>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of UiPath Live, the release show. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Valenti, welcome back to our RPA Drill Down. Ted Kummert is here he is Executive Vice President for Products and Engineering at UiPath. Ted, thanks for coming on, great to see you. >> Dave, it's great to be here, thanks so much. >> Dave your background is pretty interesting, you started as a Silicon Valley Engineer, they pulled you out, you did a huge stint at Microsoft. You got experience in SAS, you've got VC chops with Madrona. And at Microsoft you saw it all, the NT, the CE Space, Workflow, even MSN you did stuff with MSN, and then the all important data. So I'm interested in what attracted you to UiPath? >> Yeah Dave, I feel super fortunate to have worked in the industry in this span of time, it's been an amazing journey, and I had a great run at Microsoft it was fantastic. You mentioned one experience in the middle there, when I first went to the server business, the enterprise business, I owned our Integration and Workflow products, and I would say that's the first I encountered this idea. Often in the software industry there are ideas that have been around for a long time, and what we're doing is refining how we're delivering them. And we had ideas we talked about in terms of Business Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring, Workflow. The ways to efficiently able somebody to express the business process in a piece of software. Bring systems together, make everybody productive, bring humans into it. These were the ideas we talked about. Now in reality there were some real gaps. Because what happened in the technology was pretty different from what the actual business process was. And so lets fast forward then, I met Madrona Venture Group, Seattle based Venture Capital Firm. We actually made a decision to participate in one of UiPath's fundraising rounds. And that's the first I really came encountered with the company and had to have more than an intellectual understanding of RPA. 'Cause when I first saw it, I said "oh, I think that's desktop automation" I didn't look very close, maybe that's going to run out of runway, whatever. And then I got more acquainted with it and figured out "Oh, there's a much bigger idea here". And the power is that by really considering the process and the implementation from the humans work in, then you have an opportunity really to automate the real work. Not that what we were doing before wasn't significant, this is just that much more powerful. And that's when I got really excited. And then the companies statistics and growth and everything else just speaks for itself, in terms of an opportunity to work, I believe, in one of the most significant platforms going in the enterprise today, and work at one of the fastest growing companies around. It was like almost an automatic decision to decide to come to the company. >> Well you know, you bring up a good point you think about software historically through our industry, a lot of it was 'okay here's this software, now figure out how to map your processes to make it all work' and today the processes, especially you think about this pandemic, the processes are unknown. And so the software really has to be adaptable. So I'm wondering, and essentially we're talking about a fundamental shift in the way we work. And is there really a fundamental shift going on in how we write software and how would you describe that? >> Well there certainly are, and in a way that's the job of what we do when we build platforms for the enterprises, is try and give our customers a new way to get work done, that's more efficient and helps them build more powerful applications. And that's exactly what RPA does, the efficiency, it's not that this is the only way in software to express a lot of this, it just happens to be the quickest. You know in most ways. Especially as you start thinking about initiatives like our StudioX product to what we talk about as enabling citizen developers. It's an expression that allows customers to just do what they could have done otherwise much more quickly and efficient. And the value on that is always high, certainly in an unknown era like this, it's even more valuable, there are specific processes we've been helping automate in the healthcare, in financial services, with things like SBA Loan Processing, that we weren't thinking about six months ago, or they weren't thinking about six months ago. We're all thinking about how we're reinventing the way we work as individuals and corporations because of what's going on with the coronavirus crisis, having a platform like this that gives you agility and mapping the real work to what your computer state and applications all know how to do, is even more valuable in a climate like that. >> What attracted us originally to UiPath, we knew Bobby Patrick CMO, he said "Dave, go download a copy, go build some automations and go try it with some other companies". So that really struck us as wow, this is actually quite simple. Yet at the same time, and so you've of course been automating all these simple tasks, but now you've got real aspiration, you're glomming on to this term of Hyperautomation, you've made some acquisitions, you've got a vision, that really has taken you beyond 'paving the cow path' I sometimes say, of all these existing processes. It's really trying to discover new processes and opportunities for automation, which you would think after 50 or whatever years we've been in this industry, we'd have attacked a lot of it, but wow, seems like we have a long way to go. Again, especially what we're learning through this pandemic. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I'd say Hyperautomation. It's actually a Gartner term, it's not our term. But there is a bigger idea here, built around the core automation platform. So let's talk for a second just what's not about the core platform and then what Hyperautomation really means around that. And I think of that as the bookends of how do I discover and plan, how do I improve my ability to do more automations, and find the real opportunities that I have. And how do I measure and optimize? And that's a lot of what we delivered in 20.4 as a new capability. So let's talk about discover and plan. One aspect of that is the wisdom of the crowd. We have a product we call Automation Hub that is all about that. Enabling people who have ideas, they're the ones doing the work, they have the observation into what efficiencies can be. Enabling them to either with our Ask Capture Utility capture that and document that, or just directly document that. And then, people across the company can then collaborate eventually moving on building the best ideas out of that. So there's capturing the crowd, and then there's a more scientific way of capturing actually what the opportunities are. So we've got two products we introduced. One is process mining, and process mining is about going outside in from the, let's call it the larger processes, more end to end processes in the enterprise. Things like order-to-cash and procure-to-pay, helping you understand by watching the events, and doing the analytics around that, where your bottle necks, where are you opportunities. And then task mining said "let's watch an individual, or group of individuals, what their tasks are, let's watch the log of events there, let's apply some machine learning processing to that, and say here's the repetitive things we've found." And really helping you then scientifically discover what your opportunities are. And these ideas have been along for a long time, process mining is not new. But the connection to an automation platform, we think is a new and powerful idea, and something we plan to invest a lot in going forward. So that's the first bookend. And then the second bookend is really about attaching rich analytics, so how do I measure it, so there's operationally how are my robots doing? And then there's everything down to return on investment. How do I understand how they are performing, verses what I would have spent if I was continuing to do them the old way. >> Yeah that's big 'cause (laughing) the hero reports for the executives to say "hey, this is actually working" but at the same time you've got to take a systems view. You don't want to just optimize one part of the system at the detriment to others. So you talk about process mining, which is kind of discovering the backend systems, ERP and the like, where the task mining it sounds like it's more the collaboration and front end. So that whole system thinking, really applies, doesn't it? >> Yeah. Very much so. Another part of what we talked about then, in the system is, how do we capture the ideas and how do we enable more people to build these automations? And that really gets down to, we talk about it in our company level vision, is a robot for every person. Every person should have a digital assistant. It can help you with things you do less frequently, it can help you with things you do all the time to do your job. And how do we help you create those? We've released a new tool we call StudioX. So for our RPA Developers we have Studio, and StudioX is really trying to enable a citizen developer. It's not unlike the art that we saw in Business Intelligence there was the era where analytics and reporting were the domain of experts, and they produced formalized reports that people could consume. But the people that had the questions would have to work with them and couldn't do the work themselves. And then along comes ClickView and Tableau and Power BI enabling the self services model, and all of a sudden people could do that work themselves, and that enabled powerful things. We think the same arch happens here, and StudioX is really our way of enabling that, citizen developer with the ideas to get some automation work done on their own. >> Got a lot in this announcement, things like document understanding, bring your own AI with AI fabric, how are you able to launch so many products, and have them fit together, you've made some acquisitions. Can you talk about the architecture that enables you to do that? >> Yeah, it's clearly in terms of ambition, and I've been there for 10 weeks, but in terms of ambition you don't have to have been there when they started the release after Forward III in October to know that this is the most ambitious thing that this company has ever done from a release perspective. Just in terms of the surface area we're delivering across now as an organization, is substantive. We talk about 1,000 feature improvements, 100's of discreet features, new products, as well as now our automation cloud has become generally available as well. So we've had muscle building over this past time to become world class at offering SAS, in addition to on-premises. And then we've got this big surface area, and architecture is a key component of how you can do this. How do you deliver efficiently the same software on-premises and in the cloud? Well you do that by having the right architecture and making the right bets. And certainly you look forward, how are companies doing this today? It's really all about Cloud-Native Platform. But it's about an architecture such that we can do that efficiently. So there is a lot about just your technical strategy. And then it's just about a ton of discipline and customer focus. It keeps you focused on the right things. StudioX was a great example of we were led by customers through a lot of what we actually delivered, a couple of the major features in it, certainly the out of box templates, the studio governance features, came out of customer suggestions. I think we had about 100 that we have sitting in the backlog, a lot of which we've already done, and really being disciplined and really focused on what customers are telling. So make sure you have the right technical strategy and architecture, really follow your customers, and really stay disciplined and focused on what matters most as you execute on the release. >> What can we learn from previous examples, I think about for instance SQL Server, you obviously have some knowledge in it, it started out pretty simple workloads and then at the time we all said "wow, it's a lot more powerful to come from below that it is, if a Db2, or an Oracle sort of goes down market", Microsoft proved that, obviously built in the robustness necessary, is there a similar metaphor here with regard to things like governance and security, just in terms of where UiPath started and where you see it going? >> Well I think the similarities have more to do with we have an idea of a bigger platform that we're now delivering against. In the database market, that was, we started, SQL Server started out as more of just a transactional database product, and ultimately grew to all of the workloads in the data platform, including transaction for transactional apps, data warehousing and as well as business intelligence. I see the same analogy here of thinking more broadly of the needs, and what the ability of an integrated platform, what it can do to enable great things for customers, I think that's a very consistent thing. And I think another consistent thing is know who you are. SQL Server knew exactly who it had to be when it entered the database market. That it was going to set a new benchmark on simplicity, TCO, and that was going to be the way it differentiated. In this case, we're out ahead of the market, we have a vision that's broader than a lot of the market is today. I think we see a lot of people coming in to this space, but we see them building to where we were, and we're out ahead. So we are operating from a leadership position, and I'm not going to tell you one's easier that the other, and both you have to execute with great urgency. But we're really executing out ahead, so we've got to keep thinking about, and there's no one's tail lights to follow, we have to be the ones really blazing the trail on what all of this means. >> I want to ask you about this incorporation of existing systems. Some markets they take off, it's kind of a one shot deal, and the market just embeds. I think you guys have bigger aspirations than that, I look at it like a service now, misunderstood early on, built the platform and now really is fundamental part of a lot of enterprises. I also look at things like EDW, which again, you have some experience in. In my view it failed to live up to a lot of it's promises even though it delivered a lot of value. You look at some of the big data initiatives, you know EDW still plugs in, it's the system of record, okay that's fine. How do you see RPA evolving? Are we going to incorporate, do we have to embrace existing business process systems? Or is this largely a do-over in your opinion? >> Well I think it's certainly about a new way of building automation, and it's starting to incorporate and include the other ways, for instance in the current release we added support for long running workflow, it was about human workflow based scenarios, now the human is collaborating with the robot, and we built those capabilities. So I do see us combining some of the old and new way. I think one of the most significant things here, is also that impact that AI and ML based technologies and skills can have on the power of the automations that we deliver. We've certainly got a surface area that, I think about our AI and ML strategy in two parts, that we are building first class first party skills, that we're including in the platform, and then we're building a platform for third parties and customers to bring their what their data science teams have delivered, so those can also be a part of our ecosystem, and part of automations. And so things like document understanding, how do I easily extract data from more structured, semi-structured and completely unstructured documents, accurately? And include those in my automations. Computer vision which gives us an ability to automate at a UI level across other types of systems than say a Windows and a browser base application. And task mining is built on a very robust, multi layer ML system, and the innovation opportunity that I think just consider there, you know continue there. You think it's a macro level if there's aspects of machine learning that are about captured human knowledge, well what exactly is an automation that captured where you're capturing a lot of human knowledge. The impact of ML and AI are going to be significant going out into the future. >> Yeah, I want to ask you about them, and I think a lot of people are just afraid of AI, as a separate thing and they have to figure out how to operationalize it. And I think companies like UiPath are really in a position to embed UI into applications AI into applications everywhere, so that maybe those folks that haven't climbed on the digital bandwagon, who are now with this pandemic are realizing "wow, we better accelerate this" they can actually tap machine intelligence through your products and others as well. Your thoughts on that sort of narrative? >> Yeah, I agree with that point of view, it's AI and ML is still maturing discipline across the industry. And you have to build new muscle, and you build new muscle and data science, and it forces you to think about data and how you manage your data in a different way. And that's a journey we've been on as a company to not only build our first party skills, but also to build the platform. It's what's given us the knowledge that to help us figure out, well what do we need to include here so our customers can bring their skills, actually to our platform, and I do think this is a place where we're going to see the real impact of AI and ML in a broader way. Based on the kind of apps it is and the kind of skills we can bring to bear. >> Okay last question, you're ten weeks in, when you're 50, 100, 200 weeks in, what should we be watching, what do you want to have accomplished? >> Well we're listening, we're obviously listening closely to our customers, right now we're still having a great week, 'cause there's nothing like shipping new software. So right now we're actually thinking deeply about where we're headed next. We see there's lots of opportunities and robot for every person, and that initiative, and so we're launched a bunch of important new capabilities there, and we're going to keep working with the market to understand how we can, how we can add additional capability there. We've just got the GA of our automation cloud, I think you should expect more and more services in our automation cloud going forward. I think this area we talked about, in terms of AI and ML and those technologies, I think you should expect more investment and innovation there from us and the community, helping our customers, and I think you will also see us then, as we talked about this convergence of the ways we bring together systems through integrate and build business process, I think we'll see a convergence into the platform of more of those methods. I look ahead to the next releases, and want to see us making some very significant releases that are advancing all of those things, and continuing our leadership in what we talk about now as the Hyperautomation platform. >> Well Ted, lot of innovation opportunities and of course everybody's hopping on the automation bandwagon. Everybody's going to want a piece of your RPA hide, and you're in the lead, we're really excited for you, we're excited to have you on theCUBE, so thanks very much for all your time and your insight. Really appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks Dave, great to spend this time with you. >> All right thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Velanti for theCUBE, and our RPA Drill Down Series, keep it right there we'll be right back, right after this short break. (calming instrumental music)

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UI path. >>We're back. You're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. This has been a great event. UI path forward three, the third North American event, and this is day two. We're just wrapping up. Brandon nod is here as a senior vice president with UI path and Kadar. Danny, who's the vice president of global accounts at UI path. So you guys got a store? >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. Britta, what's the story you guys, one was a customer and customer that is to first customer. Um, so three years ago, something like that when you iPod, we just started out with a global expansion. We'd got our seed funding round in 2015 we started expanding and building our global sales team when he's 16. I joined in the UK, responsible globally for the banking financial services industry. And one, one fine day, I get a communication, an email from a prospective customer that, Hey, I want to talk to you about your platform. And it was a Brandon over here. Brandon, do you want to tell it? Tell them what a, how you found out about your iPad. >>Yeah, you bet. I was interviewing a couple of partners and looking at the different platforms and found that yeah, you, I've had really had what I was looking for, which is the openness of the platform, the ability to do training online and start my journey kind of on my terms. And so when I reached out to it was very much how can you help me get started? I've already made the business case internally, I'm ready to go. What year was this? 2016 and it's interesting, >>Daniel Donnez last night and his keynote said, you know, we really appreciate you guys who joined us in 2016 cause you know, the product didn't have all the features that we wanted. You know, it wasn't fully baked. This was my interpretation. That's right. But, but I, but I was saying earlier in the cube, the right move, that UI path made as you bet on simplicity. And he said, okay, let's get to market fast. Yeah. Simple. And that. And you said on your terms, what do you mean by that? >>So one of the things that I love about UI path is early on there was a principle of openness. Let people download the software. Don't be afraid, don't tease people, and then say, come to our site and we'll give you a call. Right? They said, come to our site, download, try it yourself. Here's what there's free training. And as UI path has grown, that principle is, is still very much precedent. You can go online right now and download, take free courses online. So what I wanted as a customer at that time was the ability to see it for myself. I wanted to make it real before I've made the investment. That was our experience. When Bobby Patrick first started, I said, you iPad today? He goes, go to the download a >>copy of our software, start building automations. I'm like, huh, yeah to it. And then go to automation anywhere, which by the way is the sponsor of ours. We love, we're an arms dealer. We love everybody. You know, go to blue prism, get their software too. So we tried, but we couldn't, you know, it was called the reseller will do pro what's your need? We just want to play with it, you know, so, so that's what you mean by bad on your terms and so yeah, that, that's worked pretty well for you guys, hasn't it? has and uh, you know, when we started off, right, community has always been a pillar within, within UI paths, you know, kind of strategy to to make sure that RPA is available to everyone. We call it democratization of, of automation and hence, you know, availability of the community edition. >>Uh, we go to the universities, students are able to download and use it for free and now we've tied up with certain universities to expand the education system with uh, getting, um, you know, when graduates pass out they come out ready knowing you want found RPA. Yeah, we had a, the college of William and Mary on and Tom Clancy, they were talking about that. Now I did my little review of the predictions in the morning. Guys predictions. He said that the students that come out of college, you're gonna force RPA on their companies. Most college kids don't know what RPA is. I got hit, I said it's gonna take a couple of cycles here, but, but so, okay, so run. Why did you join UI path? How did that all, you know, what drove you to say, okay, this is it. I'm going to have instead of applying the technology to make my existing company better, I'm gonna. >>So I ran operations for a mortgage company and we had already automated everything that we could using the classic tools and we are winning awards. And it was, you know, people were looking at the work that we are doing and they were impressed, but I still couldn't get past a certain point in my automations. So bringing in UI path allowed me to continue that journey to keep automating. And after a while, the more that I was working with you, I path weird, uh, I was a guest of, of them at conferences, speaking with guy Kirkwood and any number of folks. I looked at the culture of the company and thought this is a place that I want to be. And I looked at the roadmap and where the product was going and what I was able to do with it as a customer. And I thought, I want to help other people do this. I want to help them on their journey, get