>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're winding down. Day two, a forward five UI Path customer conference. This is the fourth time the Cube has been at a forward. Dave Nicholson, Dave Ante. Maureen Fleming is here. This is a program Vice President idc. She's got the data fresh survey data. We'd love to have the analyst on. And Kevin CRO is back on the cube. He's a partner for intelligent automation and digital. Upscaling is the operative word. Kevin, good to see you again, pwc. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on you guys. Yep. All right. We, we love idc. We love the data. You guys are all about it. So you've just completed a recent study. Tell us all about it. Who'd you survey? What was the objective? What'd you learn? >>Yeah, what we wanted to do was try to learn more about people who are adopting robotic process automation. So mainly large, you know, larger to midsize, enter midsize, large enterprises. And we wanted to figure out how many of them had a citizen developer program. And then we wanted to compare the difference between people who do not have that program and people who do, and what the difference is in terms of how, what kind of reach they have inside the enterprise, and also the different ways that, that they valued it. So the difference, so we asked the same questions of the, of these people without them knowing that we were actually looking for a citizen developer. And then we compared the results of that to see is it more valuable to have citizen developer and enterprise, or is it more valuable to have enterprise only? So what was the impact >>Global survey? >>It was North America. >>North America. Was it, was it we any kind of slice and dice in terms of industry or targets or you, >>We, we kept it across industry, cross industry. We're finding that RPA is adopting cross >>Industry way. Was it, was it UI path specific or more Any tech, Any automation, >>Any rpa. >>Okay. And top two or three findings. >>So one thing was, first off, the rapid growth rate in citizen, citizen developer programs grew 47% over a two year period. And so now for people who've adopted rpa, it's the majority there. They're, you know, it's a pervasive trend to >>See you're taking over, >>You know, right now the conclusion from that, and some other studies that I did that have similar conclusions is that we have to start learning to live with this idea that business users can learn how to develop. They are developing their driving value. And so now we just need to figure out how to build these sorts of programs accurately. And the other, the really key finding of it was that, that there was much more significant reach for people that were doing citizen developer plus enterprise automation, more reach, more processes touched, more employees impacted by it. And then on top of it, the, they rated the value, the people who had the combination rated the programs at a higher value across different measures. So effectively the, the combination is working out better than standalone top down automation. >>So Kevin, from what, what's your takeaway here? What does this mean to you and your customers? >>So I guess a, a couple things and just anecdotally, you know, building on what Marine found in the, in the survey, the concept of citizen development is a real concept and it's something that organizations are applying and trying to figure out how to apply at scale. The reason why they're doing it is twofold. One, early automation efforts struggled to get scale and they struggled to deliver value from a scale perspective. There were two major problems. The ability to identify the right opportunities and the ability to tackle a wide range of, from the little to the very large, often teams focus on the very large, but don't focus on the little, the little is important. The second part is thinking about how you create a better culture of innovation and actually drive identifying opportunities for the, the more, I'll call it technology professionals to focus on. And so, you know, there's been, you know, based on that big drive to say, okay, not how do we replace automation professionals with business users, you know, the random accountant, the random operations analyst. It's more around how do you actually engage them in innovation. And that in, in that engagement may involve actual hands on building of bots and technologies like UiPath or it might just involve generating ideas to get further engaged. >>So 47% growth. What's the catalyst for that kind of growth? Where's that come from? >>I scarcity? So, well there are a couple things. One is, you know, we all know about developer scarcity and it's strive to automate. You know, if you have an automation strategy in place, you wanna do this quickly and aggressively. But if you've got a shortage of, of people, you know, developers don't have enough, they're turning over. Then you go to, you go and figure out, well this is low code. And so why can't we train our business users who are the subject matter experts to do automation for themselves or their teams? So sort of think about this as the long tail, the things that that top down like enterprise, I think UiPath is calling it enterprise automation versus people automation. So, you know, so there's just different things that they work on as well. And there's also, you know, fearlessness on the part of a lot of people on the business side, they're not afraid of technology, they're not afraid of getting trained. >>And the other piece to me that made, like, I've covered this topic for a long time, and what I found originally when people started talking about citizen developers is that they, they were calling me and having inquiry about why these programs were failing. And when we would decompose the failure was because the ma their managers didn't give them any, they didn't put 'em in trading but wouldn't get, give 'em time to develop. And so they just could not, you know, they just were running into