(upbeat music) >> Announcer: theCUBE presents UiPath Forward5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hi everybody, we're back in Las Vegas. We're live with Cube's coverage of Forward 5 2022. Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson Ted Kumer this year is the Executive Vice President, product and engineering at UiPath. Brought on to do a lot of the integration and bring on new capabilities for the platform and we've seen that over the last several years. And he's joined by Dr. Edward Challis, who's the co-founder of the recent acquisition that UiPath made, company called Re:infer. We're going to learn about those guys. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Ted, good to see you again. Ed, welcome. >> Good to be here. >> First time. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, great to be here with you. >> Yeah, so we have seen, as I said, this platform expanding. I think you used the term business automation platform. It's kind of a new term you guys introduced at the conference. Where'd that come from? What is that? What are the characteristics that are salient to the platform? >> Well, I see the, the evolution of our platform in three chapters. You understand the first chapter, we call that the RPA chapter. And that's where we saw the power of UI automation applied to the old problems of how do I integrate apps? How do I automate processes? That was chapter one. You know, chapter two gets us to Forward3 in 2019, and the definition of this end-to-end automation platform you know, with the capabilities from discover to measure, and building out that core platform. And as the platform's progressed, what we've seen happen with our customers is the use of it goes from being very heavy in automating the repetitive and routine to being more balanced, to now where they're implementing new brought business process, new capability for their organization. So that's where the name, Business Automation Platform, came from. Reflecting now that it's got this central role, as a strategic tool, sitting between their application landscape, their processes, their people, helping that move forward at the rate that it needs to. >> And process mining and task mining, that was sort of the enabler of chapter two, is that right? >> Well, I'd say chapter two was, you know, first the robots got bigger in terms of what they could cover and do. API integration, long running workflows, AI and ML skills integrated document processing, citizen development in addition to professional development, engaging end users with things like user interfaces built with UiPath apps. And then the discovery. >> So, more robustness of the? Yeah, okay. >> Yeah. Just an expansion of the whole surface area which opened up a lot of things for our customers to do. That went much broader than where core RPA started. And so, and the other thing about this progression to the business automation platform is, you know, we see customers now talking more about outcomes. Early on they talk a lot about hours saved and that's great, but then what about the business outcomes it's enabling? The transformations in their business. And the other thing we're doing in the platform is thinking about, well, where can we land with solutions capabilities that more directly land on business, measurable business outcomes? And so we had started, for example, offering an email automation solution, big business problem for a lot of our customers last year. And we'd started encountering this company Re:infer as we were working with customers. And then, and we encountered Re:infer being used with our platform together. And we saw we can accelerate this. And what that is giving us now is a solution now that aligns with a very defined business outcome. And this way, you know, we can help you process communications and do it efficiently and provide better service for your customers. And that's beginning of another important progression for us in our platform. >> So that's a nice segue, Ed. Tell about Re:infer. Why did you start the company? >> Right, yeah, so my whole career has been in machine learning and AI and I finished my PhD around 2013, it was a very exciting time in AI. And me and my co-founders come from UCL, this university in London, and Deep Mind, this company which Google acquired a few years later, came from our same university. So very exciting time amongst the people that really knew about machine learning and AI. And everyone was thinking, you know, how do we, these are just really big breakthroughs. And you could just see there was going to be a whole bunch of subsequent breakthroughs and we thought NLP would be the next breakthrough. So we were really focused on machine reading problems. And, but we also knew as people that had like built machine learning production systems. 'Cause I'd also worked in industry that built that journey from having a hypothesis that machine learning can solve a problem to getting machine learning into production. That journey is of painful, painful journey and that, you know, you can see that you've got these advances, but getting into broad is just way too hard. >> So where do you fit in the platform? >> Yeah, so I think when you look in the enterprise just so many processes start with a message start with a no, start with a case ticket or, you know, some other kind of request from a colleague or a customer. And so it's super exciting to be able to, you know, take automation one step higher in that process chain. So, you could automatically read that request, interpret it, get all the structured data you need to drive that process forward. So it's about bringing automation into these human channels. >> So I want to give the audience a sense here. So we do a lot of events at the Venetian Conference Center, and it's usually very booth heavy, you know, brands and big giant booths. And here the booths are all very small. They're like kiosks, and they're all pretty much the same size. So it's not like one vendor trying to compete with the other. And there are all these elements, you know I feel like there's clouds and there's, you know, of course orange is the color here. And one of the spots is, it has this really kind of cool sitting area around customer stories. And I was in there last night reading about Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank was also up on stage. Deutsche Bank, you guys were talking about a Re:infer. So share with our audience what Deutsche Bank are doing with UiPath and Re:infer. >> Yeah, so I mean, you know, before we automate something, we often like to do what we call communications mining. Which is really understanding what all of these messages are about that might be hitting a part of the business. And at Deutsche Bank and in many, you know, like many large financial services businesses, huge volumes of messages coming in from the clients. We analyze those, interpret the high volume query types and then it's about automating against those to free up capacity. Which ultimately means you can provide faster, higher quality service because you've got more time to do it. And you're not dealing with all of those mundane tasks. So it's that whole journey of mining to automation of the coms that come into the corporate bank. >> So how do I invoke the service? So is it mother module or what's the customer onboarding experience like? >> So, I think the first thing that we do is we generate some understanding of actually the communications data they want to observe, right? And we call it mining, but you know, what we're trying to understand is like what are these communications about? What's the intent? What are they trying to accomplish? Tone can be interesting, like what's the sentiment of this customer? And once you understand that, you essentially then understand categories of conversations you're having and then you apply automations to that. And so then essentially those individual automations can be pointed to sets of emails for them to automate the processing of. And so what we've seen is customers go from things they're handling a hundred percent manual to now 95% of them are handled basically with completely automated processing. The other thing I think is super interesting here and why communications mining and automation are so powerful together is communications about your business can be very, very dynamic. So like, new conversations can emerge, something happens right in your business, you have an outage, whatever, and the automation platform, being a very rapid development platform, can help you adapt quickly to that in an automated way. Which is another reason why this is such a powerful thing to put the two things together. >> So, you can build that event into the automation very quickly you're saying? >> Speaker 1: Yeah. >> Speaker 2: That's totally right. >> Cool. >> So Ed, on the subject of natural language processing and machine learning versus machine teaching. If I text my wife and ask her would you like to go to an Italian restaurant tonight? And she replies, fine. Okay, how smart is your machine? And, of course, context usually literally denotes things within the text, and a short response like that's very difficult to do this. But how do you go through this process? Let's say you're implementing this for a given customer. And we were just talking about, you know, the specific customer requirements that they might have. What does that process look like? Do you have an auditor that goes through? And I mean do you get like 20% accuracy, and then you do a pass, and now you're at 80% accuracy, and you do a pass? What does that look? >> Yeah, so I mean, you know when I was talking about the pain of getting a machine learning model into production one of the principle drivers of that is this process of training the machine learning model. And so what we use is a technique called active learning which is effectively where the AI and ML model queries the user to say, teach me about this data point, teach me about this sentence. And that's a dynamic iterative process. And by doing it in that way you make that training process much, much faster. But critically that means that the user has, when you train the model the user defines how you want to encode that interpretation. So when you were training it you would say fine from my wife is not good, right? >> Sure, so it might be fine, do you have a better suggestion? >> Yeah, but that's actually a very serious point because one of the things we do is track the quality of service. Our customers use us to attract the quality of service they deliver to their clients. And in many industries people don't use flowery language, like, thank you so much, or you know, I'm upset with you, you know. What they might say is fine, and you know, the person that manages that client, that is not good, right? Or they might say I'd like to remind you that we've been late the last three times, you know. >> This is urgent. >> Yeah, you know, so it's important that the client, our client, the user of Re:infer, can encode what their notions of good and bad are. >> Sorry, quick follow up on that. Differences between British English and American English. In the U.K., if you're thinking about becoming an elected politician, you stand for office, right? Here in the U.S., you run for office. That's just the beginning of the vagaries and differences. >> Yeah, well, I've now got a lot more American colleagues and I realize my English phrasing often goes amiss. So I'm really aware of the problem. We have customers that have contact centers, some of them are in the U.K., some of them are in America, and they see big differences in the way that the customers get treated based on where the customer is based. So we've actually done analysis in Re:infer to look at how agents and customers interact and how you should route customers to the contact centers to be culturally matched. Because sometimes there can be a little bit of friction just for that cultural mapping. >> Ted, what's the what's the general philosophy when you make an acquisition like this and you bring in new features? Do you just wake up one day and all of a sudden there's this new capability? Is it a separate sort of for pay module? Does it depend? >> I think it depends. You know, in this case we were really led here by customers. We saw a very high value opportunity and the beginnings of a strategy and really being able to mine all forms of communication and drive automated processing of all forms of communication. And in this case we found a fantastic team and a fantastic piece of software that we can move very quickly to get in the hands of our customer's via UiPath. We're in private preview now, we're going to be GA in the cloud right after the first of the year and it's going to continue forward from there. But it's definitely not one size fits all. Every single one of 'em is different and it's important to approach 'em that way. >> Right, right. So some announcements, StudioWeb was one that I think you could. So I think it came out today. Can't remember what was today. I think we talked about it yesterday on the keynotes anyway. Why is that important? What is it all about? >> Well we talked, you know, at a very top level. I think every development platform thinks about two things for developers. They think, how do I make it more expressive so you can do other things, richer scenarios. And how do I make it simpler? 'Cause fast is always better, and lower learning curves is always better, and those sorts of things. So, Re:infer's a great example of look the runtime is becoming more and more expressive and now you can buy in communications state as part of your automation, which is super cool. And then, you know StudioWeb is about kind of that second point and Studios and Studio X are already low code visual, but they're desktop. And part of our strategy here is to elevate all of that experience into the web. Now we didn't elevate all of studio there, it's a subset. It is API integration and web based application automation, Which is a great foundation for a lot of apps. It's a complete reimagining of the studio user interface and most importantly it's our first cross-platform developer strategy. And so that's been another piece of our strategy, is to say to the customers we want to be everywhere you need us to be. We did cross-platform deployment with the automation suite. We got cross-platform robots with linear robots, serverless robots, Mac support and now we got a cross-platform devs story. So we're starting out with a subset of capabilities maybe oriented toward what you would associate with citizen scenarios. But you're going to see more roadmap, bringing more and more of that. But it's pretty exciting for us. We've been working on this thing for a couple years now and like this is a huge milestone for the team to get to this, this point. >> I think my first conversation on theCUBE with a customer was six years ago maybe at one of the earlier Forwards, I think Forward2. And the pattern that I saw was basically people taking existing processes and making them better, you know taking the mundane away. I remember asking customers, yeah, aren't you kind of paving the cow path? Aren't there sort of new things that you can do, new process? And they're like, yeah, that's sort of the next wave. So what are you seeing in terms of automating existing processes versus new processes? I would see Re:infer is going to open up a whole new vector of new processes. How should we think about that? >> Yeah, I think, you know, I mean in some ways RPA has this reputation because there's so much value that's been provided in the automating of the repetitive and routine. But I'd say in my whole time, I've been at the company now for two and a half years, I've seen lots of new novel stuff stood up. I mean just in Covid we saw the platform being used in PPP loan processing. We saw it in new clinical workflows for COVID testing. We see it and we've just seen more and more progression and it's been exciting that the conference, to see customers now talking about things they built with UiPath apps. So app experiences they've been delivering, you know. I talked about one in healthcare yesterday and basically how they've improved their patient intake processing and that sort of thing. And I think this is just the front end. I truly believe that we are seeing the convergence happen and it's happening already of categories we've talked about separately, iPass, BPM, low-code, RPA. It's happening and it's good for customers 'cause they want one thing to cover more stuff and you know, I think it just creates more opportunity