>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of UiPath Live, the Release Show. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Every body welcome back, to this special presentation, theCUBE has been covering the RPA space for quite some time. UiPath just had recently a huge launch, and Daniel Dines, as the CEO and founder of UiPath, has set forth the vision, of a robot for every person. (Giggles) pretty substantial goals that he has. And Brandon Node is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Product at UiPath. Brandon, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> So that is a really ambitious goal. And, we're going to poke at that a little bit, and ask you to sort of defend it. Give us some proof points and help us understand sort of why you guys are so confident in this vision. You guys obviously the leader in RPA, growing like crazy, you've shared some metrics, very transparent. So we'd love to have these transparent and open honest computation. So I'm going to start with just sort of the basic, I mean, people understand RPA, just as in terms of automating a lot of mundane tasks, these tasks, you know, are often very repetitive or rules based. They're sort of interacting with existing applications. Now, in the early days of RPA, these are stable legacy apps with people sitting in front of a screen. So I guess my first question to you is, you know, some of the criticisms of RPA have been that if the app changes, you know, the robot breaks. So, first of all, is that the correct way to be thinking about the state of RPA. Today, is that an outdated view? And let's get into it so we can understand how we achieve robot for every person. >> Your thought sure. So I think it's a fair point in that RPA, by definition is built on top of applications. And it's always been the case that you need to be in coordination with your release teams with the application teams to understand what's happening there. Do I think it's a fair statement on where the industry is? I don't think so I think that is a small component of what the center of excellence looks at. And when you look at RPA, at scale today, there are many considerations governance, change management training, things that make these companies successful and these companies that are embracing it as part of their strategic plan for digital transformation. So for sure, it's a part of the story. But I would say, it's just a small part, the bigger part of the story is really about how you bring RPA into the culture. And that's what I think we'll talk about some more with the robot for every person. >> Yeah, definitely. You know, and I want to get back into that sort of how you make RPA strategic but before we get there, so a lot of people have said. Okay, you know're your interacting with existing legacy applications stable. There's no problem, you kind of sort of refuted that. But a lot of people also talk about a point into the API economy that API's are really a way that your platform or other your competitors platform can interact with applications. And that begins to sort of widen the opportunity, sort of modernize both infrastructure and applications. Where do where does the API economy, the whole equation? >> Sure. When you look at RPA, we shouldn't look at it as just a narrow set of implementations. RPA is capable of connecting directly to API's directly to it interfaces to you know, mouse and click style integrations as well as deeper levels, connecting directly to the lower levels of the application bypassing the mouse and keyboard entirely. So think about RPA, not just as keyboard and mouse automations, but also benefiting from all of those API's that exists, also being able to span the full spectrum of automation. >> So I want to talk sometimes I joke, you know, tongue in cheek, it's sort of a pejorative, I say, hey, RPA sometimes paves the cow path. But you know, what if my cow path works, and I can pave it and allows me to go faster and automate. So what? There's other opportunities I can I can attack. So my question is, where are you seeing people really applying RPA today, and how rapidly are they going forward? You know, really transforming. You mentioned digital transformation. And you guys announced a ton of product getting into it where do you see them in terms of glomming on to some of those more strategic areas >> Yeah, absolutely. So we've had lots of conversation around what the right methodology is for RPA, kind of like you said, should I just automate the process as it is? Or should I break down the process, assess it, re-engineer it and then automate? And the answer is, we have customers all over the spectrum. And there's a lot to be said for automating the process as is, if a robot can do it in a minute and a half as is. But if I re engineer it, it can do it in a minute flat. Where's your time best spent? And I think the biggest consideration that companies need to have right now with regard to automation is just really around opportunity costs. If I can automate a process as is and put my re-engineering team on to a bigger problem, that's going to get a bigger lift for the organization. ploy those people there, right? So what you end up having is this kind of mosaic of opportunities. How much does it cost to automate? How much does it cost to re engineer? What's my benefit going to be from that automation or from that re engineering, and now you have different tools that you can apply to your backlog. So, for sure, RPA can automate things as it is as is as well as do take that re-engineering approach and make sure that you are getting the most out of that automation. In terms of the strategic nature of it. Again, all over the map. You know, we've always said automate the mundane automate the repeatable. I was a customer before I was an employee, some of my automations were actually my most critical things, the things that I couldn't let fall through the cracks under any circumstances. So while they were maybe relatively easy for a human To do the compliance pick up that I had the guaranteed delivery pick up that I had, to me made it worth it. >> How does artificial intelligence address some of this in terms of, of making RPA more strategic. In one hand, it is going to inject some, simplicity into the process. On the other hand, you know, people cerned about AI, where does it fit? In? What form does it take? Is it natural language processing? Is it? Is it actually taking actions like systems of agency? How should we think about that? >> Sure. I think about it as, again, a spectrum. You know, so many of these questions, there's not a single answer. There. It's really about what you want to accomplish and how you're going to approach it. So for instance, let's say I'm a company and I want to build the next best action AI model or ML model. right, I'm going to start with the data that I have from my operation. So I may want to use RPA. To help extract data out of processes the build repository that I'm going to build my, my model off of, or let's say