to this next level of automation that they're currently there. They're being kept at. >>Yeah, well a lot of people hop on the bandwagon. I saw folks from AWS, you know, have joined a gentlemen I know from Google, let's join them in these early leading companies and correct. So how are you guys spending your time these days? Special >> as I, my, my title suggests, you know, I'm responsible for the global account portfolio and I'm spending most of my time with our customers trying to help them on their automation journey. So these are some of the largest >>global customers, uh, big insurance companies, uh, automobile industry, uh, you know, Titans in that industry and they've all been our customers now for the last two years, in three years with a plan to kind of change the way they, uh, they run their business right. And RPA and you wipe out basically the automation platform that we have now with our new release come out as well, is giving these customers and end Duan a transformation engine. So it is our responsibility now to make them, uh, you know, more knowledgeable on how to apply that technology and get them successful with their plans for a, you know, transformation and automation of their business processes. Right. >>How are you spending your time, bro? I'm in product and in my focus is attended automation. So classically people are implementing unintended automation. This, this was the first big wave of RPA was really robots just working on a server somewhere. You don't, you don't interact with them. They just do their thing 24 hours a day. Now there's a huge push into attended automation, which is having a, a robot on your computer and the two of you working together, collaborating in real time throughout your day. So we're looking to save time to take out the the wasteful and small processes that nobody wants to do as well as creating an entirely new opportunities for value based on what the two of you can do together. How are you guys thinking about the way in which a user or worker interacts with that? That bot? Yeah, I think it's, it's more like a dance and and less like a task manager, right? >>So you might think in classic automation, you know, click a button, go do this thing, click a button, go do that thing that the automation is happening when you want it to. The way that our platform has written, the robot can listen to what you're doing. It can monitor for when you click on a specific button or for when you move files to a folder. So think about it less like a conscious effort to, to guide the robot and more as a collaborative effort where, where the robot is seeing what you're doing and taking action to help you and do things on your behalf and then letting you know when they're done. So it's the paradigm is changing for work and when you have a robot on your computer, it's going to open up a new way of doing your, your daily content. And the enabler there is what machine learning machine intelligence. >>It's a combination of things. So think about machine learning and AI as just one tool that that robot has to use both CR as well. You know, we did a demo earlier this week where we took receipts, moved him to a folder, the robot sees that you've moved receipts into a folder, can bounce it off and end point that and break apart those receipts using OCR, load that all into Excel and help you with your expense report. So think about things like this, you, things you need to do. You do what you would normally do, put receipts in a folder and the robot takes care of the rest. What, what things can, um, humans do that machines can't? Yeah, the ability to make on the fly judgment for complex cognitive tasks is very, very hard to replicate in, in AI right now because typically models are built on a set of specific information. >>We build our, our receipt and our invoice model off a ton of receipts and invoices. Therefore the robot can make quick work of those receipts way, way faster than we can, but present an unstructured problem or an open ended problem in an AI model might really struggle. Whereas a human can instantly make a judgment on that. So we want computers to do that. Those, those compiled activities and with the AI models that make sense for what they're doing and want humans to be thinking at higher levels, at creative levels, higher cognitive, cognitive and decision making levels. So this is as Daniel and others had mentioned, elevating the humanity when you think about it, >>but you definitely see some of your customers are certainly talking about this. This is robots taking action systems of agencies. Some people call it on behalf of the human and having to essentially make certain decisions. But you're saying those decisions are well understood and safe essentially. >>Absolutely. When you deploy a robot you don't, you don't just kind of hope for the best. Right? You have a very specific use case and you've coated the robot for that use case. I love it when when people say, you know, our compliance team is worried about the robots going wild or you know, we can have it gone the system, but he can't do anything that you haven't consciously told it to do, haven't written it to do. So it turns out it's actually even more compliant because it can throw off logs and a paper trail is as complex as you want it. So if I were a compliance officer, I would say get robots in immediately because I want more visibility into what's being done. >>So where do you see your customers going? So our customers say few. As Brandon was saying earlier, you know, customers started with this unattended robots first because everyone was trying to get an efficiency in their back office. We got a Y and that that is actually the core foundation for what comes next, which is the attended automation, the robot for every person vision that we have, we have fought for the, for the entire global customer community of ours. I mean the number of use cases where a human agent would with a robot. Now with having a robot on every desktop, I mean simple things like expense reports, time sheets or even simple things like downloading emails and reports on a daily basis. You don't need to engage with multiple systems. As a, as a human agent, you can get the robot to go ahead and do that for you. And as Brandon was saying, you know, you have much better control with the robot doing it. Then a human being who has a mind who could potentially, you know, cause certain security or compliance related issues because a human agent could go easily off track, do something different. Where as the robot has a certain set of parameters within which they work. >>Well guys, we've got to wrap, but so I'm going to ask each of you, give us the bumper sticker on UI path forward three a. When the trucks are pulling away from the Bellagio, what's the bumper sticker? Safe running. Try and keep up. >>Yeah, go, go big. Go big and go big now. >>Yeah, go bigger or go home. It's kind of seems to be the theme here. Well guys, thanks very much for. Congratulations on all the success you guys got a lot of work to do still for sure and best of luck. Thank you very much. Very welcome and thank you for watching everybody. It's a wrap from a UI path forward. You watching the cube, go to siliconangle.com check out all the news. We've got a bunch of in depth coverage of this show, RPA in general. We have five shows this week, so check that out and of course go to the cube.net to see what will be next week. Another big week. October has become the new may. So thank you for watching everyone. This is Dave Volante for the cube. Thanks guys. Great job today. We'll see you next time.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. Everybody. You're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of UI path forward UI pass, third North America event and we're excited to be here. This is our second year here. Daniel DNAs is here. He's the CEO of the rocket ship known as UI path. Welcome back to the cube. Great to see you again. >>Thank you. Thank you for inviting me here. >>Oh, so it's our, it's our pleasure and it's been great to be able to document this and we've been saying all week that we see the ecosystem developing the customer base, that UI path very reminiscent of some of the very successful companies that we've seen. But we've never seen a company sort of growing this fast. I have to start with you. Our big idea person kind of go big or go home mentality. But did you really see it getting here so fast? >>Well we, we kind of see it a year ago going here. I can not say that. I've seen it five years, five years ago, I couldn't see, I couldn't see me even in front of a hundred people speaking not to talk about 3000 like can close today, yesterday. >>Well, it's gotta make you very happy. You set it up on stages. When you see your saw the software that you developed, your, you're a developer, you're a coder affecting people's lives. The way some of the examples that you gave, it was a little tear in your eye maybe out of saying, but how to tug at your heart a little bit. That's got to be as a developer and of course now CEO, that's gotta be very gratifying to see your technology have an impact on people's lives. >>Okay, well I can tell you it is a really gratifying, in the end it's, um, we, we, we've built technology, you know, to, first of all, we are proud as engineers to build the best technology that we can, but it's, uh, it makes us a lot more, it's a lot more touching seeing that you can help humans to become better, to become healthier, to even save lives, to help refugees. It's a, it's an amazing feeling. It's when >>I talk to people about robotic process automation, most people don't, don't really are connected and they'll say things to me like, really is there that much room for automation? We've been in the computer industry for 50 years, we've been automating everything back office, front office. How much more room is there? And you put forth the premise last night in your keynote essentially said technology is actually created inefficiencies that >>despite all the automation that we've had now we have all these processes that can be improved. So necessarily the first time I had heard that put forward. I guess my question is, so technology got us into this problem, can technology get us out? >> Yeah. Um, first of all, I'm a software engineer, so I didn't believe there are so many inefficiencies in within the business world. I fought the law. Gender prizes should have been automated completely. Everything should run as move, as ineffectually. But in reality, the alert is far away from this. And as I said yesterday, email and a pro plus activity tools, especially spreadsheets and line of business application has changed completely. How we perform or in front office and back office. But uh, it's, it's a lot of skit work because it's, it's work created when people build business processes, they work with different systems and they always touch the system by looking at the user interface of the, by looking at human readable interfaces of these systems and uh, and when you go and automate them it's kind of difficult to translate into a BIS. >>So where are the at the on the field. So our approach is just through replicates Q months using the same tools, the same thing. Knowledge is that thought for media to business people building and the it's the only way that can work at scale. Of course you can take one particular process, build an it project flow developers with them be successful but you cannot do it. The large scale that an enterprise has, it's the only technology that can work at the large scale. Like I believe in the transportation industry, self-loving cars are the only solution to the industry or not. It's not feasible to say I will build much larger freeways. No, you put self driving cars or self driving trucks driving in the night on the freeway and this is how you will free daily, you know, everything else for the norm of agriculture. Same sort of concept. >>Like there's nothing, I can't make more land. Right? But as you grow your company, um, you guys growing so fast, are you able to use automations to support that growth? I'm sure there are some inefficiencies in it because there's a pace of growth. Helped me understand that this is, this is our story. So way we've built initial finance processes, finance, HR, procurement processes in the very manual slides using people and then scaling up when each a point where we've become a big consumers of all our own technology. It's not, it's not about what we use the most modern systems in the world. It's not a vote that they are not integrated. It's about all the, all the words build by this business people, all the reports that we are creating or all this stuff required a lot of work. We have automated more than a hundred thousand manual hours within you iPod today. >>A mother company built on the best technology stick, all that. Do you feel, feel like that's part of the reason why you've been able to grow so fast? Maybe faster than other historical examples of software companies? Systems are one thing way we weren't able to grow as fast by couple of reasons. First of all, we went global from day one. We were not the typical Silicon Valley company that says I will win in North America and then I will replicate this model across the world because they lose about three to five years in Muslim America just Lang to perfect the machine at least at least then we just went when globally they want an hour. It helps because we can make a business case easy so we can, we can go into a lot of gentle price, show them how it works and it does not require such a huge investment. >>That list to get started and second is it's evolved our culture. We put the big emphasize in keeping our culture customer focus and we put humility as the core. Then that evolved culture and I, I know it might sounds a bit pretentious to see, we put humility, but it's a humility that gives you a, a great, great framework of how you operate. You can, it makes you listen to people, it makes you able to change your mind. It makes you actually accelerate because people that change their mind or they look to find foster better solution that people that are stuck and they need a lot of data until they make, because they are afraid of losing face in making decision. So it's something that works. So it's uh, it's this, those two things combined gave us this cake. It's very interesting you say that because there's a lot of ways to skin a cat. >>Um, many companies have succeeded with extremely dogmatic approach. I mean, I would argue Microsoft, much of its success was it was built around personal productivity, you know, or bust. Um, yet your philosophy is be more open minded. You're humble. Listen to the customers change fast if necessary. Kind of a different philosophy maybe than some others have used in the past. I believe that our philosophy is, is helping us, I don't know, maybe a Microsoft has change. Yeah, exactly that. Satya. So, so it's uh, it's not, so I think this is, this is built in the fabric of how humans operate. We talk to other humans, we learned their needs and then we address their needs. I think it's arrogance to say, I know your boss, I will do this is what you have to do. Like many more traditional software companies are doing, we were very fortunate to build these products by listening to customers. >>That's, that's luck. You don't have to find product market fit. Listen to customers. Market is big. Bring what they want. Well the funny thing is, you know, we talking about the analysts meeting and I do remember you, you're there the other day. You said that you made a bunch of mistakes early on that you got ahead a build it and they will come a mentality. You've kind of built it and then you had to go out, listen to people and figure out how to apply it. Right. Actually I've been using a lot of parallels to service now. It's kind of right. Fred Luddy did, he built, he built a platform and then the VC said, well what do we use it for? He goes, anything good? He had to go and talk to people into the route. Okay, how do I apply it? But you said, well kind of made some mistakes early on, but you recovered from those mistakes by listening. >>It sounds like the definitely in the bill. Coming from a software engineer background, I, uh, I have, uh, at least I had the tendency to don't give enough credit to sales, to marketing even to the customers it was, we clearly understand the customers in the, so we build technology for the sake of technology. So we were really fortunate to have some MALDI customers. We didn't understand how because I fought that custom was, should all to themselves to test and find the best technology out there and just go there. I was really kind of, I had a lot of blind sports, so on how this world operates, but after I've stopped it to visit customers and understand their pain points and their requests actually realize they are smarter than us in using our own technology because they use it in the real world. So then message that that completely transformed my thinking. So I went back to my engineering team, sunlight, unlike the one guys on this day, I don't want to ever hear, we don't fix bugs and we do features and we do this. When the customers say, you do this, you say, thank you, thank you for showing me the light. I will do this. That's, that makes me create a better broad your feet >>back as a gift. The feedback is a gift. So I want to ask you about the statement you made yesterday in your keynote about we are cloud first and you announced a SAS capability today. I said I signed up, took me seconds, and now I've got to do some work to invite some other people and start doing some automations. But when you were in your apartment in Bucharest or wherever you started the company, why not cloud then? >>Most of our customers are still on prem. So way we have to be where customers are with the clouds first four years ago we wouldn't be here today. Oh. So we started close to the customers way and learn a lot from really large customers that thought a bit more reluctant to go into cloud and now as I think all in all in life is about timing. I think it's the right time timing to benefit the other segments of the market and allow for automation on demand was the infrastructure. Bryce, that people that are still on prem pay are huge. Compare some in some companies only to provision a server would be like 200 K period one time on. Then you have people to maintain them. Offering a many surveys by us in our own cloud looking at the best, you know, we create the best infrastructure, most efficient. We have the best people understanding our technology. We're seeing it. I think it's a great business proposition, but now we were ready to do it. >>Well, plus it sets up potentially new pricing models, you know, consumption based pricing models. You hear a lot of, a lot of row, a lot of bots, uh, are, are sitting idle as a customer. Help just charge me when I'm using violet, thinking of, you know, the serverless and functions. But this is possible only with economy of scale. So the cloud is, you're going to your cloud, you're not going to build it on Azure or AWS or you guys may use, we'll use Bob Lee Clow shows, which is infrastructure. You just have this look Chelios. Yeah. Okay. Um, I'm going ask you about, uh, IPO. Um, what, can you share with us your thoughts? You know, the window seems to be closing a little bit different, right? You know, Uber's and now Slack, you know, not such a successful. And what are your thoughts on IPO? Well, I think that the enterprise software >>companies were actually pretty successful in IPO and this year. And they have one of the, you know, a lot of just multiples that we have. We're seeing. So you cannot compare marketplace companies like who you are or Lyft to enterprise software. So I think for a good enterprise software company, they will always be a place to land a good IPO regardless of timing. Timing is, doesn't work for us. We are still, we are still a young company in many ways. We are 40 years old company. So it will be one of the yellow most earliest IPO. Very, very, very early. We need the bit, we need more at least one year. Like we want do an IPO in 2020, but we've been here the 2021 would be a good year for that. Depends on the climate, but we have met on the client, you have them, you're very well capitalized. Right? It's not like you need to do upsell Kevin the motivation and we still have five would bribe private Gabby. The markets are very frothy so you can still raise a lot of money and very good volume. >>Right. So the motivation for IPO is, is what awareness maybe for the employee. >>Yeah. Exited for the employees. And, uh, you'll just get to a size where you cannot be prideful. And most of our customers are public and they are much more comfortable dealing with the public. >>Yeah, for sure. It's part of your transparency edict, but I mean, well a lot of companies that have raised a ton of dough at the Cloudera for example, waited and waited and waited and then, you know, they go public. It's like, then the public doesn't get to participate in the upside. So I'm sure you're having those conversations thinking about it though. You know, the little guy wants to invest too and you're like, yeah, why not, right? Yeah. So let's go this. It's very exciting times and as you say, it depends on the time and we'll see what happens with the 2020 election who can, who can predict those things. But, so I want to ask you about the Capitol because software is a very capital efficient marketplace, but, but we see companies, you know, you included raising hundreds of millions, sometimes a billion plus dollars. Why such large raises? Where do you see that going? You mentioned engineering, you'd have plenty of money to do engineering. Is it really promotion? We tried to get to escape philosophy. We >>build a big market and we have invested in a mode in order to, if you go fast, well let's take cold car. Okay, the fosters or car go, the more guess it consumes. Right, so you need, if you want to comprise the time, it's costly, but that helps you extend much faster when when large markets and build a large bill, really a large company. In the short time, we could have been much more efficient if we, instead of four years, we would have built this company in 10 years. Many companies, if they would reach our size in 10 years, I will still be happy, but we've done it in four instead of 10 and then it was if you have unit capital to grow fast, >>I think it's the right approach because I do think there's going to be consolidation in this market and I think the company that achieves escape velocity and you are the favorite to do that now, we'll do very, very well. I think the market's much larger than the market forecast suggests. I think the Tam is way, way, way under, and again, we call this on service now as well. We saw this early on at the core. People tell how the core is really not that big, but, but the, but the adjacencies and the potential market is, it's, it's, it's way more than 16 billion or whatever that number is you showed. I think it's, it's, it's, it's 30 40 you know, perhaps even even bigger. >>I think as people realize that this is the really, the only way you can achieve automation on this, a smaller type of processes, but large volume, I think they will. They will go more and more. >>Well then, I know you're super busy and you've got to go. Thanks so much for coming again. Thank you guys for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be right back. Right after this short break. You're watching the cube from UI path forward three right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019, brought to you by UiPath. >> Hi everybody welcome back to Las Vegas, we're at the Bellagio at UiPath Forward III, day two of theCUBE covers. theCUBE is a leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Erik Alexis here is the Vice President of Global Intelligent Process Automation at GE. Eric thanks for coming on. >> Yeah absolutely excited to be here. >> So, you guys have a COE, you're obviously heavily involved in essentially running the COE, is that right? >> Yeah that's my role at GE. I lead our Global Center of Excellence for intelligent process automation. Our journey started with UiPath a while back in 2016. So, it's been an incredible journey so far. >> And I want to get into that. So, before I do, I was struck by the Forrester analyst, Craig LeClair this morning made a statement. I don't know if you're in there, but he said, "Yeah COE, setting up a COE, "maybe that's asking too much." But I talk to a lot of people that have a center of excellence. Maybe it's definitional but what does your COE look like in terms of just it's role, size? >> Yeah it's a great question, so I think in terms of the role that we play more broadly, I mean we provide a lot of the technical expertise, the hands-on development and the operational support for our business units. And so we've really kind of developed that expertise over time, and we use our business units to really drive and identify the opportunities that come in