problems. And so with things that, things like PWC and what they're doing, they're sort of saying, here's the, here are the features of a program that matter, including being given time to develop and do that as part of your job. So >>Maureen, is there a minimum level size of organization that you find taking advantage of this? I mean, you know, where's the sweet spot for the value delivered from this kind of automation? >>Do you have an idea? Right. So we, we tended in some of the surveys, we tended to do like thousand employees up. So we were screening for that. But I also met with the, our, our analysts who covered smb, small midsize. She said that they've had that for a long time because they don't have these clear distinctions between IT and business. So then the question is, who are adopters of rpa, for example? And you know that that's still a little bit at, at, you know, the enterprise level, but, but citizen developer at it, it, it is SB is just a given concept. So, >>But is it, is there, is there an economy of scale that kicks in at a certain point? Have we been able to figure that out? I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of business process automation being such a competitive advantage that there becomes almost a divide because of smaller organization. Yes, they could go out and they can buy, they have access to the same software packages, but you have to build all of those processes. Yes. You have to develop those processes over time. So is there any sense for a divide possibly happening or what the, >>It's a really good question because they, you know, in a way people have to understand what a business process is, you know, and they need to understand what the technology can do. And so from that perspective, people who have thought leaders inside their organization and maybe have a chance to get out and look at broader topics might be more inclined to try this out and also identify directly as a problem. SMB also tends to try to buy package solutions. And you see larger enterprises say, well, you know, what we do is unique and so we should just sort of use horizontal technology and apply it at will where it's needed. And so for me that's kind of why we organize toward higher, you know, higher si, larger sizes. As it gets simplified, it's gonna go down into the SMB market though. >>So Kevin, when it comes to you guys, your client engagements, upscaling keeps, keep coming back to that word low code. Is it fundamental component of upscaling? Is it, is it, I don't say synonymous, but is it a prerequisite to have low code capabilities to scale? >>You know, from our perspective, I think the two biggest challenges with making this work, one is learning and development. How do you actually teach the skills in a way that allows people to apply them very quickly and give them the time to actually function right to the finding about managers not necessarily being supportive. And so you have to figure out, you know, what, you know, how do you actually create that right environment and give people the right tools? It's an area that we invested really heavily in from the PWC side with the, with the launch of our pro edge platform and really thinking about how to solve that. But then the problem that you're ultimately getting at once you solve the people equation is how do you get scale and how do you move quicker? And so the, you know, the, the, the, the biggest challenge is not should you let a, a business user build a bot. It's, you know, how do we actually build many bots, generate many ideas for the professional developers and actually create an ecosystem to move faster. Every client that we work with, it's all about, you know, how we're not moving fast enough. A COE cannot, you know, by itself automate an entire organization. And so, you know, the, you know, the, the this theme of scale really becomes, you know, the critical aspect of this >>Is the former other words, the the teaching and individual how to build a bot. Is that trivial or, or is that really not the big gate is what you're saying? It's, >>We don't think it's a big gate. I think the, you know, to the original question, I think the, the, the low code space is a ripe spot for this, you know, upskilling construct because you're not, you're not, you're, you're gauging with employees who don't have an undergraduate degree in computer science who are not IT professionals. And so giving someone, you know, a book on job and saying, go build an application's, probably not gonna be very productive. But with, with tools in the, in the low code space, be it RPA or be it other forms of lower code technology, you get people opportunity where they need to learn some technical concepts. You need to understand how the technology works and how basic programming techniques work, but you don't need to understand everything. And again, going back to the, the simple versus the complex, the goal here is not to turn people into professional developers. The goal is to get them engaged and, and create, you know, make them part of that company's digital transformation. >>But from what you just described, that's, to me it's basic logic skills. I mean you don't have to be, like I say, a assembly language programmer. Yeah. But you gotta understand and you gotta know the business process, right? I mean you have to be a domain expert. Yeah. >>But that, but that's the, that's the biggest advantage of this. You're engaging the people closest to the business process, right? You look at how most big IT projects failed was the same reason a lot of early automation efforts failed. You're creating, you know, a function that essentially lives in an ivory tower that's focused on, you know, where can I go out and find opportunities and automate. But you're not, those aren't the people that run the process day to day. Yeah, okay. You, you put it, you make those people that run the process day to day accountable, you're gonna get a different outcome >>And they'll