UiPath Forward day number 2. You're watching theCUBE. Be right back. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. Hello. We've already welcome to Las Vegas. This is day two of the year. >>Path forward conference UI path forward three. So what UI Pat does is they named their events one two three last year we were at Miami in the year before was one. Their North American event, which was in New York city. Here is three at the Bellagio hotel in in Las Vegas. 3000 people here for this rocket ship company growing revenues, they've got over $300 million in annual recurring revenue. That's up from 25 million in 2017 so you're talking about greater than 12 X increase in annual recurring revenues over 3000 employees. Now, Daniel Dienes, the CEO just named the industries the tech industry's latest billionaire. He's now dressing like a billionaire last year. He's in a tee shirt this year. He looks more like a more like a CEO. So we're going to be interviewing him later on today, but let's get right into it. The keynotes today comprised God Kirkwood who gave some predictions and that's her. >>I'm going to go, I'm going to talk about his predictions. I'm going to make some comments on those predictions and give you some thoughts of my own. Maybe throw in a few predictions of from Dave Vellante and then Craig LeClaire from Forrester gave a keynote. He was on the QBs today. Very knowledgeable analysts, probably one of the industry's top analysts, and I'll make some comments on some of the things he said. So let me get right into it. You got Kirkwood when you do these predictions, you know I put 'em out there. Of course it is smart. He's going to do these things and make them somewhat self-serving for RPA and UI path. So I'll make some comments on that as first one. One those was, there'll be a global economic downturn. I can't remember if he actually pinned a date, but I think he said it's in paint pending. >>Let's let's say 2020 he said that's good for RPA. Why would that be good for RPA? Because if there's an economic downturn, people are gonna want to get more. For less, and they're going to want to automate. They're gonna want to spend money and get fast ROI. And RPA potentially is a way to do that. It's not necessarily good news for low wage workers. They're doing mundane tasks. But nonetheless, he made the statement that it's good for our RPA. I would say this, I think a lot of this is going to depend on 2020 and the election in the United States as to what happens. I think it's very unclear right now. You saw the democratic debates last night. It's very clear that there's a, there's a swing to the left. Elizabeth Warren is, is kind of appears to be the front runner. So I would, I would make this prediction. >>I actually think Trump was gonna win the election. You know, don't hate me for saying that all you Trump haters, but I think whatever happens, maybe, maybe doesn't win the election. Maybe he wins the election and then, and then the subsequent election goes to the Democrats. But I think there's going to be a major swing back to the left. And I think that what that's gonna do, it's gonna open up the checkbooks and put more pressure on debt and I don't think there's a real issue right now of too fast economic growth of inflation. It's obviously something that economists watch, but if interest rates start rising back to the Clinton era levels, that means big trouble for the economy. But I don't see that necessarily happening in 2020 I think 2020 we'll see some moderation. I definitely think we're seeing less tech spending expected for Q four and I think that'll spill into 2020 based on the ETR and enterprise technology research data that we see. >>But I think it's actually a healthy pullback. I kind of agree with guy on that front. I actually think it is good for RPA. I think RPA is one of those sectors that you see in the ETR surveys that is gaining share relative to other tech spending and I think that will continue in any downturn. So I expect softness. However you define downturn, I don't think it's going to be falling off the cliff or a disaster, but I definitely think spending will be more tepid. Second thing he said is RPA will become the YouTube for automations. Think of YouTube as a container. I am not going to spend a lot of time on this one. A YouTube and RPA. I think no one's a consumer, but his, his analogy was around a container for automations, just like YouTube was a container for for video. I think they have aspirations to scale like YouTube, but if you look at RPA is a right now a back office, B2B business function and I think it'll stay that way for a couple of years. >>I'll make some statements on that. Automations will move from snowflake to snowball. What does he mean by that? Well today automations are all unique. Every company, and he made this statement feels like it's automations are a snowflake there. Everyone is different and what he's predicting is that over time these automations will become, there'd be more commonality in those automations. I think that's true. I do think while there are definite business processes that are unique to companies that there are a lot of similarities. Things like the UI path marketplace will allow people to share automations