through the COE. So, in terms of the size of the COE, we've got in total number of heads, we've got about 50 primarily technical resources there, that are supporting development as well as ongoing operation. >> Awesome, okay so let's talk about your journey. When did it start? What was the motivation behind it? How did you make the business case, and we'll get into it. >> Yeah so our journey started back in 2016, GE, we used to have a shared services organization that we had a very forward-thinking CEO at the time who wanted to really disrupt the way that we worked. And so RPA was something that was just coming out and kind of getting noticed by a lot of these shared services organizations. And so throughout the year we assessed a couple of technologies obviously landing on UiPath for a number of reasons. I would say in terms of our journey 2017 was kind of our year to prove the technology. We wanted to see if this stuff could really work long term and operate at scale. Given that I'm still here obviously, we proved that was correct and then 2018 was kind of the year of scaling and operationalizing kind of a sustainable model to support our business units across the board from an RPA standpoint. So, really building out a proper structure, building out the governance that goes along with building robots and building a kind of a resource team to continue to support the bots that we were at scale at that point, so maintaining those bots is critically important. And then 2019 has really been the year and I think the theme of this conference in general, a bot for every person I think that's the direction we're moving in 2019. We've kind of perfected the concept of the back office robot and the development of those, and running those at scale. And now we're moving towards a whole new market share when it comes to attended automation and citizen development. >> So, in '16 it was kind of kicking the tires it was almost like R&D. And then '17 was really essentially a proof-of-concept right so still a small team, a two piece kind of team kind of thing right? And then when you talked about scale, helped us understand what's involved in scale, I know it's also another big theme of this conference. What are the challenges of scaling and how did you resolve those? >> Yeah that's a very good question. I think it's a question that has been very common throughout this entire conference. I would say when I think about scaling what I've noticed over the past few years is that, the actual bot development is about 25% of the work that you need to do, right? When it comes to scale there is everything outside of the actual development is the important part. So, how are you funneling opportunities into a pipeline, how are you streamlining the entire process reengineering of fitting an RPA into an existing process, what's governance you have in place to make sure that the code of that development is clean and can be maintained long term? And then more importantly I think that people overlook, people think of scale as being able to develop a lot of bots. I think more importantly what scale is is being able to efficiently maintain a large portfolio of bots, and that's what I've realized this year. We've got now about 300 automations in production and your reputation as an organization is really on how well you maintain those bots, because if your bots are consistently failing, and you're not fixing them quick enough for your functional users to leverage them, then you lose a lot of credibility. So, I think that's been a big learning for us as we reach scale. >> That's interesting I mean I think about scripts, how fragile scripts are and you got a lot of 'em, and they almost always break. And so what is the discipline that allows you to have that quality of bot that is maintainable? Is it a coding discipline? Is it a governance? Is there other automation involved in maintaining those bots? >> No there is and I think the team that's under me, my technical team has done a phenomenal job of setting this up, but we've got some very rigorous standards that we've put in place around. We do have reusable components for example that need to be used on every single robot that goes into production, so that when I look at for example a bots login, that bots login is going to be the same across all my bots. So, every developer who's going to be maintaining that bot knows what it is and how to fix it. I think the standardized logging as well to make sure that we've got robust logging for every single robot is incredibly important because again that's going to be critical when somebody goes to try and fix the bot. >> So you are like an app store, you're enforcing rules like Apple for developers. >> Exactly. >> Okay so let me ask you a question. See now several years in if you had a mulligan, what would you do differently? >> Yeah I think that's another very good question. I think when you first start with this technology, it's unbelievably exciting, because it's something that you can immediately see the difference and the impact it can make, and so you want to try and apply it everywhere to everything, to solve every problem. And I think that's kind of where we got a little ahead of ourselves. We weren't as thoughtful as we should have been when we started taking in the use cases that we were bringing in and while I sit here and tell you that we've got 300 automations in production, I've also decommissioned about 90 automations as well. Because you kind of live and you learn as you go through that process on. This doesn't make sense for RPA. It's not driving the value anymore. It's not driving the right value for the company. >> And is that because the process needs to be reworked before it's automated or there are other factors? >> Yeah I think there's a couple of factors there. I think number one, some bots are intentionally just for short-term use. We look across the portfolio, some bots you design for to operate for two weeks for a massive for example document transition or something like that. So, that's a common reason for decommissioning. I would say secondly you just picked the wrong process. It's not big enough. You think this is perfect for RPA, but it's saving somebody maybe five or 10 minutes a week, which in reality do you really want to put all the effort and to continue to maintain something like that on a back office level? So, I think the size of the processes and the complexity you've got to be thoughtful about as well. >> Thinking about a bot for every worker, what does that actually look like? Is that like you get a laptop and you get a bot? How does that actually manifest itself? >> Yeah I think as I've talked to some of the teams and Daniel as well about this, it's really around I mean imagine opening it up just like any other application on your computer and Excel, you've got that sitting on your desktop and you use that for a number of different things. I think that's kind of how I envision it and everyone when they come into GE, they'll get their laptop and it's part of their kind of package of software that they get. One of them will be UiPath and I think again if GE where I see that as the future. We've got to be thoughtful about how that's rolled out because you want to make sure it's done the right way and you want to make sure that that succeeds and what comes along with that is a lot of education. There's a lot of people that need to be educated on the technology in order to roll that out effectively. >> It's part of the onboarding part, just part of the HR onboarding, and so you open up your laptop and based on your role you'll have a library of bots that are applicable for your job. Is that kind of what you envision? >> Again I think that's kind of the future state and so HR will have a common library that they can pull from and Finance will have a common library that they can pull from. And I think the announcement this weekend of or this week of our StudioX is going to make life significantly easier. So, if you need to kind of edit any of those components or make any custom steps, you can do that with StudioX, but I think having a pre-built set of bots by function would be extremely important. >> And StudioX is the citizen developer right? So, okay now how do you then enforce the edicts of the COE if Dave Vallente's writing automations. >> It's honestly a question that we haven't answered yet and I think that's the piece that we're trying to solve for now, to roll it out more broadly. And I think part of it's going to be training right? Educating the broader group, part of it is giving them access to front office robots and so you do have the code back at the orchestrator so that you can see kind of what's going on and make sure if there are massive changes that need to be made, you can make some of that centrally, so I think figuring out how to centrally maintain and store some of that code is going to be important. >> And the idea of moving beyond this what they call this morning the snowflake into the snowball. So, reusable components is something that I've heard a lot about. That's not trivial yeah right because mapping the right component for the right job is always going to be some kind of unique, not always, but there could be some unique element to put in words. So, what are your thoughts on kind of future? I mean we touched on some of them. It sounds like even though you started early, 2016, it sounds like you still got a long way to go. What's the roadmap look like for you guys? >> Well it's really never-ending because you know you see how quickly the industry is changing and how quickly these automation platforms. I think we're at the point now where these are no longer RPA platforms. They're automation platforms with all of the different features and you look at the broader ecosystem of the technologies being pulled into play. I think it's moving from robotics process automation into intelligent process automation. And that's really our goal and leveraging the ecosystem that the UiPath is built is I think what we want to do more of going forward. >> And the primary measurement of value to you, I'm inferring is time saved from doing non-differentiated tasks, is that really a key metric or are there others that you're looking at, bottom line dollars that you're saving or what? >> I think the way that we measure productivity is really in three major buckets. One is the hours saved so that employees can do other things and I would say that is far and away, the largest bucket that we have. But I think additionally you've got to think about direct cost out. I mean if my finance team comes to me and says, we're thinking about hiring a person to do this why not an RPA? Why can't we use an RPA to do that instead? So, it's not like anyone's losing their job over. It's just figuring out a better way to supplement your existing workforce. Then I would say the third way really is thinking about the compliance element of things. So, and that's often overlooked. You may not save anyone time. You may not save anyone hours or dollars, but what you can do is expand for example in your audit function, expand your testing or sampling of a certain criteria, instead of sampling maybe the top 20 risky units, you can now sample a 100% of a population, which fundamentally changes how you can get comfortable with your financial statements and other elements of the compliance. >> Talking earlier just I asked is sampling dead because of RPA right? >> It really feels like that you know. >> Dave: Eric it's super knowledgeable. I really appreciate you coming on. >> Absolutely. >> Dave: Congratulations on all your success really. >> Thank you very much Dave. I appreciate it. >> You're welcome. All right keep it right there everybody, we will be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. This is day two of UiPath Forward III, the third North American conference that UiPath-- The rocket ship that is UiPath. Clemmie Malley is here. She's the Enterprise RPA Center of Excellence Lead at NextEra Energy. Welcome. Great to have you. And Mariesa Coughanour, who is the Managing Principal of Intelligent Automation and Technology at Cognizant. Nice to see you guys. >> Nice seeing you. >> Nice to see you. >> Thanks for coming on. How's the show going for you? >> It's been great so far. >> Yes. >> It's been awesome. >> Have you been to multiple... >> This is my third. >> Yep. >> Really? Okay, great. How does this compare? >> It has changed significantly in three years, so. It was very small in New York in 2017 and even last year grew, but now it's a two-year event taking over. >> Yeah, last year Miami was-- >> I don't know. >> It was nice. >> Definitely smaller than this, but it was happening. Kind of hip vibe. We're here in Vegas, everybody loves to be in Vegas. CUBE comes to Vegas a lot. So tell me more about your role at NextEra Energy. But let's start with the company. You guys are multi billion, many, many, tens of billions, probably close to $20 billion energy firm. Really dynamic industry. >> Yeah, so NextEra Energy is actually an awesome company, right? So we're the world's largest in clean renewable energy. So with wind and solar, really, and we also have Florida Power and Light, which is one of the child companies to NextEra as a parent, which is headquartered out of Florida. So it's usually the regulated side of power in the state of Florida. >> We know those guys. We've actually done some work with Florida Power and Light. Cool people down there. And we heard, one of the keynotes today, Craig LeClaire, was saying, "Yeah, the Center of Excellence, "that's actually maybe asking too much." But there are a lot of folks here that are sort of involved in a COE and that's kind of your role. But I was surprised to hear him say that. I don't know if you were in the keynote this morning, but was it a challenge to get a Center of Excellence? What is that all about? >> So I think there's a little bit of caution around doing it initially. People are very aggressive. And we actually learned from this story. So when we started, it was more about showing value, building as many automations as possible. We didn't really care about having a COE. The COE just happened to form. >> Okay. >> Because we found out we needed some level of governance and control around what we were doing. But now that I look back on it, it's really instrumental to making sure we have the success. So whether you do a hybrid development to automation, which you can have citizen development, or you're fully centralized, I think having the strong COE to have that core governance model and control and process is important. >> Mariesa, so your title is not, there's not RPA in your title, right? RPA is too narrow, right? >> Yeah. >> In your business you're trying to help transform companies, it's all about automation. But maybe explain a little bit about your practice and your role. >> Sure, so Cognizant's been on the automation journey now for three years. We started back in 2014 and right out the gate it was all about intelligent automation, just not RPA. Because we knew to be able to do end-to-end solutions you would need multiple technologies to really get the job done and get the outcomes they wanted. So we sit now, over 2,500 folks at our practice, going out, working cross-industry, cross-regions to be able to work with people like Clemmie to put in their program. And we've even added some stuff recently. A lot of it actually inspired by NextEra. And we have an advisory team now. And our whole job is to go in and help people unstuck their programs, for lack of a better way to say it. Help them think about, how do you put that foundation? Get a little bit stronger and actually enable scale, and putting in all this technology to get outcomes? Versus just focusing on just the pure play RPA, which a lot of people struggle to gain the benefits from. >> So Clemmie, what leads you to the decision to bring in an outside firm like Cognizant? What's that discussion like internally? >> So, I'll just give you a little bit of backstory, because I think that's interesting, as well. When we started playing with RPA in late 2016, early 2017, we knew that we wanted to do a lot of things in-house, but in order to have a flex model and really develop automations across the company, we needed to have a partner. And we wanted them to focus more on delivery, so developing, and then partner with us to give us some best practices, things that we could do better. When we founded the COE we knew what we wanted to do. So we actually had two other partners before we went with Cognizant, and that was a huge challenge for us. We found we were reworking a lot of the code that they gave us. They weren't there to be our partners. They wanted to come and actually do the work for us, instead of enabling us to be successful. And we actually said, "We don't want a partner." And then Cognizant came in and they actually were like, "Let's give you somebody." So we wanted somebody around delivery, because we said, "Okay, now that we centralize, "we have a good foundation, a good model, "we're going to need to focus on scale. "So how do we do that? "We need a flex model." So Cognizant came in and they said, "Well, we're going to offer you a delivery lead "to help focus on making sure "you get the automations out the door." Well, Mariesa actually showed up, which was one of the best hidden surprises that we received. And she really just came in, learned the company, learned our culture, and was able to say, "Okay, here's some guidance. "What can you instill? "What can you bring?" Tracking, and start capturing the outcomes that she's mentioned. And I know that was a little bit more, but it's been quite a journey. >> No, it's really good, back up. So Mariesa, I'm hearing from Clemmie that you were willing to teach these guys how to fish, as opposed to just perpetual, hourly, daily rate billing. >> Yep. And that's really what our belief is. We can go in, and yes, we can augment, from resourcing perspective, help them deliver, develop, support everything, which we do. And we work with Clemmie and others to do that. But what's really important to get to scale was how do we teach them how to go do this? Because if you're going to really embed this type of automation culture and mindset, you have to teach people how to do it. It's not about just leaning on me. I needed to help Clemmie. I need to help her team, and also their leadership and their employees. On how do you identify opportunities, and how then do you make these things actually work and run? >> So you really understand the organization. Clemmie was saying you learned the culture. >> Yeah. >> So you're not just a salesperson going in and hanging out in theCUBE. So you're kind of an extension, really, of the staff. So, either of you, if you can explain to me sort of, where RPA fits into this broader vision. That would really be helpful. >> Sure, so maybe I can kick a little bit off from what I'm seeing from clients like Clemmie, and also other customers. So what you'll find is RPA tends to be like this gateway. It's the stepping stone to all things automation. Because folks in the business, they really understand it. It's rule-based, right? It's a game of Simon Says, in some ways, when you first get this going. And then after that, it's enabling the other technology and looking at, "Look, if I want to go end-to-end, "what do I need to get the job done? "What do I need around data intake? "How do I have the right framework "to pick the right OCR tool, "or put analytics on, "or machine learning?" Because there's so much out there today and you need to have the stuff that's right-fit to come in. And so it's really about looking at what's that company strategy? And then looking at this as a tool set. And how to use these tools to go and get the job done. And that's what we were doing a lot with Clemmie and team when we sat down. They have a steering committee that's chaired by their CIO, Chief Accounting Officer, and senior leaders from every business unit across their enterprise. >> So you mentioned scaling. >> Yep. >> We heard today in the predictions segment that we're going to move from snowflake to snowball. And so I would think for scaling it's important to identify reusable components. And so how have you, how has that played out for you? And how's the scaling going? >> Yeah, so that's been one really cool component that we've built out in the COE. So I had my team actually vote on a name and we said, "We want to go after reusable components." They decided to call them Microbots. So it's a cool little term that we coined. >> That's cool. >> And our CIO and CAO actually talk about them frequently. "How are our Microbots? "How many do we have? "What are they doing?" So it's pretty catchy. But what it's really enabled us is to build these reusable snippets of code that are specific to how we perform as a company that we can plug and play and reduce our cycle time. So we've actually reduced our cycle time by over 50%. And reusable components is one of the major key components. >> So how do you share those components? Are they available in some kind of internal marketplace? And how do you train people to actually know what to apply where? >> Right. So because we're centralized, it's a little bit easier, right? We have a stored repository, where they're available. We document them-- >> And it's the COE-- Sorry to interrupt. It's the COE's responsibility, and-- >> Exactly. So the COE has it. We're actually working with Cognizant right now to figure out how can we document those further, right? And UiPath. There's a lot of cool tools that were introduced this week. So I think we're definitely going to be leveraging from them. But the ability to really show what they are, make them available, and we're doing all of that internally right now. Probably a little manual. So it'll be great to have that available. >> So Amazon has this cool concept they call working backwards documents. I don't know if you ever heard this. But what they do is they basically write the press release, thinking five years in advance. This is how they started AWS, they actually wrote. This is what we want, and then they work backwards from there. So my question is around engineering outcomes. Can you engineer outcomes, and is that how you were thinking about this? Or is it just too many unknown parts of the process that you can't predict? >> So I think one of the things that we did was we did think about, "What do we want to achieve with this?" So one of the big programs that Clemmie and the team have is also around accelerate. And their key initiatives to drive, whether it's improve customer experience, more efficiencies of certain processes across the company. And so we looked at that first, and said, "Okay, how do we enable that?" That's a top strategy driven by their CEO. And even when we prioritize all the work, we actually build a model for them. So that it's objective. So if any opportunities that come in align to those key outcomes that the company's striving for, they can prioritize first to be worked on. I actually also think this is where this is all going. Everyone focuses today on these automation COEs and automation teams, but what you will see, and this is happening at NextEra, and all the places we're starting to see this scale, is you end up with this outcomes management office. This is a core nucleus of a team that is automation, there's IT at the table, there's this lean quality mindset at the table, and they're actually looking at opportunities and saying, "All right, this one's yours. "This one's yours and then I'll pick up from you." And it's driving, then, the right outcomes for the organization versus just saying, "I have a hammer, I'm going to go find a nail," which sometimes happens. >> Right, oh, for sure. And it may be a fine nail to hit, but it might not be the most strategic-- >> Exactly. >> Or the most valuable. So what are some examples of areas that you're most excited about? Where you've applied automation and have given a business outcome that's been successful? >> Yeah, so we are an energy company. And we've had a lot of really awesome brainstorming sessions that we've held with UiPath and Cognizant. And a couple of key ones that have come out of it, really around storm season is big for us in the state of Florida. And making sure that our critical infrastructure is available. So our nursing homes, our hospitals, and so on. So we've actually built automations that help us to ping and make sure that they're available, so that we can stay proactive, right? There's also a cool use-case around, really, the intelligent automations space. So our linemen in their trucks are saying, "Hey, we spend a lot of time having to log on the computer, "log our tickets, "and then we have to turn our computers off, "drive to the next site, "and we're not able to restore as much power "or resolve issues as quickly as possible." So we said, "How can we enable them?" Speech recognition, where they can talk to it, it can log a ticket for them on their behalf. So it's pretty exciting. >> So that's kind of an interesting example. Where RPA, in and