>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back. David Ante with David Nicholson. This is UiPath Forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, you know, the customers here, they're automating all the time, sucking work and the cube. We're sucking all the information out of the experts and the customers. A bar Toban is here. He's the global business, Shared services, leading automation and AI at PepsiCo. And Para Colan is back is the chief, He's the chief product officer, UiPath longtime Cube alum. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Great to see us all day. So you guys keynote today, you know, excited to have PepsiCo on. I'm not sure I've ever interviewed PepsiCo in the Cube, but tell us about your role there. >>Absolutely. So I'm part of a PepsiCo global business shared services team. I lead automation and AI capabilities. GBS has, you know, we started GBS portfolio back about three and a half years ago, and we have a six hubs across PepsiCo. And as, as a part of my role, we deliver transformational capability across the PepsiCo. >>When did it all start? >>About three and a half years ago, 2019. So >>Prior to the pandemic. Yeah. You know, versus the pandemic was a catalyst for this. Yeah. But it was at the catalyst, but maybe it sped it up a bit. Yeah. >>PepsiCo journey started with, if, if you look at the PepsiCo, you know, the automation journey, it started back in 2017, but the GBS portfolio took shape back in 2019. So prior to that, you know, PepsiCo was definitely, you know, working on lot of, you know, the automation capabilities and automation product across, you know, PepsiCo. But with the introduction of PepsiCo global business shared services team, we are, you know, centralizing a lot of transformation capability, you know, across the functions that, that we support within the >>PepsiCo and, and UI path. Was going to part of that journey all along? Or was there sort of other activities beforehand or how >>No, no, absolutely. Starting from 2017, if I, you know, remembered, you know, with the vision of our, you know, some of our senior leadership team and recognizing the value of, you know, automation in the core, you know, capability as a transformation at that time, you know, we started with just like anybody else, right? We started with, you know, proof of concept, showed some, you know, early wins and the value back to the business, start setting up some, you know, business processes and capabilities, stood up the platform, build a complete, you know, ecosystem around that, you know, platform and partnership with, you know, UI bot team. And you know, from there, here we are five years. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very critical component to our digital transformation capability and, and yes, leverage across >>Let's talk platform. So you, you guys have made some announcements this week. You talk about the business automation platform. I remember our first forward was, you know, RPA tool. Okay. Yeah. And then you guys made acquisitions. I was there for that. So the process process cold and then people started to really expand it and it's really come in amazingly long way in a short time. So what did you guys announce today? What'd you talk about on stage 20, 22, 10? Tell us more about it. >>Absolutely, Dave. So you've seen the journey, you've been with us since the early days. You know, we were in 2017 and RPA tool that could automate a representative task that happened over and over again in the environment. And then three years ago you were here when we announced the automation platform, we said, it's not just about a task, it's about involving humans in bots to manage end to end processes. It's about discovering what automation opportunities exist. It's about using ai. Pepsi Co was actually the pioneer of using AI along with automation. You know, we were in stage together with them in, in 2019. And where we are now is we're essentially seeing people want to take the next step with automation. They're saying that it's no longer just an automation tool, It's the way we operate. It's the way we innovate in the organization. So they're really making sure that it becomes a part of their digital transformation journey that they're on. >>And they're saying that we can do the digital transformation by consolidating multiple DRP systems and CRM systems. And that'll take us seven years to do, or we can go with UI path and we can leverage the core that we can leverage the GL system that exists today. We can leverage inventory tracking system that exists today and start to build processes on top of that that can adapt to what customers are trying to do in this digital age. And that's where, you know, we've made announcements today is, is really pivot the platform to be a business automation platform. And there's sort of three layers, you know, unique but you know, connected layers of the platform. The first one is discover. And Discover is all about finding your processes, identifying the opportunities, making sure that you are managing the return on investment. What is the process? You know, how are you getting ROI on it? >>The second one is automated, and that is really where we're applying semantic automation to identify the digital building blocks of an enterprise, which is your data, your document, your screens and communication. Like putting all of that together and saying you can automate our processes, leveraging a lot of intelligence that exist in how business processes are done. And the last one is operate, which is if you're trying to execute a business process at scale, you're processing not just, you know, a task thousand times, but you are fulfilling millions of transactions. You're, you know, you're looking at trillions of records to identify what processes you need. A scalable enterprise platform that's able to ingest a lot of data, report on metrics, reporting efficiency. So that's what we've announced today is an automation platform that companies can use to put at the center of the digital transformation >>Journey. So I about the interesting thing about PepsiCo, you guys started in 2017. Yeah. So kind of early, early on. Yeah. Yeah. And you kind of been there with the progression platform. So my question to you is end up, it was, you know, we've seen the e from primarily on-prem, now it's cloud first. Yeah. How disruptive or non disruptive was that for you? Did you have to rip and replace? Did you have to sort of retool or migrate? What was that like? >>No, I mean, significant disruption, right? I mean, I mean, as, as we started our journey back in 2017, just like, you know, PRM mentioned, right? With simple rule based, you know, the automation from then now to our journey where our continue to, you know, infuse, you know, AI capability, document understanding, conversation ai, right? As a part of our end to end portfolio. At the same time, I think the cloud is providing a fantastic opportunity for us to continue to scale, right? You know, scale at, at a large. So that I think is a fantastic, you know, fantastic platform and fantastic, you know, the opportunity that we are looking forward >>To know. So how do you affect adoption inside of the organization? Can you talk about that? What's working? What's, >>It's always value driven as you know, right? I mean, the business business has to see the value. It it, it was, I mean, I would, you know, admit it was not as easy as before, but as the mindsets have started to shift, right? As the people have started to realize the value that, you know, the automation brings to, you know, the, I mean, you know, not just the, the value for the business, but actually transforming the entire portfolio, right? And, and people have started to see now that not every automation project is going to be transformation product, but for every transformation project you will find the automation at the heart and the core of it. So I, I, I think that's what has started to shift the mindset of, of uniforms. >>So how do you know when you have end to end? What are you wake up one day and say, Wow, we've achieved it. You know, is it pieces that come together? Yeah. What do you say? >>Yeah, You know, we wanna look at customers from, you know, from an end to end perspective. It's not just about piecemealing mealing finding a problem, solving it, really what does it deliver from, from an end to end perspective. Did you actually, you know, because a lot of times companies will say, we wanna automate X number of processes, and, and they do that and they're like, Well, we've automated a lot of processes. We're not sure what value we're getting out of it. It's the ability to measure like, what impact is this automation having on your business from an operational metric, but from a business metric as built. But then going back and saying, Well, where is the biggest pain point? Where do we have the largest value that we can give to the business back? So one of the things we actually announced today is the ability to take at an look at an idea and look at what was the estimated benefits of that idea, and then map it all the way through execution to say, what are we getting? >>We estimated we were gonna save a million dollars by doing those automation, or what have we achieved till now? Have we achieved a million dollars? Have we achieved half a million dollars by having achieved? That's true. That never happens. That, and, and, and, and it's hard to do that, like the data existed, but it's really hard for people to pull that data out. So we build out the box dashboards that give you the ROI bag, and that's why it's really important to, to make sure that, you know, you look at it not just as a technology project, but more as a investment from a business side. And so you can making a business more efficient. Yeah, >>That's, I just, I know you were jumping in, but that's super important. Cause you know, you run a lot of projects. Yeah, absolutely. And each of those projects has zone roi, then you jam it into the application portfolio. Exactly. And then everybody sort of forgets about it. You can't really track what impact it had because there's always, you know, some things that are benefit, some things are sometimes a negative. And so it's that holistic picture that you >>Trying to achieve, extremely critical point, what you hit on, right? From it's measuring the benefit and measuring the continuous benefit across, and not just from start and end, Okay, what I promised I delivered or not, but, but you have to have this continuous mindset. And so I think Yeah, definitely that that's a very, very critical to our finance team and our cfo, >>They organic mechanisms. It's constantly >>Evidence. Absolutely. Yeah. So abar, yeah. Global business shared services. Yeah. When you