for developers to do more things. >> Your background at Microsoft probably well prepared you for a company that you know, was born on-prem and then went all in on the cloud and had, you know, multiple code bases to deal with. UiPath has gone through a similar transformation and we talked to Daniel last night about this and you're now cloud first. So how is that going just in terms of managing multiple code bases? >> Well it's actually not multiple Code bases. >> Oh, it's the same one, Right, deployment models I should say. >> Is the first thing, Yeah, the deployment models. Another thing we did along the way was basically replatform at an infrastructure level. So we now can deploy into a Kubernetes Docker world, what you'd call the cloud native platform. And that allows us to have much more of a shared infrastructure layer as we look to deliver to the automation cloud. The same workload to the automation cloud that we now deliver in the automation suite for deployment on-prem or deploying a public cloud for a customer to manage. Interesting and enough, that's how Re:infer was built, which is it was built also in the cloud native platform. So it's going to be pretty easy. Well, pretty easy, there's some work to do, but it's going to be pretty easy for us to then bring that into the platform 'cause they're already working on that same platform and provide those same services both on premises and in the cloud without having your developers have to think too much about both. >> Okay, I got to ask you, so I could wrap my stack in a container and put it into AWS or Azure or Google and it'll run great. As well, I could tap some of the underlying primitives of those respective clouds, which are different and I could run them just fine. Or/and I could create an abstraction layer that could hide those underlying primitives and then take the best of each and create an automation cloud, my own cloud. Does that resonate? Is that what you're doing architecturally? Is that a roadmap, or? >> Certainly going forward, you know, in the automation cloud. The automation cloud, we announced a great partnership or a continued partnership with Microsoft. And just Azure and our platform. We obviously take advantage of anything we can to make that great and native capabilities. And I think you're going to see in the Automation Suite us doing more and more to be in a deployment model on Azure, be more and more optimized to using those infrastructure services. So if you deploy automation suite on-prem we'll use our embedded distro then when we deploy it say on Azure, we'll use some of their higher level managed services instead of our embedded distro. And that will just give customers a better optimized experience. >> Interesting to see how that'll develop. Last question is, you know what should we expect going forward? Can you show us a little leg on on the future? >> Well, we've talked about a number of directions. This idea of semantic automation is a place where you know, you're going to, I think, continue to see things, shoots, green shoots, come up in our platform. And you know, it's somewhat of an abstract idea but the idea that the platform is just going to become semantically smarter. You know, I had to serve Re:infer as a way, we're semantically smarter now about communications data and forms of communications data. We're getting semantically smarter about documents, screens you know, so developers aren't dealing with, like, this low level stuff. They can focus on business problem and get out of having to deal with all this lower level mechanism. That is one of many areas I'm excited about, but I think that's an area you're going to see a lot from us in the next coming years. >> All right guys, hey, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really appreciate you taking us through this. Awesome >> Yeah Always a pleasure. >> Platform extension. Ed. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Dave Nicholson, I will be back right after this short break from UiPath Forward5, Las Vegas. (upbeat music)

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>It's the Q we are live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio. Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante, we're covering UI path forward for this is our second day of coverage. We've had a lot of great conversations with customers at UI path partners, their senior leaders. And next up, we're going to be talking to, I'm going to say the queen of citizen developer nests. We're not just going to create that title for you. Sydney, Madison Prescott. She's the global head of intelligent automation at Spotify Sydney. Welcome to the program. I >>Am so excited >>To be here. We're excited to have you. So one of my, as we were talking before we went live, we both are big fans of Spotify. I don't know what we would do without it in our personal lives. But talk to me a little bit about Spotify automation, UI path. And I don't want to get into you your book, what you've done for citizen developers. >>Perfect. So Spotify is on a very interesting journey. Uh, we began the journey during the pandemic and we were speaking about this a little bit earlier. And so our journey began with trying to understand how we would tackle, uh, still wanting to upskill our employees, despite the fact that we were in the middle of this kind of global crisis. And so through that endeavor, we decided to actually split out our different, uh, automation capabilities into citizen developer and unattended automation. And we did all of this through a center of excellence. So a centralized, uh, COE, which would facilitate the growth of the automations, uh, whether on the citizen developer side or the unattended side. And through this programs, we set up, uh, several different trainings where we could facilitate the growth of the citizen developer community through five day, what we call bot boot camps and the bot boot camp is in essence, um, five day training, about four and a half, five hours a day, where we take anyone at Spotify who would like to upskill in this type of automation. And we teach them everything from the basics of robotic process automation, all the way to, you know, what are all of the Spotify specific things that you have to do in order to maintain a robust, uh, citizen developer footprint within your team. And so through that, uh, that entire journey, it's been quite amazing. We started with a very small footprint in our accounting team, and we have scaled now to over 100 citizen developers, uh, in a variety of functions within Spotify. >>And what was the role that you came to Spotify to do? Cause you came there, went there right before the everything happened. >>Yes. So I was actually, uh, brought into Spotify to stand up and scale out our intelligent automation center of excellence. >>So the center of excellence is, is sort of the main spring of knowledge, training innovation. And then the, the citizen developer piece, it sounds like you're pushing out distributing that knowledge. Right. And so I'm interested in that sort of architecture of automation is that you've got a combination of centralized expertise and decentralized innovation. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. So it's very interesting actually. So we facilitate the citizen developer program through the center of excellence. So you can think of the center of excellence as the foundation of that knowledge. And our goal is to democratize that knowledge throughout the enterprise. And the way we do that is through the training. Uh, we facilitate the governance of the program. So making sure that all of the infrastructure is properly set up, uh, enabling the citizens, if they need support, just talking about ideation, uh, even so far as up-skilling as well. So upskilling all the way to a power user, uh, whereby those users could become true innovators and facilitate a wide variety of automations within their teams. And was it >>The events of the last 18 months? It really catalyzed this and kind of led you to really become a big advocate for citizen led development. >>It did. So we initially were starting with just the center of excellence and an unintended footprint, and we quickly pivoted and realized that we needed to in order to scale, uh, significantly given the, the situation working virtually, uh, we are a distributed team around the world that it was critical for our success that we could, uh, really distribute to this workout. And we felt that the best way to do that was through standing up a citizen developer program. >>The things that I'm trying to understand is the relationship between automation and data. And I look at Spotify in many respects is a data company, at least a company who really understands data. And I see you building all these awesome data products. I'm a subscriber as well, but you know, you've added podcasts, you've got contributors to those podcasts. You've obviously got artists and you know, these people obviously have to be paid. You have this sort of interesting ecosystem and these are all data products, if you will, that you guys build. And it's very cool sort of business model. What's the relationship between data and automation? >>Well, it is a big relationship. I would actually say it is probably the pivotal relationship because in order to tell that compelling story of digital transformation, we have to understand the data behind all of the automations that we're generating. Um, and this is whether it says in developer or COE built. Um, and so for us, it's, it's a critical component of our success that we can pinpoint those key metrics that we are looking at and tracking, you know, what does success mean for our center of excellence? What does it mean for our citizen led program? And this is everything from, you know, increased data quality to risk mitigation of different internal regulatory risk. Uh, it could be something as simple as our saved on automation. So it's, uh, a wide variety of attributes that we're looking at to really pinpoint where the successes are coming from and where we can improve maybe where we need to improve our automation footprint in a given business. >>Why did you write this book? >>Great question. So I believe in citizen development, I think it is a very unique approach to spreading out the way that you can transform your business. And so I saw a lot of struggles as I've gone through I'm in the industry with understanding citizen development, uh, the premise of it, and also understanding the technology behind it. Um, I am a big fan of studio X. And so the book specifically focuses on studio X. Um, it really introducing users to what is studio X and how really teaching individuals, how to upskill themselves, um, just through the use of the book, very intuitive and hopefully taking away some of the fear that the users may have about walking through a platform like studio S >>So what do I have to know to actually, can I read your book and then start coding? Is it by >>That is the goal. Yes. So the goal for the book is very hands-on. So it is, it is a book for, um, the novice business user, uh, someone who is not familiar with RPA, someone who may not even be familiar with UI path, they would be able to pick up this book, go through the set of exercises. It's very robust out over 400 pages. So it really packed a lot of knowledge in there, but the goal would be by the time you walk through every single exercise and complete the book, you would not only understand RPA. You would also understand UI path as a, as a service provider platform. You'd also understand the nuances of studio X. >>So in theory, someone like myself could get your book, download the community edition, start building automations, right? >>Yes, exactly. Exactly. >>You have to Google a few things, but yeah. >>Yes. And it comes with a very robust code code set up. They're able to actually look at the code and review, uh, examples of the code, uh, in a source code repository. So again, it's very novice users it's meant for, to help facilitate just the learning of someone who is maybe curious about RPA, curious about UI path, or just curious about studio app. >>I already have the use case. >>You do have these guys I'm interested in doing it too. I mean, I can tell that it's a passion project of yours that you fundamentally believe in. You know, we saw this morning data from IDC and we've seen lots of different data sources that talk about, oh, automation taking jobs, people being fearful, organizations, not being ready at the same time. We've had such a tumultuous last 18 months that organizations that weren't digital are probably gone and organizations that aren't, how did there was this massive uptake in automation because suddenly you couldn't get bodies into buildings. So tell me about how this book is a facility, first of all, tell us the name of it. And then as a facilitator of those employees who might be worried about their jobs being taken by bots, >>That is a great question. So the, the name of the book is robotic process automation, a citizen developers guide to hyper automation using UI path studio X. And I would say I've heard a lot of the conversation surrounding the loss of jobs, the potential fear, uh, we all we know as humans, we are generally unfortunately, a little resistant to change and, you know, the, I'll say the digital revolution that we're going through, uh, within the workforce, whether it is hybrid work, whether it is completely virtual work, it is a bit daunting. And I understand that fear, I think in alignment with the conversation that we had heard about earlier at forward there, RPA has the ability to generate a massive amount of not only improvements within different industries, but jobs as well. Right? And for someone who is looking at this kind of ever changing landscape, and they're wondering, where do I fit in? >>Am I going to get pushed out of a, of a general, you know, uh, industry? I would say that that fear turned that into power, turned that into ambition. Um, the level of upskilling that you can do on your own, whether it's using UiPath academy, whether it's reaching out to your center of excellence, it's incredible. Um, there's a wide variety of different ways that you can upskill yourself. And in essence, you become, um, a powerful player in your environment because not only do you have the business acumen, you now have the technical acumen, and that is everything. I mean, when we talk about transformation, we talk about where our industry's going. Um, there's a saying that, you know, every company now must be a technology company, right? And so this is the key, even as workers, even as employees, we all must be technologists. And so the real question is, think of yourself and think of this concept. I like to call human augmentation. How can you augment yourself through UI path, through the use of RPA to become that up-skilled worker, that next level worker who will be integral to the success of any company moving from, >>We talk a lot about upscaling. Now, of course, part of that upskilling I presume is learning how to use robotic process automation and the tooling, but it seems that there's more to it than that. And, and you just strike me as a person that's creative, you have a power persona. So what are these sort of intangible skills that, that I need to succeed in this new world? And can I learn them? >>That's a great question. I think one of the biggest skills, being able to think outside of the box, that is huge. Uh, and again, this goes back to at least question about what does it take and what should you, you should really think outside of the box about your own career, about your team, about your company, um, how you can improve upon what is already there, um, or how can you build something completely new that has never been thought of before. And so I think that's the biggest skill. The ability to, um, innovate, think, think innovatively and think outside of the box. Um, I believe it's, it's something that is maybe a little intuitive to some individuals, but you can also learn, you can learn to, um, get out of your own way, so to speak, uh, so that you can actually start to come up with these really creative ways to address, uh, whether it's complex business problems, uh, whether it's at an industry level or even just within your internal enterprise. >>And creativity is actually one of the attributes. And I guess it might not be in your DNA, but if you, you know, it's like humor, humor, right? If you hang out with funny people, you know, if you hang out with creative people, you can, you can learn about apply. >>That's