of itself's not going to solve that problem, right, but speech recognition-- >> It's a combination. >> So you got to bring in other technology, so using, what, some NLP capability, or? >> Yeah, so that's one we're currently working on. But yes, you would need some type of cognitive speech recognition, and. >> So you sort of playing around with that in R&D right now? The speech [Mumbles]. >> Yeah. >> Which, as you know, is not perfect, right? >> It is not. >> Talk to us. We know about it all. Because we transcribe every word that's said on theCUBE. And so, there's some good ones and there's some not so good ones. And they're getting better, though. They're getting better. And that's going to be kind of commodity shortly. You really need just good enough, right? I mean, is that true? Or do you need near perfect? >> So I think there's a happy medium. It depends on what you're trying to do. In this case we're logging tickets, so there might be some variability that you can have. But I will say, so NextEra is really focused on energy, but they're also trying to set themselves apart. So they're trying to focus on innovation, as well. So this is a lot of the areas that they're focusing on: the machine learning, and the processing, and we even have chat bots that they're coining and branding internally, so it's pretty exciting. >> So NextEra is, are you entirely new energy? Is that right? No fossil fuels, or? >> So it's all clean energy, yes. Across the enterprise. >> Awesome. How's that going? Obviously you guys are very successful, but, I mean, what's kind of happening in the energy business today? You're sort of seeing a resurgence in oil, right, but? >> Yeah, so I think we had a really good boom. A couple years ago there were a lot of tax credits that we were able to grow that side of our company. And it enabled us to really pivot to be the clean energy that we are. >> I mean, that's key, right? I mean, United States, we want to lead in clean energy. And I'm not sure we are. I mean, like you say, there was tax incentives and credits that sort of drove a lot of innovation, but am I correct? You see countries outside the U.S., really, maybe leaning in harder. I mean, obviously we got NextEra, but. >> I mean, I think there's definitely competition out there. We're focused on trying to be, maybe not the best, but compete with the best. We're also trying to focus on what's next, right? So be proactive, and grow the company in a multitude of ways. Maybe even outside the energy sector, just to make sure that we can compete. But really what we're focused on is the clean renewables, so. >> That's awesome. I mean, as a country we need this, and it's great to have organizations like yours. Mariesa, I'll give you the final word. Kind of, the landscape of automation. What inning are we in? Baseball analogy. Or how far can this thing go? And what's your sort of, as you pull out the binoculars, maybe not the telescope, but the binoculars, where do you see it going? >> I think there's a lot of runway left. So if you look at a lot of the research out there today, I heard today, 10% was quoted by one person. I heard 13% quoted from HFS around where are we at on scale from an RPA perspective? And that's just RPA. >> Yeah. >> So that means there's still so much out there to still go and look at and be able to make an impact. But if you look, there's also a lot of runway on this intelligent automation. And that's where, I think, we have to shift the focus. You're seeing it now, at these conferences. That you're starting to see people talk about, "How do I integrate? "How do I actually think about connecting the dots "to get bigger and broader outcomes for an organization?" and I think that's where we're going to shift to, is talking about how do we bring together multiple technologies to be able to go and get these end-to-end solutions for customers? And ultimately go, what we were talking a little bit about before, on outcome-focused for an organization. Not talking about just, "How do I go do AI? "How do I go put a bot in?" But, "I want to choose this outcome for my customer. "I need to grow the top line. "I'm getting this feedback." Or even internally, "I want to get more efficient so I can deliver." And focus there, and then what we'll do is find the right tools to be able to move all that forward. >> It's interesting. We're out of time, but you think about, it's somewhat surprising when people hear what you just said, Mariesa, because people think, "Wow, we've had all this technology for 50 years. "Haven't we automated everything?" Well, Daniel Dines, last night, put forth the premise that all this technology's actually creating inefficiencies and somewhat creating the problem. So technology's kind of got us into the problem. We'll see if technology can get us out. All right? Thanks, you guys, for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're welcome. >> Thanks. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this short break. UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Day one of UiPath Forward III, hashtag UiPathForward. Elena Christopher is here. She's the senior vice president at HFS Research, and Elena, I'm going to recruit you to be my co-host here. >> Co-host! >> On this power panel. Jean Youngers here, CUBE alum, VP, a Six Sigma Leader at Security Benefit. Great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Dave: And Amy Chandler, who is the Assistant Vice President and Director of Internal Controls, also from Security Benefit. >> Hello. >> Dave: Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Alright Elena, let's start off with you. You follow this market, you have for some time, you know HFS is sort of anointed as formulating this market place, right? >> Elena: We like to think of ourselves as the voice-- >> You guys were early on. >> The voice of the automation industry. >> So, what are you seeing? I mean, process automation has been around forever, RPA is a hot recent trend, but what are you seeing the last year or two? What are the big trends and rip currents that you see in the market place? >> I mean, I think one of the big trends that's out there, I mean, RPA's come on to the scene. I like how you phrase it Dave, because you refer to it as, rightly so, automation is not new, and so we sort of say the big question out there is, "Is RPA just flavor of the month?" RPA is definitely not, and I come from a firm, we put out a blog earlier this year called "RPA is dead. Long live automation." And that's because, when we look at RPA, and when we think about what it's impact is in the market place, to us the whole point of automation in any form, regardless of whether it's RPA, whether it be good old old school BPM, whatever it may be, it's mission is to drive transformation, and so the HFS perspective, and what all of our research shows and sort of justifies that the goal is, what everyone is striving towards, is to get to that transformation. And so, the reason we put out that piece, the "RPA is dead. Long live integrated automation platforms" is to make the point that if you're not- 'cause what does RPA allow? It affords an opportunity for change to drive transformation so, if you're not actually looking at your processes within your company and taking this opportunity to say, "What can I change, what processes are just bad, "and we've been doing them, I'm not even sure why, "for so long. What can we transform, "what can we optimize, what can we invent?" If you're not taking that opportunity as an enterprise to truly embrace the change and move towards transformation, that's a missed opportunity. So I always say, RPA, you can kind of couch it as one of many technologies, but what RPA has really done for the market place today, it's given business users and business leaders the realization that they can have a role in their own transformation. And that's one of the reasons why it's actually become very important, but a single tool in it's own right will never be the holistic answer. >> So Jean, Elena's bringing up a point about transformation. We, Stew Bennett and I interviewed you last year and we've played those clips a number of times, where you sort of were explaining to us that it didn't make sense before RPA to try to drive Six Sigma into business processes; you couldn't get the return. >> Jean: Right. >> Now you can do it very cheaply. And for Six Sigma or better, is what you use for airplane engines, right? >> Right. >> So, now you're bringing up the business process. So, you're a year in, how's it going? What kind of results are you seeing? Is it meeting your expectations? >> It's been wonderful. It has been the best, it's been probably the most fun I've had in the last fifteen years of work. I have enjoyed, partly because I get to work with this great person here, and she's my COE, and helps stand up the whole RPA solution, but you know, we have gone from finance into investment operations, into operations, you know we've got one sitting right now that we're going to be looking at statements that it's going to be fourteen thousand hours out of both time out as well as staff hours saved, and it's going to touch our customer directly, that they're not going to get a bad statement anymore. And so, you know, it has just been an incredible journey for us over the past year, it really has. >> And so okay Amy, your role is, you're the hardcore practitioner here right? >> Amy: That's right. >> You run the COE. Tell us more about your role, and I'm really interested in how you're bringing it out, RPA to the organization. Is that led by your team, or is it kind of this top-down approach? >> Yeah, this last year, we spent a lot of time trying to educate the lower levels and go from a bottom-up perspective. Pretty much, we implemented our infrastructure, we had a nice solid change management process, we built in logical access, we built in good processes around that so that we'd be able to scale easily over this last year, which kind of sets us up for next year, and everything that we want to accomplish then. >> So Elena, we were talking earlier on theCUBE about you know, RPA, in many ways, I called it cleaning up the crime scene, where stuff is kind of really sort of a mass and huge opportunities to improve. So, my question to you is, it seems like RPA is, in some regards, successful because you can drop it into existing processes, you're not changing things, but in a way, this concerns that, oh well, I'm just kind of paving the cow path. So how much process reinvention should have to occur in order to take advantage of RPA? >> I love that you use that phrase, "paving the cow path." As a New Englander, as you know the roads in Boston are in fact paved cow paths, so we know that can lead to some dodgy roads, and that's part of, and I say it because that's part of what the answer is, because the reinvention, and honestly the optimization has to be part of what the answer is. I said it just a little bit earlier in my comments, you're missing an opportunity with RPA and broader automation if you don't take that step to actually look at your processes and figure out if there's just essentially deadwood that you need to get rid of, things that need to be improved. One of the sort of guidelines, because not all processes are created equal, because you don't want to spend the time and effort, and you guys should chime in on this, you don't want to spend the time and effort to optimize a process if it's not critical to your business, if you're not going to get lift from it, or from some ROI. It's a bit of a continuum, so one of the things that I always encourage enterprises to think about, is this idea of, well what's the, obviously, what business problem are you trying to solve? But as you're going through the process optimization, what kind of user experience do you want out of this? And your users, by the way, you tend to think of your user as, it could be your end customer, it could be your employee, it could even be your partner, but trying to figure out what the experience is that you actually want to have, and then you can actually then look at the process and figure out, do we need to do something different? Do we need to do something completely new to actually optimize that? And then again, line it with what you're trying to solve and what kind of lift you want to get from it. But I'd love to, I mean, hopping over to you guys, you live and breathe this, right? And so I think you have a slightly different opinion than me, but-- >> We do live and breathe it, and every process we look at, we take into consideration. But you've also got to, you have a continuum right? If it's a simple process and we can put it up very quickly, we do, but we've also got ones where one process'll come into us, and a perfect example is our rate changes. >> Amy: Rate changes. >> It came in and there was one process at the very end and they ended up, we did a wing to wing of the whole thing, followed the data all the way back through the process, and I think it hit, what, seven or eight-- >> Yeah. >> Different areas-- >> Areas. >> Of the business, and once we got done with that whole wing to wing to see what we could optimize, it turned into what, sixty? >> Amy: Yeah, sixty plus. Yeah. >> Dave: Sixty plus what? >> Bot processes from one entry. >> Yeah. >> And so, right now, we've got 189 to 200 processes in the back log. And so if you take that, and exponentially increase it, we know that there's probably actually 1,000 to 2,000 more processes, at minimum, that we can hit for the company, and we need to look at those. >> Yeah, and I will say, the wing to wing approach is very important because you're following the data as it's moving along. So if you don't do that, if you only focus on a small little piece of it, you don't what's happening to the data before it gets to you and you don't know what's going to happen to it when it leaves you, so you really do have to take that wing to wing approach. >> So, internal controls is in your title, so talking about scale, it's a big theme here at UiPath, and these days, things scale really fast, and boo-boos can happen really fast. So how are you ensuring, you know that the edicts of the organization are met, whether it's security, compliance, governance? Is that part of your role? >> Yeah, we've actually kept internal audit and internal controls, and in fact, our external auditors, EY. We've kept them all at the table when we've gone through processes, when we've built out our change management process, our logical access. When we built our whole process from beginning to end they kind of sat at the table with us and kind of went over everything to make sure that we were hitting all the controls that we needed to do. >> And actually, I'd like to piggyback on that comment, because just that inclusion of the various roles, that's what we found as an emerging best practice, and in all of our research and all of the qualitative conversations that we have with enterprises and service providers, is because if you do things, I mean it applies on multiple levels, because if you do things in a silo, you'll have siloed impact. If you bring the appropriate constituents to the table, you're going to understand their perspective, but it's going to have broader reach. So it helps alleviate the silos but it also supports the point that you just made Amy, about looking at the processes end to end, because you've got the necessary constituents involved so you know the context, and then, I believe, I mean I think you guys shared this with me, that particularly when audit's involved, you're perhaps helping cultivate an understanding of how even their processes can improve as well. >> Right. >> That is true, and from an overall standpoint with controls, I think a lot of people don't realize that a huge benefit is your controls, cause if you're automating your controls, from an internal standpoint, you're not going to have to test as much, just from an associate process owner paying attention to their process to the internal auditors, they're not going to have to test as much either, and then your external auditors, which that's revenue. I mean, that's savings. >> You lower your auditing bill? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Well we'll see right? >> Yeah. (laughter) >> That's always the hope. >> Don't tell EY. (laughter) So I got to ask you, so you're in a little over a year So I don't know if you golf, but you know a mulligan in golf. If you had a mulligan, a do over, what would you do over? >> The first process we put in place. At least for me, it breaks a lot, and we did it because at the time, we were going through decoupling and trying to just get something up to make sure that what we stood up was going to work and everything, and so we kind of slammed it in, and we pay for that every quarter, and so actually it's on our list to redo. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> That's a really good point. >> So we pay for it in maintenance every quarter, we pay for it, cause it breaks inevitably. >> Yes. >> Okay so what has to happen? You have to reinvent the process, to Elena's? >> Yes, you know, we relied on a process that somebody else had put in place, and in looking at it, it was kind of a up and down and through the hoop and around this way to get what they needed, and you know there's much easier ways to get the data now. And that's what we're doing. In fact, we've built our own, we call it a bot mart. That's where all our data goes, they won't let us touch the other data marts and so forth so they created us a bot mart, and anything that we need data for, they dump in there for us and then that's where our bot can hit, and our bot can hit it at anytime of the day or night when we need the data, and so it's worked out really well for us, and so the bot mart kind of came out of that project of there's got to be a better way. How can we do this better instead of relying on these systems that change and upgrade and then we run the bot and its working one day and the next day, somebody has gone in and tweaked something, and when all's I really need out of that system is data, that's all I need. I don't need, you know, a report. I don't need anything like that, cause the reports change and they get messed up. I just want the raw data, and so that's what we're starting to do. >> How do you ensure that the data is synchronized with your other marts and warehouses, is that a problem? >> Not yet. >> No not yet! (laughter) >> I'm wondering cause I was thinking the exact same question Dave, because on one hand its a nice I think step from a governance standpoint. You have what you need, perhaps IT or whomever your data curators are, they're not going to have a heart attack that you're touching stuff that they don't want you to, but then there is that potential for synchronization issues, cause that whole concept of golden source implies one copy if you will. >> Well, and it is. It's all coming through, we have a central data repository that the data's going to come through, and it's all sitting there, and then it'll move over, and to me, what I most worry about, like I mentioned on the statement once, okay, I get my data in, is it the same data that got used to create those statements? And as we're doing the testing and as we're looking at going live, that's one of our huge test cases. We need to understand what time that data comes in, when will it be into our bot mart, so when can I run those bots? You know, cause they're all going to be unattended on those, so you know, the timing is critical, and so that's why I said not yet. >> Dave: (chuckle) >> But you want to know what, we can build the bot to do that compare of the data for us. >> Haha all right. I love that. >> I saw a stat the other day. I don't know where it was, on Twitter or maybe it was your data, that more money by whatever, 2023 is going to be spent on chat bots than mobile development. >> Jean: I can imagine, yes. >> What are you doing with chat bots? And how are you using them? >> Do you want to answer that one or do you want me to? >> Go ahead. >> Okay so, part of the reason I'm so enthralled by the chat bot or personal assistant or anything, is because the unattended robots that we have, we have problems making sure that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing in prep. We have some in finance, and you know, finance you have a very fine line of what you can automate and what you need the user to still understand what they're doing, right? And so we felt like we had a really good, you know, combination of that, but in some instances, they forget to do things, so things aren't there and we get the phone call the bot broke, right? So part of the thing I'd like to do is I'd like to move that back to an unattended bot, and I'm going to put a chat bot in front of it, and then all's they have to do is type in "run my bot" and it'll come up if they have more than one bot, it'll say "which one do you want to run?" They'll click it and it'll go. Instead of having to go out on their machine, figure out where to go, figure out which button to do, and in the chat I can also send them a little message, "Did you run your other reports? Did you do this?" You know, so, I can use it for the end user, to make that experience for them better. And plus, we've got a lot of IT, we've got a lot of HR stuff that can fold into that, and then RPA all in behind it, kind of the engine on a lot of it. >> I mean you've child proofed the bot. >> Exactly! There you go. There you go. >> Exactly. Exactly. And it also provides a means to be able to answer those commonly asked questions for HR for example. You know, how much vacation time do I have? When can I change my benefits? Examples of those that they answer frequently every day. So that provides another avenue for utilization of the chat bot. >> And if I may, Dave, it supports a concept that I know we were talking about yesterday. At HFS it's our "Triple-A Trifecta", but it's taking the baseline of automation, it intersects with components of AI, and then potentially with analytics. This is starting to touch on some of the opportunities to look at other technologies. You say chat bots. At HFS we don't use the term chat bot, just because we like to focus and emphasize the cognitive capability if you will. But in any case, you guys essentially are saying, well RPA is doing great for what we're using RPA for, but we need a little bit of extension of functionality, so we're layering in the chat bot or cognitive assistant. So it's a nice example of some of that extension of really seeing how it's, I always call it the power of and if you will. Are you going to layer these things in to get what you need out of it? What best solves your business problems? Just a very practical approach I think. >> So Elena, Guy has a session tomorrow on predictions. So we're going to end with some predictions. So our RPA is dead, (chuckle) will it be resuscitated? What's the future of RPA look like? Will it live up to the hype? I mean so many initiatives in our industry haven't. I always criticize enterprise data warehousing and ETL and big data is not living up to the hype. Will RPA? >> It's got a hell of a lot of hype to live up to, I'll tell you that. So, back to some of our causality about why we even said it's dead. As a discrete software category, RPA is clearly not dead at all. But unless it's helping to drive forward with transformation, and even some of the strategies that these fine ladies from Security Benefit are utilizing, which is layering in additional technology. That's part of the path there. But honestly, the biggest challenge that you have to go through to get there and cannot be underestimated, is the change that your organization has to go through. Cause think about it, if we look at the grand big vision of where RPA and broader intelligent automation takes us, the concept of creating a hybrid workforce, right? So what's a hybrid workforce? It's literally our humans complemented by digital workers. So it still sounds like science fiction. To think that any enterprise could try and achieve some version of that and that it would be A, fast or B, not take a lot of change management, is absolutely ludicrous. So it's just a very practical approach to be eyes wide open, recognize that you're solving problems but you have to want to drive change. So to me, and sort of the HFS perspective, continues to be that if RPA is not going to die a terrible death, it needs to really support that vision of transformation. And I mean honestly, we're here at a UiPath event, they had many announcements today that they're doing a couple of things. Supporting core functionality of RPA, literally adding in process discovery and mining capabilities, adding in analytics to help enterprises actually track what your benefit is. >> Jean: Yes. >> These are very practical cases that help RPA live another day. But they're also extending functionality, adding in their whole announcement around AI fabric, adding in some of the cognitive capability to extend the functionality. And so prediction-wise, RPA as we know it three years from now is not going to look like RPA at all. I'm not going to call it AI, but it's going to become a hybrid, and it's honestly going to look a lot like that Triple-A Trifecta I mentioned. >> Well, and UiPath, and I presume other suppliers as well, are expanding their markets. They're reaching, you hear about citizens developers and 100% of the workforce. Obviously you guys are excited and you see a long-run way for RPA. >> Jean: Yeah, we do. >> I'll give you the last word. >> It's been a wonderful journey thus far. After this morning's event where they showed us everything, I saw a sneak peek yesterday during the CAB, and I had a list of things I wanted to talk to her about already when I came out of there. And then she saw more of 'em today, and I've got a pocketful of notes of stuff that we're going to take back and do. I really, truly believe this is the future and we can do so much. Six Sigma has kind of gotten a rebirth. You go in and look at your processes and we can get those to perfect. I mean, that's what's so cool. It is so cool that you can actually tell somebody, I can do something perfect for you. And how many people get to do that? >> It's back to the user experience, right? We can make this wildly functional to meet the need. >> Right, right. And I don't think RPA is the end all solution, I think it's just a great tool to add to your toolkit and utilize moving forward. >> Right. All right we'll have to leave it there. Thanks ladies for coming on, it was a great segment. