>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five, brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome to Las Vegas. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sans Convention Center covering UI Path Forward five. This is the fourth time the Cube has covered forward, not counting the years during Covid, but UiPath was one of the first companies last year to bring back physical events. We did it at the Bellagio last year, Lisa Martin and myself. Today, my co-host is David Nicholson, coming off of last week's awesome CrowdStrike show back here in Vegas. David talking about UI path. UI path is a company that had a very strange path, as I wrote one time to IPO this company that was founded in 2005 and was basically a development shop. And then they realized they got lightning in a bottle with this RPA thing. Yeah. And Daniel Deez, the founder of the company, just really drove it hard and they really didn't do any big kind of VC raise for several years. >>And then all of a sudden, boom, the rocket ship took off, kind of really got out over their skis a little bit, but then got to IPO and, and has had a very successful sort of penetration into the market. The IPO obviously has not gone as well. We can talk about that, but, but they've hit a billion dollars in arr. There aren't a lot of companies that, you know, have hit a billion dollars in ARR that quickly. These guys had massive valuations that were cut back, obviously with the, with the downturn, but also some execution misuses. But the one thing about UiPath, Dave, is they've been very successful at penetrating customers. And that's the thing you always get at forward customer stories. And the other thing I'll, I'll, I'll add is that it started out with the narrative was, oh, automation software, robots, they're gonna take away jobs. The opposite has happened, the zero unemployment. Now basically we're heading into a recession, we're actually probably in a recession. And so how do you combat a recession? You put automation to work and gain if, if, if, if inflation is five to 7% and you can get 20% from automation. Well, it's a good roi. But you sat in the keynotes, it was really your first exposure to the company. What were your thoughts? >>Yeah, I think the whole subject is interesting. I think if you've been involved in tech for a while, the first thing you think of is, well, hold on a second. Isn't this just high tech scripting? Aren't you essentially just automating stuff? How, how cool can that possibly be? >>Well, it kinda was in the >>Beginning. Yeah, yeah. But, but, but when you dig into it, to your, to your point about the concern about displacing human beings, the first things that can automate it are the mundane and the repetitive tasks, which then frees individuals up frontline individuals who are doing those tasks to do more strategic things for the business. So when you, when we, you know, one of the things that was talked about in the keynote was this idea of an army of citizen developers within an organization. Not, you know, not just folks who are innovating and automating at the core of enterprise applications, but also folks out on the front line automating the tasks that are interfering with their productivity. So it seems like it's a win-win for, for everybody throughout the enterprise. >>Yeah. So let's take a, let's take folks through the, the keynote to, basically we learned there are 3,500 people here, roughly, you know, we're in the Venetian and we do a lot of shows at, at the Venetian, formerly the San Convention Center. The one thing about UiPath, they, they are a cool company. Yeah, they are orange colors, kinda like pure storage, but they got the robots moving around. The setup is very nice, it's very welcoming and very cool, but 300 3500 attendees, including partners and UiPath employees, 250 sessions. They've got a CIO, automation council and a pickleball court inside this hall, which pickleball is, you know, all the rage. So Bobby, Patrick and Mary Telo kicked it off. Bobby's the cmo, Mary's the head of branding, and Bobby raised four themes. It it, this is a tool that it's, this is RPA is going from a tool to a way of operating and innovating. >>The second thing is, the big news here is the UI path business platform, something like that. They're calling, but they're talking about about platform and they're really super gluing that to digital transformation. The third is really outcomes shifting from tactical. I have a robot, a software robot on my desk doing, you know, mimicking what I do with the script to something that's transformative. We're seeing this operationalized very deeply. We'll go into some examples. And then the fourth theme is automation is being featured as a strategic line item in annual reports. Bobby Patrick, as he left the stage, I think he was commenting on my piece where I said that RPA automation is more discretionary than some other things. He said, this is not discretionary, it's strategic. You know, unfortunately when you're heading into a recession, you can, you can put off some of the more strategic items. However, the flip side of that, Dave, is as they were saying before, if you're gonna, if if you're, if you're looking at five to 7% inflation may be a way to attack that is with automation. Yeah. >>There's no question, there's no question that automation is a way to attack that. There's no question that automation is critical moving forward. There's no question that we have moved. We're in the, you know, we're, we're still in the age of cloud, but automation is gonna be absolutely critical. The question is, what will UI path's role be in that market? And, and, and when you hear, when you hear UI path talk about platform versus tool sets and things like that, that's a critical differentiator because if they are just a tool, then why wouldn't someone exploit a tool that is within an application environment instead of exploiting a platform? So what I'm gonna be looking for in terms of the, the folks we talked to over the next few days is this question of, you know, make the case that this is actually a platform