lean in and get excited. Exactly. >>So where, where, where is that transition? I know it's easy to say, oh, you know, it's logic and people can do it, but what about having a bot whisperer in your, in your organization who's who, who literally says, you know, Maureen, I'm gonna come and sit with you on Friday and you're going to explain your frustrations to me and I'm gonna sit right next to you and I'm gonna code this bot for you and we're gonna test it and you're gonna tell me if it does what you want it to do. And Maureen doesn't need to understand how to move the widgets around and do anything. >>It's, you know, it's a great question cuz I think it's changing the nature of how you accelerate these efforts, right? I think you know, the, and if I go into early RPA days, the initial kind of thought process was let's just get a factory in here and build as many bots as possible. A lot of our client engagement today isn't always around our bot development services. It's around can you bring in coaches? Can you hold office hours? Exactly. We have an office hour construct, which I've never really had in my consulting career where we put, you know, I mean this obviously post covid when when people are in their offices, we put someone in a room and people can come by and get help. And I think having that, that coaching and mentoring construct is very helpful. What we've also seen, and I think it's a really critical success factor for clients to make this work, is thinking about how they pick a subset of their population and making them, you know, digital accelerators, digital champions, pick your word, not it professionals, peers who will actually get realtime dedicated. Right. And maybe a full time or a halftime job where that's exactly what they do. >>Maureen, we're out of time, but my last question for you is, when you do a survey like this, you know you have open ended sometimes and you analyze a survey, you take a bath in the data, write it up. There's always something that you wish you'd asked, which is great cuz then you could do it on the next one. What, was there anything in there that you wish you'd asked that you're gonna ask in the next one? Are you gonna explore in the next survey? >>Yeah. One of the things that I asked, one thing that I was glad I asked was, I, I, we, we spent time finding what were considered business side product champions or RPA champions and then we ask 'em what they did, how often they did, how much time they spent. But what I want, what I really, really wanna ask of my next survey, and I will, I've got a planned, is to find out how, how what percentage of population is involved with, with big a citizen developer and what activities are common and what are less common and you know, what their challenges are. So we'll be looking at a different kind of audience with this next >>Survey. Well, we'd love to have you back to talk about that. Just invite, Thank you very much. Come queue. Really appreciate it Kevin. Good to see you again. >>Good to see you. >>All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante. We're here wrapping up day two of UI path forward. Five live from the Venetian, all Las Vegas. Super right back.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to the queue. We are live at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante UI path forward for it is so great to be sitting in an anchor desk next to Dave and with guests in person, we're going to be talking about automation workforce of the future. I've got two guests here with Dave and me. Kevin crone is here intelligent automation and digital upskilling leader from PWC. Kevin. Welcome. Thank you. Can't wait to talk about upskilling and Bettina Koblick is here the chief people officer at UiPath. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. So, as I understand that PWC has embedded UI path into a couple of product offerings. One of them we're going to talk about today, Kevin that's pro pro edge. Talk to me about that. What is that? >>So, um, as we look at, uh, challenges that C-suite leaders are facing, I think one of the biggest emerging challenges right now is around the topic of upscaling. There's the number of jobs that are being displaced, um, is growing by automation. But on the flip side, the number of jobs that are emerging is actually greater and there is a consistent challenge that gets cited there. All of our research through our CEO survey, their work we've done with the world economic forum and other sources around the need to fill that gap. And most leaders feel like they're not doing a good job to, to fill that. So, um, we at PWC have invested in developing a, a new software product called pro edge, which is really focused on, um, identifying the skills needed for the future, teaching those skills and helping to scale the usage of the skills and the organization. And one of the key skills as we look at the digital space is UI path. And we really think that, you know, teaching non technologists around the use of tools like robotic process automation is going to be one of those critical kind of must have skills in the future. >>And patina, you guys are using pro edge. Why, why, why? I mean, you're like the automation pros, what do you need? >>We need it because we have the same, um, challenges that every other company has that introduced us automation, right? People, um, people's time, their tasks that they have been doing are basically displaced. Um, and we're trying to figure out how do we up-skill re-skill how do we position people who now no longer are work working on maybe 50% of what they've done in the past for their next role? Um, so it's incredibly important for us, >>You know, you know this well, Tina and Kevin, you as well, when, when the automation trend RPA first hit, it was like, oh yeah, the trade press, come on. It's going to take away jobs, blah, blah, blah. Now we're working perpetual workdays, right? We all weekend all night, you never stopped working. You're