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We'll be right back from UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas, right after this short break. (technical music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to the Bellagio, everybody. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, this is Day 2 of UiPath's Forward III Conference and Kourtney Bradbeary is here R&D specialist at American Fidelity. She's joined by Michael Setticasi, who's the senior director of business development at Boston-based DataRobot, but Michael's from Seattle. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Kourtney B.: Thank you. >> Kourtney, let's start with you. I know you guys, you kind of do benefit solutions, but maybe talk a little a bit about the company and some of the big trends that are driving what you guys are doing. >> Kourtney B: Absolutely. So I work with American Fidelity, it's an insurance company based out of Oklahoma, but our main focus is providing solutions to our customer pain points. So we're a niche-based organization that focuses mainly on education, so the public sector, so education in municipalities in providing solutions and benefits to our employers and our employees that we work with. >> Cool, and Michael, you guys, obviously data science is your thing, but describe a little bit more about what you guys do. >> Yeah, we're an AI enterprise company. What we're really trying to do is democratize the use of AI machine learning within organizations, and we really appeal to both data scientists and business users that understand their business and data and want to do more. >> So Kourtney, you're title is really interesting. R&D special projects, so you got this little sandbox that you get to play with, RPA is on the hype cycle and now it's in the trough of disillusionment, but it's kind of an early play around with things. How did you get in to RPA? Where you guys at? What's this R&D thing going on? Right, so with research and development, I guess there's a lot of space to work with emerging technologies, and AI, and RPA, and how those two things come together and anything new that we see and exciting we're able to apply that technology. It's one thing to think, "Oh, AI, that's cool. Let's do that." But if it doesn't benefit your customer at the end of the day, if it's not driving decisions in your organization, then we don't want to do AI just 'cause it's cool. We really want to do AI because it's what benefits our customer. So we got into RPA because when we saw a demo, and it was like, whoa. If that's real, if that's what we think it's going to be, that's a game changer. So you have RPA, and you have AI kind of coming up at the same time and whenever it was, first coming out a few years ago, they're silo, they're separate. What we've started to do recently is to bring the two industries together and really bring together the RPA component and the AI component to really become IPA, or Intelligent Process Automation, so that way we can really start to transform businesses. >> So this is interesting to me, Michael, because as Kourtney was saying, most people think of these things as separate and more aspirational down the road. You guys are AI experts, what are you seeing in terms of these two domains coming together? >> You hear about intelligent automation everywhere, right? We are pushing it hard, and we're seeing a lot of customers and potential prospects look at it, but I have to give credit to American Fidelity. They are ahead of the curve. They're combining this ability to use an RPA process and a machine learning model to really automate things and provide better customer service and get to the endpoint faster and more efficiently. So I think they're ahead of the curve, but you're going to see more and more of this in the marketplace. >> So Kourtney, a lot of the customers that we talk to, this is kind of my observation, is they're automating obviously mundane processes but frankly really crappy processes. They're really screwed up in a lot of ways. And they're throwing RPA at the problem, it sounds like you have a little different philosophy around how to apply automation. Can you explain that? >> Right, so you don't want to automate something that's bad because then it's going to break a lot, and it's just not a good idea. So what we've tried to do is whenever we get request in the door, there's always a stopping, if somebody has to make a decision, in the past, it's been "Okay, well we can automate the first part and the last part", but it's kind of have to stop in the middle for you to make a decision. And what DataRobot has allowed us to do, in the past, it was really hard to actually apply machine learning, 'cause you had to have these data scientists and they'd have to spend months trying to figure out what model for the data, and is it, you know, retraining a model is really difficult. DataRobot makes a data scientist's job so much easier and actually applicable to the workplace where you could scale, enable scaling, because without DataRobot or without a service like that, it's impossible to scale. So it allows us to implement AI with our RPA to then not just automate the mundane processes, but the small decisions that we make everyday, just 'cause we do our jobs everyday and we know how to do our jobs, AI enables us to automate those processes, as well. >> And you're doing that in an unattended way, or is it an attended automation? >> Both, both. So there's some processes that we have to have a human select things and make certain decisions along the way, or there's some processes that are completely unattended. With any automation, your goal is always to automate 100%, but in reality, you're usually going to get about 80% of a process automated. So what we try to do, we go for the hundred percent, rarely get that, but then you can take out the 20% for human review. And so maybe of the 20% that's not fully automated, maybe we can make stop points for human interaction there, but there have been some processes that we have been able to fully automate. >> So Michael, the data scientists complain that 80% of their time is spent in wrangling data and getting the data ready to actually build a model. I presume that's what you guys do, you solve that problem, right? >> We definitely solve some of that, right? If you get the data all in one place, DataRobot takes care of a lot of the data preparation that's involved in data science. We've also have ways to kind of manage the best places you store your data, so that if other people use the platform, they can see where to get it to. But overall, I would just say, when you look at UiPath and the way it's growing, it's such an exciting growing company like we heard Daniel yesterday mention their growth from customer from year to year, how they're the fastest enterprise software growing company out there. So you combine that RPA market with this growing machine learning market, and there's a ton of excitement. I mean, that's what you're seeing at the conference today. >> So you guys have data scientists on staff, is that right, or-- >> Correct! >> Okay, and so what does this mean for them? Does it mean you just need less of them, or they spend more of their time doing productive work? >> It means they spend more of their time doing productive work, instead of trying to figure out what model to fit, 'cause if you're a data scientist, or an actuary, or any, data analyst, or any of those things, you might know five models that you try to fit everything to. What DataRobot enables us to do is not be stuck to those five models that we know. It enables us to combine models, and choose models based on that data, so it really helps us with the modeling. >> Are you, I should've asked this before, are you still in R&D? Or are you in production? Or where are you at in terms of majority? >> Oh no, we're in production. We have two IPA processes in production today, and we're working on increasing that as we go. We have over a hundred an fifty RPA processes in production, as well as, many many just machine learning, so we're working on combining those now. So we have many machine learning, we have many RPA, and we're working on increasing our IPA. >> What have you seen as the business impact? Do we have enough data yet to sort of-- >> Absolutely. We don't try to focus on ROI. What we try to focus on is how is this impacting our customer, and how is this impacting employees' lives. There's obviously a lot of fear around automation but at American Fidelity, what we try to do is show how this is going to improve our employees' lives and we're by no means trying to cut jobs. We're actually going to have a net increase of jobs over the next five years. We're re skilling our workforce. We're really focusing on how it improves our employees, rather than focusing on ROI. >> So you're not on the ROI treadmill? So how did you get your CFO to sort of agree to all of this? >> So we do track ROI. It's not something we share publicly. But we focus more on our humans and our employees than our ROI. >> Is that because, I mean you're not, virtually every customer I've talked to says, "Well, we're not firing people. We're just getting more productive, or shifting them to more interesting tasks, et cetera, et cetera," and if you do the ROI calculations, you say "Oh, I don't need as many humans to do this anymore", and so you'd say, "Okay, FTE cost" and then you apply that, it's kind of a BS number, 'cause it's not like you're cutting people, so it's not a hard ROI. Is that why you don't focus on ROI? Or you just think it's worthless metric? >> No... >> Actually, I'm sorry. You said you do have it, you just don't share it publicly. >> Right, we just don't share our ROI publicly. And I don't think it's made up, or it's fake. I've never met an organization that says they have more people than they have work for people. There's always work. I really enjoy the first video opening of UiPath, it's, "since the beginning of time, humans have worked", and everyone thinks that automation is going to get rid of jobs, there's a lot of controversy over that, but realistically, if you think about the first industrial revolution, that was, after the first industrial revolution hit, that was the biggest economic upturn that had seen since that time. We're in that same space now. It's just hard to see it with where we're at. It's only going to increase, work is only going to increase. It's definitely going to change. I think it's naive to think that jobs won't change. And there will be jobs that will be eliminated, job functions, but I don't think there's elimination of humans needed, if that makes sense. >> Well yeah, it does. You guys sound like you're pretty visionary about how to apply technology to your business. And Michael, I mean, Kourtney's right, machines have always replaced humans, this is nothing new, first time ever that it's in cognitive function, so that scares people a little bit, but what else are you seeing in the marketplace that you can share with us? >> We're just seeing increased use of automation. So like, you might think when you talk DataRobot, you're using us for the top 1% things that a company might do, right? If you're a bank, you might use us to help out, figure out, how you can more efficiently lend customer's money, and make sure that you're making good investments, but what we're finding is, automation and machine learning models are being used everywhere. They're being used in marketing now, right? An example could be this show. We'll get leads from this show. Let's run some machine learning to understand what leads to follow up on first, because we'll get the best result. We're seeing machine learning in HR, right? Making sure their employees are happy, tracking employee churn through machine learning, so I think what we're seeing is it's being adopted more broadly, which means you need more people. We're not replacing people. >> So, why UiPath? >> Whenever we started the vendor process and started looking at several vendors, the UiPath product just was unmatched, frankly. There was a lot of vendors that had more code base, and there was then UiPath that anyone can learn. And that's what we really liked 'cause in American Fidelity, we've chosen to go with, we have a COE but we've also chosen to go with a democratized model where everyone in the organization will be able to build robots. We're training people to build robots. We have, each department has people that are dedicated. A certain portion of their time is building robots and UiPath really made that available with their products for anybody to be able to learn. >> So you have a COE. >> Kourtney B.: Yes. It was interesting, Craig LeClaire this morning, I don't know if you saw his keynote, but he kind of made this statement, it was sort of a off-handed statement, he said, "COE, maybe that's asking too much". He didn't use term tiger team, but I inferred, it's like, rather just kind of get a tiger team of some experts, but talk a little bit more about your COE. >> So, we kind of go with a hybrid model. If you think about, typical, it's weird because RPA is only a few years old, and we're thinking typical RPA, but people usually either go with a COE or completely democratized. We've really gone with a hybrid model, so we have a COE with governance where we've set a loose framework of what to follow, and we have code standards, when you say, follow these things. We have a knowledge library that we share. But we only have a handful of full-time RPA developers, and everyone help, those developers help, teach and help grow that knowledge throughout the organization, so that way we have people in every area that can also develop. So our developers are not our own key developers. Our developers are focused on the IPA, on the AI, whereas our other people throughout the organization are focused more on RPA so we can really make a big difference more quickly. >> Do you have a software robot that automates auditing and checks for compliance? >> Yes, so we have, one of our robots, the function that it does is audit one of our inputs, so we do have robots in almost every area that, yeah, we do have audit robots. >> Has it cut the auditing bill? Is that part of the ROI? You don't have to answer that. (giggles) >> Michael, our last question for you is where do you see this all going? This is very interesting to me because I've inferred from a lot of the conversations that, like that PepsiCo guy was up yesterday, talking about an AI fabric throughout the organization, not just tactical projects, and that kind of interested me, but I expected it's much further off. I'm hearing from Kourtney that it's actually real today. What's your sort of prediction or forecast for the adoption of this more advanced intelligent process automation? Is it kind of just starting now and it's going to explode? Or am I just missing the mark here? >> No, I think you're a hundred percent on. I mean, first off, I think, like I mentioned earlier, RPA and machine learning separately, are in these incredible growth stages. Right, and we think our message to customers now is if you're not thinking about how you're doing AI and machine learning, you're already behind 'cause your competition is. And so you better get thinking about it. I think we're going to get to that level with intelligent automation, with RPA plus machine learning very soon. I do think right now we're in that infancy stage where people are looking for used cases, and they want to hear great stories, and so I do think American Fidelity is ahead of the curve, but they're not going to be ahead of the curve for long. It's catching up. If you're not doing it, we're going to eventually get to that point where you'll have someone like Elon Musk or Masayoshi Son, say, if you're not thinking of intelligent automation, you're already going to be left behind. >> All right, congratulations on the work that you've done. >> Kourtney B.: Thank you. >> It's a really awesome story. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, yeah, thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back from UiPath Forward day number 2. You're watching theCUBE. Be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We are joined by Craig Le Clair, he is the vice president of Forrester and also the author of the book "Invisible Robots in the Quiet of the Night: How AI and Automation will Restructure the Workforce". Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Craig: Thank you! Thanks for having me. >> And congratulations, it's already made #11 on Amazon's AI and automation bestseller list. >> Wow, it's not quite best seller but OK, that's great, thank you, it's doing well. >> So if anyone calls your book a bestseller you just take 'em on that. >> (Craig) I'll just take it. >> So it is a, it's a bleak story right now, I mean there's a lot, there's so many changes going on in the workforce and there's so much anxiety on the part of workers that they're going to lose their job that all these technologies are going to take away their their livelihood, so how are companies managing this? Are they managing it well, would you say, or is the anxiety misplaced? Give us an overview. >> Yeah, so I don't think companies are really aware of the broader implications of the automation and AI that's developing. They tend to focus on the things that companies focus on. They focus on more efficiency and productivity and so forth, and underlying that is this digital anxiety that we call it, and the fact that a lot of the jobs that we, particularly the middle class have, the working class have, are the targets of the invisible robots, and that's really the point of the invisible robot book is that there's a lot of media attention on the hardware aspects of robotics, in fact the Super Bowl last year had 10 commercials with hardware robots. But if you look at this conference you look at the number of people here. What are these people doing? They're going back to their companies and saying "You know, this UiPath, and there are other providers "in the market, we can build software robotics, "we can build bots to do some of these tasks "that a lot of these humans are doing." And while there is elevation of the human capability in spirit for many of them, there's also a comfort level in employees that do things that they have control over, have incited. And when you extract those you are left with a series of more exciting moments, perhaps, but it's not going to make you more relaxed as an employee. And then you look at the overall job numbers, and our estimates are very conservative compared to some of the other reports, that are 45, 50% of workers over 10 years being displaced. We think it's 16%, but still, when you look at just the US numbers, that's of 160 workers today, 160 million workers, that's a lot of people. >> Rebecca: It is indeed. >> So, displaced and then sort of re-targeted or? >> A percentage, >> Vaporized. >> No, no, well the 16% is the automation, is the net loss of jobs. Now in that, automation's expensive, so there are a tremendous number of new jobs that are created by the work that's been going on here. So we have a formula to calculate that for these 12 different work personas, and the work personas have different relationships to AI and automation, so you would be crossed so many knowledge workers and be very well protected for a long time. >> Rebecca: All right, there we go. >> So you're good, but... for coordinators, people that have clip boards in their hands, for those who work in cubicles, they're going to have a lot of people leaving those cubicles that aren't going to be able to migrate to other personas. And so we have a changed management issue, we need to start driving more education from the workplace through certification, and that's a really critical thing I'll talk about tomorrow, that the refresh of technology with automation is 18 months to 24 months, you can't depend on traditional education to keep up, so we need a different way to look at training and education and for many it's going to be a much better life, but there's going to be many that it will not be. >> What was the time frame for your net 16% loss? >> 10 years. >> 10 years, okay, to me a lower net loss number makes sense, and in fact if you can elongate your timeline it probably shows a net job creation, you can make that argument anyway I don't know if you. >> Craig: It's being made. >> Dave: You don't buy it though? >> I don't, the world economic foundation and others are having huge net new numbers for jobs based on AI. Some of the large integration companies that want to build AI platforms for you are talking about trillions of dollars that would be added value to the world economy, I just don't buy it, and you know the reason I wrote this book was because what's going on here is very quietly preparing to displace a lot of efforts starting with relatively small tasks, it's called task automation but then expanding to more and more work and eventually adding a level of intelligence to the task automation going on here, that's going to take a lot of jobs. And for most of those 20 million cubicle workers, they have high school educations. You know, the bigger problem is this level of anxiety, you know, you go into almost any bookstore and there's a whole section For Dummy books, and it's not, is it because we have this sort of cognitive recession or because there's a, it's because the world's getting faster and more complicated. And unless you have the digital skills to adapt to that, the digital skills gap is growing. And we need to have as much focus that you see here and energy on building automation. We need to have an equal amount of focus on the societal problems. >> Yeah, it really comes down to education, too. I mean if I were able to snap my fingers and transform the educational system, there might be a different outcome but that's very unlikely to happen. Craig, one of the things we talked about last year was you had made the statement that some of these moonshot digital transformations aren't happening for a variety of reasons but our PA is kind of a practical way to achieve automation. >> Still very true. >> Have you seen sort of a greater awareness in your client base that, "You know, hey, maybe we should dial down "some of these moonshots and just try to "pick some clear winners." >> Yeah, we have a number of prediction reports coming out from Forrester and they're all saying basically that. I'm doing reports on what I'm calling the intelligent process automation market and that's really our PA plus AI, but not all aspects of AI. You know, it's AI that you can see in ROI around, you know it's AI that deals with unstructured documents and content and email. It's not the moonshot, more transformative AI that we have been very focused on for a number of years. Now all of that's very very important. You're not going to transform your business by doing task automation even if it's a little more intelligent and handles some decision management, you still need to think about "How do I instantiate "my business algorithmically," with AI that's going to make predictions and move decision management and change the customer experience. All that's still true, as true as it was in 2014/2015, we're just seeing a more realistic pull back in terms of the invested profile. >> Well, and so we've been talking about that all day, it is taking automating processes that have been around for a long time, and you, I think identified this as one of the potential blockers before, if you get old processes that are legacy and I think you, you gave the story of "Hey, I flew out here "on American Airlines in the