right. That's right. But in the beginning of the pandemic, you know, one of the things that I think we all want, you seem to have a ton of motivation and ambition as Dave was saying. And, and I'm someone that normally has that too, but in the first year of pandemic, that was hard. It's hard to get motivated. It was hard to know where do I fit in? How do you advise? And now of course, when you publish the book six months ago, we're about a year into the pandemic. Things are looking better because here we are in Las Vegas at an in-person event with humans. But how do you, how do you see, how do you recommend to folks that are, that don't have technology backgrounds like you don't, I don't to motivate themselves to go, you can take the control, take it. And everybody don't, we all want control as people and take control of your career path. There are a lot of opportunities out there. How do you advise people navigating this challenging sort of mental state with there's so many opportunities sitting right here? Yes >>That's so I think it, it goes back to the getting out of your own way. It also goes back to really taking a look at assess assessing your own skillset, um, assessing your own personal drivers. What motivates you, uh, whether that is in your personal life, whether that is in your professional life, and then taking a look also at those motivators, how can I look at those and what use can I get out of those to help me to transform my own personal skill set and really grow out, uh, my, my capabilities, right, as a professional it's, it's all about really thinking through, uh, your, I'll say your professional background or role as ever-changing ever-growing. And as long as you approach it with a mindset of constantly growing constantly upskilling, I mean, honestly, the sky is truly the limit. >>I a weird question. If, if, if, if mastering word is a one and let's say learning, um, learning how to use Excel, macros is let's call it a three. Uh, all in the spectrum goes out to a, be a building, a complex, uh, you know, uh, AI model, data science kind of ML model. If that's a 10, where does learning how to code RPA as a citizen developer fit on that spectrum? Good question. >>Oh, that's a great question. I would say somewhere between, Hmm. I would say somewhere between maybe three and four around there, because you there. So again, we, we have so many tools that we can use to help upscale the set of sense at this point that we can really walk them through the nuances, uh, at a pace that is conducive to really retaining the knowledge. So I don't think it's, it's definitely not the level of, let's say, building out a complex, like machine learning model or something of that nature. It may be a little bit more in alignment with, um, if someone is up-skilled and macros, or you may be up-skilled in some other type of scripting, uh, language similar to that, I might even say sometimes a little bit, maybe a little bit less difficult than that, uh, depending on what you're trying to automate, right. The process you're trying to automate the company, >>But inside of a day, I can do something fairly simple, right? Yeah. >>Yes. So we actually, the, the training that we have at Spotify, we train our users from novice. Absolutely no understanding, no knowledge of RPA to building able, being able to build a bot in five days. And those are five half days sessions that the citizen developers attend. And by the morning of the fifth day, they actually have built a bot. And so it's, and it's very powerful, uh, being able to, to upskill someone and show them, I can take you from, you know, absolutely no understanding of RPA to actually having something, a bot that you can showcase that you can run within as little as five half days. I mean, it's very compelling to any business user, right? >>The business impact. Soon as you guys are too young to remember, but there's this thing called Lotus 1, 2, 3, we used to have to go to Lotus class slash file retrieve for you folks who remember this was all keyboard based, but it was game changing in terms of your personal productivity. And it sounds like there's a similar but much, much larger impact with RPA >>Impact. Talk to me about the impact of the program, especially in the last, this year, here we are in October, you mentioned started small, and now there's about a hundred folks. Talk to me about the appetite of that as we've seen this massive acceleration and the need to automate for everyday things that we expect as consumers, whether we're ordering food or buying something online. >>Hmm. So it really is a different mindset in terms of thinking through the way that we work differently. And so we really approached it with, if you're an accountant, think of what is the future role and responsibility of an accountant in this new digital, uh, I'll say environment. And through that, we have been able to really push this idea or this concept of up-skilling as a key element of personal professional success and also team success. Um, and that has been a game changer. So there's a lot of value that comes out of the cohesiveness between the personal desire to upskill and continue to, uh, be a, you know, a consummate professional in whatever role you're in, but also to help your team right, to be, to be, you know, a standout, uh, team player in terms of the skills that you're bringing to the table as both an accountant and someone that has now the power of automation within your skillset. Okay. >>And ask you one more question. And that is something that Dave brought up yesterday as we were, he was sitting on a panel with, and he was the only male, which is not common in our industry. How have you seen the role of females in technology changing? And I'm imagine you do work in stem. Imagine you're a motivational speaker you should be if you're not. Um, but how have you seen the role of females in technology changing in since there's so much opportunity there? >>Yes. That is a great question. I believe that RPA specifically, uh, is an incredible driver of women and influencing more women to enter into stem fields, primarily because it is such an innovative technology. There are so many roles he said that are open, just opening up. Uh, probably I've heard different numbers in terms of acceleration of growth over the next five to 10 years. So we're looking at a plethora of opportunities and these are brand new roles that women who are curious about stem, curious about being a technologist can dive right into from wherever they are. So whether they are a tax professional today, whether they are working within, you know, uh, counting, whether they're working with an internal audit, they have the opportunity now to test the waters. Um, and quite often it is such a, it's such a fascinating field. And as I said, there's so much potential around it and for growth and just for changing, uh, different industries, that it's a great driver for women to actually enter into, uh, stem technology, uh, and really drive change, facilitate change, and have more women at the table, so to speak. Okay. >>And you didn't, you didn't start in tech, in stem, right? I did not. Do you have a law degree or no, you have a Ms. >>So yes, little studies and then I actually, I'm a philosopher. So I started by my degree is in philosophy. I love >>This logic. Yes. I love how you've applied that to >>Yeah. Yes. I was not initially in stem and it was actually through an internship at a technology firm, uh, while I was in college that I don't first open to technology. And it just immediately captivated me just in terms of working, you know, that the speed, the pace, uh, just being able to solve these complex business problems at scale around the world. It was absolutely fascinating to me, obviously still is, but I think testing the waters in that way, um, as I was just talking before, it helped me to understand, I had never envisioned a career in technology, but having an opportunity to test the waters really enabled me to see that, wow, this is something where I have a skillset and it brings out a passion within me that I didn't know that I had. So it was a, it was a win-win. >>That's awesome. No worries. Last question. Where can folks go to get your book? >>Yes. So anywhere books are sold, uh, definitely on Amazon. Uh, we, if you are here at forward, we also are, have a book signing, so you can come find me. I'll be on the patio signing books and, uh, yeah, it's, it's everywhere. And I would love to hear feedback. And we're thinking about a second one. So please let us know how you like the, uh, the activities that are in there. >>Thank you. Congratulations. And Dave's going to pick one up so he can start. >>Yeah. The use case. I'm dying to dig >>In, do a breathing analysis on it, and he was great to have you on the program. Your energy is fantastic. You really open up opportunities for people. I hope that more people will watch this and understand that while the really the sky is really the limit. And, uh, thank you for your time. Absolutely. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure >>For Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. We are live in Vegas at the Bellagio UI path forward for you right back with our next guest.

>>from the bellagio hotel >>in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering Ui Path forward. Four brought to you >>by Ui Path. Welcome back from the bellagio in Las Vegas. The Cubans live at Ui Path forward for I'm lisa martin here with Dave Volonte. We're gonna be talking about roadblocks to automation and how to navigate around them, joining us next as Pernando Panini expert associate partner at bain and company per night. Welcome to the program. >>Thanks lisa. Happy to be here. >>Talk to us about some of the use cases that bain is working on with you I Path and then we'll dig into some of those roadblocks that you guys have uncovered. >>Yes. Uh I started a few months ago where we're working with Brandon who's the product lead on the Ui part side. We wanted to understand what's the state of citizen development and what are the blockers and how we should Both from the product side. But also on the automation journey side we need to dig deeper and understand where each of the clients and the employees are going through the journey together >>and if you look at it from the citizen developer perspective, what are some of those roadblocks? >>There are a few. So when like if you before we go to the roadblocks there are three main concerns or I would say critical groups that are involved in being successful with automation. The organization or bu leaders, the I. T. And employees. So each of the groups have different perceptions on like misconceptions or perceptions on benefits of automation and how to go up go about it. The blockers that we have seen where like a three sets of blockers. The first is cognitive where employees are unaware of automation on the benefits of automation and the second one is more organizational where organization leaders and how they feel about automation or how the how they think about employees when we introduce automation to them. One part of that is there is a misconception without nation leaders that employees are fearful of job loss when you introduce automation. What we have seen in our research is it's completely the opposite of employees are eager to adopt automation have given an opportunity, they are willing to upscale themselves and they are willing to save the time so that they can spend that on critical value added activities for um for their customers in the process. And a third blocker that we have seen is more on the product side where the some of the employees that we talked to as much as progress has been made by RPF vendors and local local vendors. It's still these tools are not intuitive user friendly for business users. They still feel they need to go through some training programs and have a better user friendly interface is >>what's the entry point she would organization first time I ever heard of Arpaio Years and years and years ago was at a CFO conference. Okay so that's cool. It seems like it forward for there's a lot more C. I. O presence here and that. Is that relatively new or did I just miss it before? >>It is relatively new. So like when we looked at like in the past few years the empty point has been someone in finance or I. T. Has heard about R. P. A. The benefits of head. They went and bought a handful of licenses and then they went and implemented it but it's just a handful of processes. It's not organizational wide. It has been mostly on a smaller sub scale of processes. And projects now that like organizations are realizing employees are asking and we are like slowly growing up with automation ceo es it's now it's intersecting with the C XL level of if it has to intersect with your or if you want to reinvent your business through automation, it has to come from the sea X level and that's where we're seeing more and more. See IOS are being involved in decisions on automation journeys, the technologies they have to buy and adopt for the business processes. >>So I. T. Can be an enabler of course. Also sometimes it can be a blocker. Um and you know, certainly from security standpoint governance etcetera. And so one of the things that we heard today in the keynotes was you don't want to automate the C I. O. He or she owns this application portfolio and everybody wants to do new projects because that's the fun stuff we heard from one CFO. Yeah. You add up all the NPV from the new projects. It's bigger than the valuation of the company. Right. But the C i O is stuck having to manage the infrastructure and all the processes around the existing application portfolio. One of things I heard today was don't automate an application or a process that you're trying to retire because we never get rid of stuff in it. So I wonder should automation like an enterprise wide automation? Should there be kind of an application rationalization exercise or a business process rationalization coincident with that >>initiative? Absolutely. I think that was one of the blockers that we have seen. Like some of the misconceptions and some of the blockers when I looked at it for them, they consider like you're bringing all these tools you're asking business users to like who haven't had haven't been trained in technology or programming, You're asking them to build these automation ins So one they have to manage with the all the applications and the tools for all that happens. And to manage these automation is after business users have either left the company or moved on. So it is essential for them to think through and provide a streamline tools it on on two aspects. one it needs to be as as you started off, it needs to be an enabler to provide them the specific tools that they can, they have already blessed. They've curated it which are ready for business consumption. A second part I can also do is providing collaboration platforms so that business users can learn from each other and from it so that they can one are developing the right processes with the right methodology that is governed by I. T. And no security or data governance issues. Come through. >>One of the things that you mentioned in terms of the three roadblocks ceo uncovered was that you were surprised that the results of the research showed that in fact employees are really wanting to adopt automation. In fact I think the stat is um 86% of employees want automation but only 30% of leaders are giving them the opportunity to use that. That's a big gap. Why do you think that is >>so a few things. Right. I mean as we talked about the three constituents that you have right one is automation leaders. If you consider from them. Their view is their employees are not capable of adopting or building on the automation is using these tools and they need technical skills. But the all the automation vendors have made progress and if you look at the tools today are much more user friendly and business users are willing to adopt. The second part as we talked about is like the fear of job loss from the employee standpoint. Whereas employees are looking at it as an opportunity for them to up skill but also eliminate the pain points that they have today in the day to day activities using the automation tools. And for them it is like this is helping them spend the time with the customers where it matters on critical value added activities versus going through reparative process of the journey. And the third part we talked about earlier with I. T. I. T. Has this notion that they need to build and develop anything technical. Business users