>> From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Manhattan at the Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018. 1100 people milling around looking at the ecosystem, looking at all the offers that all the partners have. And we're excited to have one of the strategic advisors from the company, he's Bill Raduchel. Strategic advisor, been in the industry for >> 50 years, 40 years, 50 years, whatever. Forever. >> So Bill, thanks for takin' a few minutes. >> My pleasure. >> So how did you get involved with Automation Anywhere? >> Oh the way most things happen in life, friends, right? You get involved, and got to talking to Mihir, and we got, we see the world much the same way. And see the importance of bots and bringing productivity back to the economy. And no other way to do it. So just ya know, it grew. >> It grew. So it's interesting right? Cause I though ERP was supposed to have rung out all the efficiency that, and waste in the system, but clearly that was not the case. >> I won both CIO of the year and CTO of the year, and I put in an ERP system, and I understand it. It also failed three times going in. It was incredibly painful, but it produced over a billion dollars in cash saving. So it did. The problem is the world changes. And the world changes now at a pace far faster than you can possibly change your ERP system. >> Right. >> I mean ERP systems are built to be changed every I don't know, 15 to 25 years. And the world in 25 years is gonna look very different than the world does today. So we just have a huge disconnect between how fast we can create and deploy software, and how fast the world is changing to which that software has to relay. >> Right. And still so many of the processes that people actually do in their day job, are still spreadsheet based, you know, my goodness. How much of the world's computational horsepower is used on Excel on stand alone little reports and projects? >> Another question to ask is how many errors are in those spreadsheets? >> That's right. Not enough copy paste. >> I mean, I was on a study for the National Academy of Sciences, and we looked at why productivity growth wasn't happening. And one answer, which we just talked about, is Legacy software. I mean, you just couldn't change it, you couldn't, you know when you had to rewrite the software all productivity growth just slowed to a crawl. The other thing is something that economists call lore. And lore is basically oral tradition. But it's the way the company really works. >> Right. >> You have all these processes and all these procedures but when you get down and you start talking and sort of like, what is it the secret boss show? I mean, you learn the little things that the people down at the bottom know. Well, so far, Automation has never really penetrated that. And yet that becomes the barrier to almost all change. So what RPA does, is RPA actually begins to go after lore. RPA allows companies to begin to understand lore, and understand how to optimize it. Understand how to record it. I mean, you know, it's not written down. It's below the level that people bother to document and yet, if you don't change the lore, you're not gonna matter. >> You're not changing anything. >> You're not changing anything. So this is why this is so exciting because for the first time, companies, organizations, people, I mean we see all this stuff coming out just to help us in our everyday lives. You get to go at the lore. I mean, you know that, well you don't put that field in, no you wait 20 seconds after you filled in this field before you go and do that, because it takes that long for that and you get an error over here. That's how things really work. And this is the kind of technology that can actually address that. And so for that point of view it's really revolutionary because we've never been able I mean, oral tradition has never been subject to a whole lot of scientific studies. >> Well the other thing is just so impressive when you've been in the business a long time, you know we're talking about AOL before we turn on the cameras and shipping CDs around. >> Right. >> As we get closer and closer to ya know, infinite compute, infinite storage, infinite networking, 5G just around the corner. At a price point that keeps absutodically getting closer and closer to zero, the opportunity for things like AI, and to really apply a lot more horsepower to these problems, opens up a whole different opportunity. >> Two comments to that. One is, about 15 years ago the National Science Foundation funded Monica Lamb at Stanford to do a project on the open mobile internet, POMI. And one of their conclusions was that at some point in the future, which may be happening now, we would all have a digital butler. And everybody would have, basically a bot. They would be living 24/7 operating on our behalf, doing the things that help make our life better. And that is you know, really what's gonna happen. Now you see AI, and if you saw there was a report that got a lot of news from the speech given at the Federal Reserve Bank at Dallas, I think. Where the guy said well productivity is fine, it's just that the AI technology hasn't been able to find a way to be effective, or made