that extends across all kinds of application environments. If they can't seize that high ground moving forward, it's it's gonna be, it's gonna be tough for them. >>Well, they're betting the company on >>That, that's Rob Ensslin coming in. That's why he's part of the, the equation. But >>That platform play is they are betting the company. And, and the reason is, so the, the, the history here is in the early days of this sort of RPA craze, Automation Anywhere and UI path went out, they both raised a ton of money. UI Path rocketed out to the lead. They had a much e easier to install, you know, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, some of the other legacy business process folks, you know, kind of had on-prem, Big Stacks, UiPath came in a really simple self-serve platform and took off and really got a foothold in the market. And then started building or or making some of these acquisitions like Process Gold, like cloud elements, which is API automation. More recently Reiner, We, which is natural language processing. We heard them up on the stage today and they've been putting that together to do not just rpa but process mining, task mining, you know, document automation, et cetera. >>And so Rob Ins insulin was brought in from Google, formerly Google and SAP, to really provide that sort of financial and go to market expertise as well as Shim Gupta who's, who's the cfo. So they, they, and they were kinda late with that. They sort of did all this post ipo. I wish they had done it, you know, somewhat beforehand, but they're sort of bringing in that adult supervision supervision that's necessary. Rob Sland, I thought was very cogent. He was assertive on stage, he was really clear, he was energetic. He talked about the phases, e r p, Internet cloud and the now automation is a new S-curve. He quoted a Forester analyst talking about that. He also had a great quote. He said, you know, the old adage better, faster, cheaper, pick two. He said, You don't have to do that anymore with automation. He cited reports from analysts, 50% efficiency improvement, 40% productivity improvement, 40% improvement in customer satisfaction. >>And then what I always, again, love about UiPath is they're no shortage of customers. They do as good a job as anybody, and I think I would say the best of, of, of getting customers to talk about their experiences. You'll see that on the cube all this week, talked about Changi airport from Singapore. They're adding 50 able to service 50 million new customers, new travelers with no new headcount company called Vital or retail. And how you say that a hundred thousand employees having access to it. Uber, 150% ROI in one year. New York state getting 1.2 million relief checks out in two weeks and identifying potentially 12 billion in fraud. They also talk about 25% of the, of the UI path finance team is digital. And they've, they've only incremented headcount, you know, very slightly one and a half times their revenue's grown. What a 10 x? And really he talked about how to, for how to turn automation into a force multiplier for growth. And to your point, I think that's their challenge. What were your thoughts on Rob ens insulin's keynote? >>First of all, in addition to his background, Rob brings a brand with him. Rob Ensslin is a brand, and that brand is enterprise overarching platform. Someone you go to for that platform play, not for a tool set. And again, I'll, I'll say it again. It's critically important that they, that they demonstrate this to the marketplace, that they are a platform worth embracing as opposed to simply a tool set. Because the large enterprise software providers are going to provide their own tool sets within their platforms. And if you can't convince someone that it's worth doing two things instead of one thing, you're, you're, you're never gonna make it. So I've had experiences with Rob when he was at Google. He's, he's, he's the right person for the job and I, and I I I buy into his strategy and narrative about where we are and the critical nature of automation question remains, will you I path to be able to benefit from that trend. >>So a couple things on that. So your point about sap, you know, is right on EY was up on stage. They, EY is a huge SAP customer and they chose UI path to automate their SAP installation, right? And they're going all in with UI path as a partner. Of course. I I often like to say that the global system integrators, they like to eat at the trough, right? When you see GSIs like EY and others coming into the ecosystem, that means there's business being done. We saw Orange up on stage, which was really interesting. >>Javier from Spain. Yeah. Yep. >>Talking about he had this really cool dashboard and then Ted Coomer was talking about the business automation platform and all the different chapters and the evolution. They've gotta get to a platform play because the thing I failed to mention is Microsoft a couple years ago made a tuck in acquisition and got it to this market really providing individual automations and making it, you know, it's Microsoft, they're gonna make it really easy to add it really >>Cheaply. SAP would tell you that they have the same thing and, >>And then, and then just grow from that. So UiPath has to pivot to a platform play. They started this back in 2019, but as you know, it takes a long time to integrate stuff. Okay. So they're, they're, they're working through that. But this is, you know, Rob ends and put up on the, the slide go big, I, I tweeted, took a page outta Michael Dell. Go big or go home. Final thoughts before we break? >>I think go big or go home is pretty much sums it up. I mean this is, this is an existential mission that UiPath is on right now, starting to stay forward. They need to seize that high ground of platform versus tool set. Otherwise they will never get beyond where they are now. I I I, I do wanna mention too, to folks in the audience, there's a huge difference between a billion dollar valuation and a billion dollars in revenue every year. So, so, you know, these, these guys have reached a milestone, there's no question about that. But to get to that next level platform, platform, platform, and I know we'll be, we'll be probing our guests on that question over the next couple years. >>Yeah. And the key is obviously gonna be keep servicing the customers, you know, all the financial machinations and you know, they reduced yesterday their guidance from the high end being 25% ARR growth down to roughly 20% when you, when you factor out currency conversions. UiPath has a lot of business overseas. They're taking that overseas revenue and converting it back to dollars though dollars are appreciated. So they're less of them. I know this is kind of the inside baseball, but, but we're gonna get into that over the next two days. Dave Ante and Dave, you're watching the Cubes coverage of UI path forward, five from Las Vegas. We'll be right back, right after this short break.