always on. So I think people will brace automation, but as the chief people officer, first of all, how, how was it getting through the pandemic? And have you seen, I presume that UI path folks embrace automation, of course it's in your DNA, but have you seen others sort of, is that narrative done in, is COVID effected that >>I think COVID has affected it, um, for a number of reasons, because so many things shifted in how we do work. Number one, and I can talk about that a little more, but I yesterday I was in a customer advisory board meeting actually with Kevin. And the biggest conversation was not about the technology. It was around what happens when automation is introduced to a company and what happens with people, um, as to whether they want, they're willing to adopt, embrace, have an automation mindset. So that conversation isn't done at all. And it's probably one of the biggest conversations after, you know, adopting the technology, trying to introduce it as how do you drive adoption. And a lot of that is people's people's ability to understand how it will make their life easier, but then not be afraid about what's next. Uh, so I think it's absolutely still a conversation. I don't know if you feel the same. Yeah, >>Yeah. It it's been interesting. I think during the pandemic cause peoples, you know, day to day work lives have gone up ended and he start to think about, um, you know, the, the mixture between what I'll call kind of transaction oriented type work versus analytical type work. And if it just, you know, historically everyone's always said we should do less transaction work and more analytic work. But I think the pandemic was almost like forced that conversation on steroids and people's lot. You I've had to figure out that, like, I don't want to do this type of work and I'm being, I have more demands on me and I'm being asked to do other things, how can I do this more effectively? And so part of this becomes learning these skills to automate the things in front of you right now, the part of this becomes, I need to be able to, to actually have that analytical skill set in the future. And I think that is almost a precursor for what we see happening. And that was, that was the fun part of the conversation yesterday is thinking about, okay, well, what is the, you know, what is the, uh, the accounting analyst role five years from now and what someone does today versus what someone does in five years and how do you actually plan for that, >>The patina, where in your organization, like who's using it and talk to me about the adoption and their willingness to embrace it. >>Yeah. So we are, we've introduced it to our finance organization. One of the reasons we did that is because our finance organization is also a big user of automation, right? So, um, what's been really interesting is that because the technology or because pro edge kind of takes biases out of mapping, what a person can do, um, what learning paths there are for them and what their job will look like in the future, in which job do they go to or could be a potential path. I think it actually motivates people much beyond having work shifting because of automation. Because in addition, you also get to see a path, right. And everywhere you turn, just want to know what's the possibility for the future. So, um, while I'd like to say it was genius for us to envision that it's, it's a pleasant surprise and something, we should talk about more, >>I'm sensing a journey. It's always the case where I know I call it the force March to digital. We were thrown into this. And so, so much was unknown. And I know our team, I mean our producers and it's death by a thousand paper cuts in any one individual thing is not that bad, but yeah, the Moffitt, it's just, that's what kills your work day, your work week and your mental health. And so maybe it's, that's kind of the starting point is, are pigs a band-aid for, for, for, for that fundamental, but then it's wow. I can see the light bulb goes off. I can see the potential, that's where the digital upskilling comes in. I mean, maybe that's oversimplifying it, but how do you see that journey? Yeah. >>Yeah. I think there's a couple of different pieces with this cause, you know, and it goes back to the divide between the things you need to do now. And how do you think about making your life easier, but then it really goes to what you need to do in the future. And that journey to actually get there is tough because it's not just a question of, Hey, I need to pick up a textbook or pick up an online training module. And I'm just going to become an expert. It's really thinking about what are the, what's the combination of different skills. I need to learn. Some of that's going to be hands on technical skills. It's going to be platforms like UI path. It may be other complimentary platforms in the analytics space and other things. Um, some of this may also be on the kind of softer side. >>How do I learn how to work in a more agile way and have a design thinking mindset, have a product mindset, but then it's really how's that going to change my role in the future. And how do I actually, for lack of a better word, start to embed these practices in my job in a way that I'm actually learning these skills and it will stick. And how do you actually manage that co culture change? Um, for lack of better word over time. That was probably the biggest thing I picked up from yesterday was just some of this talk around change management and culture, uh, which is, you know, we, we have a lot of, for lack of better word techie. Cause if this conference would like to think about all the cool stuff that technology doing, but the big lesson learned is really, you know, you actually have to make the stick inside an organization. >>And in the last year, Kevin, I'm curious about the adoption because you know, everything we've seen so much acceleration in the last year that digital acceleration, the acceleration in automation, we've