old SABRE system." How old are those processes, you know? We've, you know the old term "paving the cow path." So the question is, given all the hype around RPA, the valuations, et cetera, what role do you see RPA having in those sort of transformative use cases? >> Well here's the interesting thing that was, I think, somewhat accidental by the, you know what really changed from having simple desktop automation? Well you needed some place to house and essentially manage that automation, so the RPA platforms had to build a central management capability. UiPath calls that the orchestrator, others call it the control tower, but when you think of all the categories of AI none of them have a orchestration capability, so the ability to use events to link in machine intelligence and dispatch digital workers or task automation to coordinate various AI building blocks as we call them and apply it to a use case, that orchestration ability is pretty unique to the RPA platforms. So the sort of secret value of RPA is not in everything that's being talked about here but eventually is going to be as a coordinating mechanism for bringing together machine learning that'll begin in the cloud, conversational intelligence that might be in Google. Having the RPA bots work in conjunction with those. >> But if I recall, I mean that's something that you pointed out last year as well that RPA today struggles with unstructured data that... >> Well it can't do it. >> You're right, we've talked about it NLP versus RPA, RPA, given structured data, I can go after it. >> That's the RPA plus AI bit, though. I mean, you take text analytics layer, and you combine it with RPA bots and now you have the unstructured capability plus the structured capability that RPA does so well. And, with the combination of the two, you can reach. I think what the industry needs to do or the buyers of RPA need to take the pressure off this immediacy of the ROI. In a sense, that's what's driven the value. I can deploy something, I can get value in a few months but, to really make it effective and transformative you need to combine it with these AI components, that's going to take a little longer, so this sort of impatience that you see in a lot of companies, they should really step back and take a look at the more end to end capabilities and take a little hit on the ROI immediately so that you can do that. >> No, I mean I can definitely see a step function, okay, great, we've absorbed that value, we get the quick ROI, but there's, to your point there's got to be some patient capital to allow you to truly transform in order for RPA, I don't want to put words in your mouth, to live up to the hype. >> Absolutely, I totally agree. And I am still very, very high on the market, I think it's going to do extremely well. >> Well, if you look at the spending data, it's quite interesting. I mean RPA as a category is off the charts. You know, UiPath, from the, your last wave kind of took the lead but, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism spending, even in traditional incumbents, maybe not even RPA, maybe more "process automation" like Pegasystems. Their spending data suggests that this is the rising tide lifting all boats so, my question to you is, how do you see this all shaking out? I mean, huge evaluations, the bankers are swarming around. You saw them in the media yesterday. You know, at some point there's got to be a winner takes most. The number two guy will do pretty well and then everybody else kind of consolidates. What's your outlook? >> Well, there are a lot of emerging players coming into the market and, part of my life is having to fend them off and talk to them, and the RPA wave is coming out in a week. It's going to have four new players in it. Companies like SAP. >> Well, they acquired a company right? >> They acquired and they built internally, and have some interesting approaches to the market. So you are going to see the big players come into the market. Others I won't mention that'll be in the market in a month It's getting a lot of attention. But also I think that there are domains, business domains that, the different platforms can start to specialize in. The majors, the UiPaths to the world, will be horizontal and remain that way. And depend on partners to tailor it for a particular application area. But you're going to see RPA companies come into the testing market, software testing market. You're going to see them come into the contact centers to deal with attended mode in more sophisticated ways perhaps than those that don't have that background. You're going to see tailored robots that are going to be in these robot communities that are springing up. That'll give a lot of juice to others to come into the market. >> And like you say you're going to see, we've talked about this as well Rebecca, the best of breed versus the suite, right? Whether its SAP, Inforce talking about it, I'm sure Oracle will throw its hat in the ring I mean, why not, right? Hey, we have that too. >> Well, if you're those companies that the RPA bots are feasting on, they're slowing the upgrades to your core platforms, in some ways making them less relevant, because their argument has been, let's integrate, you get self integration when you buy SAP, when you buy Oracle, when you buy these big platforms. Well, the bots actually make that argument less powerful because you can use the bots to give you that integration, as a layer, and so they're going to have to come up with some different stories I think if they're going to continue to move forward on their platforms, move them to the cloud and so forth. >> So, finally, your best advice for workers in this new landscape and how it is going to alter their working lives. And also, your best advice for companies and managers who are, as you said, maybe not quite, they're grappling with this issue but maybe not and they're not being disingenuous to workers about who's going to lose their jobs, but this idea of as they're coming to terms with understanding quite all of the implications of this new world. >> Yeah, I know, I'm presenting data tomorrow that shows that organizations, employees, and leaders are not ready and I have data to show that. They're not understanding it. My best advice, I love the concept of, it's not a Forrester concept, it's called constructive ambition. This is the ability in an employee to want to go a little bit out of the box, and learn, and to challenge themselves, and move into more digital to close that digital skills gap. And, we have to get better at, companies need to get better at identifying constructive ambition in people they're hiring, and also, ways to draw it out. And to walk these employees up the mountain in a way that's good for their career and good for the company. I can tell you, I'll tell a few stories on the main stage last night, I interviewed Walmart employees and machinists that could no longer deal with their machine because they had to put codes into it so they had to set it up with programming steps and the digital anxiety was such that they quit the job. So a clear lack of constructive ambition. On the other hand, a Walmart employee graduated from one of their 200 academies and was able to take on more and more responsibility. Somebody with no high school degree at all. She said, "I've never graduated "from anything in my life. "My kids have never seen me "succeed at anything, and I got this certification "from Walmart that said that I was doing this level "of standard work and that felt really, really good." So, you know, we, companies can take a different view towards this but they have to have some model of future of work of what it's going to look like so they can take a more strategic view. >> Well Craig, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a really great talk. Another plug for the book, "Invisible Robots in the Quiet of the Night" you can buy it on Amazon. >> Craig: Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward. (techno music)

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UI path. Hello everyone and welcome >>do the cubes live coverage of UI path forward. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Volante. We are joined by Layla Delage. She is the chief information and digital officer at Coca-Cola. ECEK thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Great to be here. Very exciting. And also Christina Perala, she is the group RPA lead at Generali. Thank you so much for coming into, for inviting me. Thank you. So I want to hear from you both about what, what your industry is and what your role is. Level. Let's start with you. Okay, great. Um, so we are, um, one of the Rogers bottlers within the Coca-Cola system. Uh, we produce, distribute and sell Coca Cola company products. The operating around 10 countries are middle East and central Asia and parts of middle East, Pakistan, Syria and Turkey. They are actually born out of Turkey and that's where our central offices, um, we've operate with 26 plants, around 8,500 employees. >>Uh, we serve a consumer base of 400 million and we have around close to 1 billion, uh, customers. Uh, and we continue to invest in the countries where we operate. And my role is to film and my role is all things digital within this community. So leading technologists, leading technology, all things digital. Yes. So Christina, tell us about Generali. Generalia. Sikora Zuni is a leading insurance company as the presidency. Enough 50 countries worldwide and more than a 70,000 employees that were wider. So it's a bigger company, not only for insurance. And my role with the internet rally group is to leader the LPA program. So I'm inside of the group that I in digital. So am I inside this group, I'm very focused on smart process automation. So RPA plus AI, because a has a, we already know all I loudly, LPA without a AI is announcer nowadays. So we have to keep on talking about AI, machine learning algorithms to enrich, uh, uh, the capabilities of basic robotic sell, hand reach, also the Antwerp and automation of processes. You're the CIO and the CDO. Yes. Yes. That's unique. First of all, there's one that's unique too. It's even more unique than a woman has both roles. So what's the reason behind it? So, um, there's definitely a reason behind it. I joined the Coca Cola >>system about a year ago, so I'm just a over a year in the company. The reason actually I wanted to make sure that we highlight the CIO and CTO CDO role together is, um, I want to advocate for all the it organizations to transform and really get into the digital world and get into the world of advanced technologies, become strategic business partners. Get out of the kitchen, I call it kitchen kitchen, it, you know, get out of the managing of data centers or cloud and um, just the core foundational systems and applications. Get into the advanced technology, understand the business, gain business acumen and deliver solutions based on business needs. So to highlight that, I want to make sure that I hold the role of both and I'm able to be advocate of both worlds. Cause digital without it support is not able to accomplish what they need to accomplish and it needs to get into more of the digital space. And Christina, as the RPA, you write bots, you evangelize the organization. >>Um, mostly the second. So in generally we have a, a very, uh, so, uh, sort of ivory the organization. So for something we are very decentralized, for example, for the developing of robots or the deploying for the action, the operational stuff and so on. Uh, but uh, for some stuff like a guidelines, uh, uh, risk framework to ensure that robots can do their work in the right way with notice to all for the business processes, uh, for this stuff before guidelines, framework, best practice sharing. We are a central centralized, we, we try to be centralized. So, uh, my role is to try to collect is to collect and not try and super lat, uh, best practices and share with you in the companies chair, uh, um, the best use cases. And, uh, also tried to gather what are the main concerns, what are the difficulties in order to a facilitator and to boost smarter process automation of the option. So >>Laila, you are up on the main stage this morning. You, I Pat highlighted Coca Cola itchy as a, as a customer that is embraced automation, embrace the UI pass solution. So tell us a little bit about the challenges you are facing and then why you chose I a UI path. So as I joined the company, uh, I introduced a very strong digital strategy that required a lot of change and it's within a company that has been very successfully operating all these years and doing pretty much know what to do very well. And all of a sudden with digital we are starting to disrupt the, are trying to say, Hey, we've got to change the way, do some of the things. Um, so belief in digital and belief that it can really bring efficiency and outcomes was very important. And I needed a quick win. I needed to have a technology or a solution or an outcome that I would generate very quickly and show to the whole organization that this can be done and we can do this as Coca-Cola. TJ. >>So that was, that was RPA, that was our PA for this fascinates me because you're an incumbent business, been around for a long time. you're a bottler and distributor, right? So yeah, processes are around the bottling plants and the distribution system. Yes. And now you're transforming into a digital business. Yes. I'll put data at your core. Totally not start his daytime customer. Okay. So describe the difference between the traditional business and what it looks like when you've transformed, particularly from a data perspective. And then I want to understand what role RPA plays. So we are definitely a very data rich company, however, to call ourselves data rich and to call it a strategic asset, I first need to capture and control my data and I have to treat it like a strategic asset. So that is a huge transformation. The second, once you treat it as an asset, how do you generate more insights? >>And I call this augmenting the gut feeling. I have an amazing gut feeling in the company. How do I augment that with data and provide our, this is partners and then our customers and our suppliers and some of the information. And then obviously future maturity level is, you know, shared economy and data monetization, et cetera. So that's how I describe within the company. And then assets, other assets like our plants and coolers cooler, we call it cooler, you know, where do you actually see all our products? They are called, they are visible and they are available, but they are also in that set where I can turn them into a digital cooler and I can do so much more with the cooler that standing. And I recently, in one of our leadership meetings I said we have as many coolers as the um, population on the fishy Island, which is close to 1 million. >>So just imagine in this new world, in this digital era, everything that you can do by just having a cooler, 1 million coolers present out there on the street, I can serve the consumers, I can serve customers with very different information. So that's kind of what I mean by turning the business into a digital business. So that's an awesome story. By the way, how does RPA fit into that vision? RPA is everywhere in division. So I said when I started the journey, uh, any digital journey has some Muslim battles for me. There are four must win battles. I need to get certain things right in it, in the, and that was one, one of the Mustin battles was alteration. So we have to create efficiency, we have to optimize, we have to streamline. And we said automation first. Um, and we started with, I call it robotics and automation. >>And I agree with what you said, Christina. It's more than just robots. It's actually a strategic application. It could be a good old ERP. It's the RPA, it's AI, it's all the other technologies that are out there that they bring the two of them brings. So how do you create this end to end solution using all the trends, technologies to create optimization? Uh, our goal was how do we get back to our customer much faster. We had so many customer facing processes and they're going to be there forever. They are a very customer centric customer into company obviously. So how do I get back to my customer faster? How do I make my employees just happy? They were working on so many things would be until midnight over time during weekends. How do I take that away from them? So we called it lifting the weight of the shoulders and giving you a new capabilities. So again, augmentation and then giving them that space. So we had uh, three of my employees upskilled and reskilled themselves. They became a developers in the robotics space, a couple of fire functional, um, colleagues are now reskilling themselves because now they have the time to reskill. More importantly, they have the time to actually leverage their expertise and they are so much more motivated. The engagement, the employee engagement is increasing. So that's how we are positioning RPA. Pristina ICU >>nodding a lot, your head too. A lot of what Layla is saying. I'm wondering if you can talk to about any best practices that have emerged as you've implemented RPA at Generali to what you've learned. Yes, for sure. Um, we have a lot of processes automated, uh, all around the group. Uh, but we are not, we have not reached our maximum or, uh, benefits, uh, gaining. So what we need to do right now is to try to boost the smart process automation, uh, via analyzing the issue around value, Cena. So each business area of the value chain because currently we have countries that has, that have a different level of maturity. So, so some countries are at the very beginning and we have to help them with best practice sharings with a huge case, successful use cases. And we are, uh, we have a lot of help from parts into, in this because locally and who I Potter as a, a very strong presence and is very powerful in doing that. >>And, uh, now, uh, our next mouth are very focused on try to, um, uh, deep dive, the vertical, our area of the issue around value chain and identify which are the processes inside them are best to automated. Uh, uh, Basinger. Uh, these activities are not so you, I part, we'd, his experience has created a heat mapper, value chain Heath mapper. And so it's given up as some advice where to focus our strengths, our hand energy in automating. And I think that this is a very huge, uh, uh, support that you are UI parties given us. So it's not just a matter of, okay, let's start, uh, uh, do some, uh, process assessment in order to identify which processes are the best candidates to be automated. But, uh, we have, uh, how our back, uh, us. So we, we are, uh, we have the backing of UI pass saying it's better to do that and automate in depth, uh, processes of that, but Oh, the value chain. So we are starting a program to do that with all the countries or the vertical area of the country. So, and I think that this could really bring a, uh, high benefits and can, uh, uh, drive us to, uh, really having a scaling up in using a smart process, automation and UI. But you a bot ecosystem not only are, so >>one of the nice things about RPA is you can take the software robots and apply them to an existing process. A lot of times changing processes and a lot of times almost always changing processes is painful. However, we've talked to some customers that have said by applying RPA to our business, it's exposed some really bad processes. Have you experienced that and can you maybe share that experience with it? Absolutely. So for us, one of the initial, um, robots, we applied to a customer facing process. It was our field team trying to get back to our customer with a, with some information. And we realize that the, um, the cycle time was very long. And the reason is there are four functions involved in answering the question and seven different applications are being touched all the way from XL to ERP to CRM. So what we did obviously bringing a strategic solution to fix the cycle time and reduce that to streamline the process was going to take us long. So RPA was great help. We reduced the cycle time by putting a robot and we were able to get back to ours, priests, sales team in the field in matter of minutes. What used to take hours was now being responded to in minutes. Now that doesn't mean that process is perfect, but that's our next step. So we created value for our customer and our sales team within the field, um, before, you know, streamlining and going into a bigger initiatives. So then you could share Christina. >>Yes. Uh, so, um, it is necessary to automate something that could be automated. So, uh, it is necessarily to out optimize the process before automating it, but sometimes it's better to automate it as Caesar because, uh, also the not optimize the process can bring value if ultimated. So let me share an example. If you, for example, have to migrate some data obviously is a one shot, uh, uh, activity. But with the robot you can do it in a very short, well sharp timer. Maybe it's not the best, uh, process to be automated, but that could be useful as well. So it's always a matter of understanding the costs and the benefits. Uh, and sometimes, uh, FBA is very quickly, is very quick to be implemented and can be, can have a, also a lot of savings instead of integrating instead of doing more complex things. >>And then other things, uh, that it's important to take into account is that, uh, uh, after having a automating goal, all the low hanging fruits and so the processes with a low cost, uh, uh, low complexity and high benefits, uh, then it starts to facer when it's necessary to understand how to the end to end processes. Because, uh, it happens, uh, in, uh, some of our countries that, uh, the second phase is very difficult because, uh, the situation is that you have very, um, a lot of very fermented processes. And so before automating it is necessary to apply operational efficiency methodology, lean six Sigma, rare business process for engineering and then automate it. So it's a longer trip. And our Amer as group head office in general is to give these kinds of methodologies and best practices for all kinds of level of maturity in our countries. So finally, w what is the customer is the employee response then in terms of how you're talking a lot about streamlining, getting rid of these tedious tasks that took forever, how, how our employees reacting to the implementation. >>So we, um, we actually launched the, uh, announce announced RPA robotics and automation with a Hekaton in our company. And we invited 40 colleagues from various functions and two and everybody from the business was there and they participated actually in gathering ideas and prioritizing what matters most to the company. And we looked at customer, we looked at compliance, we look to the employee and we actually with during the hackathon you iPad team helped us to go live with one of the robots. They were mesmerized. They couldn't believe that this could happen. I think that's where we kind of engaged them and now going forward everyone who generate the idea was part of the building of the robots so they continue to be engaged to me allowed them to name the robots so they start naming and once the robots were alive yet literally had some of our teams who are dancing from happiness and I think that said it all. That was the strongest voice of our business partner and we published that video. So our business partners became our advocates and that's really our how we born the robotic and automation within CCI. We have so many advocates right now they are coming to us. Our business partners are coming to us with more use cases and they are actually, they are sharing with rest of the system within Coca-Cola and with the group that we are part of locally in Turkey, they are sharing their stories. So now we have a hype going on in the system. >>Yes. And in generally, um, at the beginning, uh, we face some fears in our employees fears of losing their job, but fear is not be able to use this kind of technology. Uh, but, uh, also with the help of HR because I, Charlie is, uh, driving a huge program of upskilling and reskilling of people. Uh, nowadays, uh, also hand user are very happy to use robotics, uh, because, uh, uh, when they realize that they can really help in their activities, in their very boring and not useful activities, they are very happy to enjoy this, this program. But it is so, uh, it, it was a trip, a journey with the employees to make them understand that it's not something that, uh, is affecting their job. So, at least in generally group, we are, we are programming, uh, these, uh, uh, or employees, uh, journey in order to make them, uh, uh, to have more, uh, uh, awareness about robotics and not be scared about it. Layla and Christina, thank you both so much for coming on the cube. It was wonderful. Thank you very much for you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Volante. Please stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of UI path forward.

>>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.