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path, >>Everybody. We're back in Las Vegas. The cube's coverage we're day one at UI Path forward. Five. Pascal Borne is here. He's an expert and bestselling author in the topic of AI and automation and the book Intelligent Automation. Welcome to the world of Hyper Automation, the first book on the topic. And of course, Ray Wong is back on the cube. He's the founder, chairman and principal analyst, Constellation Reese, also bestselling author of Everybody Wants To Rule the World. Guys, thanks so much for coming on The Cubes. Always a pleasure. Ray Pascal, First time on the Cube, I believe. >>Yes, thank you. Thanks for the invitation. Thank you. >>So what is artificial about artificial intelligence, >>For sure, not people. >>So, okay, so you guys are both speaking at the conference, Ray today. I think you're interviewing the co CEOs. What do you make of that? What's, what are you gonna, what are you gonna probe with these guys? Like, how they're gonna divide their divide and conquer, and why do you think the, the company Danielle in particular, decided to bring in Rob Sland? >>Well, you know what I mean, Like, you know, these companies are now at a different stage of growth, right? There's that early battle between RPA vendors. Now we're actually talking something different, right? We're talking about where does automation go? How do we get the decisioning? What's the next best action? That's gonna be the next step. And to take where UI path is today to somewhere else, You really want someone with that enterprise cred and experience the sales motions, the packages, the partnership capabilities, and who else better than Roblin? He, that's, he's done, he can do that in his sleep, but now he's gotta do that in a new space, taking whole category to another level. Now, Daniel on the other hand, right, I mean, he's the visionary founder. He put this thing from nothing to where he is today, right? I mean, at that point you want your founder thinking about the next set of ideas, right? So you get this interesting dynamic that we've seen for a while with co CEOs, those that are doing the operations, getting the stuff out the door, and then letting the founders get a chance to go back and rethink, take a look at the perspective, and hopefully get a chance to build the next idea or take the next idea back into the organization. >>Right? Very well said. Pascal, why did you write your book on intelligent automation and, and hyper automation, and what's changed since you've written that book? >>So, I, I wrote this book, An Intelligent Automation, two years ago. At that time, it was really a new topic. It was really about the key, the, the key, the key content of the, of the book is really about combining different technologies to automate the most complex end to end business processes in companies. And when I say capabilities, it's, we, we hear a lot about up here, especially here, robotic process automation. But up here alone, if you just trying to transform a company with only up here, you just fall short. Okay? A lot of those processes need more than execution. They need language, they need the capacity to view, to see, they need the capacity to understand and to, and to create insights. So by combining process automation with ai, natural language processing, computer vision, you give this capability to create impact by automating end to end processes in companies. >>I, I like the test, what I hear in the keynote with independent experts like yourself. So we're hearing that that intelligent automation or automation is a fundamental component of digital transformation. Is it? Or is it more sort of a back office sort of hidden in inside plumbing Ray? What do you think? >>Well, you start by understanding what's going on in the process phase. And that's where you see discover become very important in that keynote, right? And that's where process mining's playing a role. Then you gotta automate stuff. But when you get to operations, that's really where the change is going to happen, right? We actually think that, you know, when you're doing the digital transformation pieces, right? Analytics, automation and AI are coming together to create a concept we call decision velocity. You and I make a quick decision, boom, how long does it take to get out? Management committee could free forever, right? A week, two months, never. But if you're thinking about competing with the automation, right? These decisions are actually being done a hundred times per second by machine, even a thousand times per second. That asymmetry is really what people are facing at the moment. >>And the companies that are gonna be able to do that and start automating decisions are gonna be operating at another level. Back to what Pascal's book talking about, right? And there are four questions everyone has to ask you, like, when do you fully intelligently automate? And that happens right in the background when you augment the machine with a human. So we can find why did you make an exception? Why did you break a roll? Why didn't you follow this protocol so we can get it down to a higher level confidence? When do you augment the human with the machine so we can give you the information so you can act quickly. And