also seen tremendous, uh, people and from a cultural perspective, I'd love to, for you to shed some light on what you've seen since you've rolled this product out, how is the pandemic, has it been an enabler of that change management and that cultural change, which historically is very hard to do. >>It's very hard. And I think this, if, if I want to CFO or COO two years ago and talked about the skills gap in what was happening, the organization, I would probably get someone that would be on and say, okay, yeah, that, that, that is happening. We need to think about this, but I got 50 other things I need to worry about. You know, I think over the past year a while, things like, you know, TA TA, well, time is a big, uh, luxury or having excess time is a big luxury that most people don't have. I think there's a recognition that, um, it's a challenging work environment right now. We're trying to get more done. People are not in person. Um, people have, you know, there's issues with, with mental health and other challenges and there's, uh, almost like a renewed focus on how do we make employees lives better and better can mean different things. >>But when I think about it, it's, it's giving people a hope that they have a future career path, that their job is not going to be eliminated, that they're developing the right skills and they're being given the capacity to actually do that now. And so a lot of the discussions have really been are around that fact. And I would say probably more so than the traditional just cost saving discussion than most automation, um, threads in with RPA begin with this really, you know, became, um, we need to do this and we need to, you know, send a message to our employees that we really care about you. And this is something that is really going to be us investing in you as a perk in the future. >>What's the role of the head of human capital management in the context of automation? Is she the champion? Is she the therapist? Is she the change agent? Well, how do you see that? >>Well, clearly he should have been talking to the head of people, um, two years ago. We even, because, uh, the way I think about it, and I think a lot of people in my role think about it is, you know, a CFO really looks after the financial health of the company. Um, the focus for us is looking after the people, health of the company, right? And so I think, um, in my career, what I've learned is that change is constant. We all know this and, um, change for people is difficult. So the way I think about introducing new technology, introducing automation, introducing anything that changes or being forced to change because of something like a pandemic, um, what I really ended up thinking a lot about is how does that impact people and how do we, how do we help them through it? Um, so that's my lens. And I think that's a chief people officer lens to all of this, but makes a perfect partnership with platforms that make this easy for us. Because if you can imagine, uh, a C-suite person comes to, uh, comes to an HR department and says, tell me what we should do here. How do we develop all our people? And it's, it's an overwhelming task. What pro edge does is just beautifully delivers this on a platter, um, in a way that we could never do manually. So it's >>Talk to me a little bit Bettina about the last year and a half. And obviously as being the chief people, officer, you came in, you said about five months ago, but obviously during a very, very challenging time, I always think that the employee experience is directly related to the customer experience. I see them as inextricably linked, how have you been able to foster a good employee experience in your time here in a very strange world so that the customer experience, I mean, you guys are a fast moving company, 8,000 plus customers. So that, that customer experience is a stellar as UI path has always had to be. >>Yeah, I think for us, it came down to just some simple things. Um, one is just being flexible. Uh, there was not a one size fits all. We had to recognize that we have to meet people in a place that works for them, everybody, uh, dealt with a different reality and the same for our customers. Um, and I agree with you. I think employees that feel enabled that feel safe, that feel they have a future, um, have a much different relationship with their customers, um, then employees that are worried about their safety and security and whatnot. So we really took an approach of flexibility, safety, um, meeting people where they are jumping in when there were big crises in India and whatnot to really, really take care of our people and help them understand that we're here for >>Big impact on mental health. Did you see that, um, there was an insert in the wall street journal. I think it was last week, uh, women at work. Um, and it was a stat in there. I don't know if you're a working mom, but it said that, uh, 30, it was Qualtrics was the source. 30% of working moms said their mental health had declined since the pandemic. Interestingly only 15. I said only 15% of working dads. Um, so that was sort of interesting, uh, and notable, uh, but you know, to your point, CFO, financial health of the company, the chief people officer, the, the human capital health. Yeah. >>Um, very much so. And by the way, I'm not surprised by that stat as a woman. >>I thought it was, I thought it was low. I was talking to my wife about it the other day. She's not a working mom, but she's like my mental health, even though I'm not a working mom, I have my mental health. I'm a working dad, but, but I got it easier than she does, but, but, and I'm not surprised at the disparity. I'm surprised that the only 30% and 50%, I think it's a lot higher than that. And people may be just like, I don't know if that's actually, maybe some people like working at home and that's, I could see that both sides of that equation. Yeah. >>There's also a stigma around mental health that we've, that's been addressed