will not be able to build or manage and they're also worried about the governance, the security and the third part which you brought up earlier is that tool sprawl, It's like we need to manage like this volume of tools that are coming in which is only adding to their plate of already busy busy workforce. >>I have one of those. It depends questions and it's a good consultant I'm sure you say well it depends but are there patterns best practice or even more than best pressures? Are there sort of play books if you will? And patterns? I'm sure it's situational. But are you seeing patterns emerge, you can say okay this sort of category should approach it this way. Here's another one in a different, maybe it's a department bottoms up top down, can you help us sort of squint through that? >>Yeah. So in terms of approaches like at least up till now the prevalent thing that is happening is like C. O. Es went and buy some licenses they talk about like opportunities that they have. So it's more of a top down driven uh like ceo driven agenda. What we're seeing now especially with citizen automation or democratisation of automation is there's a new approach of including employees into the journey and bringing the bottoms up approach. So there's a happy path where you marry up the top down approach with bottoms up and one you will find opportunities which are organizational wide with the bu leaders and they are ones which are on the long tail of opportunities which employees feel the pain but I. T. Or C. O. He doesn't have the time to come and implement or automate these activities. Um considering like one part we have seen which is increasingly helpful for people who have done this properly is including employees. And one thing we talked yesterday is invest in employees. They consider automation as investment in employees rather than something they're doing to employees. So it's kind of collaborating with employees to make progress which seems to be helping evangelize and also benefit with automation. How >>Have the events of the last 18 months impacted this as well, we've seen so much acceleration and the mandate for automation. What are some of the things that you've seen? >>Sure. So for us like even before the pandemic we've seen in our research so like more than close to 50% of the organizations that they started the automation journey were unable to achieve the savings or targets that they set themselves for whatever the success factors are. Which which hard. A few reasons one they didn't have the organizational support, not they were taking the end to end journey or a customer journey to figure out like what are these big opportunities that they can go through and they haven't included employees and to figure out what are the major pain points to go through the journey. One thing it was clear was with covid, no one expected this kind of disruption in a pan and a pandemic. There are a lot of offshore centres or like pretty much different geography is got disconnected from the work that's being done. You still need to support your customers, there is still a higher demand, what do you do? It's not like you can scale up your employees in a pandemic, that's where like we have seen increasing push towards automation and technology to see that can help and support and scale in a pandemic environment uh and also help your customers in the journey. >>So has in your opinion has automation become a mandate? Uh As a result of the pandemic >>I would say. Yeah I I would consider it's more of like now it's become a I would say uh business won a competitive differentiator to say like one I needed to keep my lights on and resiliency but also the companies have done really well they saw the advantage and they whether the pandemic better with the customers now they use that as a platform to create a competitive differentiation against their peers and push things forward. >>one of the things we heard of today and the keynotes is you got to think about my words, the life cycle, you don't just put in the bot and then just leave it alone. You really have to think through that. And that seems to me to be where you would help customers think through how to get the most return out of their investment. You I passed product company I think it's great. And so you talk about the value layer that you guys bring. >>So for us it's it's like when we talked to mostly be bringing from the business side of the house to understand what are the key drivers that you need to work on. I mean even before we talk about technology, we talk about, let's understand from the customer standpoint what is your customer journey into end and look through that journey lens and let's take the process and to end, let's look at redesigning process and making it more optimal and streamlined and where technology fits in. That's when we talk about like if it is an RPG or if it's a UI Path platform that can support, let's go through that journey versus taking the tool itself as the solution and trying to find every nail that you can hurt, which usually is not sustainable to your point. Like we need to think through the whole life cycle, make sure this is going to last. Or if you are retiring. Like in the ceo panel that was a discussion where that we need to think through when we are going to retire and make sure like we are in that journey versus building all these automation zor bringing all these tools and leaving them alone for I. T. To manage long term. >>No. Again the last 18 months. Again, question about the the um reactions catalyzed facilitated thinking about those three roadblocks. The cognitive roadblocks the organizational roadblocks since particularly what I'm interested in this question and product, what are some of the conversations that you've seen or trends that you seem to help those organizations better understand how to collaborate with each other so that what they're not doing is putting in our P. A point tools but really starting to build the right part of the nomination and and journey into their digital transformation plans. Yeah. >>I mean in a way to again, I'll go back to the three concerns that we talked earlier, right? It's it can only go so far and automate so much because they haven't seen the business lens of like how the processes are what they have to do and to end, which is where you need to involve the business leaders who can give you that view from the business side and employees who are seeing the work day to day and where they can eliminate the pain points. So the organisms that are successful, they are creating a collaborative environment between the three groups to push things forward. You >>have to have that collaboration that's critical. Otherwise, that's probably one of the road blockers as well. >>Yeah, absolutely. >>Where does automation fit? I mean you're obviously heavily into automation, but let's think about the bane portfolio, the boardroom discussions. Where does automation fit? I mean there's security, there's how do we embed ai into our business? How do we sas if I our business um how do we do transform digitally? Where's automation fit in that hole discourse? >>So I think the automation is like at the heart of digital transformation, the part which we have seen where the gap is is not taking the business angle and actually thinking through the process and to end versus picking up a tool and trying to go solve a problem or find a problem to solve. And that's where we think in our discussions with boardrooms, it's more of let's think through how you want to reimagine your company or how you want to be more competitive looking into the future and like walk back from that standpoint and then started part from, I mean, the way we call it the future back like where you are today and now, like let's go forward and to what your end status and where technology broadly a digital tools and where automation fits in the process. >>How do you see what you i path is talking about at this conference? The announcements from yesterday? There's a lot of people here which is fantastic. How do you see what they're announcing? The vision that they set out a couple years ago that they're now delivering on. How is that a facilitator of organizations removing those roadblocks? Because as you said automation is a huge competitive differentiator these days and If we've learned nothing in the last 19 months you gotta you gotta be careful because there's always a competitor in the rear view mirror who might be smaller faster more agile ready to take your place. >>Yeah so like a few things that we've seen in the product roadmap that you talked about is they are providing the collaboration platform or tools where the I. T. Business owners can work through. Like for automation hub is what they talked at length yesterday is that's the platform where business users can provide their ideas. Like you provide process mining tools which can capture the process and the business users understand the process and they are the ones who are putting in an opportunity on the road map. So you have now a platform where all the ideas are being catalogued and once you implement they're being tracked on the automation hub so that that is providing a platform for everyone to collaborate together. The second one which Brandon talked yesterday is the tool itself for Studio X. When we're talking about citizen developers, employees trying to use and make it more user friendly. Is that where the Studio X which is providing that you are interface? Which is easy intuitive for business users to build basic automation is and try to take that long tail of opportunities that we talked about. So all these tools are coming together as one platform play, which you ipod has been talking about all through the conference and that is critical for everyone to collaborate to make a progress versus only thinking it's an easy job to implement the automation opportunities. That >>collaboration is business critical these days. Right. Thank you for joining David me and the program talking about some of the roadblocks that you've uncovered, but also some of the ways that organizations in any industry can navigate around them and really empower those employees who want automation in their jobs. We appreciate your insights. >>Happy to be here. Thanks for having us. You're welcome >>for day Volonte. I'm lisa martin live in las Vegas at UI Path forward for we'll be right back with our next guest. Yeah. >>Yeah. Mm. Mhm

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>We're back in Las Vegas. UI path forward three. You're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Bobby Patrick is here. He's the COO of UI path. Welcome. Hi Dave. Good to see it to be here. Wow. Great to have the cube here again. Right? Q loves these hot shows like this. I mean this is, you've said Gardner hasn't done the fastest growing software segment you've seen in the data that we share from ETR. You guys are off the chart in terms of net score. It's happening. I hanging onto the rocket ship. How's it feel? Well it's crazy. I mean it's great. You all have seen some of the growth along the way too, right? I mean we had our first forward event less than two years ago and you know about 500 plus plus non UI path and people then go year later. It was Miami USY. >>There's probably a lot. Cube I think was Miami right yet and a, and that was a great event, but that was more in the 13 1400 range. This one's almost 3000 and the most amazing part about it was we had 8% attrition from the registrations. Yeah. That's never seen that we're averaging 18% of 20% for all of our, most of our events worldwide. But 8% the commitment is unbelievable. Even 18 to to 20% is very good. I mean normally you'll see 25 to sometimes as high as 50% yeah. It just underscores the heat. >> Well I think what's also great, other stats that you might find interesting. So over 50% of the attendees here are exec. Our senior executives, like for the first time we actually had S you know, C level executive CHRs and CEOs on stage. Right. You could feel the interest level. Now of course we want RPA developers at events too, right? >>But this show really does speak, I think to the bigger value propositions and the bigger business transformation opportunity from RPA. And I mean, you've come so far where no one knew RPA two years ago to the CIO of Morgan Stanley on stage, just warning raving about it. That's, we've come a long way in two years. >> Well, and I saw a lot of the banks here hovering around, you know, knocking on your door so they, they know they are like heat seeking missiles, you know, so, but the growth has been amazing. I mean I think ARR in 2017 was what, 25 million at this time. Uh, at the end of 17 it was 43 and 43 and 25 and now you're at 12 times higher now 1212 X solve X growth, which is the fastest growing software company. I think in that we know from one to 100 we were, we did that in 21 months and all that. >>And we had banks who now we're not really counting anymore and we're kind of, you know, now focus more on customer expansion. Even though we hit 5,000 customers, which we started the year at 2050 ish. We just crossed 5,000. I mean, so the number of customers is great, but there's no question. This conference is focused on scaling, helping them grow at enterprise wide with, with, with RPA. So I think our focus will be in to shift a bit, you know, to really customer expansion. Uh, and that's a lot of what this announcements, the product announcements were about a lot of what the theme here is about. We had four dozen customers on, on stage, you know, the Uber's of the world, the Amazons of the world. It's all about how they've been scaling. So that's the story now. Well, you know, we do a lot of these events and I go back to some of the, uh, when the cube first started, companies like Tablo, Dallas Blunck great service. >>Now, I mean, these you can, and when you talk to customers, first of all, it's easy to get customers to come talk about RPA. Yeah. And they're, they're all saying the same thing. I mean, Jeanne younger said she's never been more excited in her career from security benefit. But the thing is, Bobby, it's, I feel like they're, they're really just getting started. Yeah. I mean most of the use cases that you see are again, automating mundane task. We had one which was the American fidelity, which is a really bringing in AI. Right. But they're really just getting started. It's like one to 3% penetration. So what are your thoughts on that to kind of land and expand, if you will? I think, you know, look, last year we announced our vision of a robot for every person. At that point we had SNBC on stage and they were the one behind it. >>And they are an amazing story. Now we have a dozen or so that are onstage talking about a robot for every person like st and others. And so, but that, that, that's a pretty, pretty, pretty bold vision I think. Look, I think it's important to look at it both ways. Um, there's huge gold and applying RPA to solve real problems. There's a big opportunity, enterprise wide, no question. We've got that. But I look New York Foundling was on stage yesterday. We have New York Foundling is a 150 year old associate. Our charity in New York focused on child welfare, started by three fishers of charity. They focused on infants. And anyway, it's an amazing firm. Just the passion that New York family had on stage with Daniel yesterday was amazing. But what they flew here because for once they found a technology that actually makes a huge difference for them and what in their mission. >>So their first RPA operation was they have 850 clinicians every week. They spend four hours a week moving their contact, uh, a new contact data associate with child child issues from system to system to spreadsheet and paper to system, right? They use RPA and they now say for a 200,000 hours a year. But more importantly, those clinicians spend those four hours every week with children not moving. So I'm still taking, I think Daniel had a bit of a tear in his eye, hearing them talk about it on stage, but I'm still taken by, by the, by the sheer massive opportunity for RPA in, in a particular to solve some really amazing things. Now on a mass scale, a company can drive, you know, 10, 15, 20% productivity by every employee having a robot. Yes, that's true on a mass scale. They can completely transform their business, your transform customer experience, transform the workplace on a mass scale. >>And that, that is, that's a sea level GFC level goal and that's a big deal. But I love the stories that are very real. Um, and, and I think those are important to still do