the last one is, when do you wanna insert a human in the process? That's gonna be the biggest question. Order to cash, incident or resolution, Hire to retire, procure to pay. It doesn't matter. When do you want to put a human in the process? When do you want a man in the middle, person in the middle? And more importantly, when do you want insert friction? >>So Pascal, you wrote your book in the middle of the, the pandemic. Yes. And, and so, you know, pre pandemic digital transformation was kind of a buzzword. A lot of people gave it lip service, eh, not on my watch, I don't have to worry about that. But then it became sort of, you're not a digital business, you're out of business. So, so what have you seen as the catalyst for adoption of automation? Was it the, the pandemic? Was it sort of good runway before that? What's changed? You know, pre isolation, post isolation economy. >>You, you make me think about a joke. Who, who did your best digital transformation over the last years? The ceo, C H R O, the Covid. >>It's a big record ball, right? Yeah. >>Right. And that's exactly true. You know, before pandemic digital transformation was a competitive advantage. >>Companies that went into it had an opportunity to get a bit better than their, their competitors during the pandemic. Things have changed completely. Companies that were not digitalized and automated could not survive. And we've seen so many companies just burning out and, and, and those companies that have been able to capitalize on intelligent automation, digital transformations during the pandemic have been able not only to survive, but to, to thrive, to really create their place on the market. So that's, that has been a catalyst, definitely a catalyst for that. That explains the success of the book, basically. Yeah. >>Okay. Okay. >>So you're familiar with the concept of Stew the food, right? So Stew by definition is something that's delicious to eat. Stew isn't simply taking one of every ingredient from the pantry and throwing it in the pot and stirring it around. When we start talking about intelligent automation, artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence, it starts getting a bit overwhelming. My spy sense goes off and I start thinking, this sounds like mush. It doesn't sound like Stew. So I wanna hear from each of you, what is the methodical process that, that people need to go through when they're going through digital trans transmission, digital transformation, so that you get delicious stew instead of a mush that's just confused everything in your business. So you, Ray, you want, you want to, you wanna answer that first? >>Yeah. You know, I mean, we've been talking about digital transformation since 2010, right? And part of it was really getting the business model, right? What are you trying to achieve? Is that a new type of offering? Are you changing the way you monetize something? Are you taking existing process and applying it to a new set of technologies? And what do you wanna accomplish, right? Once you start there, then it becomes a whole lot of operational stuff. And it's more than st right? I mean, it, it could be like, well, I can't use those words there. But the point being is it could be a complete like, operational exercise. It could be a complete revenue exercise, it could be a regulatory exercise, it could be something about where you want to take growth into the next level. And each one of those processes, some of it is automation, right? There's a big component of it today. But most of it is really rethinking about what you want things to do, right? How do you actually make things to be successful, right? Do I reorganize a process? Do I insert a place to do monetization? Where do I put engagement in place? How do I collect data along the way so I can build better feedback loop? What can I do to build the business graph so that I have that knowledge for the future so I can go forward doing that so I can be successful. >>The Pascal should, should, should the directive be first ia, then ai? Or are these, are these things going to happen in parallel naturally? What's your position on that? Is it first, >>So it, so, >>So AI is part of IA because that's, it's, it's part of the big umbrella. And very often I got the question. So how do you differentiate AI in, I a, I like to say that AI is only the brain. So think of ai cuz I'm consider, I consider AI as machine learning, Okay? Think of AI in a, like a brain near jar that only can think, create, insight, learn, but doesn't do anything, doesn't have any arms, doesn't have any eyes, doesn't not have any mouth and ears can't talk, can't understand with ia, you, you give those capabilities to ai. You, you basically, you create a cap, the capability, technological capability that is able to do more than just thinking, learning and, and create insight, but also acting, speaking, understanding the environment, viewing it, interacting with it. So basically performing these, those end to end processes that are performed currently by people in companies. >>Yeah, we're gonna get to a point where we get to what we call a dynamic scenario generation. You're talking to me, you get excited, well, I changed the story because something else shows up, or you're talking to me and you're really upset. We're gonna have to actually ch, you know, address that issue right away. Well, we want the ability to have that sense and respond capability so that the next best action is served. So your data, your process, the journey, all the analytics on the top end, that's all gonna be served up and changed along the way. As we go from 2D journeys to 3D scenarios in the metaverse, if we think about what happens from a decentralized world to decentralized, and we think about what's happening from web two to web three, we're gonna make those types of shifts so that things are moving along. Everything's a choose your end venture journey. >>So I hope I remember this correctly from your book. You talked about disruption scenarios within industries and within companies. And I go back to the early days of, of our industry and East coast