and I think there will be much more commonality. I think it's critical for scale. Number four, he said students entering the workforce will force employers to use automation. He didn't give a timeframe on this, but I'll tell you one thing. At a 2020 I've got three kids in college with two kids in college, one that's recently, recently graduated, who does something. >>Most kids in college have no clue what robotic process automation is, let alone what the acronym RPA stands for. So this is going to take some time. asked a hundred college kids what RPA is and I bet you maybe one or two have heard of it, even know what it is. So that's not happening today. I think that'll take probably another two cycles of graduate's before that really hits. We heard from the college of William and Mary yesterday where Tom Clancy and the college have partnered to really push in RPA into the curriculum and I think that's great. I'm going to talk, Tom Clancy's, a expert in the area of training and education that's going to take some time to bake out. So I would put that again. Guy didn't give a timeframe, but I would, I would say that's, that's five to eight years away. Number five, we'll continue to be surprised by the intelligence of machines and the stupidity of humans. >>Well, what he meant by that was there are some things that humans do that are repetitive, that are mistakes. They make the same mistakes over and over and over again, and machines won't necessarily do that. I do think this, that the gap or the number of things, if you make a list between the number of things that humans can do versus what robots can do with a physical or software robots, that gap is closing. There's no question about it. It's, you know, short few years ago, robots couldn't even climb stairs and now they can and you're, you're seeing things like chatbots improving. There's still, you know, a lot of them are still crap frankly, but, but you're going to see a lot of money go into chatbots. And so I do think that that gap will, will close. And I think it's, it's gonna, it's gonna come down to education and creativity in terms of the impact on job loss. >>And I'll make some comments about that in a moment. The six prediction, there are seven overall, so bear with me here. Automation will be discussed in the United nations con and the context will be jobs, wages and global economics. That's already happened. It's already happening. People are concerned about the impact on productivity and, and so, you know, that's a lock. The last one was consolidation amongst RPA vendors and automation led services will accelerate. I totally agree with this. He mentioned work fusion and amp works as two companies that are gonna. We're going to where we're going to see consolidation. We've already seen it. SAP got bought Contexto so you see in the big whales come into this market in four talks a lot about RPA. Anytime there's a fast growing software segment like RPA and as a leader like UI path, would you other companies all you know on their tail automation anywhere and blue prism automation anywhere in UI path have a ton of dough. >>You're going to see the big software companies say, wait a minute, I need a piece of that pie. Because software companies generally feel like every dime that's spent on software should go to them. That's the mentality of an SAP or an Oracle or even IBM and so either, unquestionably, you're going to see some consolidation. You mentioned service providers as well. Companies like symphony. I've been making a lot of comparisons this week between what I see in the UI path ecosystem and what I saw way back in the early part of this decade in the service now ecosystem. You had a company with Fritz like cloud sharper, which nobody ever heard of. They were a service management ITSMs expert and Accenture eventually snapped them up and came in. You saw DXC or CSC at the time do the same thing. And so I think you'll see the same thing here in this ecosystem. >>This ecosystem here is happening. It's buzzing, but it's got to grow and, and you're already seeing Deloitte and cognizant and E Y and PWC. The big guys could have jump in here. I often say that SIS love to eat at the trough and they know where the money is and the money appears to be in RPA because really there's so many screwed up processes inside companies. RPA is actually can give them a quick ROI. Now let me turn to some of my thoughts on this. Let me talk about the job impact of automation the vendors would have. You believe that it's all good, that people love this and and when they bring in software robots, it makes their lives better because they're doing less money, less money, less of the mundane tasks, and they're able to focus on new, more strategic things to our customer that we've talked to here in the cube. >>And also privately. This is true, people do love your software. Robots. When we were Jean younger yesterday from security benefit. If you Civ most excited she's ever been, you know, having said that, Craig Le Claire's research shows that over the next 10 years we will see a 16% job loss of jobs will disappear, rolls will disappear, and by the way, foresters at the low end of the spectrum of that forecast. Most forecast say 30 40% of jobs are going