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Day one of UiPath Forward III, hashtag UiPathForward. Elena Christopher is here. She's the senior vice president at HFS Research, and Elena, I'm going to recruit you to be my co-host here. >> Co-host! >> On this power panel. Jean Youngers here, CUBE alum, VP, a Six Sigma Leader at Security Benefit. Great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Dave: And Amy Chandler, who is the Assistant Vice President and Director of Internal Controls, also from Security Benefit. >> Hello. >> Dave: Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Alright Elena, let's start off with you. You follow this market, you have for some time, you know HFS is sort of anointed as formulating this market place, right? >> Elena: We like to think of ourselves as the voice-- >> You guys were early on. >> The voice of the automation industry. >> So, what are you seeing? I mean, process automation has been around forever, RPA is a hot recent trend, but what are you seeing the last year or two? What are the big trends and rip currents that you see in the market place? >> I mean, I think one of the big trends that's out there, I mean, RPA's come on to the scene. I like how you phrase it Dave, because you refer to it as, rightly so, automation is not new, and so we sort of say the big question out there is, "Is RPA just flavor of the month?" RPA is definitely not, and I come from a firm, we put out a blog earlier this year called "RPA is dead. Long live automation." And that's because, when we look at RPA, and when we think about what it's impact is in the market place, to us the whole point of automation in any form, regardless of whether it's RPA, whether it be good old old school BPM, whatever it may be, it's mission is to drive transformation, and so the HFS perspective, and what all of our research shows and sort of justifies that the goal is, what everyone is striving towards, is to get to that transformation. And so, the reason we put out that piece, the "RPA is dead. Long live integrated automation platforms" is to make the point that if you're not- 'cause what does RPA allow? It affords an opportunity for change to drive transformation so, if you're not actually looking at your processes within your company and taking this opportunity to say, "What can I change, what processes are just bad, "and we've been doing them, I'm not even sure why, "for so long. What can we transform, "what can we optimize, what can we invent?" If you're not taking that opportunity as an enterprise to truly embrace the change and move towards transformation, that's a missed opportunity. So I always say, RPA, you can kind of couch it as one of many technologies, but what RPA has really done for the market place today, it's given business users and business leaders the realization that they can have a role in their own transformation. And that's one of the reasons why it's actually become very important, but a single tool in it's own right will never be the holistic answer. >> So Jean, Elena's bringing up a point about transformation. We, Stew Bennett and I interviewed you last year and we've played those clips a number of times, where you sort of were explaining to us that it didn't make sense before RPA to try to drive Six Sigma into business processes; you couldn't get the return. >> Jean: Right. >> Now you can do it very cheaply. And for Six Sigma or better, is what you use for airplane engines, right? >> Right. >> So, now you're bringing up the business process. So, you're a year in, how's it going? What kind of results are you seeing? Is it meeting your expectations? >> It's been wonderful. It has been the best, it's been probably the most fun I've had in the last fifteen years of work. I have enjoyed, partly because I get to work with this great person here, and she's my COE, and helps stand up the whole RPA solution, but you know, we have gone from finance into investment operations, into operations, you know we've got one sitting right now that we're going to be looking at statements that it's going to be fourteen thousand hours out of both time out as well as staff hours saved, and it's going to touch our customer directly, that they're not going to get a bad statement anymore. And so, you know, it has just been an incredible journey for us over the past year, it really has. >> And so okay Amy, your role is, you're the hardcore practitioner here right? >> Amy: That's right. >> You run the COE. Tell us more about your role, and I'm really interested in how you're bringing it out, RPA to the organization. Is that led by your team, or is it kind of this top-down approach? >> Yeah, this last year, we spent a lot of time trying to educate the lower levels and go from a bottom-up perspective. Pretty much, we implemented our infrastructure, we had a nice solid change management process, we built in logical access, we built in good processes around that so that we'd be able to scale easily over this last year, which kind of sets us up for next year, and everything that we want to accomplish then. >> So Elena, we were talking earlier on theCUBE about you know, RPA, in many ways, I called it cleaning up the crime scene, where stuff is kind of really sort of a mass and huge opportunities to improve. So, my question to you is, it seems like RPA is, in some regards, successful because you can drop it into existing processes, you're not changing things, but in a way, this concerns that, oh well, I'm just kind of paving the cow path. So how much process reinvention should have to occur in order to take advantage of RPA? >> I love that you use that phrase, "paving the cow path." As a New Englander, as you know the roads in Boston are in fact paved cow paths, so we know that can lead to some dodgy roads, and that's part of, and I say it because that's part of what the answer is, because the reinvention, and honestly the optimization has to be part of what the answer is. I said it just a little bit earlier in my comments, you're missing an opportunity with RPA and broader automation if you don't take that step to actually look at your processes and figure out if there's just essentially deadwood that you need to get rid of, things that need to be improved. One of the sort of guidelines, because not all processes are created equal, because you don't want to spend the time and effort, and you guys should chime in on this, you don't want to spend the time and effort to optimize a process if it's not critical to your business, if you're not going to get lift from it, or from some ROI. It's a bit of a continuum, so one of the things that I always encourage enterprises to think about, is this idea of, well what's the, obviously, what business problem are you trying to solve? But as you're going through the process optimization, what kind of user experience do you want out of this? And your users, by the way, you tend to think of your user as, it could be your end customer, it could be your employee, it could even be your partner, but trying to figure out what the experience is that you actually want to have, and then you can actually then look at the process and figure out, do we need to do something different? Do we need to do something completely new to actually optimize that? And then again, line it with what you're trying to solve and what kind of lift you want to get from it. But I'd love to, I mean, hopping over to you guys, you live and breathe this, right? And so I think you have a slightly different opinion than me, but-- >> We do live and breathe it, and every process we look at, we take into consideration. But you've also got to, you have a continuum right? If it's a simple process and we can put it up very quickly, we do, but we've also got ones where one process'll come into us, and a perfect example is our rate changes. >> Amy: Rate changes. >> It came in and there was one process at the very end and they ended up, we did a wing to wing of the whole thing, followed the data all the way back through the process, and I think it hit, what, seven or eight-- >> Yeah. >> Different areas-- >> Areas. >> Of the business, and once we got done with that whole wing to wing to see what we could optimize, it turned into what, sixty? >> Amy: Yeah, sixty plus. Yeah. >> Dave: Sixty plus what? >> Bot processes from one entry. >> Yeah. >> And so, right now, we've got 189 to 200 processes in the back log. And so if you take that, and exponentially increase it, we know that there's probably actually 1,000 to 2,000 more processes, at minimum, that we can hit for the company, and we need to look at those. >> Yeah, and I will say, the wing to wing approach is very important because you're following the data as it's moving along. So if you don't do that, if you only focus on a small little piece of it, you don't what's happening to the data before it gets to you and you don't know what's going to happen to it when it leaves you, so you really do have to take that wing to wing approach. >> So, internal controls is in your title, so talking about scale, it's a big theme here at UiPath, and these days, things scale really fast, and boo-boos can happen really fast. So how are you ensuring, you know that the edicts of the organization are met, whether it's security, compliance, governance? Is that part of your role? >> Yeah, we've actually kept internal audit and internal controls, and in fact, our external auditors, EY. We've kept them all at the table when we've gone through processes, when we've built out our change management process, our logical access. When we built our whole process from beginning to end they kind of sat at the table with us and kind of went over everything to make sure that we were hitting all the controls that we needed to do. >> And actually, I'd like to piggyback on that comment, because just that inclusion of the various roles, that's what we found as an emerging best practice, and in all of our research and all of the qualitative conversations that we have with enterprises and service providers, is because if you do things, I mean it applies on multiple levels, because if you do things in a silo, you'll have siloed impact. If you bring the appropriate constituents to the table, you're going to understand their perspective, but it's going to have broader reach. So it helps alleviate the silos but it also supports the point that you just made Amy, about looking at the processes end to end, because you've got the necessary constituents involved so you know the context, and then, I believe, I mean I think you guys shared this with me, that particularly when audit's involved, you're perhaps helping cultivate an understanding of how even their processes can improve as well. >> Right. >> That is true, and from an overall standpoint with controls, I think a lot of people don't realize that a huge benefit is your controls, cause if you're automating your controls, from an internal standpoint, you're not going to have to test as much, just from an associate process owner paying attention to their process to the internal auditors, they're not going to have to test as much either, and then your external auditors, which that's revenue. I mean, that's savings. >> You lower your auditing bill? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Well we'll see right? >> Yeah. (laughter) >> That's always the hope. >> Don't tell EY. (laughter) So I got to ask you, so you're in a little over a year So I don't know if you golf, but you know a mulligan in golf. If you had a mulligan, a do over, what would you do over? >> The first process we put in place. At least for me, it breaks a lot, and we did it because at the time, we were going through decoupling and trying to just get something up to make sure that what we stood up was going to work and everything, and so we kind of slammed it in, and we pay for that every quarter, and so actually it's on our list to redo. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> That's a really good point. >> So we pay for it in maintenance every quarter, we pay for it, cause it breaks inevitably. >> Yes. >> Okay so what has to happen? You have to reinvent the process, to Elena's? >> Yes, you know, we relied on a process that somebody else had put in place, and in looking at it, it was kind of a up and down and through the hoop and around this way to get what they needed, and you know there's much easier ways to get the data now. And that's what we're doing. In fact, we've built our own, we call it a bot mart. That's where all our data goes, they won't let us touch the other data marts and so forth so they created us a bot mart, and anything that we need data for, they dump in there for us and then that's where our bot can hit, and our bot can hit it at anytime of the day or night when we need the data, and so it's worked out really well for us, and so the bot mart kind of came out of that project of there's got to be a better way. How can we do this better instead of relying on these systems that change and upgrade and then we run the bot and its working one day and the next day, somebody has gone in and tweaked something, and when all's I really need out of that system is data, that's all I need. I don't need, you know, a report. I don't need anything like that, cause the reports change and they get messed up. I just want the raw data, and so that's what we're starting to do. >> How do you ensure that the data is synchronized with your other marts and warehouses, is that a problem? >> Not yet. >> No not yet! (laughter) >> I'm wondering cause I was thinking the exact same question Dave, because on one hand its a nice I think step from a governance standpoint. You have what you need, perhaps IT or whomever your data curators are, they're not going to have a heart attack that you're touching stuff that they don't want you to, but then there is that potential for synchronization issues, cause that whole concept of golden source implies one copy if you will. >> Well, and it is. It's all coming through, we have a central data repository that the data's going to come through, and it's all sitting there, and then it'll move over, and to me, what I most worry about, like I mentioned on the statement once, okay, I get my data in, is it the same data that got used to create those statements? And as we're doing the testing and as we're looking at going live, that's one of our huge test cases. We need to understand what time that data comes in, when will it be into our bot mart, so when can I run those bots? You know, cause they're all going to be unattended on those, so you know, the timing is critical, and so that's why I said not yet. >> Dave: (chuckle) >> But you want to know what, we can build the bot to do that compare of the data for us. >> Haha all right. I love that. >> I saw a stat the other day. I don't know where it was, on Twitter or maybe it was your data, that more money by whatever, 2023 is going to be spent on chat bots than mobile development. >> Jean: I can imagine, yes. >> What are you doing with chat bots? And how are you using them? >> Do you want to answer that one or do you want me to? >> Go ahead. >> Okay so, part of the reason I'm so enthralled by the chat bot or personal assistant or anything, is because the unattended robots that we have, we have problems making sure that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing in prep. We have some in finance, and you know, finance you have a very fine line of what you can automate and what you need the user to still understand what they're doing, right? And so we felt like we had a really good, you know, combination of that, but in some instances, they forget to do things, so things aren't there and we get the phone call the bot broke, right? So part of the thing I'd like to do is I'd like to move that back to an unattended bot, and I'm going to put a chat bot in front of it, and then all's they have to do is type in "run my bot" and it'll come up if they have more than one bot, it'll say "which one do you want to run?" They'll click it and it'll go. Instead of having to go out on their machine, figure out where to go, figure out which button to do, and in the chat I can also send them a little message, "Did you run your other reports? Did you do this?" You know, so, I can use it for the end user, to make that experience for them better. And plus, we've got a lot of IT, we've got a lot of HR stuff that can fold into that, and then RPA all in behind it, kind of the engine on a lot of it. >> I mean you've child proofed the bot. >> Exactly! There you go. There you go. >> Exactly. Exactly. And it also provides a means to be able to answer those commonly asked questions for HR for example. You know, how much vacation time do I have? When can I change my benefits? Examples of those that they answer frequently every day. So that provides another avenue for utilization of the chat bot. >> And if I may, Dave, it supports a concept that I know we were talking about yesterday. At HFS it's our "Triple-A Trifecta", but it's taking the baseline of automation, it intersects with components of AI, and then potentially with analytics. This is starting to touch on some of the opportunities to look at other technologies. You say chat bots. At HFS we don't use the term chat bot, just because we like to focus and emphasize the cognitive capability if you will. But in any case, you guys essentially are saying, well RPA is doing great for what we're using RPA for, but we need a little bit of extension of functionality, so we're layering in the chat bot or cognitive assistant. So it's a nice example of some of that extension of really seeing how it's, I always call it the power of and if you will. Are you going to layer these things in to get what you need out of it? What best solves your business problems? Just a very practical approach I think. >> So Elena, Guy has a session tomorrow on predictions. So we're going to end with some predictions. So our RPA is dead, (chuckle) will it be resuscitated? What's the future of RPA look like? Will it live up to the hype? I mean so many initiatives in our industry haven't. I always criticize enterprise data warehousing and ETL and big data is not living up to the hype. Will RPA? >> It's got a hell of a lot of hype to live up to, I'll tell you that. So, back to some of our causality about why we even said it's dead. As a discrete software category, RPA is clearly not dead at all. But unless it's helping to drive forward with transformation, and even some of the strategies that these fine ladies from Security Benefit are utilizing, which is layering in additional technology. That's part of the path there. But honestly, the biggest challenge that you have to go through to get there and cannot be underestimated, is the change that your organization has to go through. Cause think about it, if we look at the grand big vision of where RPA and broader intelligent automation takes us, the concept of creating a hybrid workforce, right? So what's a hybrid workforce? It's literally our humans complemented by digital workers. So it still sounds like science fiction. To think that any enterprise could try and achieve some version of that and that it would be A, fast or B, not take a lot of change management, is absolutely ludicrous. So it's just a very practical approach to be eyes wide open, recognize that you're solving problems but you have to want to drive change. So to me, and sort of the HFS perspective, continues to be that if RPA is not going to die a terrible death, it needs to really support that vision of transformation. And I mean honestly, we're here at a UiPath event, they had many announcements today that they're doing a couple of things. Supporting core functionality of RPA, literally adding in process discovery and mining capabilities, adding in analytics to help enterprises actually track what your benefit is. >> Jean: Yes. >> These are very practical cases that help RPA live another day. But they're also extending functionality, adding in their whole announcement around AI fabric, adding in some of the cognitive capability to extend the functionality. And so prediction-wise, RPA as we know it three years from now is not going to look like RPA at all. I'm not going to call it AI, but it's going to become a hybrid, and it's honestly going to look a lot like that Triple-A Trifecta I mentioned. >> Well, and UiPath, and I presume other suppliers as well, are expanding their markets. They're reaching, you hear about citizens developers and 100% of the workforce. Obviously you guys are excited and you see a long-run way for RPA. >> Jean: Yeah, we do. >> I'll give you the last word. >> It's been a wonderful journey thus far. After this morning's event where they showed us everything, I saw a sneak peek yesterday during the CAB, and I had a list of things I wanted to talk to her about already when I came out of there. And then she saw more of 'em today, and I've got a pocketful of notes of stuff that we're going to take back and do. I really, truly believe this is the future and we can do so much. Six Sigma has kind of gotten a rebirth. You go in and look at your processes and we can get those to perfect. I mean, that's what's so cool. It is so cool that you can actually tell somebody, I can do something perfect for you. And how many people get to do that? >> It's back to the user experience, right? We can make this wildly functional to meet the need. >> Right, right. And I don't think RPA is the end all solution, I think it's just a great tool to add to your toolkit and utilize moving forward. >> Right. All right we'll have to leave it there. Thanks ladies for coming on, it was a great segment. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We'll be right back from UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas, right after this short break. (technical 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

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Hello everyone and welcome to the cubes live coverage of UI path forward here at the Bellagio. I'm your host hosting alongside of Dave Volante. David's so great to be here with you. I'm so excited to get into this. See Rebecca, so we were, we would use came from the keynote. A lot of high profile UI path executives and important customers were on there too, but then this is the message is it's time to reboot work. It's time to reboot your business, transformed the customer experience, transform the employee experience. I'm wondering as someone who spent a lot of time at these kinds of conferences, and here's a lot of this, these, this kind of messaging, especially in this age of digital transformation, how compelling do you find this value proposition, this, this idea that RPA, robotics, processing automation can do these things? >>The first thing I would mention, Rebecca, is to me it's all about the customers. And you know, it's rare that you see a tech show start with the customers to actually do in the intro. I've seen it before. Nutanix actually does it at his shows, but it's, but it's quite rare because you know, the vendors want to put their message out, they want to control everything, and so they're very, very cautious about that. But, so we had three customers up on stage today doing the intro, which I thought was kind of cool. Tech shows, you know, a lot of smoke, a lot of mirrors and so forth. So you have to try to squint through that. I would say this, it's very clear that the age of automation is here. You know, people have been always concerned about automation for good reason. They're afraid that automation is gonna take away their jobs. >>Having said that, machines have always replace humans. We've talked about this a lot on the cube, but this is the first time in history that machines are replacing humans with cognitive tasks. So that's got to be scaring people a little bit. But when you come back and answer your question, when you talk to customers, they're really happy about software robots because they're doing, they're automating mundane tasks that these folks don't want to do on a day to day basis and they want to do other things. They want to get their weekends back. They don't want to just manually enter data from spreadsheets into applications and back and forth. And so from that standpoint, I think it is real and it is unique. You know, the big question is how much of this is transformational and is it really a path to AI something that UI path and others are really pointing towards and we're going to explore that, >>right? I mean in what you were just saying too is that that that the company's pitch is that we are freeing people. We are liberating them from the mundane, from the drudgery, from the data entry. And as you, as you pointed out, rightfully, a lot of the customers are saying, Oh no, it's giving our time. It's giving our employees time back to focus on the higher level tasks, the more creative aspects of their job. But, but I wonder if it is in fact a w what it really is doing. Two jobs. I mean I think that there was a really telling line in that Forbes profile of uh, Daniel Dina's who is the, the CEO of this company is founder of this company. The first ever bought billionaire exactly. Um, where it was an MIT professor quoted saying, you know, we always say to the companies that we say, give, give us your data and we'll tell you if it is in fact, uh, having this job killing effect. And he said, the companies don't want to give, give that up. >>Right? So now just look at the why is Daniel didn't as a billionaire, it will here, here, here's why. >>Yeah, walk, walk us through this. >>So UI path is up to 3,400 employees. 