think of PepsiCo, yeah, of course people immediately think of Sure, Pepsi. But PepsiCo is a multi tentacled absolutely beast of a company. Absolutely. In a good way. Yeah. For organizations that are in that same category, holding companies, companies that have all sorts of different entities that are working together under one umbrella, how shareable is this idea of automation and business automation process moving forward? How, how shareable is that on the share oter? Yeah. Yeah. As far as, as far as, as far as you're concerned, are you, are you talking to some people where you're saying, Hey, I'm here, I'm here from GBS and I'm here to help, and they look at you like you're crazy because you don't understand their business? Or is this something that relatively easily applies across businesses >>That No, to your point, I mean, very valid point, right? I mean, it's, that's, that's the gbs, global business shared services mindset, right? As you move the functional areas into the Pepsi, into the Pepsi, gbs, like hr, procurement, commercial sales, supply chain, right? That's where you wanna start to find those, you know, the optimization, you know, opportunity. You wanna start to ize your processes, and that's where you will, you know, as you transition this processes within the gbs, that's what create those, you know, opportunities for you. So >>What, >>What about automation opportunities? Not in the sh I know you're in the shared arena. Yeah, yeah. But each of those business units has processes that could probably be optimized and automated. Sure. Is that something that's under your purview? We've heard, we've heard a lot about citizen developers. Yeah. I don't know if that, if that >>Applies to No, that definitely. I mean, you cannot just have focus on end to end, you know, automation. I mean, that's, that's a huge portfolio for gps at the same time supporting, you know, automation through the citizen development capability. That that's where, once again, you know, you have not provided a lot of capability and solution tools that we use, right? To continue to empower the folks who are part of our, you know, GBS team inside or outside gbs, right? It, it, it's, I think it's very, very critical. It, it, it helps people transform their career even in one ways, right? And, and, and, and you have that muscle, you have that resource, and you have the power. You definitely want to utilize that. >>So let's talk about metrics for a minute. So more data, the better. Usually I like data. Yeah. But, but if you're trying to optimize for 15 metrics, I feel like you're not gonna optimize on any, So how do you deal with that from both, as par was saying, an operational standpoint and a business standpoint? What are the things about how do you sort of get the, the teams focused on the right things? >>B business, functional leadership team drive those alignment for us as a part of a global business, shared services, we, we are hip to have connected with our business, you know, functions, right? They, they have to help us prioritize those. And to your point, I mean, yeah, you cannot attack 15 metrics at once. You have to prioritize, you have to make sure that you bring the focus to the product, you know, project, right? So, so definitely, I mean, it's, it's, it's not often 15 metrics, but top three metrics, let's, let's focus, let's zoom in and ensure we are driving it. But, >>And if you think about the system, I mean, at the end of the day, the p and l manager, he or she cares about ebit, let's say. Sure, okay. But there are so many factors, you know, in that complicated organization that are gonna affect ebitda and they're gonna be different. But somebody's gotta figure out, okay, how do they fit together in a system? And can, can UiPath help me understand that, those relationships and those dependencies? >>Absolutely. I mean, I think there's a, there's an aspect of human relationships and, and making sure that you get the right level of sponsorship from the business and, and there's a business stakeholder and, and looking at every investment and, and outcomes that you're driving based on that. But, but that is something that we, from a tools perspective, we're trying to make sure that you can measure the value throughout the entire value chain. But then getting the business sponsorship, like where we've seen automation scale is always because there's a business sponsor that's essentially saying, Here's what I'm trying to achieve and here's the, here's my goal, here's a North star and go get it and let me know how you're tracking against it. And, and our job is to make sure that we can provide the visibility, the people that are operating the, the programs to make sure they get that level of visibility. >>What's the scope of automations in your, you know, organization? Is it dozens, hundreds, >>Huge. >>That is thousands. >>We are getting there. Okay. No, definitely. I mean, we have definitely, you know, realized that it's, it's a core component to our digital transformation, right? So, so there is no, there's no stopping on it. There, there, there, there's plenty of support from top down and you know, it's a fantastic time to be at PepsiCo. Right? Especially at the PepsiCo gbs. Right, >>Right. Thanks for sharing your story. Congratulations on all the progress you guys have made. It's actually quite remarkable to see where you guys have come from. So I really appreciate it. Thank you, Dave. Thanks. Thank you Dave. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson. We are right middle of day two at forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, we're right back.

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back. David Ante with David Nicholson. This is UiPath Forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, you know, the customers here, they're automating all the time, sucking work and the cube. We're sucking all the information out of the experts and the customers. A bar Toban is here. He's the global business, Shared services, leading automation and AI at PepsiCo. And Para Colan is back is the chief. He's the Chief product officer at UiPath, longtime Cube alum. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Great to see us all day. So you guys keynote today, you know, excited to have PepsiCo on. I'm not sure I've ever interviewed PepsiCo in the Cube, but tell us about your role there. >>Absolutely. So I'm part of a PepsiCo global business shared services team. I lead automation and AI capabilities. GBS has, you know, we started GBS portfolio back about three and a half years ago, and we have a six hubs across PepsiCo. And as, as a part of my role, we deliver transformational capability across the PepsiCo. >>When did it all start? >>About three and a half years ago, 2019. So >>Prior to the pandemic. Yeah. You know, versus the pandemic was the catalyst for this. Yeah. But it was at the catalyst, but maybe it sped it up a bit. >>Yeah. PepsiCo journey started with, if, if you look at the PepsiCo, you know, the automation journey, it started back in 2017, but the GBS portfolio took shape back in 2019. So prior to that, you know, PepsiCo was definitely, you know, working a lot of, you know, the automation capabilities and automation product across, you know, PepsiCo. But with the introduction of PepsiCo global business shared services team, we are, you know, centralizing a lot of transformation capability, you know, across the functions that, that we support within the >>PepsiCo and, and UI path was kind of part of that journey all along? Or was there sort of other activities beforehand or how did that >>No, no, absolutely. Starting from 2017, if I, you know, remembered, you know, with the vision of our, you know, some of our senior leadership team and recognizing the value of, you know, automation in the core, you know, capability as a transformation at that time, you know, we started with just like anybody else, right? We started with, you know, proof of concept, showed some, you know, early wins and the value back to the business, start setting up some, you know, business processes and capabilities, stood up the platform, build a complete, you know, ecosystem around that, you know, platform partnership with, you know, UI bot team. And you know, from there, here we are five years. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very critical component to our digital transformation capability and, and yes, leverage across >>Let's talk platform probably. So you, you guys have made some announcements this week. You talk about the business automation platform. I remember our first forward was, you know, RPA tool. Okay. Yeah. And then you guys made acquisitions. I was there for that. So the process process cold and then people started to really expand it, and it's really come in amazingly long away in a short time. So what did you guys announce today? What'd you talk about on stage 2022 dot 10? Tell us more about it. >>Absolutely, Dave. So you've seen the journey, you've been with us since the early days. You know, we were in 2017 and RPA tool that could automate a representative task that happened over and over again in the environment. And then three years ago you were here when we announced the automation platform, we said, it's not just about a task, it's about involving humans in bots to manage end to end processes. It's about discovering what automation opportunities exist. It's about using ai. Pepsi Co was actually the pioneer of using AI along with automation. You know, we were in stage together with them in, in 2019. And where we are now is we're essentially seeing people want to take the next step with automation. They're saying that it's no longer just an automation tool, It's the way we operate. It's the way we innovate in the organization. So they're really making sure that it becomes a part of their digital transformation journey that they're on. >>And they're saying that we can to the digital transformation by consolidating multiple RP systems and CRM systems. And that'll take us seven years to do, or we can go with UI path and we can leverage the core that we can leverage the GL system that exists today. We can leverage the inventory tracking system that exists today and start to build processes on top of that that can adapt to what customers are trying to do in this digital age. And that's where, you know, we've made announcements today is, is really pivot the platform to be a business automation platform. And there's sort of three layers, you know, unique but you know, connected layers of the platform. The first one is discover. And Discover is all about finding your processes, identifying the opportunities, making sure that you are managing the return on investment. What is the process? >>You know, how are you getting ROI