Prime, Wang, dg, they're all gone. And then, but, but you look at companies like Microsoft, you know, they were, they were able to, you know, get through that novel. Yeah. Ibm, you know, I call it survived. Intel is now going through their, you know, their challenge. So, so maybe it's inevitable, but how do you see the future in terms of disruption with an industry, Forget our industry for a second, all industry across, whether it's healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, automobiles, et cetera. How do you see the disruption scenario? I'm pretty sure you talked about this in your book, it's been a while since I read it, but I wonder if you could talk about that disruption scenario and, and the role that automation is going to play, either as the disruptor or as the protector of the incumbents. >>Let's take healthcare and auto as an example. Healthcare is a great example. If we think about what's going on, not enough nurses, massive shortage, right? What are we doing at the moment? We're setting five foot nine robots to do non-patient care. We're trying to capture enough information off, you know, patient analytics like this watch is gonna capture vitals from a going forward. We're doing a lot what we can do in the ambient level so that information and data is automatically captured and decisions are being rendered against that. Maybe you're gonna change your diet along the way, maybe you're gonna walk an extra 10 minutes. All those things are gonna be provided in that level of automation. Take the car business. It's not about selling cars. Tesla's a great example. We talk about this all the time. What Tesla's doing, they're basically gonna be an insurance company with all the data they have. They have better data than the insurance companies. They can do better underwriting, they've got better mapping information and insights they can actually suggest next best action do collision avoidance, right? Those are all the things that are actually happening today. And automation plays a big role, not just in the collection of that, that information insight, but also in the ability to make recommendations, to do predictions and to help you prevent things from going wrong. >>So, you know, it's interesting. It's like you talk about Tesla as the, the disrupting the insurance companies. It's almost like the over the top vendors have all the data relative to the telcos and mopped them up for lunch. Pascal, I wanna ask you, you know, the topic of future of work kind of was a bromide before, but, but now I feel like, you know, post pandemic, it, it actually has substance. How do you see the future of work? Can you even summarize what it's gonna look like? It's, it's, Or are we here? >>It's, yeah, it's, and definitely it's, it's more and more important topic currently. And you, you all heard about the great resignation and how employee experience is more and more important for companies according to have a business review. The companies that take care of their employee experience are four times more profitable that those that don't. So it's a, it's a, it's an issue for CEOs and, and shareholders. Now, how do we get there? How, how do we, how do we improve the, the quality of the employee experience, understanding the people, getting information from them, educating them. I'm talking about educating them on those new technologies and how they can benefit from those empowering them. And, and I think we've talked a lot about this, about the democratization local type of, of technologies that democratize the access to those technologies. Everyone can be empowered today to change their work, improve their work, and finally, incentivization. I think it's a very important point where companies that, yeah, I >>Give that. What's gonna be the key message of your talk tomorrow. Give us the bumper sticker, >>If you will. Oh, I'm gonna talk, It's a little bit different. I'm gonna talk for the IT community in this, in the context of the IT summit. And I'm gonna talk about the future of intelligent automation. So basically how new technologies will impact beyond what we see today, The future of work. >>Well, I always love having you on the cube, so articulate and, and and crisp. What's, what's exciting you these days, you know, in your world, I know you're traveling around a lot, but what's, what's hot? >>Yeah, I think one of the coolest thing that's going on right now is the fact that we're trying to figure out do we go to work or do we not go to work? Back to your other point, I mean, I don't know, work, work is, I mean, for me, work has been everywhere, right? And we're starting to figure out what that means. I think the second thing though is this notion around mission and purpose. And everyone's trying to figure out what does that mean for themselves? And that's really, I don't know if it's a great, great resignation. We call it great refactoring, right? Where you work, when you work, how we work, why you work, that's changing. But more importantly, the business models are changing. The monetization models are changing macro dynamics that are happening. Us versus China, G seven versus bricks, right? War on the dollar. All these things are happening around us at this moment and, and I think it's gonna really reshape us the way that we came out of the seventies into the eighties. >>Guys, always a pleasure having folks like yourself on, Thank you, Pascal. Been great to see you again. All right, Dave Nicholson, Dave Ante, keep it right there. Forward five from Las Vegas. You're watching the cue.