to get disrupted. I tend to believe that Craig's number is probably a better one at the lower end of that spectrum, but that's still a huge number. You are going to see unquestionably job impact from automation. Absolutely. No question in my mind. I think you're already seeing it now. Look it. Humans have always been replaced by machines, but for the first time in history we're seeing Keith cognitive functions replacing humans and as going to have a big disruptive impact on the workforce. >>And the other piece of this I would predict we are going to see a productivity boost. I think a significant productivity boost. Let me share you some data with the Bureau of labor statistics, which you know, you may look at that, you know in question some of their methodologies, but over the longterm, I think it's a viable metric from 2007 to 2018 productivity grew at 1.3% that's an anemic rate from from 1947 to 2018 productivity grew at 2.1% so Oh seven to 18 half the longterm productivity gain, 2000 to 2007 2.7% and then from, and then what we saw in Q one of 19 3.4% uptick in productivity. Is that sustainable? I think it is. I think we're now entering a, a new phase of productivity growth and I think it's gonna be driven by things like RPA and other automation. So that is going to have an impact back to the earlier statements on job loss. >>Okay. The other thing is I want to talk about the forecast, the market. Last year at UI path two in Miami, I said that I thought that forecast was low. They had like $4 billion by 2020 and I sort of called out Craig LaClaire on that, you know, and so I said this could be 10 billion by 2020 now he clarified that today up on stage. I was including services in, in my prediction, correct. Declares follows this market much more closely than I do. So I'll defer to him on, on on that. But he put in the services number and he showed the services to license ratio of around, you know, three X or so. But he actually had this very serial number about 10 billion by 2020 so I felt, felt good about that. That kind of bat my back of napkin prediction. I used to do this stuff at IDC for a living. >>So you know, actually got a little knack for that on an analog basis. Then he showed sort of his, his forecast for the market, you know, growing at a very linear rate. Now I'll say this, I think hot markets like RPA, they generally don't grow at a, at a, at a linear steady rate. If you look at some of the emerging forecasts that I, you know, for instance, IDC had in my years there, we would always have these linear like smooth growth forecasts. You know, some of those big markets, you know, think, you know, early days of the PC, the, the, the, the internet flash storage, you know, things of that nature. They tend to, these disruptive technologies tend to grow in an curve or an S curve. So what you see is sort of this momentum building where the market is being seeded. Know Gardner has RPA now in the trough of disillusionment. >>So you're seeing some of this, okay, the little engine that could, and then what you see is this steep part of the S curve growing and then after it explodes and hits escape velocity, it's sort of stretches out into maturity. And I think that's what you're going to see with RPA. But some things have to happen before that happens. And one is specifically the RPA has to move from the back office to the front office. It has to move from only really dealing with pretty simple, mundane tasks to more complicated automations. It's got to be able to deal with unstructured data. It's gotta be able to handle on attended or rather attended bots where you're injecting humans into the equation and you're actually using machine learning and artificial intelligence to to learn and then identify other areas of automation and actually have systems of agency that can act. >>In other words, a bot will call another bot that actually can complete a transaction and so you're going to see a lot of money spent here. This is a big chasm. I think that RPA has to cross. We're going to talk to Daniel DNAs about this. He's a big ticker. He's a go big or go home guy, and so I think those things I would predict those things actually are going to happen because you're going to see so much effort and money and emphasis put into AI and for competitive advantage that I actually think that RPA can lead that and then again come back to the consolidation. I think you will see some consolidation. I think you're seeing UI path. Try to take the lead automation anywhere is kind of pressing the lead if you will. Both companies have raised a couple of billion dollars if you combine them and I think the way this market shakes out is any and you're going to have some of the big whales come in like SAP. >>I think the way this happened is you're going to see one or two specialists emerge. I think UI path is on its way there automation anywhere as well and and the number one player is going to make a lot of money. The number two players going to do two. OK the number three player is going to struggle and everybody else is kinda be either break even or they're going to bundle it in like SAP as part of their overall portfolio and compete on that basis. So I would predict that UI path will maintain its lead. I