on it? The second one is automated, and that is really where we're applying semantic automation to identify the digital building blocks of an enterprise, which is your data, your document, your screens and communication. Like putting all of that together and saying you can automate in our processes, leveraging a lot of intelligence that exist in how business processes are done. And the last one is operate, which is if you're trying to execute a business process at scale, you're processing not just, you know, a task thousand times, but you are fulfilling millions of transactions. You're, you know, you're looking at trillions of records to identify what processes you need, a scalable enterprise platform that's able to ingest a lot of data report on metrics report and efficiency. So that's what we've announced today is an automation platform that companies can use to put at the center of the digital transformation journey. >>So like about the interesting thing about PepsiCo, you guys started in 2017. Yeah. So kind of early, early on. Yeah. Yeah. And you kind of been there with the progression of platform. So my question to you is, and it was, you know, Yeah, we've seen the e from primarily on-prem now it's cloud first. Yeah. How disruptive or non disruptive was that for you? Did you have to rip and replace? Did you have to sort of retool or migrate? What was that like? >>No, I mean, significant disruption, right? I mean, I mean, as, as we started our journey back in 2017, just like, you know, PRM mentioned, right? With simple rule based, you know, the automation from then now to our journey where our continue to, you know, infuse, you know, AI capability, document understanding, conversation ai, right? As a part of our end to end profile. At the same time, I think the cloud is providing a fantastic opportunity for us to continue to scale, right? You know, scale at, at large. So that I think is a fantastic op, you know, fantastic platform and fantastic, you know, the opportunity that we are looking forward >>To. So how do you affect adoption inside of the organization? Can you talk about that? What's working? What's, >>It's always value driven as you know, right? I mean, the business business has to see the value. It it, it was, I mean, I would, you know, admit it was not as easy as before, but as the mindsets have started to shift, right? As the people have started to realize the value that, you know, the automation brings to, you know, the, I mean, you know, not just the, the value for the business, but actually transforming the entire portfolio, right? And, and people have started to see now that not every automation project is going to be transformation product, but for every transformation project you will find the automation at the heart and the core of it. So I, I, I think that's what has started to shift the mindset of, of uniforms. >>So how do you know when you have end to end? What are you still wake up one day and say, Wow, we've achieved it. You know, is it pieces that come together? Yeah. What do you say? >>Yeah, You know, we wanna look at customers from, you know, from an end to end perspective. It's not just about piecemealing finding a problem, solving it, really what does it deliver from, from an end to end perspective. Did you actually, you know, because a lot of times companies will say, we wanna automate X number of processes, and, and they do that and they're like, Well, we've automated a lot of processes. We're not sure what value we're getting out of it. It's the ability to measure like, what impact is this automation having on your business from an operational metric, but from a business metric as well. But then going back and saying, Well, where is the biggest pain point? Where do we have the largest value that we can give to the business back? So one of the things we actually announced today is the ability to take at an look at an idea and look at what was the estimated benefits of an idea, and then map it all the way through execution to say, what are we getting? >>We estimated we were gonna save a million dollars by doing those automation, or what have we achieved till now? Have we achieved a million dollars? Have we achieved half a million dollars by having achieved? That's, that never happens. That, and, and, and, and it's hard to do that, like the data existed, but it's really hard for people to pull that data out. So we build out the box dashboards that give you the ROI bag. And that's why it's really important to, to make sure that, you know, you look at it not just as a technology project, but more as a investment from a business side. And so you can, making a business more efficient. You >>Know, that's, I just, I know you were jumping in, but that's super important. Cause you know, you run a lot of projects Absolutely. And each of those projects has zone roi, then you jam it into the application portfolio. Exactly. And then everybody sort of forgets about it. You can't really track what impact it had because there's always, you know, some things that are benefit, some things are sometimes a negative. And so it's that holistic picture that >>You trying >>To achieve, extremely critical point, what you hit on, right? From it's measuring the benefit and measuring the continuous benefit across, and not just from start and end, Okay, what I promised I delivered or not, but, but you have to have this continuous mindset. And, and so I think yeah, definitely that, that's a very, very critical to our finance team in our cfo, >>Organiza, they're organic mechanisms and it's constantly >>Absolutely. Yeah. So abar, yeah. Global business shared services. Yeah. When you think of PepsiCo, yeah, of course people immediately think of Sure, Pepsi. But PepsiCo is a multi tentacled absolutely beast of a company. Absolutely. In a good way. Yeah. For organizations that are in that same category, holding companies, companies that have all sorts of different entities that are working together under one umbrella, How shareable is this idea of automation and business automation process moving forward? How, how shareable is that on the share oter? Yeah. Yeah. >>As >>Far as, as far as, as far as you're concerned, are you, are you talking to some people where you're saying, Hey, I'm here, I'm here from gvs and I'm here to help, and they look at you like you're crazy because you don't understand their business? Or is this something that relatively easily applies across >>Businesses that No, to your point, I mean, very valid point, right? I mean, it's, that's, that's the gbs, global business shared services mindset, right? As you move the functional areas into the Pepsi, in, into the PepsiCo gbs like hr, procurement, commercial sales, supply chain, right? That's where you gonna start to find those, you know, the optimization, you know, opportunity. You wanna start to standardize your processes, and that's where you will, you know, as you transition this processes within the gbs, that's what create those, you know, opportunities for you. >>What, >>What, what about automation opportunities? Not in the, I know you're in the sharing arena. Yeah, yeah. But each of those business units has processes that could probably be optimized and automated. Sure. Is that something that's under your purview? We've heard, we've heard a lot about citizen developers. Yeah. I don't know if that, if that >>Applies to No, that definitely. I mean, you cannot just have focus on end to end, you know, automation. I mean, that's, that's a huge portfolio for gps at the same time supporting, you know, automation through the citizen development capability. That that's where, once again, you know, you have had, provides a lot of capability and solution tools that we use, right? To continue to empower the folks who are part of our, you know, GBS team inside or outside gbs, right? It, it's, I think it's very, very critical. It, it, it helps people transform their career even in one ways, right? And, and, and, and you have that muscle, you have that resource, and you have that power. You definitely want to utilize that. >>So let's talk about metrics for a minute. So more data the better. Usually I like data. Yeah. But, but if you're trying to optimize for 15 metrics, I feel like you're not gonna optimize on any, So how do you deal with that from both as Paramo saying an operational standpoint and a business standpoint? What are the things about how do you sort of get the, the teams focused on the right things, >>Bi business, functional leadership team drive those alignment for us as a part of a global business, shared services, we, we are hip to have connected with our business, you know, functions, right? They, they have to help us prioritize those. And to your point, I mean, yeah, you cannot attack 15 metrics at once. You have to prioritize, you have to make sure that you bring the focus to the product. You have a project, right? So, so definitely, I mean, it's, it's, it's not often 15 metrics, but top three metrics, let's, let's focus, let's zoom in and ensure we are driving it. But then >>If you think about the system, I mean, at the end of the day, the p and l manager, he or she cares about ebit, let's say. Sure, okay. But there are so many factors, you know, in that complicated organization that are gonna affect ebitda. Yeah. And they're gonna be different. Yeah. But somebody's gotta figure out, okay, how do they fit together in a system? And, and can, can UiPath help me understand that, those relationships and those dependencies? >>Absolutely. I mean, I think there's a, there's an aspect of human relationships and, and making sure that you get the right level of sponsorship from the business and, and there's a business stakeholder and, and looking at every investment and, and outcomes that you're driving based on that. But, but that is something that we, from a tools perspective, we're trying to make sure that you can measure the value throughout the entire value chain. But then getting the business sponsorship, like where we've seen automation scale is always because there's a business sponsor that's essentially saying, Here's what I'm trying to achieve and here's the, here's my goal, here's the North star and go get it and let me know how you're tracking against it. And, and our job is to make sure that we can provide the visibility, the people that are operating the, the programs to make sure they get that level of visibility. >>What's the scope of automations in your, you know, organization? Is it dozens, hundreds, huge. That is thousands. >>We are getting there. >>Okay. >>No, definitely. I mean, we have definitely, you know, realized that it's, it's a core component to our digital transformation, right? So, so there is no, there's no stopping. I mean there, there, there, there's plenty of support from top down and you know, it's a fantastic time to be at PepsiCo. Right? Especially at the PepsiCo ubs, Right. >>So, Right. Thanks for sharing your story, Pam. Congratulations on all the progress you guys have made. It's actually quite remarkable to see where you guys have come from. So I really appreciate it. Thank you Dave. Thank you Dave. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson. We are right middle of day two at forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, we're right back.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Hello from Las Vegas, the cube is live at the Bellagio. We are here covering UI path forward for Lisa Martin with Dave a long time. We're very pleased to be joined next by the chief product officer of UI path, param colon per I'm. Welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's great to be back here in person. Isn't it? It >>Is lovely to be back >>Here in person, Dave and I got to see a little bit of your keynote this morning, and when we had to leave to come to set, we turned around and it was standing room only. It was amazing to see how many customers, partners, prospects, UI path has brought here. Clearly you've got over 8,000 customers now, tremendous growth. The IPO just six months ago. Last time you were on the cube at forward three was two years ago, 2019, where you unveiled this vision for a fully automated platform. Talk to us about what's transpired since >>It's been, it's been fascinating, been more than 9,000 customers now. Um, you know, when we were two years ago, um, we, you know, we shared a vision with our customers. The vision was all about having an end to end platform. The end to end platform can help companies automate simple processes, complex processes. It can help them automate anything from point in time tasks to long running into and processes. And we imagine that our automations will impact every worker within the enterprise. And, you know, you'll augment the capacity to build automations through citizen development initiatives. Um, we didn't have all the components then. So we worked hard since then to make sure that we can make this end to end platform available that can do everything from discovering automation opportunities to helping companies easily build automation. Whether that automation is for simple processes that are, you know, doing a predictable pattern of work or whether it's using more complex, you know, machine learning and AI algorithms and extracting information from documents to do that kind of stuff. >>And then also helping citizen developers build automation. So build pillar is what differentiates our time to value in the market. Helping companies realize quick valid for that. Then we, the next pillar we look at is manage and manage is all about making sure that our it stakeholders that are imagined managing the deployment of the entire platform from our server components like orchestrator to two components, like robots that run the workflows can, can easily be managed and low cost of ownership and can effectively manage the, meet the, the requirements of it, stakeholders like governance and security and audit and all those kinds of things. And then we have, you know, the next pillar is run, which makes sure that our robots can run on machines. And we're very excited actually in this release announced that our robots can run at cross-platform. So sonically our, you know, we were a Microsoft windows.net based, uh, code base. >>Uh, it only ran on Microsoft windows machines, and now we can actually run those robots on Linux-based machines as well. So you can deploy those robots in Lennox containers. Um, so that's, that's the run pillar. And then we have engaged, which is all about making sure that the software that we're releasing can be used by every user within the enterprise. So it's an engaging experience. Automations are available to business users where they need them, right? If they're working in a line of business application like slack or Microsoft teams, robots are available there, if they're working in a productivity application, so I'd look they're available there. And then we also have a curated set of, you know, engaging interface for people to use UiPath robots and something. We call it UI path assistant. So super excited about this sort of end to end platform. I think it's delivering a lot of value to our customers. Yeah. >>Tweeted out during your keynote, the, all the features under discover a build, manage, run, engage, and could barely fit it in the screen. It was an eye test in terms of just the number of features that you guys developed. My point is, was that, you know, the innovation is the lifeblood of life source of tech companies, you know, demand gen too. But I mean, they're real this, the product, right? And, and so, and the, the indicator is the pace of those innovations. And so you, it seems like you're picking up the pace, uh, as you scale as a company, is that true? Um, in terms of just the velocity of the features that you're rolling out, you guys have been busy since the pandemic hit. Yeah. >>At the, at the expense of, uh, you know, are not, not trying to annoy anybody within the company. We are a very product centric. You know, company it's company was founded by an engineers and, and ran it truly as a, you know, engineering centric company for many, many years. So as we've scaled, I think we haven't lost that attribute for culture to make sure that we are continuing to innovate, continuing to make sure that we are delivering capabilities based on what our customers are demanding of us. And that's been core part of our strategy as well, with all this said that we're going to build what our customers ask for. And we're going to learn from our customers. And it's very expanding our installed base of customers. We're learning more things from them, and we're continuing to respond to those customers as fast as we can and helps the fact that where helps that we're a bigger company now, so have more resources at our disposal so we can do more. Uh, but I'd say, you know, if you look historically at some of our releases over the last two, three years, we've done a lot of innovation in, in every one of these releases. And we do it twice a year. Um, these, these big releases, and this >>Is released 2021 dot 10, >>We're talking about that's right. This is released 20, 21 10. And it's the one of two major releases in a year. So we do a release in the first half of the year, and we do a release in the second half of the year. And that's how we've been doing or this, this is how on-premise customers consume sort of our software, the cloud customers get these capabilities more frequently. That's every two weeks, but the on-premise customers give them, uh, get these capabilities every twice a year >>Time, do the on-prem customers have to get to the new release. I mean, you can't just make it, you know, and minus 30. So what do you give him a couple of cycles? Three, four cycles, two, three. >>We give them so six cycles of three years to upgrade to the next version of the software. Um, most customers upgrade much sooner than that, because if you looked at our software three years ago and you compared it to what we have today, you basically said, there's no reason why I should be paying you for that capability when I can get so much. So generally we see customers upgrading more frequently. We've also because we run the same code base for our cloud customers that we run for our on-premise customers and Cod customers. As we update their service every two weeks, we've built enough resiliency to make sure that the upgrades are seamless for customers. So it's, you know, it doesn't cause them a lot of pain to go from one version to the next. So, you know, we, we expect most customers upgrade within 12 to 18 months of deploying a software. >>Let's talk about acceleration the last 18 months. We've seen a massive acceleration in automation as a mandate for every industry to first survive what was happening in the world. And then to really thrive, how has the pandemic influenced the roadmap, maybe what's in 2021 dot 10. What, what is, and how have you helped customers accelerate their need to automate, to stay in business and to be successful disruptors? >>Yeah. So what, that's a great question. What we've noticed is that, you know, in, in our customer base, there are certain aspects of business processes that have just required a lot more demand to be able to accelerate, you know, certain parts of our business, whether it's a, um, a, a retailer trying to meet demand for a certain set of product category, or whether it's a healthcare organization, trying to make sure they can provide care to more people more, more frequently. Um, the, the truth is that we didn't have to make fundamental shifts in our technology to be able to meet that demand because we had built the core underpinning of our technology was built on the premise that you are allowing a machine to mimic human behavior. And to do that. And if you can throw more compute at those machine, doesn't have more robots. >>You can do more work at that. Um, so the pandemic has definitely accelerated the demand for automation. It hasn't changed our roadmap to go in a different direction as we go there. We've just made sure that we can continue to meet the demands of our customers. Um, the, the, the one thing that it has impacted us, it it's brought automation to the top of the priority list for it stakeholders, right? In the past, we sold a lot and our value and messaging resonated a lot with line of business owners. But as, as the pandemic, as they started using more and more automation, the it stakeholders are now a lot more interested in sort of what we're doing. And we've done a lot of work in ensuring that the requirements that our it stakeholders have from running mission, critical workloads from compliance, from governance, from security, are all met as part of the platform, you know, basically out of the box, as opposed to having to, to bolt on >>One of your competitors, uh, just got bought out by private equity and the PE firms going to mash them together with an integration company. You guys bought cloud elements. I look at it as a nice clean integration play. I wonder if you could talk about the importance of cloud elements, how that fits into your product portfolio and in the marketing. >>Yeah, it's a, it's a fascinating time to be in the, in the automation business, the slots going on, you know, we, when we saw cloud elements earlier this year, what we realized was, as companies are trying to automate processes, there are certain systems where you can get to information. We can get to actions you want to take through API, and it's maybe better to access them