in. So even during the Olympic coverage this last summer, but having your team be really focused and enabled and knowing that they took to your point, Kevin, from an upscale perspective, that they have a path where they can go, they can increase their own value to the company. >>I completely agree. And I think, uh, other studies show that what people really want is a future at work. And, and this is what I think privilege dresses. Beautiful. >>Yeah. It's interesting. Right. Cause I think when you talk about some of the mental health challenges, I think it can get down very quickly to a cab just on this crazy schedule or I'm on zoom for 14 hours a day. And I, I don't have the time to breathe in my time commuting where I may have had time to decompress. It's just been replaced with more meetings. And I think that that may be the, like the surface issue, but I actually think if you go below the surface, not being in the office, not having some of the in-person networking, not having some of that creates anxiety about the future. And you're not really sure around, okay, what does my career path look like? I may not be getting the amount of career counseling that I used to get just by impromptu conversations or, you know, just by more traditional ways. Um, but I think the reality is when we look at the way most companies are thinking about their future work models. It's not going to go back to the way the world operated two years ago, it's, we're going to be in some sort of hybrid model. And so it really becomes more important to actually dig below where maybe some of the challenges were in the passengers, not surfaced. And I think upskilling and thinking about, um, kind of role skills and roles, it just becomes a much more important conversation. >>Absolutely. Last question, Bettina for you, we're almost out of time, but you started this in the, in financial, in the finance organization. What do you see over the next couple of years in terms of being very much UI path land and expand with your customers? Where do you see it rolling out across two iPads. >>We're already talking to our sales enablement group. Um, for a couple of reasons we want them to experience it. We want them to have also, we want them to have the conversations with our customers much like what we learned yesterday, right? It's a multi-dimensional conversation. It's not just a financial ROI, it's a people journey, change management. So we'll, we're taking it to our sales enablement group. We're absolutely gonna use it in HR, uh, obviously. Um, and I, I would just think we'll use it in two years. It'll be enterprise wide >>Different is pro edge in the marketplace. And just in, particularly in terms of its business impact. >>Yeah. I take a stab. So when we think about the challenge in a topic like digital upskilling, I think in traditional approaches to learning, it would be okay, we're going to enroll someone in a learning program. You know, you're going to go through, do certain amount of self study. Maybe there's a class, the some classroom based training. And that's it. I think for us, we saw two different challenges on both sides of that. One was trying to identify who needs to learn, what, and what part of the organization, why is that important? What an executive may need to learn is going to be different from what someone who does the transaction processing, uh, for their, their full-time job needs to learn and learning kind of from basic digital acumen through kind of hands-on skills. What are the different, um, pieces? I think probably the more interesting part is the back end of that. >>And thinking about, you know, how do you actually put these skills into practice and how do you put scale? One of the buzzwords that's thrown around at this conference a lot is the concept of citizen led automation as a topic. And really how, how do you have your, does this users building bots or creating data dashboards or doing other things that is, um, that's challenging. So as we design the product, what we really wanted to think about was that end to end journey from kind of the point of identifying skills through the point of scaling a citizen led effort. It's one of the things we're really excited to be working with UI path on is one of the core technologies that we, that we view in this ecosystem is really thinking about how do you make that happen? And if the outcome is not just people are new things, but the outcome are, people are actually creating solutions that are, that are having an impact on their job on a day to day basis. We think that's a really powerful concept. >>It's really important work, what you guys are doing. Thank you both for joining David me on the program today, talking about this very interesting symbiotic relationship partners, PWC UI path customers. Really interesting, great work that you're doing. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having us for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from Las Vegas at the Bellagio UI path forward for it. We'll be right back, stick around.

>>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.