think its got the culture to do that. I think automation anywhere also could company is going to keep pressing that lead and those should are two companies you know that you need to watch me. Interesting to see. Blue prism, I think they are somewhat under capitalized. They went to the public markets. >>The spending data actually shows all three of these companies as well as some of the legacy companies like Pega systems actually gaining could have more share relative to other initiatives. So I think even some of these legacy companies are going to continue to chug along and actually do pretty well in the business. But, but the real darling, you know, I think it's going to be UI path. All the bankers are hovering around earlier on this week trying to get their business. They know there's an IPO coming at some point. Again, we'll ask Daniel Dienes about that today. You have it. That's my intro. Some of my predictions. Some a guy Kirkwood's predictions. Wall-to-wall coverage on the cube today, day two at UI path forward three from Las Vegas. We'll be right back right after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Vellante. We're joined by Param Kahlon, he is the Chief Product Officer at UiPath, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me here. >> So-- >> Big week! >> Yes. >> You've been busy! >> I have been busy. >> (Rebecca laughs) >> Thank you David. >> So this morning, you were up on the main stage, and you were sort of giving the audience a state of play of business today. And you were lamenting, saying, "Wasn't technology supposed to make our lives easier? "Wasn't it supposed to free us from the mundane, "and supposed to make us more efficient?" And yet, hasn't quite ended up that way. You had the quote, the famous quote, "We see computers everywhere "except in the productivity statistics," from Robert Solow, the Nobel winner. Can you refine that a little bit? And particularly within the context of the RPA market. >> Yeah, isn't it exciting? I mean, we really have so much technology that we live in today, yet we're busier, we're doing more mundane work than we've ever done before. We're more stressed than ever before. That just seems sort of paradoxical to me that, you know, all this stuff that was supposed to give us more time to do the things that we wanted to do, yet we keep doing the repetitive, robot type work that, you know, we thought technology will free us from. And I think that's fascinating that, you know, that's happening. And I think there's a few theories on why we think that's happening. I think it's happening because business has gotten a lot more complex. You know, companies are having to change business models on the fly. Digital transformation is effecting standard companies, regulated industries, in ways that they did not imagine, and companies don't know how to cope and manage all the technology well. And this where, I think, RPA is really, really useful, because it can help you change the processes, modernize the processes without having to go change, rip and replace those existing systems. You know, do the work that you were going to hire humans to do in moving data, moving processes from one system to another. Do that through robots. And that's what our robots can help free the humans, to be able to focus on the things that matter, the things that they care about, right? That's really what the beauty of the RPA is. >> So I wonder if you can help our audience, you know, understand UiPath a little bit better. You know, Daniel talks about, how is it that UiPath has ascended so quickly? And you appear to be achieving escape velocity. You kind of started out, you know, third, fourth, whatever it was, and now you're sort of number one in all these quadrants and waves. And so yesterday you talked about five pillars. And I want to unpack them a little bit. Open platform, rapid results, which I think is around ROI. Path to AI, scalability, and trust. So here's my question. Any one of your competitors could say the same thing. "Oh yes, we're open. "Oh, we get rapid ROI." So what makes UiPath different? >> I think actually not just saying those words, but making it happen, right? So anybody can say we've opened, we've done something, but do people actually have 400,000 community members that have actually using the platform on an active basis? Can you actually go to a website over the last two years and download the software and use it? How long does it take you to sign up for a cloud service that we have made available? What does it take for you to do that? I think all the things that we've invested in, in really enabling engagement with the community, right? Making it open, not just from a technology perspective, but from a people perspective as well, are the things that have differentiated ourselves. And those can be very generic terms, that you're right, other people can use as well, but I think we live those terms, right? We actually do everything in the product, from the business perspective, to make sure that openness is embraced. You know, when we look at building new capabilities, new products, we focus on, is it actually going to help our customers get quicker value, right? Is it going to help them reduce five clicks to be able to get