>> Announcer: From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath FORWARD IV brought to you by UiPath. >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. We are wrapping up day two of our coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We've had an amazing event talking with customers, partners, and users, and UiPath folks themselves. And who better to wrap up the show with than Daniel Dines the founder and CEO of UiPath. Welcome, Daniel, great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm becoming a regular at theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's good to see you again. >> You are, this is your fifth... >> Fifth time on theCUBE. >> Fifth time, yes. >> Fifth time, but as you said before we went live, first time since the IPO. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> UiPath has been a rocket ship for a very long time. I'm sure a tremendous amount of acceleration has occurred since the IPO. We can all see the numbers. You're a public company now, ARR of 726 million. You've got over 9,000 customers. We got the chance to speak with a few of them here today. We know how important the voice of the customer is to UiPath and how very symbiotic it is. But I want to talk about the culture of the company. How is that going? How is it being maintained especially since the big splashy IPO just about six months ago? >> Well, I always believe that in order to build a durable company, culture is maybe the most important thing. I think long lasting companies have very foundational culture. So we've built it, and we invested a lot in the last 5-6 years because in the beginning when it's just a bunch of people, they don't have a culture. It's maybe like a vibe of a group of friends. But then when you go and try to dial in your culture, I think it's important that you look at your roots and who are you? What defines you? So we ended up of this really core values, which is to be humble. To me, it's one of quintessential value of every human being. And all of us want to work with humble people much more inclined to listen, to change their mind. And then we say, you have to be humble, but you have to be bold in the same time. This rocket ship need a bold crew onboard. So you need to be fast because the fastest company will always win. And you need to be immersed because my theory with life and jobs is in whatever you do, you have to be immersed. I don't believe necessarily in life-work balance. I believe in life-work cycles, in life-work immersion. So when you are with family, you are immersed. When you work, you are immersed. That will bring the best of you and the best of productivity. So we try so much to keep our culture alive, to hire people that add to the culture, that nicely fit into the culture. And recently we took a veteran of UiPath and we appointed her as Chief Culture Officer. So I'm very happy of this move. So I think we are one of the few companies that really have a Chief Culture Officer reporting directly to the CEO. So we're really serious of building our culture along the way. And as I said yesterday in my keynote, I think our values are universal values. I think they have the value of the new way of working. All of us would like to work in a company, in an environment that fosters these values. >> I certainly think the events of the last 18 months have forced many more people to be humble and embrace humility. Because everybody on video conferencing, your dog walks in, your kids walk in, you're exposed. They have to be more humble because that's just how they were getting work done. I've seen and heard a lot of humility from your folks and a lot of bold statements from customers as well. We had the CIO of Coca-Cola on talking about how UiPath is fundamental in their transformation. I think that the fact that you are doing an event here in person, whereas as Dave was saying earlier this week, your competitors are on webcams is a great example of the boldness of this company and its culture. >> Well, thank you. I think that we've made a really good decision to do this event in person. Maybe on Zoom over the last 18 months, we kind of lost a bit how important is to connect with people. It's not only about the message, it's about the trust. And I think we are deeply embedded into the critical systems of our customers. They need to trust us. They need to work with the company that they look in their eyes and say, "Yes, we are here for you." And you cannot do it over Zoom. Even I really like Zoom and Eric Yuan is a friend of mine, but a combination I think, and going into this hybrid world, I think it's actually extremely beneficial for all of us. Meeting in person a few times a year, then continuing the relationship over Zoom in time, I think it's awesome. >> Yeah, and the fact that you were able to get so many customers here, I think that's, Lisa, why a lot of companies don't have physical events 'cause they can't get their customers here. You got 2000 customers here, customers and partners, but a lot of customers. I've spoken to dozens and they're easy to find. So I think that's one point I want the audience to know. You've always been on the culture train. And enduring companies, CEOs of great enduring companies, always come back to culture. So that's important. And of course, product. You said today, you're a product guy. That's when you get excited. You've changed the industry. And I think, I've never bought into the narrative about replacing jobs. I'd never been a fan of protecting the past from the future. It's inevitable, but I think the way you've changed the market, I wonder if you could comment is... You had legacy RPA tools that were expensive and cumbersome. And so people had to get the ROI and it took a long time. So that was an obvious way to get it is to reduce headcount. You came in and said, short money