The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>I Ready, Dave Ante with David Nicholson. We're back at UI Path forward. Five. We're getting ready for the big guns to come in, the two co CEOs, but we have a really special analyst panel now. We're excited to have Daniel Newman here. He's the Principal analyst at Future and Research. And Andy Dai, who's the Vice president and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for making some time to come on the queue. >>Glad to be here. Always >>Good. So, >>Andy, you're deep into ai. You and I have been talking about having you come to our maor office. I'm, I'm really excited that we're able to meet here. What have you seen at the show so far? What are your big takeaways? You know, day one and a half? >>Yeah, well, so first of all, I'm d AI because my last name has AI and I >>Already talk about, >>So, but, but all jokes aside, there are a lot of good things I heard from the conference, right? I mean, one is the last two years because of the pandemic, the growth has been phenomenal for, for a lot of those robotic automation intelligent automation companies, right? So because the low hanging through position making processes have been already taken care of where they going to find the next growth spot, right? That was the question I was looking answers to. And they have some inverse, one good acquisition. They had intelligent document processing, but more importantly they're trying to move from detrimental rules based RPA automation into AI based, more probabilistic subjective decision making areas. That's a huge market, tons of money involved in it, but it's going to be a harder problem to solve. Love to see the execut. >>Well, it's also a big pivot for the, for the company. It started out as sort of a a point product and now is moving to, to platform. But to end of the macro is not in UI pass favor. It's not really in any, you know, tech company's favor, but especially, you know, a company that's going into a transition transitioning to go to market cetera. What are you seeing, what's your take on the macro? I mean, I know you follow the financial markets very closely. There's a lot of negative sentiment right now. Are you as negative as the sentiment? >>Well, the, the broad sentiment comes with some pretty good historical data, right? We've had probably one of the worst market years in multiple decades. And of course we're coming into a situation where all the, the factors are really not in our favor. You've got in interest rates climbing, you've got wildly high inflation, you've had a, you know, helicopters dumping money on the economy for a period of time. And we're, we're gonna get into this great reset is what I keep talking about. But, you know, I had the opportunity to talk to Bill McDermott recently on one of my shows and Bill's CEO of ServiceNow, in case anybody there doesn't know, but >>Former, >>Yeah, really well spoken guy. But you know, him and I kind of went back and forth and we came up with this kind of concept that we were gonna have to tech our way out of what's about to come. You can almost be certain recession is gonna come. But for companies like UiPath, I actually think there's a tremendous opportunity because the bottom line is companies are gonna be looking at their bottom line. A year ago it was all about growth a deal, like the Adobe Figma deal would've been, been lauded, people would've been excited. Now everybody's looking at going, how are they paying that price? Everybody's discounting the future growth. They're looking at the situation, say, what's gonna happen next? Well, bottom line is now they're looking at that. How profitable are we? Are you making money? Are you growing that bottom line? Are you creating earnings? We're >>Gonna come in >>Era, we're gonna come into an era where companies are gonna say, you know what? People are expensive. The inflationary cost of hiring is expensive. You know, what's less expensive? Investing in the cloud, investing in ai, investing in workflow and automation and things that actually enable businesses to expand, keep costs somewhat contained fixed costs, and scale their businesses and get themselves in a good position for when the economy turns to return to >>Grow. So since prior to the pandemic cloud containers, m l and RPA slash automation have been the big four that from a spending data standpoint have been above the line above all kind of the rest in terms of spending momentum up until last quarter, AI and RPA slash automation declined. So my question is, are those two areas discretionary or more discretionary than other technology investments you heard? >>Well, I, I think we're in a, a period where companies are, I won't say they've stopped spending, but you listened to Mark Benioff, you talked about the elongated sales cycle, right? I think companies right now are being very reflective and they're doing a lot of introspection. They're looking at their business and saying, We hired a lot of people. We hired really fast. Do we need to cut? Do we need to freeze? We've made investments in technology, are we getting a return on 'em? We all know that the analytics, whether it's you know, digital adoption platforms or just analytics in the business, say, What is all this money we've been spending doing for us and how productive are we? But I will tell you universally, the companies are looking at workflow automations that enable things. Whether that's onboarding customers, whether that's delivering experiences, whether that's, you know, full, you know, price to quote technologies, automate, automate, automate. By doing that, they're gonna bring down the cost, they're gonna control themselves as best as possible in a tough macro. And then when they come out of it, these processes are gonna be beneficiary in a, in a growth environment even more so, >>Andy UiPath rocketed to a leadership position, largely due to the, the product and the simplicity of the product relative to the competition. And then as you well know, they expanded into, you know, platform. So how do you see the competitive environment? A UI path is again focusing on that platform play Automation Anywhere couldn't get to public market. They had turnover at the go to market level. Chris Riley joined a lot of, lot of hope left Microsoft joined into the fray, obviously is having an impact that you're certainly seeing spending momentum around Microsoft. Then SAP service Now Salesforce, every software company the planet thinks they should get every dollar spent on software. You know, they, they see UI pass momentum and they say, Hey, we can, we can take some of that off the table. How do you see the competitive environment