that process done? And if so, then we should build this feature because it will make it easier, and engage more people in the audience, more people like the customer to be able to get work done. So we're super excited about bringing all those capabilities >> Okay, so the big part of that is the product. I mean if you have a great product, that always helps. It's not the sole condition, but it helps a lot. >> Param: Yeah. >> Many times we've seen leaders that don't have the best product, but I'm guessing you feel as though you have the best product. So architecturally, what is it about UiPath that's different, that differentiates you? >> Yeah, I think the core difference is, I'd say, fundamentally at a company level, is in our culture. This is a culture that's built around customers. This is a culture that's built around humility. This is a culture that's built around getting things done, and being fast about it, right? You saw a lot of product innovation that we did. If we told you a year ago, we're going to do all this, you would've laughed at our face, right? We're continue to do that pace, at the pace the market wants. And I think that is the fundamental difference in us, versus the rest of the companies out there. I'd also like to believe that we are, from a technology perspective, we have an edge, because we didn't start with the legacy of doing RPA many, many years ago. We have a much more modern stack. You alluded to the fact that we came in from behind, and we've taken to the number one place very quickly. I think part of that is the architecture decisions that we've made are more modern, are not vetted in a lot of legacy, that are helping us bring more rapid innovation to the market. That are helping us build more resilient technology, that's helping our customers achieve those outcomes, the goals that they want to be able to do, more easily on our platform. We have a number of our customers that actually did not start with us. They started with one of our competitors, and they said, "We started, we thought it was going to work, "it didn't. We came to UiPath and we saw that "it actually works." And that's a testament to the technology that we built, that's actually helping deliver the results that our customers expect it to. >> Rebecca: So, >> Dave: You know, >> Sorry Rebecca, go ahead. >> I was just going to say that, one of the other things you said this morning, was that bots allow you to focus on you, focus on the more creative aspects of your job, and you brought up some customers, PepsiCo and Nielsen, too. Can you describe sort of, how you're helping customers focus on themselves, these employees who are now, you're taking away the tedium, and that's great, and they're giddy about that. But how are they, then, channeling that energy into strategy, innovation, and the sort of more value added things? >> Param: Yeah, you know I'll give you a really quick example of a customer, that I worked with, it's a bank. And in this bank, it's a retail bank, and what used to happen before we deployed UiPath, was the banker had to go to like six different applications, and pull reports of the customer they were about to go meet, print them all out, review the data, and be able to suggest what the customer's unique needs might be, right? So for that half an hour appointment with the customer, it used to take that banker another half an hour to get ready for that appointment. After the deployed UiPath robots, UiPath's robots now go pull up the data for the customer, from those six different core banking systems, and be able to feed that to a machine learning system, to suggest what their unique needs might be. So they need five minutes to get ready for that appointment. They're more ready for that appointment, and they deliver a better outcome. People want to help other people, right? They don't want to go to systems, and print reports, and read them, and understand what it might be. They really want to be able to go meet with the customer, and help solve their problems, that help the customer, but also help the business goals for the bank. And that's what makes the people that are using our technology more happier, right? It makes them free enough to say that, instead of now spending half an hour printing stuff, I now have that extra 25 minutes, because I still need five minutes to get ready, I have the extra 25 minutes, to think about, what else can I do to further more creative aspects of my job? Or maybe I don't have to work as hard as I did in the past. >> I wonder if I could ask you about, I've been drawing parallels today with another company, ServiceNow, that I've been tracking for a long time. And they started out in this kind of narrow, change management, ITSM space >> Param: ITSM, yeah. >> And then expanded their TAM dramatically. And you shared with us, yesterday and today in the keynote, You've got RPA for devs and testers, you know StudioT, that targets 2% of the market. and then you've got the citizen developers, that's StudioX, that expands up to 10%. Business analysts, which is Explorer and Insights, that gets you to 25%. And then apps, where automation is the apps, that was a little fuzzy to me, so I want to dig into it a little bit, but that's 100% of the market. That's