you can actually try it even a free version. You compressed that ROI and the light bulb went off, and so people then said, "Oh, wow, this isn't about replacing jobs, but making my life better." And you've always said that. And that's I think one way in which you've changed the market quite dramatically, and now you have a lot of people following that path. >> That was always kind of our biggest competitive advantage. We showed our customers and our partners, this is a technology that gives you the faster time to value and actually faster time to value translate into much higher return on investment. In a typical automation project, the license cost is maybe 5% of the project cost. So the moment you shrink the development time, the implementation time, you increase exponentially the return on investment. So this is why speaking about our roadmap, and we always start with this high level, how can we reduce the development time? So how can we reduce the friction? How can we expand the use cases? Because these are essential themes for us, always thinking customer first, customer value and that serves us pretty well really. We win a lot in all the contests where we go side by side with other competitors. It was a very simple strategy for us. Asking customers, "Just go and test it side-by-side and see," and they see. We implement the same process in halftime, half of resources involved. It's an easy math multiplied by a thousand processes and it's done. >> When theCUBE started Daniel in 2010. It was our first year. And so it coincided with big data movement. And we said at the time that the companies who can figure out how to apply big data are going to make a lot of money, more than the big data vendors. And I think in a way now the problem with big data was too complicated, right? There were only a few big internet giants who could figure out Hadoop and all that stuff. Automation, I think is even bigger in a way, 'cause it involves data. It involves AI, it's transformative. And so we're saying the same thing here. The companies that are applying automation, and we've seen a lot of them here, Coca-Cola, Merck, Applied Materials, on and on and on, are actually the ones that are going to not only survive but thrive, incumbents that don't have to invent AI necessarily or invent their own automation. But coming back to you 'cause I think your company can make a lot of money. You've set the TAM at 60 billion. I think it actually could be well over 100 billion, but we don't have to have that conversation here. It's just convergence of all these markets that guys like IDC and Gartner, they count in stove pipes. So anyway, big, no shortage of opportunity. My question to you is feels like you have the potential to build a next great software company and with the founder as the CEO, and there aren't a lot of them left. Michael Dell is not a software company, but his name is still, Larry Ellison is still there, Marc Benioff. How do you think about the endurance, the enduring UiPath? Are you envisioning building the next great software company, may take 20 years? >> People were asking me for a long time. Did you envision that you'd get here from the beginning? And I always tell them, no. Otherwise I would have been considered mad. (Lisa and Dave laughing) So you build the vision over time. I don't believe in people that start a small SaaS company and they say, "We are going to change the world." This is not how the world works. Really, you build and you understand the customer and you build more. But at some point I realized we change so much how people work, we get the best out of them. It's something major here. And if you look in history, we are in this trap that started with agriculture. This is the trap of manual, repetitive, low value tasks that we have to do. And it took the humanity of us. And I talked to Tom Montag about with this book "Sapiens". It's interesting and that book comes with the theory that our biggest quality is our ability to collaborate. Well, our technology gives people the ability to collaborate more. So, in this way, I think it's truly transformative. And yes, I believe now that we can build the next generation of software company. >> How do you like... That's the wrong question. How are you doing with the 90-day shot clock as Michael Dell calls it? It's a new world for you, right? You've never been a CEO of a public company, the street's getting to know you like, "Who is this guy?" I'll give you another cute story. There were three companies in the early CUBE days, Tableau, Splunk, and ServiceNow that had the kind of customer passion that you have. I think ServiceNow could be one of the next great software companies. Tableau now part of Salesforce. I think Splunk was under capitalized, but we see the same kind of passion here. So now you're the CEO of a public company, except the street's getting to know you a little bit. They're like, "Hmm, how do we read the guy?" All that stuff. That'll sort itself out. But so what's life like on the public markets? >> Well, I don't think anyone prepares you for the life of a public company. (Dave laughing) I thought it's going to be easier, but it's not, because we were used to deal with private investors and it's much easier because I think private investors have access to a lot more data. They look into your books. So they understand your business model. With public investors, they have access only to like a spreadsheet of numbers. So they need to figure out a business model, the trajectory from just a split. It's way more difficult. I've come to appreciate their job. It's much more difficult. So they have to get all the cues from how I dress, how do I say this word? They watch the FED announcements. What do they mean to say by this? And I and the shim we are first time in a job as a public company CEO, public company CFO. So