I, you know, we have customers that are implementing complex models to help with with their customers. And they have those models being surfaced through RPA. So now I have the model, but I want a human to review it before it takes action. I can surface that in an attended automation in a form or something that's pre built that gives the agent guidance on what to do. And then at the fully autonomous side, you have AI and ML models attached to chat bots that are hooked into RPA processes that can service customers in real time. >> You know, I want to ask you about sort of Product versus platforms in their, their book, the second Machine Age Andy McAfee and Erik brynjolfsson MIT professors years ago sort of laid out, they said products or platforms beat products. And I think a lot of the criticisms of EA around point products, you guys made a big deal. In your your last release, you didn't really talk specifically about this. But to me, my one of my takeaways is, you're building out a platform, you talked about a spectrum. You know, you've got, you know, studio x versus low code, you've got your studio, which is for RPA developers, you got Studio Pro, for hardcore, you know what to do quality assurance, so you've really got a spectrum of capabilities. So it strikes me that one of the ways in which you get to a robot for every person is that you've got a platform that can evolve, you know, with the market. And I wonder if you could sort of talk about that and really try to plug it into that vision that Daniel set out a couple years ago. >> Absolutely. You know, to be honest, this always been a blessing and a curse for us, right? When you install UiPath, you have all of these tools, all of these capabilities. And you've got some places that you can start immediately we place a number of pre existing code bases and modules up on our marketplace. For instance, we have sample code that you can use that we provide. But still, you need to take the platform and customize it for your applications for your business. And when we talk about the platform mindset, really what our primary goal is, is to build something robust enough, flexible enough, reliable enough that any company can use it within their operations. And you see that that's borne out on our customer list that we publish. And we talked about, you have every industry covered, every region covered, and and that's our Challenge is really to make something robust enough to be everywhere, but intuitive and understandable enough that anyone can pick an entry point and begin to use that platform. >> So when we talk about a robot for every person, I want to know better definition around a person we talking about every worker, or is it even more sort of ambitious. >> More ambitious, because it's not just a worker, an employee, it includes students, teachers, take the broadest definition. And think about how taking advantage of automation or being able to write your own automations is beneficial. There's, there's no limit my son is in first grade. He's taking a class right now as part of his curriculum, on the basics of coding. He's doing loops and retries and step based algorithm. Islamic teaching, this is something that's ubiquitous, this applies to everybody. >> That's awesome. Scary at the same time. [Laughter] So I'm talking about this idea of bringing your own AI to the equation. You guys referenced that a little bit of your kind of fabric approach. But can you clarify sort of how you see that playing out? >> This goes straight back to the platform concept, right? If it's the case, that you already have an existing model, and I talk to customers almost daily, who have some form of intelligence existing within their platform today, right? It could be a model that helps with payment processing. Could be that next best action model, right? Data science has been on its own rocket ship for the past couple decades. And by now, most enterprise companies already have models that they're using. Or somewhere or something, we don't want to come in and say, rebuild that model with us. We're not a takeout company. We're an integration company. So we want you to be able to use those existing models, connect them directly to orchestrator. And once it's connected to orchestrator, that means that your developers can access those models directly within the automations that they're writing. So the ability to attach what you already have, those assets that you've already been working on, and make it one click, one drag and drop accessible to your developers is huge. >> It is huge. I mean, I think that's you can observe markets, the ones that have less friction in terms of, you know, their deployments tend to have greater adoption, you're not asking people to rip and replace. This is really sort of additive and you can get some quick wins. I want to come back to mentioned, you know, security, you mentioned that you've got to be in sync with your your teams. What's the right regime? I'm particularly interested in the security and compliance piece because a lot of times users when they hear it security, compliance governance, they go slow me down, say no. How do you help square that circle? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And it's funny because the narrative has changed so much. A year and a half ago, we were educating people on you know, the fact that robots won't go rogue, they won't. All of a sudden just start doing things that you haven't told him to do or haven't programmed in. Right. It was very much a fear of the unknown. I don't have those conversations anymore. Now the conversations with customers are really around. I will enable people to build around automations. I wanted to democratize RPA but I don't want people to automate things. That I don't want them to, for instance, I have a legacy database, it has a limited amount of bandwidth of capacity. So if all of my developers hit that database at once, I could slow down the the access to that database. So maybe I want to blacklist that from my development environments, because that's off limits for automation. And from our standpoint, we're completely okay with this. We want customers to use RPA for the right tools for their organization and give them the ability to build governance into the development tools and into the overall framework, so that it's very much in line with what their expectations. >> Brandon, I really appreciate you helping me wrap up this sort of RPA market analysis, the post UI path, Folks, you can you can DM me @DaveVellante or hit me on Twitter, and you know, love to hear your comment. UiPath as I've said, very open and transparent in the organization, go hit them up, challenge them as I have. Brandon again, thanks so much for for coming on theCUBE and helping us with this program. >> Great. Thanks for having me. It's always great to be here. All right, you're welcome. And thank you everybody for watching Dave volante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. 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