right now? >>So first of all, in in my mind, UI path is slightly better because of a couple of reasons. One, as you said, it's ease of use. >>They're able to customize it variable to what they want. So that's a real easy development advantage. And then the, when you develop the bots and equal, it takes on an average anywhere between two to maybe six weeks, generally speaking, in some industries regulated government might take more so that it's faster, quicker, easier than others in a sense. So people love using that. The second advantage of what they have in my mind is that not only they are available as a managed SA solution on, on cloud, on Azure Cloud, but also they have this version that you can install, maintain, manage any way you want, whether it's a public cloud or, or your own data center and so on so forth. That's not available with almost, not all of them have it, Few have it, but not all of the competitors have it. So they have an advantage there as well. Where it could become useful would be one of the areas that they haven't even expanded is the government. >>Government is the what, >>Sorry? The government. Yeah, related solutions, right? Defense, government, all of those areas when you go, which haven't even started for various reasons. For example, they're worried about laying off people, worried about cost, worried about automating things. There's a lot of hurdles to overcome. But once you overcome that, if you want to go there, nobody's going to use, or most of them will be very of using something on the cloud. So they have a solution for version variation of that. So they are set up to come to that next level. I mean, I don't know if you guys were at the keynote, the CEO talked about how their plans to go from 1 billion to 5 billion in ar. So they're set up to capture the market. But again, as you said, every big software company saw their momentum, they want to get into it, they want to compete with them. So >>Well, to get to 5 billion, they've gotta accelerate growth. I mean, if you do 20% cer over the next, you know, through the end of the decade, they don't quite get there. So they're gonna have to, you know, they lowered their forecast out of the high 20 or mid twenties to 18%. They're gonna have to accelerate that. And we've seen that before. We see it in cloud where cloud, you know, accelerates growth even though you got the lower large numbers. Go ahead Dave. >>Yeah, so Daniel, then how do we, how do we think of this market? How do we measure the TAM for total addressable market for automation? I mean, you know, what's that? What's that metric that shows how unautomated are we, how inefficient are we? Is there a, is there a 5% efficiency that can be gained? Is there a 40% efficiency that can be gained? Because if you're talking about, you know, how much much of the market can UI path capture, first of all, how big is the market? And then is UI path poised to take advantage of that compared to the actual purveyors of the software that people are interacting with? I'm interacting with an E R p, an ER P system that has built into it the ability to automate processes. Then why do I need 'EM UI path? So first, how do you evaluate TAM? Second, how do you evaluate whether UI Path is gonna have a chance in this market where RPAs built into the applications that we actually use? Yeah, >>I think that TAM is evolving, and I don't have it in front of me right now, but what I'll tell you about the TAM is there's sort of the legacy RPA tam and then there's what I would sort of evolve to call the IPA and workflow automation tam that is being addressed by many of these software companies that you asked in the competitive equation. In the, in the, in the question, what we're seeing is a world where companies are gonna say, if we can automate it, we will automate it. That's, it's actually non-negotiable. Now, the process in the ability to a arrive at automation at scale has long been a battle front within the nor every organization. We've been able to automate things for a long time. Why has it more been done? It's the same thing with analytics. There's been numerous studies in analytics that have basically shown companies that have been able to embrace, adopt, and implement analytics, have significantly better performances, better performances on revenue growth, better performances and operational cost management, better performances with customer experience. >>Guess what? Not everybody, every company can get to this. Now there's a couple of things behind this and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to close my answer out cause I'm getting a little long winded here. But the first thing is automation is a cultural challenge in most organizations. We've done endless research on companies digitally transforming and automating their business. And what we've found is largely the technology are somewhat comparable. Meaning, you know, I, I've heard what he is saying about some of the advantages of partnership with Microsoft, very compelling. But you know what, all these companies that have automation offerings, whether it's you know, through a Salesforce, Microsoft, whether it's a specialized rpa like an Automation Anywhere or a UI path, their solutions can be deployed and successful. The company's ability to take the investment, implement it successfully and get buy in across the organization tends to always be the hurdle. An old CIO stat, 50% of IT projects fail. That stat is still almost accurate today. It's not 50% of technology is bad, but those failures are because the culture doesn't get behind it. And automation's a tricky one because there's a lot of people that feel on the outside rather than the inside of an automation transformation. >>So, Andy, so how do you think about the, to Dave's question, the SAPs the service nows trying to, you know, at least take some red crumbs off the table. They, they're gonna, they're gonna create these automation stove pipes, but in Automation Anywhere or, or UI path is a horizontal play, are they not? And so how do you think about that progression? Well, so >>First of all, all of