real. Well the way it's gonna be made real is these bots because you still got your ERP system. Now granted I can have AI over here, but if it doesn't talk to the ERP system, how is the order gonna get placed? How is the product gonna get mailed? How is it gonna get shipped? So something has to go bring these together. So again, you're not gonna have impact from AI unless you have an impact from bots. Because they're the interface to the real world. >> Well the other huge thing that happened, right, was this mobile. And the Googles and the Amazons of the world resetting our expectations of the way we should be interacting with our technology. And you know, it's funny but there's little things that are in our day all the time. I mean, Ways is just a phenomenal example, right? And auto fill on an address. You know, this is the address you typed in, this is the one that USPS says is the official address from your home. So it's all these little tiny things that are just happening >> Spell check. >> Without even, spellcheck. >> Spell check, I mean, the inventor of spell check is John Seely Brown. And he was giving a speech at the University of Michigan 15 years ago and the graduates weren't pleased. Here was a computer scientist gonna come talk to them and it's at the Michigan stadium, and they're throwing beach balls and no one's paying any attention. And the person who introduced him said and I wanna introduce John Seely Brown, the man who invented spell check. And he had a standing ovation from 100,000 people because that got their attention. They all knew that that was really important. No you're right. I mean, the iPhone is 10 years old. Well I mean smart phones are 20 years old. The iPhone is 10 years old, 10 and a half now. I mean, it's changed how we live our lives, how we do business, how everything goes. Anybody who thinks that the next 10 years is gonna be less change >> No, it's only accelerating. >> There's so many vectors. I mean a year ago, a friend coined the Cambric Extinction, basically a play on words on the Cambrian Extinction. And it's Cloud, AI, mobile, big data, robotics, Internetive things, and cyber security. And he pointed out that any one of those would be incredibly disruptive, they were all hitting at the same time. The thing that's amazing is that's a two year old comment. Block chain wasn't around. >> Right. >> And today, block chain may be more disruptive than any of those. And yet, how do all of those connect to the Legacy systems for some long period of time? It's what's going on in this room. >> Right. Well cause I was gonna ask you, cause you advise a ton of companies, so you've seen it and you continue to see it across a large spectrum. What's special about this company? what's special about this leadership team that keeps you excited, that keeps you involved? >> It's the people side of this, right. I mean, I have been to more computer related conferences in my life than I can count. I've never seen as much enthusiasm as there is here. Maybe, at a Mac conference. But I mean it's that same level of enthusiasm, it's passion. How does technology get adopted when you have to go invest in it? It takes passion. You gotta get people who believe. People who are committed. People who wanna go and do something with it. And that's what they've been able to do. That's what Mihir has done. And it's been brilliant in bringing that on board. >> Yeah, you can certainly feel it here in the room. Especially when it's still relatively intimate. >> Right. >> You know, people are sharing ideas, you know they're excited. It's really not kind of a competitive vendor fair, it's more of a community that's really trying to help each other out. >> Well that, I mean, they're at that stage. It may get a little bit, you know this, well no I'm not gonna tell you about my bot. It's a great bot and it does great things, but nope, I'm not gonna tell you how it works. >> Right. So just last parting word, you know as you see kind of the bot economy. We've seen they got the bot store, I guess they have a hundred bots, they've only had it open for a very short period of time. You can buy, sell, free. What do you see kind of the next short term evolution of this space? >> I think that bots are probably worth somewhere around a point in productivity growth. Well, a point >> Not a basis point, but a point point. >> A point. That's what Makenzie says, that's what, I mean because this is allowing you to capture benefits that you should of and you haven't. A point in global productivity is about a trillion dollars. So then your question for the bot economy is okay, if the value of the bots is a trillion dollars, what portion of that can the bot economy capture? And that you know, I mean 20 30 percent is certainly a reasonable number to go look at. The real world lives over here, all this technology change lives over here, and bots are gonna be the bridge by which you bring those two things together. So yes, it should be big and growing for a long time. >> Well Bill, thanks for taking a minute. I really appreciate the conversation. >> Great, thank you. >> Alright, he's Bill, I'm Jeff. You're watchin' theCUBE from Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)