your, whatever it is, 20, 40, 50 billion dollar TAM. My question is this, I was going to the event last night, and I ran into some business analysts. So you're already working with those folks. So it seems like you're learning from folks that are sort of using a product, that was maybe developed for testers and devs, but they're using it today as business analysts, and you're improving that. Can you help us just understand your product strategy, just in terms of what you've announced, and how it dove tails into those segments that we just talked about? >> Absolutely, so you know, our product strategy isn't tied to like, what are we going to do to grow our TAM, and other stuff. Our marketing organizers can get super excited about that, Bobby is all over that, but really everything we've done in the product today, is about listening to customers. Understanding what their needs are, what do they want us to grow into, and what capabilities they want us to go build, right? So we've expanded the StudioX, not because we thought everybody should have StudioX, but we actually had customers that took our product, the Studio product, and said, "We want to roll this out "to every single user within the enterprise." Because they thought that every person has unique needs and they should be able to build a bot for themselves. Well they came back and told us, well we wanted to do that, but this isn't really quite ready for all of our accountants. This isn't quite ready for all of our business analysts. Can you actually make it simple? All of these people use Excel, can you make it look like Excel? So we took all of that feedback, and that's what we focused on, building StudioX. So we can make sure we meet the needs of the market. And every single pillar of the investment that we've done, has focused around making sure that we're able to meet those requirements around those. Automation is the application, now I'm going to go to that. And that also came from, you know, there's different kinds of, if you look at, take a product like Analytics, right? Or Reporting. Different people within the organization have different kinds of needs. There's people that are like, "Hey I want to create my own reports, "I want to slice and dice, I want to understand the strands, "and I'm going to use it this way." Then there's somebody who says, "Oh, I want to bring more data into that, "and I want to do data joins, "and I really am going, I'm a data junky, "I'm going to build a data model around it." And then there's users that are like, "I just want to use the report, I want somebody else to build them, I just want this report every Monday morning." Those are more executives, they're like, I just want to look at the data, let me tell you my report, and I'm just going to use it, I'm just an end user. And that's what we're trying to do, is from an automation perspective, there's people that have different types of needs. There's going to be people that are true developers, RPA developers that we've targeted with Studio, then there's people that are business analysts that are like, I can do some stuff with it, I'm not going to spend 8 hours a day every day working on it, I may spend two hours, once a week, building something that's relevant for me. And that's what StudioX is targeted to. But then there's a whole lot of other users, that are like, I don't want to build anything myself, but I want to use it, things that are relevant for me. These are people, maybe like contact center agents, that are taking orders from customers. So, let's say, in a typical Fortune 500 company, if you hired a person to take orders today, you'd have to go train the person in at least 10 different applications to be able to take orders, right? You'd have to show them how it works, when a customer calls, if it's a material order take it in this SOP system, if it's a this order that came through an acquired company, take it in that system. That takes a lot of time. What is the call center agent, the order taking person, doing? They're essentially capturing some very basic information from the customer, that are saying, I am this customer, I want this, this, and this product to be shipped at this address, and tell me when you can ship it, and what is the price for that? What we're trying to do with that application, is give that order agent a very simple interface, where they can punch in the three things simply, and get the results back that the customer cares about, without having to learn how to jump hoops across these 15 different applications to be able to enter that. Because robots can learn those applications, and take what you have put into that interface, and do the work of putting in, cascading that data, and extracting information from those systems. That is the concept behind, automation is the application. >> Sounds like a killer app. >> Yeah, it is. Yeah I like to say it that way as well. >> I want to ask you about cloud. Cause you guys announced the ability, and I did it, I went and downloaded, not downloaded but I signed up, it took seconds. I mean it was simple, and now I got to invite other people, and start, you know, digging in. But we saw this with CRM. Email, Service Management, HR, now even analytic databases, all got