>>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.