through API because the user interface doesn't provide the same set of capability in the same way. And there's other systems where you want to have UI based automation because API APIs don't exist or too hard to use. Historically, there were different products that people had to use either have to use a, an integration platform type product to be able to get to all the API APIs. And it was a very developer driven workflow to put that process in place. >>Or you could use something like UI path where you can connect systems through UI automation. What, and when we looked at that problem, we said, the problem is, is to connect, break the silos that exist across processes and apps in the enterprise. And we wanted to provide one single design environment in which developers can use API or UI automation, or even machine learning based predictions and construct an end to end workflow where you can blend together a set of ML skills, UI automation, API automation, to, uh, you know, to compose that into an automation. So that was our thesis behind that the market definitely seems to be paying attention. And it seems that, you know, other people are trying to follow the same, same path as well as some industry analysts have written about sort of the consolidation in, in categories happening. >>Yeah. You guys started a trend for sure. Let's talk about security. You guys announced a partnership with CrowdStrike endpoint security, clearly the leader there, uh, they're, they're really amazing company. What what's that partnership all about how to, how to come about and, you know, maybe give us some color there. >>Yeah. So we're very excited about this partnership. And as I was mentioning earlier, you know, one of the things that pandemic has done is elevated the importance of automation to the boardroom, to the CIO, the CSOs, and, and now they're looking at, you know, UI path automation platform as a key enabler of getting work done within the enterprise. So when they look at something that's gonna, you know, take like 20, 30% of the transactions in a, in a working environment and move it through that platform, they want to make sure that it has all of the security that they have heard about for all other application than end users are using as well. So CrowdStrike has done phenomenal work in security solutions to manage how employees are using based on their profiles, different applications and different API as well. What we've done is we've taken that the capability that they have built for the employee workforce and make sure that we can apply it to the robotic workforce that our customer is using as well. >>So the same policy based control that says, you know, a, this employee in this department isn't allowed to access the system, or it needs to be logged that they had access to this data. The same can be applied to robot as well. So you're no longer able to say, you know, I don't know what my robots are doing. I need to go through locks to find out he can maintain a policy. You can get alerts when robots do something that they're not allowed to do. And not only that you're able to pinpoint specifically to which workflow process that robot was executing when it tat, and when it touched a system that it wasn't allowed to. So it gives you that peace of mind, if you are a business owner or an it stakeholder at a company, to make sure that my robotic workflows isn't doing what it is supposed to do. >>So the point of integration for Crosstrek is a robot. Is that correct? It is, it is a robot. So it monitors what the robots are doing. And it, it makes it reports it back into the, their Falcon interface that basically says I've got a policy that when applied to my robot workflows and when, as they're executing things, I can monitor control and get alerted of different things that they're doing. And the robot today already does it's own identity access, right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. The robot has its own identity. So a robot generally historically, had to go log into many line of business systems to do the work. Right. And if the robot is running in, attended as it it's working with a side-by-side with a human, then it assumes the identity of the person that's working. So they can go access those systems. But if it's working unattended, then it's using a service account to make sure that it can go access the applications that it needs to access, to be able to, you know, pull information or update actions into those systems. >>So you mentioned more than 9,000 customers. Now, I know you've got more than 1200 with a hundred thousand or more ARR customer listening. I know is very important to you. I bet we just had the CIO and digital officer of Coca-Cola on talking about that was a big differentiator when it was, I said, who else did you look at, but what was it that really made you iPad stand out? And that's that customer listening the voice of the customer, the impact that it has on the technology in the company. Overall, talk to me about some of your favorite stories of customers that have really helped influence, especially in the last year and a half, the direction of the company, you know, IPO and six months ago, as I mentioned, how is that customer voice really critical to the innovation that your team is driving? >>Yeah, I know it's, it's very important. And that's something that we've done from like the beginning of, you know, creating this market and entering this category of RPA. You know, it was initially a customer that educated us about what RPA is, you know, brought us in and told us what kind of solution they wanted and to help us create the first solution. And we worked very closely. In fact, I joined the company about three and a half years ago. In my first month, I spent a lot of time with a customer in Japan to learn from what they thought about automation, very large bank in Japan, and we've continued that process. So we have, um, every quarter we eat with our customers around the world and customer advisory boards. We run a product advisory board every six months, very specific information at a feature level on what we're working on. And we ask our customers to ward on the feature list and we decide based on how much importance they put to different product areas to see what we're going to innovate on. Um, we feel this is the best way to build enterprise products. You know, it's, it's, it's helped us tremendously. Uh, and, and we're, we're extremely grateful to our customers to be able to, you know, help us shape the platform in this way. You know, >>When the whole discussion around AI first started AI and RPA, and there were some naysayers, and it seems like you're applying AI everywhere. It's hard to even understand it sometimes. So can you help us understand your strategy with respect to AI, where aren't you applying it, but maybe you could help us sort of shape that discussion. >>That's really a good question. So, um, I I'd say AI is a core intrinsic aspect of what we do in our platform. Um, and I'll tell you how it, it matters. It matters because what we're trying to do at the end of the day is mimic how people work, right. And, and make sure that, you know, we can process the systems that just like humans processes as well. So when you look at something on your computer screen, you're using your computer vision to be able to identify what is on the computer screen, whether you're looking at a browser or you're looking at a specific control that you can enter the customer name, or, you know, hit the button. So our technology essentially give our robots the same skills to be able to understand what is on the user interface in front of the screen. And if I'm going to give you an instruction to say, start a certain application and click the new button, and then enter, you know, this information on this form, the robot is able to process that exactly the way you would do it by using those eyes. >>And that's what we know intrinsically. We build a computer vision capabilities. Now we've applied that, that ability to understand computer screens, to documents as well. And that's where we build machine learning bottle models for extracting information from documents. So if you, if you hired somebody in accounts payable department, and you showed them a piece of paper, and you said, Hey, this is an invoice. Please put it into this system. You know, they are able to look at that invoice and when they get the next document, they know this next document is also an invoice. And they're able to put that in, you know, extract information from it and put it into a line of business system. So we're teaching a robots, the same skills to be able to classify documents, a certain document types and using machine learning models, extract relevant information from those documents. Even if one invoice looks different from the second invoice, you're still able to, as, as human I reliably extract information from it, the robots have the exact same skills to be able to deal with. >>So, okay. So classification, it makes sense because you're using math and now you have enough processing power and enough data. And so you can apply that those algorithms does the AI help. Maybe this is a stupid question, but does it, does it give context as well? Right? It can, it, can it interpret context like a human, could we, we, at that point, >>Um, well, it depends on what you mean by context in general, you know, the applications of AI, um, broadly speaking are narrow, right? And they're not able to go broad and, and understand the entire context that's where humans are better, right? That's where humans are able to sort of truly apply the context, especially if it's, you know, a rare occurrence of that context. And that's why we fundamentally believe that, you know, AI is powerful only if you can apply together with humans. And so we've built capabilities to support like a human in the loop scenario where if a document was read by the robot and it extracted information, but extractive the low confidence or it didn't, wasn't able to find all the right fields of a supposed to, we can suspend the process, send the document and the extracted information to a human and the human can correct what they've extracted. And with that, you know, you're creating retraining model data for the model to behave appropriately. Next time it sees similar information in the next document. So we do believe that, you know, AI is not going to solve all the problems. Yeah. It's going to be able to solve the narrow path, but in, as you look at sort of broader and contextual specific things that are out of normal behavior, you would still need humans to be able to guide what robots are able to do. >>Chatbots can interpret contexts. I don't know if that's because it's brute force and he's just