SaSified. >> Param: Right. >> I'm curious as to why, not really it took so long, why didn't you start with SaS? Is there something unique about RPA? Is it cause Daniel was a Microsoft guy, pre-Azure? And will this industry eventually go all SaS? Or will it be hybrid, or? >> Param: I think it's like any other workload in the enterprise, there's some customers that are going to want to remain on premise, because that's who they are, that's what they do. >> Governance, compliance, all those, security, right. >> Governance, compliance, you know, we're special. And then there's other customers that are like, you know, we're going where the rest of the world is going. We're going to let this data center work in a cloud, that we believe is secure, has the governance and compliance. So I think we're meeting customers where they are. We're going to continue to support on premise deployments. We will continue to support deployments for customers that want to deploy on private cloud infrastructure. And we'll keep deploying customers that want to use in SaS. Your question was why did it take so long for this to go to that? I think, my theory behind that, is that a lot of the automations that are happening, are touching systems that are only available on premise. Some of these are affecting systems that haven't moved to the cloud, So companies are saying, well I've got to put my robot on premise, because it's got to touch this application that's on premise. I might as well deploy the whole infrastructure on premise. And what we've done with the cloud service, is we've given you the options. You will definitely run their infrastructure in the cloud. That manages and governs the robots. And you can decide to run the robots on premise, or you can decide to run the robots in the cloud, as VMs and machines in any data center. >> So if I can put it in my words, the data lives on prem. >> Param: Yes. >> So you're bringing the automation to where the data lives, independent of the cloud, so that's really why. So the latency issues, we mentioned the other ones, compliance, governance, you know, security, etc. But there's going to be performance implications as well. If you've got a lot of data on-prem, you want to be on prem. >> Again, yeah, it just depends upon, if you've got a lot of data on-prem, and more importantly the business applications that you're using, let's say you're trying to automate a process in a mainframe application that hasn't moved through any cloud yet, that's sitting on a server in the on-premise environment. And the robot can only access it if it's deployed on a machine that sits within the same network, then you've got to put the robot in there, that can access it there as well. >> Dave: It makes sense, it's not a standalone application. It's automating other apps, and touching others, it's got dependencies all over the place. >> Exactly, it's sort of like the lowest common denominator. If every application your touching is the cloud, there's no reason you want to put the robot on premise. You would want to put the robot in the cloud as well. But the reality is that people have moved some applications to the cloud, but not every application to the cloud, that the business process is touching. >> Dave: Well a lot of ERP, a lot of financials, I would imagine the folks I talked to last night were insurance industry, so. >> Yeah, those industries have a lot of homegrown systems, built a long time ago. >> Rebecca: So there's been a lot of exciting product announcements at this conference, but I want you to talk about what's coming up ahead. What are some of the things that you're working on, that are most exciting to you, as these bots become smarter, more durable, and more able to take on complex tasks? What are we going to be talking about at next year's UiPath? >> Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question, and I think you'll hear talk next year about a few things. One is, we started a lot of initiative this year, and we're going to release the version one of many of our products this time. We're going to keep focusing on making sure we make them enterprise ready, we take the feedback across the customers, and make it ready for what they're able to do. I think another key initiative that we're focused on, is contact center. We see mass adoption of our technology in contact centers, and today what we do, is we give our customers the components that we will deploy in call centers, but we don't actually have a finished solution for call centers. Call centers have a lot of automation opportunities, we'll build a more finished solution for contact centers. The other stuff that you'll hear us do more next year, is the concept of applications. We have some ways to build applications today, but I think we're going to grow that ability to create applications, compose applications, very quickly, and you'll hear us do a lot more next year there. >> Rebecca: Well we'll look forward to hearing about it. >> Param: I really look forward to telling you next year about it. >> Dave: Thanks for coming on. >> Rebecca: Thank you so much, Param >> Thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, that wraps up day one of UiPath Forward, come back tomorrow for more. >> [Electronic Music]