plug some great tech for good story. Look, tech gives, you know, the whole Facebook stuff and the fake news got beat up and it had Benny come out recently say, Hey, it's, it's not just about increasing the value to shareholders, you know, it's about tech for good and doing other things affecting lifestyle's life changing. And Michael Dell is another one. Now I've, I've, I've kind of said tongue in cheek, you know, show me the CEO misses is four quarters in a row and see if that holds up. But nonetheless, you love to see successful companies giving back. It seems to be, it's part of your, well look I've been part of hardware companies and I met you all through a few of them and others they have good noble causes but it was hard to really connect the dots. >>Yes there CPS underneath a number of these things. But I think judging by the emotional connection that these customers have on stage, right and these are the Walmarts and Uber's and others in the world judging by the employee and job satisfaction that they talk about the benefits there. I just, I my career, I have not seen that kind of real direct impact from you know, from B2B software for example on the lives of people both everyday at work but also just solving the solving, you know, help accelerate human achievement. Right. And so many amazing ways. We had the CEO of the U N I T shared services group on stage yesterday and they have a real challenge with, you know, with the growth of refugees worldwide and he would express them and they can't hit keep up. They don't have the funding, which is, you know, with everybody and, and Trump and others trying to hold back money. >>But they had this massive charter for of good, the only way they get there is through digital. The new CEO, the new head of the U N is a technology engineer. He came in and said, the way we solve this is with templates, with technology. And they decided, they said on stage yesterday that RPA and RPA has the path to AI and the greater, the greater new technologies and that's how they're going to do it. And it's just a, it's a really, it's, I think it's, it feels really great. You know, it's funny too, one of the things we've been talking about this week is people might be somewhat surprised that there's so much head room left for automation because the boy, 50 years of tech, Kevin, we automated everything. That's the other, but, and Daniel put forth the premise last night, it actually, technology is created more process problems or inefficiencies. >>So it's almost like tech has created this new problem. Can tech get us out of the problem? Well, essentially you think about all the applications we use in our lives, right? Um, you know, although people do have, you know, a Salesforce stack and sometimes in this SAP, the reality is they have a mix of a bunch of systems and then we add Slack to it and we add other tools and we add all the tools alone, have some great value. But from a process perspective of how we work everyday, right? How a business user might work at a call center, they have to interact then. And the reality is they're often interacting with old systems too because moving them is not easy, right? So now you've got old systems, new systems and, and really the only way to do that is to put a layer on top of the systems of engagement and the systems of record, right? >>A layer on top that's easy to actually build an application that goes between all of these different, these different applications, outlook, Excel, legacy systems and salesforce.com and so on and so on and, and build an app that solves a real problem, have it have outcomes quickly. And this is why, Dave, we unveiled the vision here that we believe that automation is the application. And when you begin to think about I could solve a problem now without requiring a bunch of it engineers who already are maxed out, right? Uh, I can solve a problem that can directly impact the businesses or directly impact customers. And I can do that on top of these old technologies by just dragging and dropping and using a designer tool like studio or studio X in a business user can do that. That's, that's a game changer. I think what's amazing is when you go to talk to a CIO who says, I've been automating for 20 years, you know, take up the ROI. >>Once they realize this is different, the light bulb goes off. We call it the automation first mindset. A light bulb goes off and you realize, okay, this is a very different whole different way of creating value for, for an organization. I think about how people weigh the way that people work today. You're constantly context switching. You're in different systems. Like you said, Slack, you're getting texts and you want to be responsive. You want to be real time. I know Jeff Frick who was the GM of the cube has got two giant screens right on his desk. I myself, I always have 1520 tabs open if I go, Oh you got so many tabs on my, yeah. Cause I'm constantly context switching, pulling things out of email, going back and forth and so and so. I'm starting to grok this notion of the automation is the app. >>At first I thought, okay, it's the killer app, but it's not about stitching things together with through API APIs. It's really about bringing an automation perspective across the organization. We heard it from Pepsi yesterday. Yeah, right. Sort of the fabric, the automation fabric throughout the organization. Now that's aspirational for most companies today, but that really is the vision. Well, I think you had Layla from Coca-Cola also on, right. And her V their vision there and they actually took the CDO role of the CIO and put them together. And they're realizing now that that transformation is driven by this new way of thinking. Yeah, I think, you know, look, we introduced a whole set of new brand new products and capabilities around scaling around helping build these applications quicker. I, I think, you know, fast forward one year from now, the, you know, the vision we outlined will be very obvious the way people interact with, you know, via UI path to build applications, assault come, the speed to the operate will be transformational and, and so, you know, and you see this conference hear me walk around. >>I mean you saw last year in the year before you see the year before, but it's, it's a whole, the speed at which we're evolving here, I think it's unprecedented. And so I'll talk a little bit about the market for has Crigler killer was awesome this morning. He really knows his stuff now. Last year I saw some data from him and said the market by 2020 4 billion, and I said, no way. It's going to be much larger than that. Gonna be 10 billion by 2020 I did Dave Volante fork, Becca napkin by old IDC day forecast. Now what he, what he showed today is data. It actually was 10 billion by 2020 because he was including services, the services, which is what I was including in my number as well, but the of it, which was so good for him now, but the only thing is he had this kind of linear growth and that's not how these rocket ship Marcus grow. >>They're more like an old guy for an S curve. You're going to get some steep part now, so I'd love to see like a longer term forecast because that it feels like that's how this is going to evolve. Right now it's like you've seated the base and you can just feel the momentum building and then I would expect you're going to see massive steep sort of exponential growth. Steeper. There may be, you know, nonlinear because that's how these markets go >> to come from the expansion potential, right? And none of our customers are more than 1% audit automated from an RPA perspective. So that shows you the massive opportunity. But back to the market site, data size, Craig and I and the other analysts, we talk often about this. I think the Tam views are very low and you'll look at our market share, let's just get some real data out there, right? >>Our market share in 2017 was 5% let's use Craig's linear data for now. You know, our market share this year is over 20% our market share applying, and I don't want to give the exact numbers as you don't provide guidance anymore, is substantially we're substantially gaining share now. I believe that's the reality of the market. I think because we know blue prisms numbers, we go four times faster than the every quarter automation. The world won't share their numbers. But you know, I can make some guesses, but either way I think, you know, I think we're gaining share on them significantly. I think, you know, Craig's not gonna want us to be 50% of the market two years, he's just not. And so he's going to have to figure out how to identify how to think. That brought more broadly about, about that market trend. He talked about it on stage today about how does he calculate the AI impact and the other pieces now the process mining now that now that we are integrating process mining into RPA, right? >>It's strategic component of that. How does that also involve the market? So I think you have both the expansion and the plot product portfolio, which drives it. And then you have the fact that customers are going to add more automations at faster pace and more robots and that's where the expansion really kicks in. And we often say, you know, look as a, as a, as a, as a company that, you know, one day we'll be public company, our ARR numbers. Very important. We do openly transparently share that. But you know, the other big metric will be, you know, dollar based net expansion rate that shows really how customers are expanding. I think that, I know it, our numbers, we haven't shared it yet. I know all the SAS companies, the top 10 I can tell you, you know we're higher than all of them. >>The market projections are low. And I think he knows it well. >> Speaking of Tam, and when we, I saw this with, with service now, now service now the core was it right? So the, the ROI was not as obvious with, with, with you guys, you're touching business process. And so, so in David Flory are way, way back, did an analysis of service and now he said, wow, the Tam is way being way under counted by everybody. That wall street analyst Gardner, it feels like the same here because there are so many adjacencies and just talk to the customers and you're seeing that the Tam could be enormous, much bigger than the whatever 16 billion a Daniel show, the other Danielson tangles, the guy's balls. He said, Oh that's 16 billion. That's you. I pass this data. And you know, we laugh, but I'm, I'm like listening. Say I wonder if he's serious cause this guy thinks big. >>I mean, who would've thought that he'd be at this point by now? And you're just getting started? Well, I think, you know, one thing I think is, you know, we're, we're, you know, we were a little bit kind of over a little less humble when we talked about things like valuation over the last few years. We were trying to show this market's real, you know, we want to now focus more on outcomes and things get a little less from around those numbers. And I think that shows the evolution of a company's maturity, um, that we, I think we're going through right now. Uh, you know, the outcomes of, you know, Walmart on stage saying, you know, their first robot that was, this was, this was two years ago, delivered 360,000 hours of capacity for them in, in, in, in, in HR, right? That, you know, I think those, that's where we're gonna be focused because the reality is if we can deliver these big outcomes and continue them and we can go company-wide deliver on the robot for every, every, every, every person, then you know, the numbers follow along with it. >>Well we saw some M and a this week as well, which again leads me to the larger Tam cause we had PD on, um, with Rudy and you can start to see how, okay now we're going to actually move into that vision that the guy from PepsiCo laid out this, this fabric of this automation fabric across the organization. So M and a is, is a part of that as well. That starts to open up new Tam. Opportunity does. And I think, you know, a process mind is a great example of a market that is pretty well known in Europe, not so much in the U S um, and there are really only a few players in that, in that market today. Look, we're going to do what we did in RPA. We're going to do the same thing. You're process mining. We're going to just say anything we're doing in it, not as democratization, you'll our strategy will be to go mass market with these technologies, make it very easy for accessibility for every single person in the case of process mining, every business analyst to be able to mind their processes for them and, and ultimately that flows through to drive faster implementations and then faster, faster outcomes. >>I think our approach, again, our approach to the business users, our approach to democratization, um, you know it's very different than our competitors. A lot of these low code companies, I won't name a number cause I don't remember our partners here at our conference. They're IT-focused their services heavy and, and you know, their growth rates I'll be at okay are 30% year over year in this market. That shouldn't be the case at all. I mean we're a 200 plus a year. We are still and we've got big numbers and we have a whole different approach to the market. I don't think people have figured it out yet, Dave. Exactly, exactly. The strategy behind which is, which is when you have business users, subject matter experts and citizen developers that can access our technology and build automations quickly and deliver value proof for their company. And you do that in mass scale. >>Right. And then you will now allow with our apps for your end users, I get a call center to engage with a robot as part of their daily operation that none of the other it vendors who are all kind of conventional thinking and that's not, our models are very different, which I think shows in our numbers and and, and the growth rates. Yeah. Well you bet on simplicity early on. In fact, when you join you iPad, you challenged me so you have some of your Wiki bond analysts go out. I remember head download our stuff and then try to download the competitors and they'll tell us, you know how easy it as well we were able to download UI path. We, we built some simple automations. We couldn't get ahold of the other other, other companies products we tried. We were told we'll go to the reseller or how much did you have to spend and okay so you bet on simplicity, which was interesting because Daniel last night kind of admitted, look, he tracked the audience. >>He said thank you for taking a chance on us because frankly a couple of years ago this wasn't fully baked right and and so, so I want to talk about last, the last topic is sort of one of the things Craig talked about was consolidation and I've been saying that all week and said this, this market is going to consolidate. You guys are a leader now you've got to get escape velocity cause the leader makes a lot of money and becomes, gets big. The number two does. Okay, number three man, everybody else and the big guys are starting to jump in as well. You saw SAP, you know, makes an announcement and you guys are specialists and so your thoughts on hitting escape velocity, I wouldn't say you're quite there yet. I want to see more on the ecosystem. There's maybe, who knows, maybe there's an IPO coming. I've predicted that there is, but your thoughts on achieving escape velocity and some of the metrics around there, whether it's customer adoption penetration, what are your thoughts? >>Yeah, I mean we definitely don't have a timetable on an IPO, but we have investors, public investors and VCs that at some point are going to want, this is the reality of how, of how it works. Right. Um, you know, I think the, uh, you know, I think the numbers to focus right now are on around, you know, customer outcomes. I think the ecosystem is a good one. Right? You know, we have, I'd say the biggest ecosystem for us to date has been the SAP ecosystem. When we look at our advisory board members, for others, that's really where, where the action is. Supply chain management, ERP, you know, certainly CRM and others, we don't have a view that, so our competitors have, but we have chosen not to take money from our, from ecosystem companies because we don't, our customers here are building processes, all the automation across ecosystems. >>Right? So you know, we don't want to go bet on say just one like Salesforce or Workday. We want to help them across all the ecosystem now. So I think it's a little bit of a different strategy there. Look, I think the interesting thing is the SAP is the world. They bought a small company