throwing a lot of repetitive sort of data. I don't know if you guys seen the, um, the, the very first AI, standup comedy. No, you haven't seen this. Yeah. >>It's, it's the >>First standup comedy routine written by machines. And it's a lot of, it's really stupid, but some of them, some of the jokes aren't bad, you know, and they have an audience and they're like this, the fake laughter coming in. But so it seems like it's amazing. You have to I'll, I'll send it to you. You have to check it out. But, but, so we're starting to get to the point where you could interpret context or create context. And like you say, human in the loop allows you to sort of verify >>That are correct and validate, you know, robot actions, actions. Yeah. >>Okay. So you'll just kind of ride that AI curve, wherever it takes you. Right. >>Well, I think yeah, is really important and they'll become increasingly important as we look at the future. We're also looking at, you know, in the future AI based development or AI based, helping of build building development script. So something that, you know, you'll hear Daniel talk a lot about semantic automation. So where, you know, investing a lot and ensuring that we can have semantic automation type capabilities into a product that helps, you know, the process of building automation simple enough, so that more citizen developers can build it and drives developer productivity. And at the end of the day, I have a specific use case. I want to show you offline and tell me if you can help. >>I got to ask you one more question. As here we are talking about humans and AI surrounded by humans. Finally, for the first time in a long time, what's just been some of the feedback that you've heard yes. Between yesterday and today in the last 30 seconds that we have here, >>The feedback about the product specifically, that the >>Technology, the direction of the company, what you're announcing. >>Yeah. Our customers are very excited about, you know, some of the things that we've announced today, um, you know, I'd say the excitement is specifically around some of the things we're doing around the discovery pillar. We've got a lot of excitement around what we've acquired through cloud elements and the integration service that's available as part of our platform. Uh, we've got customers very excited about running automations on Lennox machines that they can scale them, manage the total infrastructure, uh, around it. Um, we've also released a automation suite that gives our on-premise customers the same sort of manageability and deployment, uh, capabilities that are available to our SAS customers so that the admin experience has improved. So in general, the feedback around the innovation and things that we're doing has been very, very positive from our customers. >>The validation problem. Thank you for joining David me on the program today, talking about what's new, congratulations on that. And for holding a very successful in-person event, >>That's a big deal. Thank you so much for having me. We're happy to >>Be here for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. We've been coming to you all day from Las Vegas. We're going to see you tomorrow. Same channel from UI path forward for C then.

>>live from Orlando, Florida It's the cue covering Microsoft Ignite Brought to you by Cohee City. Welcome >>back, everyone to the cubes Live coverage of Microsoft IC night here at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host Stew Minutemen were joined by Parham Cologne. He is the chief product officer at you. I path. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. >>Thank you so much for >>coming back on the cute. >>Thank you. >>So I I was just a u IE path with you in Vegas a couple of weeks ago and the U AI Path tagline is a robot for every employee Microsoft tagline is employing empowering every employee to be a technologist, empowering citizen developers. Does it strike you that do the two missions are are similar in their way? >>That's that's absolutely right. I think we have so much in common their companies together on I think we're working very closely together and not just our technology, but also in what we're trying to achieve, which is to make people achieve more in amplifying human achievement is a core mission of our company and very excited that Microsoft so shares the same emission. >>Yeah, it really does connect with Mace onto this morning. Talked about that 61% of job openings for developers air outside the tech sector. And of course, you AI path is really trying to help. But this is productivity overall, with everything you're doing, >>absolutely, and productivity's where we focus our technology primarily on. In fact, a lot of focus is around. How do we actually get people to do more with less time so they can have more time to do the things that they could do with the creative parts of their time, as opposed to doing a Monday in part? So, yeah, productivity's is really important to us. The company. That's what we think about every day. >>Could you bring us inside the relationship with Microsoft and you? I passed? >>Yeah, so we're deeply partner that Microsoft's and today one we've most of our technology is built on Microsoft's stack on dot net miran. Our databases all run on sequel server or cloud service runs on Microsoft Azure. So we are very deeply partner to be health Microsoft Bill. A lot of a I service is around document extraction. The forms recognize her with one of the first customers that we work together with Microsoft and Chevron on so very deep partnership with Microsoft. Okay, >>so let me ask you a question. Actually, as a customer of Microsoft, you know what? Why, why everything built on Microsoft from, you know, the dot net through the infrastructure of the service. What, what? Why did you bypass choose Microsoft? >>I think it made a lot of sense. Microsoft's focus on productivity Microsoft's focus on enabling developers do stuff quickly on it also helped a lot of the founders, myself included, came through with Microsoft to be a lot of experience with Microsoft's. I think part of that helped as well. >>Does it help or hurt when you are then pitching your service? Is that that it is that it is a much more Microsoft focused company, >>So I think we've grown over the years to actually have a much broader ecosystem, so we have more than 500 partners now we work with Google. Google is a customer, it's an investor. It's also very deep partner. A lot of very I service is we're welding on it with Google were be partnered with AWS as well. So I think we're working with all the way our customers are today. But I think we're still have a very close relationship with Microsoft, given our agitated given where we started. >>Yeah, I actually I I went to the passport event last year and had not realized how deep that connection was with Microsoft. I see you. I path across all the clouds. So there's a little mention of our p A. That this morning in the keynote theme, the power automate solution coming out from Microsoft. Of course, everyone seems tohave an R p A. Out there, you know all the big software houses out there. Tell us what this means in the marketplace. >>Yes, Listen, our P a is a very fast growing market. Is the fastest growing enterprise category today, And when you grow so fast, it's good for the business but also attracts attention, I think getting somebody like Microsoft to sort of say that we're in it as well. Only help sort of solidify the foundation, solidify the category and brings a lot more, you know, credibility to this category. So I think we're excited to have Microsoft here as well. >>And in terms of a CZ, you were saying to companies that are very much focused on workplace productivity, employee collaboration, and being able to be more creative with the time that you have. How much is that cultural alignment? How much does that help your partnership? >>I think it helps a partnership a lot. So you know, when we, for example, of when you meet with the office team, they think deeply about helping people do more with last time. You know, we think about the same things as well. So if you notice some of the newer products that we've launched our very deeply integrated into office, in fact to do a lot of inspiration from products like Excel to be able to say business people that are able to, you know, do some very sophisticated, complex business models and excel should be able to do similar stuff with their products as well. So we continue to work with Microsoft and across collaboration across the steams, anything in general, our message. We have a close relationship with Microsoft, So when Microsoft bring this into opportunities and it closes, it actually retired Dakota for Microsoft Sellers as well. So I think all of that alignment really helps. >>I would love to hear you know what? What? Joint customers. You know what brings customers to you? I path at a show here. What? What are some of the key drivers for their discussions that you're having this week? >>Yeah. I mean, we've got you know, through through the years, we've got over 5000 customers that work with us large enterprises in a very large banks to companies like Chevron. Chevron in particular, is one of those customers. You know, that's a very, very deep customer of Microsoft, but also a very strong customer of ours and a specific use case at my at Chevron. Chevron wanted to extract data from their oil field service reports. They were getting more than 1000 oil. Regular reports coming in every day with about 300 pages for average. For report on. Somebody had to manly go in and physically read those reports. Put him into that s a P system so that you could predict if there was a pretty prevent amendments appear that was acquired, you know, working together with Microsoft, we were able to take service that Microsoft was building an A. I called forums recognize ER and take it to pre bid on Alfa with customers so that Chevron is now able to have all of those reports read by you. I path robots and automatically punch it into, you know, the SNP preventive maintenance applications so that you can actually ship the engineer on side before you know that something happened to the old Greg. So I think that's a pretty cool a scenario. >>Another's another similarity between AI Path and you, AI Path and Microsoft is this customer obsession. And this is something that you talked a lot about at your path forward. This spending time with customers, learning how they would use our p A and then also thinking, thinking ahead of them and in terms of how they could use our p A. How do you work with customers and Microsoft together in partnership in terms of how do you find out exactly what their needs are and the joint solutions you could provide? >>Yeah, and then that's