>> From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we are at Automation Anywhere in midtown Manhattan, 2018, excited to have our next guest, he's Kevin Kroen, he's partner of financial services, intelligent automation leader at PWC, Kevin, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> So financial services seems to be a theme, we're here in Manhattan, why is financial services an early adopter or maybe a frequent adopter or an advanced adopter of the RPA technology? >> Sure, so I think as we see our financial services clients and their agendas, there's been a huge focus on productivity and simplifying their overall operating model over the past couple of years. Banks in particular have gone through several years of having to focus their spending on non discretionary manners like regulatory compliance and risk management. And what that's generated is a need, as they started looking towards the next generation to really start thinking about what they're gonna look like in a post regulatory environment. And automation has quickly risen to the top of the agenda. >> What they're gonna look like in a post regulatory environment. >> Yes. >> Why a post regulate? >> Well I mean if you look through, you know what banks have had to deal with in term of Dodd-Frank, in terms of CCAR, you know, the regulation from federal reserve, these are things that took a lot of spending both on implementing operational processes and on implementing technology. A lot of that work is starting to you know, the banks are putting that behind themselves and so as they look forward and look at how they're going to gain more profitability in the future, the challenge becomes, there's not necessarily a new set of product innovation coming in, and so you have to really look at the expense line. >> Right. >> And so because of that automation has risen to the top of that agenda and so this continues to be one of the top areas of interest that we're getting from our clients. >> Right, so when you say post regulatory, you mean like a new regulation that they have to respond to, not that they're suddenly not gonna be regulated. >> There's not a lot of new regulations coming in right now, especially- >> That pesky one last week, GDRP. >> Yeah but in the US we're in an environment right now, there was just, you know, the revisions to the Dodd-Frank bill that were passed a lot of regulatory rules were actually being loosened so you don't necessarily have an increase in dollars that are going to be going into that. >> Right right, so it just always fascinates me, right, I thought ERP was supposed to wring out all the efficiency in our systems but that was not the case, not even by a long shot and now we continue to find these new avenues for more efficiency and clearly this is a big one that we've stumbled upon. >> Yeah, you know I think it's interesting, when you look at big technology investment over the last decade or two, you could argue a lot of efforts been focused at what I call the kind of core infrastructure and core plumbing so you know, how do I consolidate data into a single location? How do I make sure that data reconciles into different parts of my organization but that like kind of last mile of what someone does as part of their day to day business process was never really addressed, you know or is only addressed in pieces, and so I think as you start looking at the productivity term and how you actually start getting efficiency, we have very few clients that are saying, I want to take on that next big ERP type of limitation or I'm ready to spend 300 million dollars on a new project, they're looking to try to get the most value out of what they already have and they're actually looking to look at that last mile and how can they actually gain some benefit off it so the RPA technologies I think we're one of the catalysts of just being the perfect technology in the right place at the right time from a current business environment, a current technology spend perspective. >> Yeah it's pretty interesting Mihir was talking about, you know one of the big benefits is that you can take advantage of your existing infrastructure, you know, it's not a big giant rip and replace project but it's, again, it's this marginal incremental automation that you just get little benefit, little benefit, little benefit, end of the day, turns into a big benefit. >> Yeah, and I think that's, you know, it's quick, it's fast, it's, you know it can be implemented in an agile manner and you know, our clients are continuously telling us over and over again, they're willing to invest, but they wanna invest where they're gonna see a tangible payback immediately. >> Right. >> And I think when you start to talk the concept of digital transformation, it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people but there are big picture changes that could be made, those may be longer term trends but they're more immediate things and more immediate benefits that could be gained and I think that's really the sweet spot of where RPA and Automation Anywhere fall into. >> I was just looking up Jeff Immelt in his key note said this is the easy fountain money of any digital transformation project, I think that was the quote, that you'll ever do. That's a pretty nice endorsement. >> Yeah and it's, as we go out, we talk to CFOs, COOs, CIOs, you know, it's, the value proposition is really attractive because, you know, there have been, there's a track record of failed, technology projects failed big transformation projects and, you know, no one wants to necessarily risk their career on creating the next big failure and so I think using technology like RPA almost as an entry point or kind of like a gateway drug into the digital world, see the benefits, start to understand what are some of the business problems and historical kind of, you know, things you're trying to untangle in your infrastructure, attack that and then, you know, start to layer on additional things on top of that, once you get good with RPA and then you can start figuring out, okay, that's they gateway to artificial intelligence, okay how do I start to apply AI across my organization? As you get beyond AI, okay, how do I get into, more advanced state infrastructure and you can start thinking about this world where you can, you know, rather than do the big, five year project where you're gonna try to solve world hunger, it gives you a chance to kind of incrementally go digital over time and I think that's definitely the direction we see a lot of our clients wanting to go in. >> Right, Kevin I want to get your feedback on another topic that came up again in the keynote, was just security, you know it was like the last thing that was mentioned, you know, like A B C D E F G and security, financial services, obviously security is number one, it's baked into