of course it's a lot of learning for us and like in any learning environment, initial learning curve is tough, but you progress quite a lot. So I believe that over the next few quarters, we will be in the position to build trust with the street and they will understand better our business model, and they see that we are building everything for creating durable growth. >> It's a marathon, it's not a sprint. I know it's a cliche, but it really does apply here. >> You've certainly built a tremendous amount of trust within your 9,000 strong customer base. I think I was reading that your 70% of your revenue comes from existing customers. I think this is a great use case for how to do land and expand really well. So, the DNA I think is there at UiPath to be able to build that trust with the street. >> Yeah, absolutely. Our 9,000 plus customers, it's our wealth. This is our IP in a way. It's even better than in our pro. It's our customers. We have one of the best net retention rate in the industry of 144%. So that speaks volume. >> Lisa: It does. >> Automation for good. I know you've read some of the stuff I've written. I've covered you guys pretty extensively over the years. And that theme sounds like a lot of motherhood and apple pie, but one of the things that I wrote is that you look at the productivity decline and particularly in Western countries over the last two decades. Now I know with the pandemic and especially in 2021, productivity is going up for reasons that I think are understood, but the trend is clear. So when you think about big problems, climate change, diversity, income inequality, health of populations, overpopulation, on and on and on and on. You're not going to solve those problems by throwing labor at them. It has to be automation. So that to me is the tie to automation for good. And a lot of people might roll their eyes at it. But does that resonate with you? >> It totally resonates with me. Look at US. US population is not growing at the rates that we were used to. It's going to plateau at some point. It's just obvious. Like it plateaued in Japan, in Japan it's decreasing. US will see a decrease at some point. How do you increase the GDP? If your population is declining, productivity is declining. How do you increase GDP? Because the moment we stop increasing GDP, everything will collapse. The modern world is built on the idea of continuous economical growth. The moment growth stops, the world stops. We'll go back to our case and restart the engine. So, automation is hugely important in continuous GDP growth, which is the engine of our life. >> Which by the way is important because the chasm between the haves and the have-nots, that's how growth allows the people at the bottom to rise up to the middle and the middle to the top. So that's how you deal with that problem. You asked Tom Montag about crypto. So I have to ask you about crypto. What are your thoughts? Are you a fan? Are you not a fan? Do you have any wisdom? >> I have to admit, I never really understood the use cases of crypto. Technology behind crypto, blockchain is fascinating technology, but crypto in itself, I was never a fan. Tom Montag today gave me one of the best explanation of the very same. Look, Daniel, from Americans perspective we have the dollars, and this is the global currency. Crypto doesn't have so much sense, but think about a country like Columbia or Venezuela, countries where there people don't have so much trust in their currency, and where different political system can seize your assets from you. You need to be able to be capable of putting them into something else that is outside government context. I believe this is a good use case but I still don't believe that crypto is that type of asset that you know will survive the test of time. I think it's really too much... To me the difference between gold and Bitcoin is that it's too... You cannot replicate gold whatever you... It's impossible, unless you are God you cannot create gold two, right? It's impossible, but you can create Bitcoin 2. And at some point the fashion will move from Bitcoin 2 to Bitcoin 3. So I don't think the value that you can build in one particular crypto currency right now will stay over time. But it's just me. I was the wrong so many times in my life. >> You've been busy. You haven't had time to study crypto. >> I agree, totally agree. (Lisa and Dave laughing) >> What's been some of the feedback from the customers that are here. We saw yesterday a standing room only keynote. I'm sure it was great for you to be on stage again actually interacting with your customers and your partners. What's been some of the feedback as we've seen really this shift from an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform? >> Well, first of all, it was really great to be on stage. I don't know, I'm not a good presenter, really. But going there in front of people felt me with energy. Suddenly I felt a lot of comfort. So, I was capable of being myself with the people, which is really awesome. And the transition to a platform, from a product to a platform was really very well received by our customers because even in our competitive situations, when we are capable of explaining to them, what is the value of having an independent automation platform that is not tied to any big silos that application providers creates, we win and we win by default somehow. You've seen them now. So I think even the next evolution of semantic automation, this one is very well with our customers. >> Well, Daniel, it's been fantastic having you on. We have a good cadence here, and I hope we can continue it. On theCUBE, we love to identify early stage companies. Although as I wrote, you had a long, strange path to IPO because you took a long, long time and I think did it the right way to get product market fit. >> Absolutely. >> And that's not necessarily the way Silicon Valley works, double, double, triple, triple, and that you got product market fit, you got loyal customer base, and I think that's a key part of your success and you can see it and so congratulations, but many more years to come and we're really watching. >> Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to meeting you guys again. Thank you, that was awesome really. Great discussion. >> Exactly, good. Great to have you here in person and thanks for having us here in person as well. We look forward to FORWARD V. >> You will be invited forever. Thank you, guys, really. >> Forever, did you hear that? All right, for Daniel Dines and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. This is theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV day two. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