a really good question. Microsoft has been very obsessed with, you know, driving customer obsession and all parts of the organization we culturally have a really deep obsession about working closely with customers. And I think so that Microsoft has empty sea, meet the customer sessions around around the world on We were close living Microsoft to make sure that our technology can be showcased by Microsoft people in those empty see sessions so that when customers come in, they able to not only see Microsoft technology, but also our technology. And if they're interested, then our sales teams work elaborately together to make sure we can, you know, have a joint session than planning and working with customers. >>So I had a chat earlier this year with your CMO Bobbi Patrick talking about how a I and r p a go together. You on the product? So will I. I be able to allow our p A to get into more complex configuration, give us where we are and you know what? What's what's new in that space? >>Yeah, No, absolutely. So like the first wave of our p A was all about taking sort of structured processes, you know, deluding data from excel sheets, reading data for maybe eyes and be able to process it in different systems now in the humans don't always work with that. 10% of what >>we do >>on a daily basis, a structure, data right, spreadsheets and stuff, 90% of what we d'oh reading spread shades, extracting information from papers responding Thio. You know Chad conversations. All of that unstructured information can now be processed by AI algorithms to be able to extract the intent off the chat conversation to be to extract the data. That's in that unstructured document that we just received to be able to use computer vision to detect what is on the computer screen so that you're able to detect that control, whether rendered the browser or renders in a window start to application of that. So I brings the possibility to automate a lot more complex processes within the organization, you know, mimicking sort of MME. Or human like behavior. So the robots are not just doing the numbers and structured data but be able to process unstructured information. It's >>well, well, the way I help it all, trying to understand, what can I automate? >>Absolutely. And that's the other piece off being able to use process, understanding capability. So what we've done is we've built capability that's able to follow human activity logs and how people are using systems, but also how the databases air getting updated by different applications and be able to mind that information to understand how work is getting done and the enterprise and be able to understand what are the scenarios and possibilities for automating mawr business processes that's hold onto the key benefits of how a I and process mining can be can be applied to the context of the R P. A. >>There's so many product announcements today. On the main stage is an 87 page book that we that we were sent from the Microsoft calms team. What is it? What's the most exciting things you've seen here today? >>I think I'm really excited about some of the innovation that Microsoft is doing in the analytic stock to be able to report on the, you know, the data warehouse, but also big data together and one stack. I think that's really powerful. That is something that our customers have have be very interested in, because robots process structure log, but also in structure logs. I'm also excited about some of the eye investments that Microsoft is making, I think some of the eye capabilities and are really coming to practical use. A lot of companies tuck Brody I For a long time. We've applied a I practically in our technology, but I think a lot more technology is now available for us to be used in our products. >>Okay, parm. There's a recent acquisition process. Gold was. The company could tell us a little bit about that. What what? What are the plans for that >>absolutely process Goal is a company that's basically all in Germany and nine home and in bed. Ireland. On this is the company that was focused on process, understanding of process. Mining's essentially, what they had was that connectors a different line of business applications and be able to sit and study logs of how work was getting done over long periods of time. So what happened is if you went to a line of business owner and he asked them, What is your process for procure to pay look like, in order to cash look like chances out, they'll draw you a straight line. That's a haze with the processes, However, when you look at how work is getting done, it's typically not a straight line. And depending on how many variations you're looking at, you can get up to, like, you know, 15 or 20 different variations, the same process being done. So what process gold does is identifies. What are the different ways in which processes air getting done? Identify where the bottlenecks exist in the process, right? How long is the step one? How long is the time? But we step two and step three, right? Is that taking 25% of what the total time is? And is there a way to optimize that process by eliminating that bottleneck? And once you've optimized the process, it also gives you the ability to go automate that optimized process right? You don't want to automate a process that is sub optimal. You want to go understand the process, see how work is getting done, optimized the bottlenecks and eliminate the bottlenecks, optimize the process and then go out of made that and process go. It really helps us sort of cater to that need, which is go automate. You know, the best possible way to optimize the process >>in terms of Microsoft's use of things like a I and ML And now we have not really talked a lot about ML here. I mean, it was mentioned on the main stage, but not a lot. How? What? What do you think the future holds in terms of Microsoft in the next 5 to 10 years? >>Yeah. I mean, I think I see Microsoft investing a lot in data and really being able Thio get all kinds of data because ML is useful only after it's able to reason over tons of data. And Microsoft is in a rightfully investing and the data repositories in stores so that it has the ability to store that data to process that data. And once that's got the data on the data assets over it, then it's able to go Korea the algorithms that can reason over data on and create that stuff. And I think that's really exciting because Microsoft has a lot of the horsepower to be able to not only store that data process that data efficiently said can be used in machine learning. And I >>hope our um thank you so much for coming on the Cube. It was a pleasure talking to you. >>Thank you. Pleasure to have you here. Thank you very much. >>I'm Rebecca Knight. First to minimum. Stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage of Microsoft ignite.

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

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas, brought to you by UiPath. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Miami Beach, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is UiPathForward Americas. We're talking about robotic process automation. We're seeing the ascendancy of a new marketplace. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Let's see, let's get into it. So Param Kahlon is here. He's the UiPath's Chief Product Officer. Welcome, so we're going to get into some of the product stuff. We haven't really dug down deep today, so that's great. >> Thank you. >> Jairo Quiros is here. He's the Vice President of Global Shared Services, an RPA COE, center of excellence, leader at Equifax. Welcome, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Jairo, let's start with you. Tell us about your role. I love the title. (Jairo laughs) You got automation in your title. Do people embrace you when they see you coming or run? >> No, no, no. Actually, that's very interesting. I've been with the company for 20 years now, so I'm responsible to lead Global Shared Services all across from business operations, financing, accounting, you name it, IT security, right? So, coming along with automation has been quite a journey for us. First of all, we love the product so thank you, Param for everything you guys do at the service, as well. But truly, automation, what it means to us is pushing our workforce to do stuff that is of more valued added to our customers, removing the but out of the human which is critical to us, so no fear of buts anymore. And it's been two years. >> The product's at the tip of the iceberg, I'm hearing. There's a whole lot of other stuff beneath it, culture, obviously process, mindset. >> Jairo: Yeah, correct. >> We will get into some of that. But Param, tell us about your role as Chief Product Officer. You make it all happen. (Param laughs) >> I'm responsible for making sure we can listen to what our customers want, what the market wants, translate that into requirements, and deliver that in the form of products. That's all I do, it's very simple. >> You're a translator. >> We translate it, transform it into requirements that can be given to the product team, their development team that can go write software for it. >> Kind of like that AI layer in UiPath that translates all this data into something that's actionable, right? >> Param: Absolutely. >> Jairo, you were saying you liked the product before. I mean, our personal experience is we could actually download it and play with it, and we're not ultra technical, some of our guys are. What do you like about the product? >> Well, I think many things. I mean, first of all, I think it's very easy to use, right? So, it's built for execution, right? For instance, in our case, we're having a lot of junior engineers coming on board. So we go out to colleges and recruit people that are passionate about process. So what UiPath offer us is a way for them to entry our operation and actually perform tasks and do, and realize results pretty easily. So then, they can see the work being done and appreciate it. >> So who are the users in your organization? Is it a spectrum? You got the sort of RPA developers and then you got business users, as well? Describe that. >> Well, it's a combination, right? So we built the COE over the past couple years. It's inclusive of not only configurators, but also analysts and people that can understand the business. So when you look at through the process, start thinking about how do you design for automation? So this tool allows a very comprehensive very easy to use and we see they make progress release after release, so it's very exciting. >> Alright, Param, why don't you walk us through the announcements that you made? What's new to the platform? Some enhancement to the community. >> Yeah, so we've done some really key announcements in this event today. The