everything that everyone's trying to do now, it's no longer this big moat and wall, but it's got to be everywhere so I'm just curious, from the customer adoption point of view, where does security come up in the conversation, has it been a big deal, is it just assumed, is there a lot of good stuff that you can demonstrate to clients, how does security fit within this whole RPA world? >> You know with security and I would just say the broader kind of risk management pieces to the operator infrastructure are one of the first questions we get asked and a highly regulated environment like financial services, you know, the technology is easy and powerful with RPA but you also have to take a step back and say okay, I can program a bot to go do anything in my infrastructure, and that could mean running a reconciliation or it could mean going to our wire system and trying to send money out the door. And so there's a lot of concern around, not only understanding the technical aspects to you know, how the tools work with different types of security technologies, but more looking at your approach to entitlements and your approach to how you actually manage who has access to code bots, deployed bots in production, the overtime, understand what happens, you know we did a presentation to a board of directors a couple months ago on kind of automation more broadly and you know this is, you know, senior level executives the first question we got was, you know, okay, how do I prevent the 22 year old kid that just came off of campus from building a bot that no one knows about, setting it loose in our infrastructure and it going rogue, right? And so I mean this group was pretty savvy, they caught onto it very quickly and you know, the CIO of this client was sitting next to me and she kind of didn't have an immediate answer to that and I think that was kind of the a-ha moment, this is something we really need to put some thought into around you know, who are we gonna let build bots, what policies are gonna be set around how bots get deployed into our production environment, how are we gonna monitor what happens? You know how are we gonna get our auditors, our operational risk folks, our regulators, how are we gonna get all our different stakeholder groups comfortable that we have a well controlled, well functioning bot infrastructure that exists? >> Right, cause the bots actually act like people, they're entitled as like a role right, within the organization? >> We have clients that have literally had to set bots up as new employees, like they get onboarded, they have a, you go to the corporate directory and you can see a picture of R2D2, right like and it's the way they get around how they get a bot intel to a system but it's still, it's not a human right, so you still have to have a policy for how you actually will get code that uses that bot entitlement to function right and so that has to be done in a well disciplined, well controlled manner. >> Right, because to give them the ability to provide information to help a person make a decision is very different then basically enabling them to make that decision and take proactive action. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, it's funny we talked to Dr. Robert Gates at a show a little while ago and he said the only place in the US military where a machine can actually shoot a gun is on the Korean border, but every place else they can make suggestions but ultimately it's gotta be a person that makes the decision to push the button. >> And we're seeing, you know, trying to equate that to financial services, you see a similar pattern where there are certain areas where people are very comfortable playing this technology, you know you get into accounting and reporting and you know more back office type processes, you got other areas that people are a little less comfortable, you know anything that touches kind of wire systems or touches things that, you know, going out the door, touches kind of core trading processes, things like that there's a different risk profile associated with it. I think the other challenge is too is RPA is getting the gateway drug into this going back to my previous point, as you start to layer additional technologies into this, you might have less transparency over understanding clearly what's happening, especially as artificial intelligence takes a much broader role in this and so there's gonna be a lot of scrutiny I think over the next couple years put into like how do I understand the models that are created by artificial intelligence technologies and those decisions that are being made because you, if your regulator says, okay, why did you make this decision, you have to be able to explain it as the supervisor of that intelligent bot, you can't just say, oh it's cause what the machine told me to do, as so, that'll be one of the interesting challenges that's ahead of us. >> Yeah it's good, I mean it's part of the whole scale of conversation, I had interesting conversation with a guy, talking about really opening up those AI boxes so that you have an auditable process, right, you can actually point to why it made the decision even if you're not the one that made it in real time and it's doing it really really quickly so. >> Exactly. >> Really important piece. >> Yeah and as PWC, it's one of our challenges, as a consultant I'm helping clients implement this, my colleagues in our audit practice are now grappling with that same question because we're increasingly being asked to audit that type of infrastructure and have to prove that something did what it was suppose to have done. >> Right, right, alright Kevin, well nothing but opportunities for you ahead and thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. >> Okay, thank you for having me. >> Alright, he's Kevin, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Automation Anywhere, Imagine 2018 in Manhattan, thanks for watching. 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