Upbeat Music >> From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath FORWARD IV. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE at UiPath Forward IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Day 2 of our coverage. We've been getting a lot of really great perspectives on automation and how it is impacting, significantly, every industry. We're pleased to have, from the keynote stage, Junaid Amed, the corporate Vice President of Finance at Applied Materials. He's going to talk us through why you have a why-can't-we-automate-it-all attitude. Junaid, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. >> So you have a really aggressive strategy for digital transformation automation led digital transformation. Your keynote this morning was great. It was, I just thought, strategically, it was so well thought out. And then, when you got up here before we went live, you started talking about how fast the time frame was. >> Yes. >> Give the audience an overview of the strategy, what you're aiming to do and how quickly you're expecting to see change. >> Yeah, absolutely. So when we set out, when we launched about two and a half years ago, the company had doubled in size the prior five years. We were looking for it to double again. We were honest with ourselves, with the CFO and the finance leadership team, could we support the new wave of growth? And the answer is no. Okay, what do we do? We knew we had to do something, not just more things but take a complete new view on things. That's how this whole initiative got incubated. And we took a bold approach. We said, we don't want just to cover the next five years, let's cover the next 20 years. Set ourselves up to make sure we do this right for the company and for our people. So, we basically set some very ambitious goals. Which is, the key KPI that we set at our true north is, we're going to get 50 % of finance work effort, all oriented around decision support. That's what helps move the needle for the company. Sure, we have our responsibilities to close the books, to do all the transactional stuff, to do all the reporting stuff. We will do that. But that can't be the mainstay anymore. That's just table stakes. And the business is screaming for this. It's just that we didn't have the levers and the tools to be able to do it. To pivot. But given the technological advancements, we said, "This is possible now." And that's- >> I think we have to set the table here with your industry. Because you started your journey to PA automation in 2019. >> Yes. >> You participate in one of the most challenging, if not the most challenging, industry on the planet. >> Junaid: Hundred percent. >> Everybody, I don't know, maybe not the insiders but everybody else missed, absolutely no, the insiders missed it too. What was the impact of the pandemic, right? And now, chips are every part of our lives. We've got this massive chip shortage. And you know, Wall Street missed it. They said, "Oh, sell Applied Materials. Sell every semiconductor company." And then they realized, "Oh wow," kind of late into the cycle, that this is like a multi-year, perhaps a decade long transition to, maybe this never ending demand, who knows? So that's the backdrop of your business. That was driving it. What was it like inside your company? >> So Dave, you know, what we could see, obviously we couldn't predict the pandemic. We could see long term growth, right? Really tangible market inflection on the back of AI big data. If you want to say where we made a big bet as a company? We went all in on AI. Right? We believed in that growth, at a time when I think not everyone was so convinced. Okay, is this going to be- How strong is this going to hit us? So, we had the benefit of going all in on AI and saying this is another big computing wave. The next big wave of computing. Coming off of mobile and social media. And Gary Dickerson, our CEO, bet the company that we're going to enable this growth. This is real. This is going to touch the whole global economy. So yes, that's a bet, a successful bet, the company made. No one could foresee what would the pandemic do but we had the good fortune of saying we were reacting to the growth, that we were committed to service. And we knew we had to get ahead of it. So we quickly organized and got finance, our organization well positioned to successfully support the company. Now, we got hit with the pandemic. Luckily for us, we're proactive and then, you know what we did? We accelerated. >> So your move to automation was an offensive move- >> Junaid: Hundred percent. >> Not a panic move to respond to a pandemic. >> Hundred percent. What do investors want? Operating leverage. Operating leverage. >> Yeah. >> Okay. And then, right now all the models have a certain baseline. Size of company, complexity. Okay, you need a certain amount of leverage coming out of this model. The models are going to change. Those that don't change ahead of the models, they're going to play catch up. It's