34 50 is the actual number. Now back in 2017, two years ago, this company did $25 million in annual recurring revenue. Now, ARR is a metric that's very important because you know, even though you book, let's say you book a $12,000 deal, you recognize that $1,000 a month over the 12 month period. So ARR is a very really important metric. So 25 million in 2017 my sources indicate that they'll do over 300 million this year in ARR. So we're talking about a 12 X plus increase in a two year period. They've raised $1 billion. One of their key competitors, automation anywhere has raised similar amounts of money. So they're talking about a couple of billion dollars raised just in the last couple of years. UI past valuation in March was $7 billion. So at that kind of back of napkin, and we're talking about a $10 billion valuation, Daniel obviously owns a lot of that. >>So 20% yeah. So it's, it's pretty substantial in terms of the market impact. Now valuations, as you all know, it's a fleeting metric, right? It comes in, it goes, but so the, but the landscape is very strong right now. It's really interesting to see how much customers are glomming onto this automation tailwind. The other comment I would make is let's lay out the sort of competitive landscape. UI path has gone from kind of a clear third in the marketplace to clear number one. I mean they're kind of separating from the pack, but there are others automation anywhere, blue prism and there are a number of legacy customers as well >>that that's what I wanted to ask you too, is that we have seen a few Microsoft and Google of course are, are, are partnered in their, in their customers, but they also are moving into this area themselves. So I mean will you will let UI path be able to maintain its competitive position as these very established and frankly very smart companies move into this area. Safety's >>another one. SAP bought an RPA company. It's a good question, but, so if you look at, let me start with this sort of underlying trend. If you look at the spending data, so we have access to the enterprise technology, research spending data and it shows the entire space is gaining share relative to other technology initiatives. So when you look at the data for UI path automation, anywhere blue prism, even legacy process automation companies like Pega systems, they're all actually from a spending standpoint attracting a lot of attention. So it's this rising tide lifts all ships. It's still somewhat early in terms of this next generation RPA if you will, you I-PASS advantage is simplicity. They are totally focused on this. You see this all the time. Do we go best of breed or do we go with a suite? So if Oracle comes up with an RPA solution, they throw it in for free, you know, does a customer take that? >>I think it comes down to what the business value is and that's something we're going to explore. It's not uncommon in detect industry that there's a first mover advantage or maybe it's a second mover advantage. You know, Facebook wasn't really first mover, but the one who really gets it right is kind of a winner take most. And so that's where a UI path is going like crazy right now. Trying to scale the company, raise a bunch of money. We saw this week a bunch of bankers sort of sniffing around. All the bankers are here cause they want their business. So I would expect there's some kind of IPO on the horizon, which I think they need to do to be, to your point to be able to compete with the big guys. So bottom line is they have to do it on a better product, more openness, moving faster and getting to scale. And I think they'll be able to reach escape velocity. I don't know if there's enough room for the big three. I would expect that given the spending climate is very good for everybody right now. I would expect within the next two to three years, some consolidation in this space. >>Well. So one of the things that you had just talked about with this next generation RPA, and that is exactly where we're going because these bots have got to become more durable, more smarter and more capable of handling complex tasks. We saw a number of new product announcements today. Oh, I might to get your thoughts and what you think about them and just whether or not they will have this transformational effect. Um, so, so yes, we have some new product announcements, some, some that democratize automation building that all you have to do is know how to run an Excel spreadsheet and you too can build an automation in your company. >>Yeah. It'll take a little bit of training though. >>I know. I think a better idea for those those demos is they should just pluck someone out of the audience and say, okay, you're going to do this. >>No, they would fail. I mean, let's say said, I remember the first time you learned Excel, I'm old enough to remember slash file, retrieve, paste, copy, whatever. You had to go through some training and we went through classes back in the eighties I think it's a similar here. I mean it's not overly complex. It's gonna have a low code theme, but you're right, UI path announced the number of new products. You know, we looked at this a couple of years ago, we went, we went out and we took the big three from the Forrester wave blue prism automation anywhere in UI path and we said, Hey, let's download them and start building some, some, some automations. While the only software we could get ahold of was UI path. Because as they say, they had kind of a simpler or more open model. The other guys were like, well, talk to a reseller is spend some money. >>And we were like, no, we just want to try it before we buy it. And we weren't able to get the other guy software. Now I think automation anywhere has made some strides in that regard in terms of simplification. You know, it's a copycat industry like the NFL. But so let's remember here we're talking about automating mundane tasks. Relatively simple automations. The customers are asking for things like more complex automations. How do we prioritize the automations? How do we figure out where, what's the best bang for the buck? How do we actually have attended bots because many of these are unintended. They'd like to have the human injected into the equation and that's pretty interesting because it brings forth this augmentation scenario that's everybody's talking about in AI and that starts to move us from sort of this tactical, I'm going to save some time on a use case specific or a technology specific automation to something that's more strategic that I can scale across my organization but right now people are saving money on this as a super hot space. As I say, all the bankers are trying to get in because they know some other ideas are coming down the road and the VCs I'm sure are gonna want the air exits. >>I want to talk to you about the leadership of this company. This is Daniel Dienes and you have interviewed him many times. Do minimun has as well. He he, he seems like a different kind of CEO. I mean, first of all, he is, he's a Romanian. Uh, he grew up, uh, behind the iron curtain. Uh, he was a professional bridge player for awhile, at least play competitive bridge player play competitive bridge and now he is a company headquartered in New York city. He still spends a lot of time in Bucharest but I'm curious to hear your thoughts about his leadership style and the kind of culture he's created at UI path and whether or not, because he's made some key hires from AWS, from Google, some, some of the more established tech players, whether or not he is, whether or not he'll be able to keep that startup culture, that startup mindset as the company becomes so much bigger. Well >>I think it's a concern and something that we want to ask about when you ask Daniel about, you know, how have you been able to do this? He'll talk about the mistakes that they made, how they sort of, they had a build it and you and they shall come mentality, which is kind of kind of old thinking these days and they sort of lucked into this RPA space. He also emphasize, emphasize as humble, and he's a very humble guy. I mean, you'll, you'll, you'll meet him I think last year he came on and you know, he's a developer. He had a tee shirt on. He's a coder right now. He's a billionaire coder. So maybe, maybe he'll, he'll dress up a little bit, but you know, maybe a fancy tee shirt, I don't know. Or maybe a collared shirt that says UI path on it. We'll see. >>But so they end, they want to move fast. They believe in openness there. They believe in transparency. I think those things worked in today's marketplace. People love the guy. I mean the customers love them. The employees love them. As you said, they're pulling people in from the hottest companies. Google, AWS. We, I got a on the shoulder today from, from a gentleman and I know from Google, he was in sales at Google. It's not me. There's no, Oh, I'm day three. And so people want to be part of this, this rocket ship. And I think it's gonna move very, very fast. Like I say, I think you're going to see some moves in the marketplace. I think you're going to see some exits and consolidations. We saw some M and a today UI path announced the acquisition of company called process gold that actually competes with a partner of UI path. So it's again, people are going to be on collision courses and they recently made another acquisition of a company called step shots and we're seeing some M and a, you know, relatively small MNA, but it's all about how can they transform from this little startup to this major player. To your point that can compete with the Microsofts and the SAP and the big whales of the world. >>And what do you think is his bigger selling point? Is it that it is transforming the employee experience, which as we know that that should not be discounted because an employee who is doing less mundane tasks able to focus on the more creative interesting parts of his or her job is a happier employee, happier your employees, more productive employee. A more productive employee means a healthier bottom line. So that's now funding to discount. Also the customer experience, as you said, which is clearly a huge top priority for this company. But, but I think the question is, is this technology now is a transformative enough? >>You know, as you asked that question, it kind of reminds me in a different way of a company that we've followed for years service now. When service now first came out, it was kind of doing what people saw as help desk, improving help desk, and they disrupted an industry and they made it better, which is kind of boring. It's kind of mundane, but actually having good it where you're not constantly down and you're not complaining and stuff's not falling through the cracks actually can be somewhat transformative. Kind of boring, but really important. And I see a similar sort of pattern here now the vision is, you know, a robot for every worker and the path to AI and we'll see. But right now the trans, the transformation is we're going to take away all this crap that you hate doing all these crap locations or mundane tasks and we're going to make your life better. >>And people workers want that and it's going to be in theory, a productivity boost as a result of that. That in and of itself, I think Rebecca can be transformative because it'll, it'll help with morale, it'll help with culture, it'll allow people to shift their emphasis on more strategic work and drive more value for the companies. And so, and I think companies that invest in RPA are, are seeing returns in terms of quality, just in terms of employee morale. You'll hear that from the customers that we talked to today. So I think in that sense it can be transformative like service now was now can it take the next step or is this really just paving the cow path? Is it just taking mundane known processes, automating them as opposed to really rethinking what process automation should look like. And that's some of the criticism of RPA and the RPA hype. And you know, we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk to customers about that. We've got analysts from HFS coming on, Kathy from Gartner's coming on. So excited to hear their perspectives as well. >>Exactly. And I, I want to reiterate that point that you're absolutely right. Their question is should we actually think about redesigning the process itself rather than automating the, the the flawed process? >>Yeah, and I mean I guess part of me says yes strategically we should be doing that, but another part of me says, look, I don't have to change anything. And I think that's the big advantage of UI path and these other players is you can basically automate what you have today. You don't have to redesign the process because process redesign is a heavy lift. So if I don't have to do a heavy lift, if I can improve what I'm doing today and it works, yeah, it's the old, if it ain't broke, why fix it, but just improve it. I think that's a very powerful, I think the big question I have is, is that like a big hit of a step function or is it really transformative? I feel like today's tech is a step function, which is important. You're going to get that step function, but I think you're going to absorb that benefit fast and then people are going to say, okay, now what? >>Another good example is virtualization. When I first saw virtualization and the ability to spin up a server, my jaw dropped and went, Oh my God, I could spin up a server in five minutes and it used to take weeks, months to spin up a server. That's game changing. Nobody talks about virtualization anymore. It was a, you know, a five year absorption of productivity for it and now it's like, yeah, I've been there, done that. That's yesterday's news. I think the same thing is going to happen with today's RPA and the big question is can they cross that strategic chasm into what the gentleman from Pepsi, the executive from Pepsi was saying, this automation fabric across the enterprise as a, as a platform for automation and artificial intelligence. That's a big leap. These guys get big plans. Daniel Dienes is a big thinker, go big or go home. So I don't, I don't have the crystal ball on that, I think, but I think there's a decent opportunity given that there's enough attention on this business right now that it, that it could be transformed. >>All right, well, hopefully we'll know more at the end of these two days. Dave, I've, I'm looking forward to getting into with you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Volante. Stay tuned for more. You're watching the cube.

>>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 cube live coverage of UI path forward here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of it. Dave Volante, we're joined by Richard Fong. He is the it manager, finance delivery at Chevron. Thank you so much for coming on the show that you're having me. So Chevron of course is a household name, a big oil company, but tell us a little bit about what you do, what you do there. >>The it manager, and I'm responsible for software and application engineering. My team develops custom applications for Chevron and over the last couple of years we've actually started an RPA development practice. >>Okay. So what, what were the issues, the challenges that you were experiencing where you said, Hey, maybe maybe we could get a bot to help us do? >>Yeah, yeah. There are a plethora of opportunities in Chevron to automate many, many mundane tasks. What UI path and RPA brings to the table is a very easy way to automate tasks where these tasks, maybe building a traditional like.net application would be too expensive and take too long. Using the UI path platform, we're able to very quickly build solutions and deploy them much quicker than we would have done if we had to build a traditional, like a.net application. The bots aren't coding are they? Are the bots coding the you could. We found that you don't need to do a lot of coding for these, uh, for these solutions. So that was a big help in terms of being able to deploy and automate solutions very quickly. Like what's an example? What do you mean by a solution? So, believe it or not, we, we have many people who still go through and open up attack email attachments, their Excel files or PDF files or text files and that's their day job. That's what they do all day long, four weeks, usually maybe about two weeks of doing data processing. They spend the other two weeks doing error corrections. So we are able to use UI path to develop a solution. A bot that will call through your one's inbox, open up attachments, copy and paste that data automatically into like a flat file and then they would just upload that into the ERP system. So that was a big, big win for us. And that's just one example. So >>this is, was this an it limo is interested in how RPA gets into an organization? Was that it led, was it business led, is it, is it top down? It sounds like it was an it lead >>initiative in this example. It was an it. Interestingly, it came to Chevron. Chevron's a huge organization with many different it departments actually. And for Chevron it actually started with another it manager in our supply and trading department. I think that took a look at RPA and he just brought it out and socialized it with other it managers and the finance group said, Hey, this is, this has huge potential here. So then we took it and did some proof of concepts with it and just took off with it. >>So get it going back to those employees that you were describing, whose job it was to open up email attachments and then do that data looking for aberrations. What do they do now? I mean the, this has been built to us as we are freeing up your time. You can now focus on the more creative aspects of your job. How are they spending their time >>that, that actually that played out exactly like you mentioned, there was a little bit of nervousness what these employees like, Oh my God, what's going to happen to my job? I've been doing this for years. I am comfortable with it. I'm an expert at opening attachments. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So there was definitely some nervousness, no doubt. Um, and but what eventually happened is that we were able to redeploy these folks onto other projects and have actually a cost avoidance situation because instead of hiring new folks having to hire new folks are high, bringing in contractors, we are able to redeploy them on to higher value projects. >>Yeah. I mean, I think we hear that a lot from customers, from the vendors you hear, Oh no, everybody loves it. Which is true. Once you experienced it, you love it, but you've got to be cognizant, I would think. And I wonder if you could sort of share your experiences as to how you dealt with that, that uncomfortableness. You got to be cognizant that it's going to affect people's jobs. So what did you guys do to get people more comfortable to educate them that you're not just trying to replace them with software robots. >>Yeah, yeah. No, that's, um, you do need to be sensitive to how people will react to, you know, potentially losing their job. And actually it's not, this story's not, you're losing your job. This is an opportunity to upskill and to, you know, to grow your career. Right. Not we, you know, just doing data entry is kind of like, yeah, it's a little bit career limiting. So, you know, you kind of approach it in that context. And the other thing is Chevron's a great company to work for. W we're not, we're not purposely trying to eliminate positions. We're still growing. You know, oil is still in big demand, so it's about upskilling and reallocating people to higher value work. >>I mean, everybody's hiring, I mean this is basically 0% unemployment. So absolutely. If you're like 98 90 97% of the people you'll, you'll have a job. So right now, be interesting to see if that changes, but even in bad times, you know 90% of the people are employed. So my question is how far do you see this going? Rebecca and I were talking at the top of the our segment. In many ways you're, you're basically, you're, you're automating mundane tasks that already exists. So they're known processes. Okay. It's important you're saving money, you're freeing up undifferentiated heavy lifting. You use Gavin's term, but how far do you see this going? Do you see an opportunity to really create an automation fabric across the company? Have you guys started to think about that? Absolutely. I think >>I see it going pretty far actually. We've kind of just scratched the surface. One of the reasons why I'm here at this conference is that look at what are the new products coming out, new products and features. We're at a juncture where we need to understand now how to scale all of these solutions across the enterprise and how do we ensure also not only that things are automated, but that we are following all our governance risk and compliance procedures so that, you know, when the comptroller, our internal controls group says, you know, you're doing these, automating these financial transactions, what are you doing to make sure you're protecting the integrity of the systems as well? So I'm excited to see that the UiPath has invested quite a bit in things like information protection, security, management of bots and things like that. So that's going to help us. Um, the other thing that we, the other area that we have not fully deployed is around artificial intelligence and machine learning. So those solutions will actually help us and will give us the capability to really further automate and leverage things and ease more easier than what we do today. Most of the solutions that we've deployed are more algorithmic based, rules-based. Um, whereas some of the things that we saw about extracting semi-structured data, tempted template lists, you know, data processing, that's gonna be the next big area that we need to look into. >>So scale makes sense. Cause if you can take something that one person is saving some money on and you can scale it across the organization, I don't know how many employees Chevron has. It's a lot. Absolutely. >>Oh yeah, yeah. Miss benefit to 160 countries. You know, there's folks still the, the automation that we ran for the finance department has been mostly for the central finance groups, corporate finance, but there's financial groups all over the world with Chevron that are looking that also doing similar data processing. We haven't even gone out there yet as much as we want to. Um, but I think what we want to do is go out there this time with artificial intelligence and machine learning features of the, of the platform. So I want to double click on this. So this insecurity piece makes sense. If you're gonna scale it across, you know, 160 countries, et cetera, you got to make sure it's secure and complies. The iPad talks about a path to AI. Why is RPA a path to AI? Can you help us understand that better? Well, I think it's my connection to that. >>I was, I actually was, I was hearing, I'm hearing this talk this morning about that it good marketing and it's, you know, catches your ear. But yeah, and so I had about 20 minutes to think about it since then. I think the easy connection is that it seems, while the way they've deployed AI and ML, it's using the current UI paths UI studio, and it's a drag and drop operation for what they've, the way they're deploying AI and ML. So if you're currently using UI path studio to develop your algorithmic based automations, it's not a great leap to just bring in the AI and ML modules of UI path. >>I want to ask about that. This, this two ideas of introducing AI and ML also declining deploying bots really across the enterprise. We're really talking about change management here. And we scratched the surface a little bit saying that some employees have been happier and saying, okay, I can move over here and I can focus on these higher value areas of my career, grow my career. But there's also a great skepticism within the public about bots. I mean, we've had, we've seen the malevolent bots that really had a real effect on our election and we're seeing that in other areas of technology. How do you bring people along and say that this is a force for good and they'll trust us? Link arms with us. Bots are the future. And there, I mean, do say it, >>it's a valid point that, um, you do need to address the things where, you know, bots could go wrong, things could go rogue. You know, how did we make sure we still have control that incorrect decisions are not being automatically made. So that is a valid, that is a very valid point. And I, so I kind of go back to the whole thing about we have to have good governance risk and compliance processes supported by, uh, the flatform UI path. Um, I'm glad to hear that they made it a priority to continue invest in the platform and include governance, risk and compliance into it. Um, the other aspect from a developer, individual developer perspective is that we need to encourage the developers to put in very good checks and balances in their code to the, to develop for, you know, worst case scenarios about something happens, something goes bump in the middle of the night that your bod is able to recover or alert, you know, and, um, so, and for everything to be very transparent and audible. >>So, um, those things, I think if you do a combination of those things, I think you'll put people at ease about these solutions. How important is the SAS announcement today? Uh, in terms of a deployment model? Is that something that you know, struck a chord with you, that resident? Yeah, so, um, actually before the conference I actually, uh, registered myself for the SAS. An instance of the SAS platform and just like what, uh, they said that it takes a minute. Actually took me a minute. I wanted to say, yeah. Hey, it was just a minute. And I had, I was, you know, it was very seamless to, to develop the RPA using their SAS solution. Great. New features. So I think that has also the potential for organizations like ours that have it on prem to maybe move to a hybrid solution to so we could leverage all the new features and in the 2019 version in hybrid, because you want to maintain some kind of level of GRC compliance, that's, yeah. >>Chevron and not just sort of cookie cutter cloud and, and you know, say, and also to just to, uh, uh, we've invested a lot in the on pram and we're gonna, you know, uh, look for the, you know, get our ROI out of everything that we've done on prem, but I think maybe eventually everything's moving to the cloud. Um, so we'll probably start a journey at some point to, to their cloud version. But I think there's also, um, some, some other companies that I talked about, they do need to know how secure is the cloud version of the, of the UI path. Did you evaluate other companies besides UI path before you took on? Ah, yeah. Why are you I-PASS? I'd love to hear home. So definitely we evaluated other vendors. Um, I think the, the advantage with UI path is it's easy to use. >>Um, you know, it was a fairly, it's a fairly robust tool. Um, the, the, uh, so the concept of the studio and the orchestrator to manage your portfolio of solutions, uh, we felt that it wasn't a, it, it was a stronger product overall. When you go, you know, we've heard a lot about citizen developers and low code or no code as RPA permeates through the organization. Do you see that continuing to be an it service led? I mean, kind of an interesting role for you guys? I mean, I was saying to Rebecca before, it kind of reminds me of service now. I don't know if your service now customers that we are started on it and then you know, I don't know if you have gone into the lines of business, but it was kind of it bringing it two lines of business. Is there a similarity there and do you see RPA as pretty much? >>Very much. And I'd been in it for a really long time. So I went through the days of citizen developers doing access databases or Excel macros and then they throw it over to the fence to it to support. And these things are like, they're not compliant, you know, they're there. So we've had, I was like, we were really worried about what are we going to do with all these RPAs that these folks are going to do, you know, develop on their own. Um, I think the reality is is that we need, we are trying to push innovation out to everyone. So the reality is, is that there will, there will be citizen developers and we actually just need to embrace that and let them develop. And, but the challenges as far as an ID it department is how can we set up the processes, the infrastructure, everything else to receive all these new solutions and manage it and be, be stewards of all these new solutions. >>So I think that's going to be the challenge for our it department. And I think that's going to be something that we need UI path to help us figure out is how do we scale to have thousands of these solutions without having to hire whole army of it, support folks to leverage the tools. Maybe we need RPA for it just as much as we're doing it, RPA for the business, getting the whole house in order. Absolutely. That's going to be, that's, I think that's the key to survival. Thank you so much for coming on the cures. Great. Thank you for having me. I'm Rebecca stay tuned for more into cubes live coverage and the U AIPAC.