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