not a fun ride. We wanted to be ahead. >> Well, I mean, talk about operating leverage. You're a company with what? 120+ Billion dollar market cap. You've got a 20+ Billion dollar revenue and you sell extremely expensive equipment. >> Extremely. >> And then a 5X revenue multiple. That's a trailing revenue multiple. I mean that's, that's impressive. That's operating leverage. >> Yes and but the bar keeps moving. You've got to stay ahead, right? You've got to be a leader. We're a leader. We've been a leader for five decades. It's the leadership mindset, I would say, in the company and our leadership team, that really propelled us towards this. The leadership of our CFO, Dan Durn, who invested. He made a bet. No one, you know, now we're sitting here, over almost 300,000 hours automated. We didn't have the playbook when we did it. >> You created the playbook. >> We created the playbook. >> Talk to me about the appetite, because obviously aggressive leadership, bold leadership, talk to me about the appetite to be able to be able to transform so quickly. Such that when, as Dave said, you're on the offensive, such that when the pandemic came, you leveraged that as an accelerator of what you've already been doing. Because culturally, that's challenging for folks to get on board to. How did you do that? >> I have to say, it is challenging. And it's at time's it feels counter-intuitive. We were going through the pandemic. We were having a large M&A integration happening, okay and we're transforming finance. And we're a resource constrained organization. Then you tell your people, "We've got more work to do. Transformation." And you're like, "Is that the right thing to do? Isn't everyone going to leave?" But when you dig deep, you say, "How do you get mind share?" How do you, first of all, you have to get people to see the value and then you have to make sure you do it fast enough, where they want to stick around. It's counter-intuitive. "Hey, we're going to launch this new platform. It's going to take three and half years. All right everyone, we're going to do this." What happens? People are like, in-out. Okay yeah, it'll come, we'll deal with it. Then instead, you say, "Hey, we're going to transform the way we plan. Completely. Top to bottom. 10 months. We're going to do it. Here's what you're going to be at your hands- Here's what you're going to have at your disposal in 10 months, all right? Oh, by the way, we're just showing you the high level. You get to really design. What do you want?" Now, when you have credibility, street cred with your organization, and you come out and say, "I'm going to give you top to bottom agility around forecasting and you get to have input on what you really want." Now people get excited. Like, "Oh, I'm going to work 25% more but wait a second, I'm really excited about what I get at the end of 10 months." >> So, the world was betting several years ago on the consolidation of fabs. "Oh, that's bad for Applied Materials." The exact opposite happened. You know, ARM changed the model, WAYFA volume's going through the roof. Now Intel is basically following that playbook, which is wonderful, they're breaking ground in Arizona. Which is, you have these massive tailwinds behind you. So I'm interested in how you forecast that and what role automation plays in that forecasting. >> Well, if you think about it, the fundamental demand isn't changing. Capacity has to go in. People think, wait a second, so and so is going to build less or whatever, The capacity, maybe geographically, is going to get dispersed out but it still has to go in. So I think it doesn't change the fundamental demand statement. Then, how does automation play into- I just thing that the fundamental nature and pace of business is changing. For us. And our customers are going through the same. So we have to be more reactive, we have to be able to respond to their needs. That whole thing cascades down into the organization. All the way deep into finance analyst forecasting, right? So, if everyone has to work off a weekly, monthly, quarterly cadence, you're too slow. Too late. Doesn't matter how good your plan is. It's old. It's stale. We're moving into a time and era where everything happens realtime. It always happened realtime but we just never had the tools to react realtime. Now, we have realtime business performance, enterprise grade dashboards. Any minute of the day you can see what the revenue forecast is, what the margin associated with that is. Yes, when we get into the official commit cycle everything firms up but it's not the big crank, right? You're fine tuning the knobs now. Which is great. What do you want in a plan? You want greater optionality. Is there a perfect plan? Of course there isn't. What is the North Star of forecasting? Give me as much options as- viable options and then let me decide. Because there's trade-offs. There's no one perfect plan. But you were limited. It just took too long to put a plan together. So you had very small degrees of freedom around it. Viable plans. We're changing all of that. >> This might be out of your swim lane but you had a slide up today and it had the IT in the middle- >> Yes. >> So technology's fundamental. And then, you had the elephant. The Hadoop elephant in the room. So I have to ask you, you guys announced this thing earlier this year called AI to the power of X, actionable insights. I remember reading about it, it's like you're collecting data across all the estate. So I'm like, wow this is a data company. Becoming a data company. So we've been talking a lot and of course the CFO purview is the reporting and I get that. The close, daily close, virtual close, all that. But then there's this whole line-of-business data play. >> Yes. >> And I'm wondering how automation fits there. I mean, that's got to be part of the vision. >> Yeah. Now, I