in France called contexture. They're trying to do this themselves. Microsoft, Microsoft didn't in Mark Benioff and Salesforce are asked on every earnings call now what are you doing for RPA? So they've got pressure. So maybe they invest in one of our competitors or maybe they, you'll take flow in Microsoft and expanded. I think we can't move fast enough because you know, I don't know if Microsoft has, I mean they're a great sponsor by the way. So I don't want to only be careful we swept with what I say. But you know, strategically speaking, these larger companies operate in 18 months, 12 1824 months kind of planning cycles. >>If he did that, he will never keep up with us. There's no one at any of our traditional large enterprise software companies that ever would have bet that we would come out and say that the best way to build applications right to solve problems will be through RPA. Either there'll be a layer on top of all their technologies that makes it easier than ever for business users to build applications and solve problems, that's going to scare them to death. Why? Because you don't have to move all your legacy systems anymore. Yes, you've got tons of databases, but guess what? Don't worry about it. Leave him alone. Stop spending money on ridiculous upgrades right now. Just build a new layer and I'm telling you I there. As they figured this out, they're going to keep looking back and say, Oh my God, why didn't we know? >>Why did we know there's it looked I hopefully we could all partner. We're going to try to go down that route, but there's something much bigger going on here and they haven't figured it out. Well, the SAP data is very interesting to me that I'm starting to connect the dots. I just did a piece on my breaking analysis and SAP, they thank you. They, they've acquired 31 companies over the last nine years, right? And they've not bit the bullet on integration the way Oracle had to with fusion. Right? And so as a result, there's this, they say throw everything into HANA. It's a memory that's not going to work from an integration standpoint, right? Automation is actually a way to connect, you know, the glue across all those disparate systems, right? And so that makes a lot of sense that you're having success inside SAP and there's no reason that can't continue. >>Why there's, you know, there's a number of major kind of trends we've outlined here. One of, uh, we call human in the loop. And you know, today, you know, when each, when an unattended robot could actually stop a process and instead of sending the exception to a, an it person who monitoring, say, orchestrator actually go to an inbox, a task and box of that business user in a call center or wherever, and that robot can go do something else because it's so, so efficient and productive. But once that human has to solve that problem, right, that robot or a robot will take that back on and keep going. This human and robot interaction, it doesn't exist today and we know we're rolling that out in our UI path apps. I think you know that that's kind of mind blowing and then when you add a, I can't go too far into our roadmap and strategy or when you added the app programming layer and you add data science, that's a little bit of a hint into where we're going because we're open and transparent. >>Our data science connection, it's, it's this platform here, this kind of, I'd like to still call it all RPA. I think that that's a good thing, but the reality is this platform does Tam. What it can do is nothing like it was a year ago and it won't be like where it is today. A year from now you've got the tiger by the tail, Bobby, you got work to do, but congratulations on all the success. It's really been great to be able to document this and cover it, so thanks for coming on the cube. Thank you. All right. Thank you for watching everybody back with our next guest. Right after this short break, you're watching the cube live from UI path forward three from Bellagio in Vegas right back.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of UI path forward here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside at Dave Vellante. We are joined by Gavin Jackson. He is the senior vice president and managing director EMEA at UI path. Thanks so much for coming on the phone. You are brand spanking new to the company. You were at AWS for four years, joined UI path in September. I want to start this conversation by having you talk a little bit about what, what appealed to you about UI path and what do you want to make the leap after four years at AWS? >>Yeah, so I've, I had the privilege to be of really having a really close proximity to enterprise customers and getting the opportunity to listen to what they really wanted when they were talking about their digital transformation journeys. And as it turns out, the sort of cloud first and the automation first eras, if you will, our operating models are to two sides of the same coin. If you think about what the cloud proposition has been over the last number of years, it's really been about sort of reducing or eliminating the undifferentiated heavy lifting so that builders can build. And then that turned into an operating model principle and then became sort of cloud first as the same thing for the automation world. Uh, you know, we are reducing and eliminating the undifferentiated heavy lifting of, of, of, of, of product, um, uh, uh, business processes and tasks and everything else, whether they're complex tasks or simple tasks, removing that so that builders can build and business people can innovate and uh, giving them the freedom to do what they need to do as business owners. >>No, I'm going to keep pushing on this. There's similarities and differences because we're seems to break down is where RPA is focusing on the citizen developer or the, the end user. I'm afraid of AWS. I won't go near it. I see that console. I go, Oh, call my techies. Hey, you know, AWS is, you know, you gotta be pretty technical to actually leverage it. At the same time I'm thinking, well maybe not. Maybe my builders are building things that I can touch, but help us square that circle. >>So I think your, the world is trending towards as much automation as possible. So if it can be automated or if you can reduce the, the, uh, the, the, the burden to get to innovation. I think, you know, technology is moving in that way. Even in coding. I think the trends we're seeing, whether it's AWS or anyone else, is low to no code. And so we, we occupy a world within the RPA space or the intelligent automation space where we're providing tools for people that don't need a requirement or, or a skillset to code. And they can still manufacture, if you will, their own automations. And particularly with a release that we have, we're just today, which is studio X. It really kind of reduces the friction from a business user who has zero understanding of how to code to build their own automations, whether it's kind of recording a process or just dragging and dropping different components into a process. Uh, even like even I could do that. And that's saying something. I can tell you >>your alter ego is Tony stark. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So just in terms of this idea of democratizing the, the automation, the building, you said even just someone who is pretty decent at excels. Yes, very much so. What will this mean? I mean, what, what, what does, what does that bode for the future of how work gets done? Because we, that is at the core of what you're doing is scientifically understanding how and where work gets done. Where are the bottlenecks, where are the challenges and how can RPA fix this? >>So I think ultimately like a lot of technologies, it's really about the exponential curve of productivity and whether you're looking at a national level or global level or company level, a human level at every level, productivity have declined really over the last number of years and technology hasn't done a great job to improve that. And you can say that some technologies, I've done a good job, again, I'd use AWS as a good job in terms of the proliferation or the prolific. You can get more code out and more, more progress there, but overall productivity has declined. So our sort of view of the world is if you can democratize automation, if you can use a Oh, add a digital workforce to your, to your, to your teams, then you'll have an exponential curve of productivity, which are human level is important at a company level is important and national level is important and probably at global level is important, right? >>We're at this tipping point for technology really unlocking a lot of value. One of the things that your former boss, Jeff Bezos said was bet on dreamy businesses that have unlimited upside. These, these streaming businesses, customers love them. They grow to very large sizes. They have strong returns on capital and they can endure for decades. I wonder if you could put UI path in that context of a dreamy business. >>What does he know? Right. I mean, no is absolutely right. I mean, so, um, and this is one of the reasons I was attracted by the way to do UI path because I think, I think that the robust themselves, if you can just kind of look at the subcategory of the robot. Um, I think it's on a similar curve to how Gordon Moore was talking about the Intel microprocessor in 1965 and the exponential curve of progress. I think we on that similar curve. So when I sort of project five years from now, I just think that the amount that robots will be able to do, the cognitive kind of capabilities that we'll be able to do are just phenomenal. So, um, and customers, customers give us feedback all the time about to, to things they love and they value what we do. The value is important because it's very empirical for the first time they can actually deploy a technology and see almost an immediate return on that technology. >>Whether it's a point technology solving one process or a group of processes, they can see an immediate empirical return. The other thing that I like to measure and I quite like is that they value it. Sorry. They, they, they love, they love and value it. So they love it. Meaning it actually induces an emotion. So when you, when you watch the robots in action and they watch something that has been holding your team back or that has been stifling productivity or whatever it is, people get giddy about it. It's quite fascinating to see, comment about Gordon Moore and tie that to digital transformation. When I think of digital transformation, I think of data like what's the difference in a business in a digital business? That's how they use data. They put data at the core and for years we marched to the cadence of Moore's law and that's changed. >>It's not what the innovation engine is today. It's machine intelligence, it's data and it's cloud for scale. Where do you guys fit? I mean obviously AI is a piece of that, but, but maybe you could add some color to where RPA fits in that equation. So I think that's an important point because there's a lot of miscommunication. I think about really what it means when you talk about digital transformation and what it means to be digitally transformed and really digitally transformed. You're really talking about a category of customers which are large more institutional enterprises and governments because they have something to transform. What they're transforming into is more of a digital native sort of set of attributes, more in search and mindsets. And these companies are, to your point, they're very data hungry. They harvest as much data as they can from, from value, from data. >>They're very customer centric. They focus on the customer experience, they use other people's resources. Know the cloud being one great example of that and the missing point from what you said is they automate everything they born automated. So part of the digital transformation journey is that if it can be automated, it will be automated and anything that's new will be born automated. So let me ask you a follow up on that. Is there a cultural difference in AMEA versus what you're seeing in North America in terms of their receptivity to automation? I mean there are certain parts of of Europe which are more protective of jobs. Do you see a cultural difference or are they kind of, I mean we do see even some resistance here, but when you talk to customers they're like, no, it's wonderful. I love it. What are you seeing in Europe? >>So I don't, I don't see much of a cultural difference there. And I actually don't, I don't see yet. I haven't seen any feedback yet. It's very, I'm very new still, but I haven't seen anybody talk about really the, this technology is a technology to take jobs out. I think most people see this technology as a way of getting better performance at the humans, you know, pivoting them towards more. So I would say like in some markets in my, in my, in my prior life, in many prior lives, I would say that there are some countries like France for example, that would have been a little bit more stayed within their approach to new technologies and adoption, not so with regards to automation. They see this as a real gain productivity increase. I think that's true for people who have tasted it. But I do think there's still some reticence in the ranks until they actually experienced it. That's why we will talk to some customers about it. They'll have bought Athens and just just to yeah, to educate people on what's possible to let them try to build their own robots and then people, then the light bulbs go off. >>Yeah. That's 0.2 is that it, that it's taking away the aggravations, the frustrations, the mundane, the drudgery. And then you said people get giddy about those things when they don't have to do that anymore. Um, but then the question is also so, so what creative things are you doing now? So how are you spending your time? What are you doing differently that makes your job more interesting, more compelling? And I think that that's the real question too. So what is the, okay, yes we're saving some money and people aren't having to do this mundane tasks. But then what are, what is the value add that the employees are now bringing to the table? >>Yeah, so an actually said it and they've made the right point as well in terms of the mechanism for doing that is that part of the battle here is to spark the imagination and just like anything really just let it like in back in the Amazon world is sort of our spark in the imagination. If you can, if you can imagine it, you can build it. It's the same thing really with within our world now is it is figuring out with customers what things, what tasks did they do that they hate doing either a user level or a or a or a downstream level. What are the things that they really want to do that they need our help to harvest. And so we do the same sort of the same sort of things that we would have done with AWS where we did lots of hackathons and your bulldozer technology partners in with us and we were sort of building all of this. >>We do the exactly the same thing with the RPA space. It's exactly the same. This is really important because creativity is going to become an increasingly important component because if productivity goes up, it means you can do the same amount of work with less people. So it is going to impact jobs and people are going to have to be comfortable to get out of their comfort zone and become creative and find ways to apply these technologies to really advance, you know, drive value to their organizations. And actually I look at this as well as a longterm technology, right? As a longterm technology, as something that's important for my children. I have three and they're still very young, so 1210 and six but eventually they will go into the workplace with these skills embedded. They will just know that the, how you get one done is you have your robot do a whole load of task for you here and your, your job is to build and to be creative and to harvest data and to manipulate data and serve customers and focus on the customer experience. That's really what it's all about. The real brain. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Kevin, a pleasure having you on the show. Great luck at UI path. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for J for Dave Alante. Please stay tuned for more from the cubes live coverage of UI path coming up in just a little bit.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering UIPath FORWARD America's 2019. Brought to you by UIPath. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of UIPath FORWARD, here in Sin City, Las Vegas Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside Dave Velante. We have two guests for this segment. We have Kurt Carlson, Associate Dean for faculty and academic affairs of the Mason School of Business at the college of William and Mary. Thanks for coming on the show. >> Thanks you for having me. >> Rebecca: And we have Tom Clancy, the SVP of learning at UIPath, thank you so much. >> Great to be here. >> You're a Cube alum, so thank you for coming back. >> I've been here a few times. >> A Cube veteran, I should say. >> I think 10 years or so >> So we're talking today about a robot for every student, this was just announced in August, William and Mary is the first university in the US to provide automation software to every undergraduate student, thanks to a four million dollar investment from UIPath. Tell us a little bit about this program, Kurt, how it works and what you're trying to do here. >> Yeah, so first of all, to Tom and the people at UIPath for making this happen. This is a bold and incredible initiative, one that, frankly, when we had it initially, we thought that maybe we could get a robot for every student, we weren't sure that other people would be willing to go along with that, but UIPath was, they see the vision, and so it was really a meeting of the minds on a common purpose. The idea was pretty simple, this technology is transforming the world in a way that students, we think it's going to transform the way that students actually are students. But it's certainly transforming the world that our students are going into. And so, we want to give them exposure to it. We wanted to try and be the first business school on the planet that actually prepares students not just for the way RPA's being used today, but the way that it's going to be used when AI starts to take hold, when it becomes the gateway to AI three, four, five years down the road. So, we talked to UIPath, they thought it was a really good idea, we went all in on it. Yeah, all of our starting juniors in the business school have robots right now, they've all been trained through the academy live session putting together a course, it's very exciting. >> So, Tom, you've always been an innovator when it comes to learning, here's my question. How come we didn't learn this school stuff when we were in college? We learned Fortran. >> I don't know, I only learned BASIC, so I can't speak to that. >> So you know last year we talked about how you're scaling, learning some of the open, sort of philosophy that you have. So, give us the update on how you're pushing learning FORWARD, and why the College of William and Mary. >> Okay, so if you buy into a bot for every worker, or a bot for every desktop, that's a lot of bots, that's a lot of desktops, right? There's studies out there from the research companies that say that there's somewhere a hundred and 200 million people that need to be educated on RPA, RPA/AI. So if you buy into that, which we do, then traditional learning isn't going to do it. We're going to miss the boat. So we have a multi-pronged approach. The first thing is to democratize RPA learning. Two and a half years ago we made, we created RPA Academy, UIPath academy, and 100% free. After two and a half years, we have 451,000 people go through the academy courses, that's huge. But we think there's a lot more. Over the next next three years we think we'll train at least two million people. But the challenge still is, if we train five million people, there's still a hundred million that need to know about it. So, the second biggest thing we're doing is, we went out, last year at this event, we announced our academic alliance program. We had one university, now we're approaching 400 universities. But what we're doing with William and Mary is a lot more than just providing a course, and I'll let Kurt talk to that, but there is so much more that we could be doing to educate our students, our youth, upscaling, rescaling the existing workforce. When you break down that hundred million people, they come from a lot of different backgrounds, and we're trying to touch as many people as we can. >> You guys are really out ahead of the curve. Oftentimes, I mean, you saw this a little bit with data science, saw some colleges leaning in. So what lead you guys to the decision to actually invest and prioritize RPA? >> Yeah, I think what we're trying to accomplish requires incredibly smart students. It requires students that can sit at the interface between what we would think of today as sort of an RPA developer and a decision maker who would be stroking the check or signing the contract. There's got to be somebody that sits in that space that understands enough about how you would actually execute this implementation. What's the right buildout of that, how we're going to build a portfolio of bots, how we're going to prioritize the different processes that we might automate, How we're going to balance some processes that might have a nice ROI but be harder for the individual who's process is being automated to absorb against processes that the individual would love to have automated, but might not have as great of an ROI. How do you balance that whole set of things? So what we've done is worked with UIPath to bring together the ideas of automation with the ideas of being a strategic thinker in process automation, and we're designing a course in collaboration to help train our students to hit the ground running. >> Rebecca, it's really visionary, isn't it? I mean it's not just about using the tooling, it's about how to apply the tooling to create competitive advantage or change lives. >> I used to cover business education for the Financial Times, so I completely agree that this really is a game changer for the students to have this kind of access to technology and ability to explore this leading edge of software robotics and really be, and graduate from college. This isn't even graduate school, they're graduating from college already having these skills. So tell me, Kurt, what are they doing? What is the course, what does it look like, how are they using this in the classroom? >> The course is called a one credit. It's 14 hours but it actually turns into about 42 when you add this stuff that's going on outside of class. They're learning about these large conceptual issues around how do you prioritize which processes, what's the process you should go through to make sure that you measure in advance of implementation so that you can do an audit on the backend to have proof points on the effectiveness, so you got to measure in advance, creating a portfolio of perspective processes and then scoring them, how do you do that, so they're learning all that sort of conceptual straight business slash strategy implementation stuff, so that's on the first half, and to keep them engaged with this software, we're giving them small skills, we're calling them skillets. Small skills in every one of those sessions that add up to having a fully automated and programmed robot. Then they're going to go into a series of days where every one of those days they're going to learn a big skill. And the big skills are ones that are going to be useful for the students in their lives as people, useful in lives as students, and useful in their lives as entrepreneurs using RPA to create new ventures, or in the organizations they go to. We've worked with UIPath and with our alums who've implement this, folks at EY, Booz. In fact, we went up to DC, we had a three hour meeting with these folks. So what are the skills students need to learn, and they told us, and so we build these three big classes, each around each one of those skills so that our students are going to come out with the ability to be business translators, not necessarily the hardcore programmers. We're not going to prevent them from doing that, but to be these business translators that sit between the programming and the decision makers. >> That's huge because, you know, like, my son's a senior in college. He and his friends, they all either want to work for Amazon, Google, an investment bank, or one of the big SIs, right? So this is a perfect role for a consultant to go in and advise. Tom, I wanted to ask you, and you and I have known each other for a long time, but one of the reasons I think you were successful at your previous company is because you weren't just focused on a narrow vendor, how to make metrics work, for instance. I presume you're taking the same philosophy here. It transcends UIPath and is really more about, you know, the category if you will, the potential. Can you talk about that? >> So we listen to our customers and now we listen to the universities too, and they're going to help guide us to where we need to go. Most companies in tech, you work with marketing, and you work with engineering, and you build product courses. And you also try to sell those courses, because it's a really good PNL when you sell training. We don't think that's right for the industry, for UIPath, or for our customers, or our partners. So when we democratize learning, everything else falls into place. So, as we go forward, we have a bunch of ideas. You know, as we get more into AI, you'll see more AI type courses. We'll team with 400 universities now, by end of next year, we'll probably have a thousand universities signed up. And so, there's a lot of subject matter expertise, and if they come to us with ideas, you mentioned a 14 hour course, we have a four hour course, and we also have a 60 hour course. So we want to be as flexible as possible, because different universities want to apply it in different ways. So we also heard about Lean Six Sigma. I mean, sorry, Lean RPA, so we might build a course on Lean RPA, because that's really important. Solution architect is one of the biggest gaps in the industry right now so, so we look to where these gaps are, we listen to everybody, and then we just execute. >> Well, it's interesting you said Six Sigma, we have Jean Younger coming on, she's a Six Sigma expert. I don't know if she's a black belt, but she's pretty sure. She talks about how to apply RPA to make business processes in Six Sigma, but you would never spend the time and money, I mean, if it's an airplane engine, for sure, but now, so that's kind of transformative. Kurt, I'm curious as to how you, as a college, market this. You know, you're very competitive industry, if you will. So how do you see this attracting students and separating you guys from the pack? >> Well, it's a two separate things. How do we actively try to take advantage of this, and what effects is it having already? Enrollments to the business school, well. Students at William and Mary get admitted to William and Mary, and they're fantastic, amazingly good undergraduate students. The best students at William and Mary come to the Raymond A. Mason school of business. If you take our undergraduate GPA of students in the business school, they're top five in the country. So what we've seen since we've announced this is that our applications to the business school are up. I don't know that it's a one to one correlation. >> Tom: I think it is. >> I believe it's a strong predictor, right? And part because it's such an easy sell. And so, when we talk to those alums and friends in DC and said, tell us why this is, why our students should do this, they said, well, if for no other reason, we are hiring students that have these skills into data science lines in the mid 90s. When I said that to my students, they fell out of their chairs. So there's incredible opportunity here for them, that's the easy way to market it internally, it aligns with things that are happening at William and Mary, trying to be innovative, nimble, and entrepreneurial. We've been talking about being innovative, nimble, and entrepreneurial for longer than we've been doing it, we believe we're getting there, we believe this is the type of activity that would fit for that. As far as promoting it, we're telling everybody that will listen that this is interesting, and people are listening. You know, the standard sort of marketing strategy that goes around, and we are coordinating with UIPath on that. But internally, this sells actually pretty easy. This is something people are looking for, we're going to make it ready for the world the way that it's going to be now and in the future. >> Well, I imagine the big consultants are hovering as well. You know, you mentioned DC, Booz Allen, Hughes and DC, and Excensior, EY, Deloitte, PWC, IBM itself. I mean it's just, they all want the best and the brightest, and now you're going to have this skill set that is a sweet spot for their businesses. >> Kurt: That's the plan. >> I'm just thinking back to remembering who these people are, these are 19 and 20 year olds. They've never experienced the dreariness of work and the drudge tasks that we all know well. So, what are you, in terms of this whole business translator idea, that they're going to be the be people that sit in the middle and can sort of be these people who can speak both languages. What kind of skills are you trying to impart to them, because it is a whole different skill set. >> Our vision is that in two or three years, the nodes and the processes that are currently... That currently make implementing RPA complex and require significant programmer skills, these places where, right now, there's a human making a relatively mundane decision, but it's sill a model. There's a decision node there. We think AI is going to take over that. The simple, AI's going to simply put models into those decision nodes. We also think a lot of the programming that takes place, you're seeing it now with studio X, a lot of the programming is going to go away. And what that's going to do is it's going to elevate the business process from the mundane to the more human intelligent, what would currently be considered human intelligence process. When we get into that space, people skills are going to be really important, prioritizing is going to be really important, identifying organizations that are ripe for this, at this moment in time, which processes to automate. Those are the kind of skills we're trying to get students to develop, and what we're selling it partly as, this is going to make you ready of the world the way we think it's going to be, a bit of a guess. But we're also saying if you don't want to automate mundane processes, then come with us on a different magic carpet ride. And that magic carpet ride is, imagine all the processes that don't exist right now because nobody would ever conceive of them because they couldn't possibly be sustained, or they would be too mundane. Now think about those processes through a business lens, so take a business student and think about all the potential when you look at it that way. So this course that we're building has that, everything in the course is wrapped in that, and so, at the end of the course, they're going to be doing a project, and the project is to bring a new process to the world that doesn't currently exist. Don't program it, don't worry about whether or not you have a team that could actually execute it. Just conceive of a process that doesn't currently exist and let's imagine, with the potential of RPA, how we would make that happen. That's going to be, we think we're going to be able to bring a lot of students along through that innovative lens even though they are 19 and 20, because 19 and 20 year olds love innovation, while they've never submitted a procurement report. >> Exactly! >> A innovation presentation. >> We'll need to do a Cube follow up with that. >> What Kurt just said, is the reason why, Tom, I think this market is being way undercounted. I think it's hard for the IDCs and the forces, because they look back they say how big was it last year, how fast are these companies growing, but, to your point, there's so much unknown processes that could be attacked. The TAM on this could be enormous. >> We agree. >> Yeah, I know you do, but I think that it's a point worth mentioning because it touches so many different parts of every organization that I think people perhaps don't realize the impact that it could have. >> You know, when listening to you, Kurt, when you look at these young kids, at least compared to me, all the coding and setting up a robot, that's the easy part, they'll pick that up right away. It's really the thought process that goes into identifying new opportunities, and that's, I think, you're challenging them to do that. But learning how to do robots, I think, is going to be pretty easy for this new digital generation. >> Piece of cake. Tom and Kurt, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE with a really fascinating conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, you guys >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Velante, stay tuned for more of theCUBEs live coverage of UIPath FORWARD. (upbeat music)