this other companies, when they, they, whether it's a build, acquire, what have you, these guys already have what, five, seven years on them. So it's gonna be difficult for them to catch up with the Center of Excellence knowledge on the use cases, what they got to catch up with them. That's gonna be a lot of catch up. Just to give you an idea, Microsoft Power Automate has been there for a while, right? They're supposedly doing well as well, but they still choose to partner with the UiPath as well to get them to the next level. So there's going to be competition coming from all areas, but it's, it's about, you know, highlights. >>So, so who is the competition? Is it Microsoft chipping away an individual productivity? Is it a service now? Who's got a platform play? Is it themselves just being able to execute >>All plus also, but I think the, the most, I wouldn't say competition, but it's more people are not aware of what areas need to be automated, right? For example, one of the things I was talking about with a couple of customers is, so they have a automation hub where you can put the, the process and and task that need to be automated and then you prioritize and start working on it. And, and almost all of them that I speak to, they keep saying that most of the process and task identification that they need to do for automation, it's manual right now. So, which means it's limited, you have to go and execute it. When people find out and tell you that's what need to be fixed, you try to go and fix that. But imagine if there is a way, I mean the have solutions they're showcasing now if it becomes popular, if you're able to identify tasks that are very inefficient or or process that's very inefficient, automatically score them up saying that, you know what, this is what is going to be ROI and you execute on it. That's going to be huge. So >>I think ts right, there's no shortage of, of a market. I would, I would agree with you Rob Sland this morning talked about the progression. He sort of compared it to e R P of the early days. I sort of have a love hate with E R P cuz of the complexity of the implementation and the, and the cost. However, first of all, a couple points and I love to get your thoughts for you. If you went back, I know 25 years, you, you wouldn't have been able to pick SAP out of a lineup and say that's gonna be the leader in E R P and they ended up, you know, doing really, really well. But the more interesting angle is if you could have figured out the customers that were implementing e r p in, in a really high quality fashion, those are the companies that really did well. You buy their stocks, they really took off cuz they were killing their other industry competitors. So, fast forward to automation. Will automation live up to its hype and your opinion, will it be as transformative and will the, the practitioners of automation see the same type of uplift in their markets, in their market caps, in their competitiveness as did sort of the early adopters and the excellent adopters of brp? What are your thoughts? Well, >>I think it's an interesting comparison. Maybe answer it slightly different way. I think the future is that automation is a non-negotiable in every enterprise organization. I think if you're a large organization, we have absolutely filled our, our organizations with waste too much overhead, too much expense, too much technical debt and automation is an answer. This is the way we want to interact, right? We want a chat bot that actually gives us good answers that can answer on a Tuesday at 11:00 PM at night when we want to know if the right dog food, you know, and I'm saying that, you know, that's what we want. That's the outcome we want. And businesses have to be driven by the outcome. Here's what I'm not sure about, Dave, is we have an era where over the last three to five years, a lot of products have become companies and a lot of 'EM products became companies ended up in public markets. >>And so the RPA space is one of those areas that got this explosive amount of growth. And you look at it and there's two ways. Is this horizontally a business rpa or is this going to be something that's gonna be a target of those Microsofts and those SAPs and say, Look, we need hyper automation to be deeply integrated at the E R P crm, hcm SCM level. We're gonna build by this or we're gonna build this. And you're already hearing it in the partnerships, but this is how I think the story ends. I I think either the companies like UiPath get much bigger, they get much more rounded in their, in their offerings. Or you're gonna have a large company like a Microsoft come in and say, you know what? Buy it rather >>Than build can they can, they can, can this company, maybe not so much here, but can a company like Automation Anywhere stay acquisition? Well, >>I use the, I use the Service now as an, as a parallel because they're a company that I thought would always end up inside of a bigger company and now you're like, I think they're too big. I think they've they've dropped >>That, that chart. Yeah, they're acquisition proof. I would agree. But these guys aren't yet Nora's automation. They work for >>A while and it's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes getting bit bought is good, but what I mean is it's gonna be core and these big companies know it cuz they're all talking >>About, but as independent analysts, we want to see independent companies. >>I wanna see the right thing. >>It just makes it fun. >>The right thing >>Customers. Yeah, but you know, okay, Oracle buy more customers, more >>Customers. >>I'm kidding. Yeah, I guess it's the right thing. It just makes it more fun when you have really good independent competitors that >>We >>Absolutely so, and, and spend way more on r and d than these big companies who spend a lot more on stock buyback. But I know you gotta go. Thanks so much for spending some time, making time for Cube Andy. Great to see you. Good to see as well. All right, we are wrapping up day one, Dave Blan and Dave Nicholson live. You can hear the action behind us, forward in five on the Cube, right back.