first one that we're very excited about is UiPath Go, which is our marketplace that enables broad innovation across our entire ecosystem of customers and partners. We can create on a platform or we can put it in a marketplace and then everybody else can easily access the innovation that's available there. We also released 2018.3 which is the third release we've done this year, but probably the most comprehensive release that we've done 'til date in the history of Enterprise Automation. So we're very excited about launching that release today, as well. And third, we've announced a $20 million fund that will fund our partners that will co-innovate together with us in bringing out new RPA capabilities, new machine learning and AI capabilities into the marketplace. Those are three key announcements. >> What are the-- >> I'm just-- Sorry, but from my understanding, you run on a quarterly cadence for the release of the primary product, correct? >> We're in a quarterly cadence, yes. >> What are the critical aspects of the new release? >> So, there's a few things we've done in the main release. One of the first things we've done is we've allowed for re-usability of the software. So if you're using a lot of components, if you've built a way to automate a certain process, it could be as simple as, here's how I log into a application, a financial application. The rest of the people in my organization don't have to go reinvent that thing themselves. They can reuse the component, the way I've built it, so they can be reused to process every single aspect of the customer, as well. We've made it very easy for our customers to upgrade to new versions of the software, as we're releasing very rapidly, we want to make sure that the upgrades are easy, but the upgrades are also seamless as in they don't affect any of the existing processes that are running in production. So we support version management and package management so we make it easier for people to manage that. There's some other capabilities that we've done. We've supported internationalization of the platform, so now customers in Japan can use our product in Japanese, customers can use it in Spanish, they can use it in Deutsche, German, so we've allowed that in this release, as well. Another cool thing we've done is allowing humans to provide input to what the robots need to do by putting a form that they can use to provide input to them, so it can provide a better symbiosis of humans working together with robots to achieve more processes and more automation in the ecosystems. There's a lot of stuff, this is some of the highlights. >> So what do you think? I mean, what of those, what of that compendium is of interest to you? >> I think, you know, I've been a member for a year now, from, of their customer advisory board, so they truly listen to what we need to say, right? Because the robotic aspect of it is critical, but there's so many other aspects, such as the analytics. So, understanding the business outcome, right? What's the bot producing? Not necessarily the bot that's up and running, but really, what's the impact to the business? I think that's part of the feedback that we've been given in UiPath, they're really working hard on that. The other aspect which is important also is how do you move forward from simple RPA to more complex automations? So, the human in the loop approach to things is important. We call that those small black boxes, you know people with 20 years of experience, they understand how to make decisions but those aren't documented, right? So, now we're giving the opportunity for that human to become part of the process, right? So that is very powerful to us. >> So one of the aspects we've been looking at, the marketplace seems interesting. I'm wondering if you've had a chance to look at that, are there things that you would consider using, and anything that you might even consider contributing in the future? >> I think so. I think this is a whole movement, it's a community today, so no matter where you are, developers, they love it. My guys are telling me, "When is this out?" Because, you know, they have I mean, they're so much hungry to get stuff done and to share what they can do, it makes a difference not only for our company, but for the world, right? So it means something. >> That's interesting. Your company's been around for a long time. You're not worried about, I mean, this open mindset is really intriguing to us, you're not worried about putting your IP in there? Or do you feel like, this open community, we're going to get back as much as we give? >> No, of course. Of course, there are controls in place, and of course, there'll be a protocol in place, but you know, at the end, you're making a difference in the world. So if someone wants to, for instance, have a mortgage because they're wanting to buy a house, you want to make it easy, right? At the end, that's the end goal. You know, for EquiFax and for all the institutions that are in the same sector. >> So from a product standpoint, we just have Craig LeClair on, he couldn't directly call out UiPath. It's not cool, right? I mean, he has to be independent. But, look, he wrote the report, UiPath went from third on the list to first on the list, out of I don't know, 10, 15 vendors. It's like the Gardiner magic quadrants, all these rating systems, right? We don't do 'em, but we read them because they're good, and they're informative. He said in there that last year's features have become this year's table stakes. And some of the things that are differentiating companies, and obviously UiPath won so I presume you have the differentiation ears. Analytics and governance. Those are two big areas, I see the heads nodding. Maybe you guys could each talk about that, Jairo let's start with you, why are those things important? You address the analytics, you kind of address governance, as well, but maybe you can summarize. >> I mean, we address governance as the get-go, and it's an evolution. So for instance, you know, really, truly when we're looking into RPA, it's not only so much about a tactical approach to a specific problem, but it's really turned into a strategy, right? So if you want to scale, you need to have the proper controls in place. So, these guys have done an amazing job integrating with tools such as Cyberart, for instance which is reall important for many companies. They're trying to secure their systems and make sure that the bots are operating on their very secure environment. >> So you guys not only you were in the place position, now you're in the lead. Now the pressure's really on. It's like the Red Sox, Stu. (laughs) So, how'd you get there? What is that enables that? Architecture? Mindset? Culture? You know, give us the insights there. >> Yeah, first of all, let's say we're super excited about being in the first place. I think it's really good, it's a really good testament to the hard work the team is putting in there, so we're super excited about that. We believe that our success and the product roadmap depends upon hearing a lot from customers and making sure that we're responding to their customers. So I think that's what we have done for the most part is ensuring that if there are things that our customers need, if there are things that our customers think our platform and technology is moving toward, we're actually doing the kinds of things that'll actually take us there. So a lot of the innovation that we've done on the platform has come from a direct result of engagement and working with customers and bringing their success into there. Specifically, the governance and analytics, those are very important aspects of what we're doing on a product. Most of our customers are very large corporations like Equifax, other corporations. They will not use our technology if we couldn't support the level of governance and compliance that they need from the ability to run those processes, especially when they're running autonomously without having a human look over what's happening. So that was a core part of what we've invested in. Analytics is also something that we've invested but we'll continue to make more investments there. We're now hearing from Equifax and other customers that people don't want to just get analytics that is responding to what the robots are doing but they want to understand what sort of business impact the robots are having on the corporation. So we want to build an analytics platform that is ingesting not just the robot workloads but bringing in information about line of business systems, as well, to be able to give the reports and perspectives that somebody can look at that and say the robots have done so much for me. Not just in terms of number of hours, but in terms of the business outcomes that I've achieved through the work the robots are executing. >> Jairo, I want to ask you about innovation at Equifax. We've observed many times in theCUBE that innovation in the tech industry used to march at the cadence of Moore's Law. Oh, new chip's out! We've got to do, we can now put better, faster data warehouse. You know, more storage, whatever it was. The innovation model is changing dramatically. And we've observed that it's a combination now, it seems, of data plus AI plus cloud, for scale. So, what do you think about that sort of innovation sandwich? Do you buy into it? How are you guys applying innovation in your business? >> I mean, I'll tell you I got a similar question the other day, you know. It's about, you know, I live in Costa Rica, right? So we surf all the time, right? So it's about riding, you know, the wave, right? So it's not about riding it, right? If you don't ride it, then you're going to drop, right? And then you're going to fall behind. >> Dave: You're going to be driftwood. >> So, yeah, innovation is there, you know. It's that demand for all companies. For us, innovating not only about how do we approach customers and consumers and we put them first in everything we do, but in how we operate internally. Creating a culture that drives automation, right? So giving time for people to think about stuff, you know, that makes a difference, right? I think that's how I can summarize innovation as of this moment. >> So, Stu had a question. >> So, if I understand this right now, we can blame the robots if our credit score isn't good enough now, right? (laughs) >> What do you think? Blame the robots, right? >> Blame the robots, always. >> Blame the innocent, as we say. Well, guys, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. >> Param: Thank you. >> Param and Jairo, it was great to have you, appreciate it. >> Thank you again. >> Alright, keep it right there. Stu and I will be back with our next guest from UiPath Forward Americas. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)