you live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering you I pat forward America's 2019 brought to you by uipath welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of UI path forward here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas Nevada I'm your host Rebecca night co-hosting alongside Dave Volante we are joined by Gavin Jackson he is the senior vice president and managing director amia at uipath thanks so much for coming you are brand spanking new to brands thanking you AWS for four years yeah joined UI paths in September yeah I want to start this conversation by having you talk a little bit about what what appealed to you about UI path and what more do you want to make the leap after four years at AWS yeah so I had the privilege to be west of really having a really close proximity to enterprise customers and getting the opportunity to listen to what they really wanted when they were talking about their digital transformation journeys and as it turns out the sort of cloud first in the automation first eras if you will are operating models at to two sides of the same coin if you think about what the that the cloud proposition has been over the last number of years it's really been about sort of reducing or eliminating the undifferentiated heavy lifting so that builders can build and then that turned into an operating model principle and it became sort of cloud first it's the same thing for the automation world you know we are reducing and eliminating the undifferentiated heavy lifting of Tata a product of business processes and tasks and everything else whether they're complex tasks or simple tasks removing that so that builders can build and business people can innovate and given them the freedom to do what they need to do as business owners think about AWS we obviously follow them very closely yeah anybody but it strikes you didn't thank you such are filters yeah what's the analog so what I think we again I would say that we are we are providing tools so the builders could build but at the same time our our products that works across the entire business stack whether that is sort of automation first as an operating principle across all businesses or whether it's across a business persona whether it's a CFO or somebody in accounts or a salesperson or whatever might be we're building tools that take the mundane tasks away from those users so that they have the freedom to go and serve their customers or or innovate within finance or do the do the job that they really love doing and that's really important for the business it turns out there's not a lot of value and a lot of the work that people do every day so if we can remove some of that then innovation will have an exponential curve of progress and that's what we're focused on today yes yeah again there are similarities there so if I understand the you're shifting one date asked allowing people freeing them up to do so that they can have a strategic impact in their business yes yeah yeah I think it is so if you look at even the technology paradigms and how cloud and AWS evolved and then also the layer on how uipath is evolving in the same way so you have computing and compute power started really with the mainframe and went to distributed servers and then to virtual machines and then from virtual machines it went to hosted virtual machines in the cloud and then from then it went to containers and now we're in this world of server lists we're in the cloud right so effectively the logic lives in server lists and the infrastructure sort of disappears and that provides massive scale in the automation world you started off with big monolithic processes you then had sort of network processes with software and data in the middle of all of that networked RPA really came in as an early sort of tool to help automate a lot of that a lot of processes and now in the realms of sort of automation as a function where in the end like the end game really is where automation is the application and the the applications themselves the data sources the processes really disappear so that the best done analogy I can come up with a metaphor acting um up with is I'm a Marvel fan I'm a geeky kind of Marvel fan of my favorite character is his Iron Man or Tony Stark and more specifically the Jarvis AI so what's happening all the time with with Tony Stark in the Jarvis a is he's interacting with his AI user interface all the time and what's happening in the background is that Java she's working with probably you know a hundred different applications and a hundred different data sources and everything else and rather than having you know a human go and do what the integration work that robots are doing that for him and it's just coming back as a as an outcome yeah I'm gonna keep pushing on this yeah similarities and differences because where it seems to break down is where our PA is focusing on the citizen developer the the end-user I'm afraid of AWS I won't go near it I see that console I call it my techies hey you know AWS is you know you got to be you know pretty technical to actually leverage it at the same time I'm thinking well maybe not maybe my builders are building things that I can touch but help us square that circle yeah so I think you the world is trending towards as much automation as possible so if it can be automated or if you can reduce the the burden to get to innovation I think you know technology is moving that way even in coding I think the transit we're seeing whether it's AWS or anyone else is low to no code and so we we occupy a world within the RPA space or the intelligent automation space where we're providing tools for people that don't need a requirement or or a skill set to code and they can still manufacture a few world their own automations and particularly with a release that we're just announcing today which is Studio X it really kind of reduces the friction from a business user where's zero understanding of how to code to build their own automations whether it's kind of recording a process or just dragging and dropping different components into a process even like even I could do that and that's saying something I can tell you yes exactly yeah this idea of democratizing the the automation the building that you said yeah very much so what will this mean I mean what what does what does that bode for the future of how work gets done because that is at the core of what you're doing is typically understanding how and where work gets done or the bottlenecks where the challenges and how can our PA fix this so I think ultimately like a lot of technologies it's really about the the exponential curve of productivity and whether you're looking at a national level a global level a company level a human level every level productivity has declined really over the last number of years and technology hasn't done a great job to improve that and you can say that some technologies have done a good job again I'd use a TBS is a good job in terms of the proliferation or the how prolific you can get more code out and more more progress there but overall productivity has declined so our sort of view of the world is if you can democratize automation if you can use or add a digital workforce to your to your to your teams then you'll have an exponential curve of productivity which a human level is important company level is important a national level is important and probably at global level is important you know you guys might be right place right time as well yeah because I remember you know all the spending in the 80s said receive growth everywhere except the Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Solow yeah [Laughter] [Music] you guys are hitting it right at the right time yeah you be able to take credit for a lot of it but yeah your thoughts on that in terms of productivity depending yeah I think it is pent up I think that is where where we're at right now and it's ready to be unleashed and I think that these technologies are are the technologies that will unleash it I think really what's happened over the last number of decades probably is that the six trillion dollar IT industry they exist today has largely kind of increased productivity or performance of other technologies it hasn't really increased output so whether it's sort of you know the core networking when Cisco started core networking there was a big increase I would imagine in connectivity and outputs then the technologies that were laid on top of that maybe less so and it was just really kind of putting bad band-aids on problems so it was really technology solving technology problems rather than technology solving human output problems and so I think that this is now the most tangible technology category that really is turning technology into value and productivity for technology really unlocking a lot of value one of the things that your former boss Jeff Bezos said was bet on dreamy businesses that have unlimited upside these these dreamy businesses customers love them they grow to very large sizes they have strong returns on capital and they can endure for decades I wonder if you could put you iPad in that context of a dreamy business what does he know right I mean nobody right I mean so and this is one of the reasons I was attracted by the way to DUI path because I think I think that the robots themselves if you can just kind of look at the subcategory of the robot I think it's on a similar curve to how Gordon Moore was talking about the Intel microprocessor in 1965 and the exponential curve of progress I think we were on that similar curve so when I sort of project five years from now I just think that the amount the robots will be able to do the cognitive kind of capabilities it will be able to do are just phenomenal so and customers customers give us feedback all the time about to two things they love and they value what we do the value is important because it's very empirical for the first time they can actually deploy a technology and see almost an immediate return on their technology whether it's a point technology solving one process or a group of processes they can see an immediate empirical return the other thing that I like to measure I quite like is that they value it so they think they love it they love and value it so they love it meaning it actually induces an emotion so when you when you watch the robots in action and they watch something that has been holding your team back or there's been stifling productivity or whatever it is people get giddy about it it's quite fascinating to see comment about Gordon Moore and Ty that's a digital transformation when I think of digital transformation I think of data yeah what's the difference in a business in a digital business it's how they use data yeah they put data at the core and four years we march to the cadence of Moore's law and that's changed its that that's not what the innovation the engine is today it's it's machine intelligence it's data and it's cloud for scale where do you guys fit I mean obviously AI is a piece of that but but maybe you could add some color to where our PA fits in that equation so I think that's an important point because there's a lot of miscommunication I think about really what it means when you talk about digital transformation and what it means to be digitally transformed and really to see transformed you're really talking about a category of customers which are large more institutional enterprises and governments because they have something to transform what they're transforming into is more of a digital native sort of set of attributes more insurgent mindsets and these companies are to your point they're very data hungry they harvest as much data as they can from from value from data they're very customer centric they focus on the customer experience they use other people's resources oh the cloud being one great example of that and the missing point from what you said is they automate everything they've to meet it so part of the digital transformation journey is if it can be automated it will be automated and anything that's new will be born automated so let me ask a follow-up on that is there a cultural difference in amia versus what you're seeing in North America in terms of the receptivity to automation I mean there are certain parts of of Europe which are you know more protective of jobs do you see a cultural difference or are they kind of I mean we do see even some resistance here but when you talk to customers they're like no it's it's wonderful I love it what are you seeing in Europe so I don't I don't see much of a cultural difference there and I see don't I don't see yet I haven't seen any feedback yes Peres I'm very new still but I haven't seen anybody talk about really that this technology is a technology to take jobs out I think most people see this technology as a way of getting better performance out of humans you know pivoting them towards more so I would say like in some markets in my in my in my prior life in in many prior lives I would say that there's some countries like France for example that would have been a little bit more stayed within their approach to new technologies and adoption not so with regards to automation they see this as a real and game productivity increase thank you I think that's true for people who have tasted it yeah but I do think there's still some reticence in the ranks until they actually experience it that's why we'll talk to some customers about it they'll have bought a Thon's and just a yeah to educate people and what's possible to let them try to build their own robots and then people then the light bulbs go off that it's taking away the aggravations the frustrations the mundi the drudgery and then you said people get giddy about those things you don't have to do that yeah but then the question is also so so what creative things are you doing now so how are you spending your time what are you doing differently that makes your job more interesting more compelling yeah and and and I think that's the real question - so what is the okay yes receiving some money and people aren't having to do those mundane tasks but then what are what is the value add that the employees are now bringing to the table yeah so in actually sit and it takes made the right point as well in terms of the mechanism for doing that is the the part of the battle here is to spark the imagination just like anything really just let you like it back in the Amazon wild it's all of our spark in the imagination if you can if you can imagine it you can build it it's the same thing really with within our world now is figuring out with customers what think what tasks do they do that they hate doing either a user level or a downstream level what are the things that they really want to do that they need our help to harvest and so we do the same sort the same sort of things that we would have done with AWS where we did lots of hackathons and you bought lots of technology partners in with us and we would sort of building all of this we do exactly the same thing with the RP a space it's exactly the same this is really important because creativity is going to become an increasingly important because if productivity goes up it means you can do the same amount of work with less people so it is going to impact jobs and people are gonna have to be comfortable to get out of their comfort zone and become creative and find ways to apply these technologies to really advance but you know drive value to their organizations and actually I look at this as well as a long term technology whereas a long term technology is something that's important for my children I've three and they're still very young so twelve ten and six but eventually they will go into the workplace with these skills embedded they will just know the how you get work done is you have your robot do a whole load of tasks for you here and your your job is to build and to be creative and to harvest data and to manipulate data and and serve customers and focus on the customer experience that's really what it's all about the real brain works I've been a pleasure having you on the show at uipath thank you so much appreciate it i'm rebecca night for j4 day Volante please stay tuned for more from the cubes live coverage of uipath coming up in just a little bit