can't speak to the capabilities you're talking to but we are leveraging some of that infrastructure, right? We have amazing IT organization. I have to say, we within Applied, we're a latecomer. From a product, customer product standpoint, already there is so much AI work being done. So we had the benefit of leveraging some of their capabilities for finance, when we launched Agile Finance. There is a lot going on over there. I think we actually enhanced that by introducing these RPA capabilities. And we did so from partnering with, I wouldn't say partnering, IT co-piloted this with us. Fundamentally co-piloted this, okay. And now, IT is taking it to other organizations. And they're taking it to product, they're taking it to operation, they're taking it to sales. So it will have a role. Hundred percent. But they're obviously starting, over the past three to six months is when they got started. So the answer is yes, for sure but I can't speak to exactly how it plays into that specific technology. >> But you addressed the dynamic. Which is, it started in a quick wind part of the company, finance. >> Yes. >> Which is logical. That's where I first introduced RPA a decade ago. A CFO conference, right? Then that now applies to the rest of the business. They're talking about operating leverage- >> Fundamental. Yeah. Hundred percent. >> How do you get that buy-in? How do you get finance and how do you get IT to work with finance, such that IT becomes a catalyst in all these downstream reactions to get this going across the company? >> Important question. >> Well they work for you. >> They don't. >> Oh they don't. >> They don't work for us. They work for me. I'm a customer of theirs. >> Okay. >> The first person that I needed to convince that we were serious and we're going to do it is the CIO. Okay, so you ask how do you get IT bought in? Well first thing, you have to get them in the tent. This is not about, "Oh, can you go do this for me? I need this from you. Can you do that?" Too slow, okay? This RPA, especially RPA, fundamentally, is such a, it's a technology that really needs to get embedded throughout the IT operating model. So you really need IT co-piloting this with you. This is how we did it. We said we're going to learn together. This is a must have for finance. We believe strongly this is going to become a must have for the enterprise but we're going to make the investment. In that must have for the enterprise, IT has to play the roll, right? So we started this together and we learned together and they've been fundamental in our being able to get to scale in 12 months. >> How do you federate governance? Who in the organization, what part of the organization owns governance, if you will? >> Yeah. So we created, established an RPA COE. They own the governance, the policies, the processes. Then, obviously there's a role to play for the business side. So we finance a business organization to them and there's roles to play. We actually, like I showed today in the presentation, there's multiple other players across the enterprise that have to vet these automations, right? Especially in finance. We have to be SOX compliant, we have to be data privacy compliant. We set all of those processes up. So, multiple parties have to engage but engage in an efficient way. >> We're seeing the CFO role emerge. I think of you as a CFO. I mean, I just use that umbrella, emerge as an innovator. I see this all of the place now, especially in Silicon Valley. You look at a company like Snowflake, I don't know if you know Mike Scarpelli but he kind of changed the world of software in some ways. So you're seeing very innovative CFOs emerge, that are technology savvy, they understand the operating leverage, we've used that term several times today, that you can get out of technology. It just reminds me, I don't know how long ago it was when Nick Carr wrote the book Does IT Matter. It seems like technology has never been more important. Along with people and process, of course, but in terms of creating that operating leverage, it's really a key part of the equation, the playbook going forward. >> I think it is a mindset change. We're trying to drive mindset change, right? But it's also, I think, come about because I think technology has become more friendly to non IT people. I think that's a fundamental driver. All these SaaS platforms in the market place, right? What did they design for? Business users. Of course IT has a very prominent role in that whole process and supporting it and implementing it. But the target audience is business users. What was the target audience for ERP? IT. Okay. Fundamental, the technology is changing by design and you're seeing now the impact of that. Where, "Hey wait, I can do this. I can do this by myself." Okay. IT always has been and will be a very important partner. They will service your data needs. This is how we're setting up the collaboration, right? But we really want the finance users to be able to iterate, model, analyze on the fly, in the moment. And they need to do it alone. >> Self serve, yeah. >> That's it. >> Self serve in realtime. I think one of the things, you mentioned it this morning, you mentioned it on our program and one of the things we've learned in the pandemic, that realtime and access to realtime data is no longer a nice-to-have. >> Yes. >> It's really a business critical element of any industry. >> Hundred percent. >> When do you think you'll put crypto on your balance sheet? I ask all the CFOs. >> He's been asking everyone that. >> There's an easy answer. I'm not authorized to answer. Above my pay grade. >> That's a good answer. >> That's good. >> Junaid, thank you so much for joining us. Talking to us about the transformation at Applied Materials, how you're partnering with UiPath to achieve that and the aggressive strategy that you've set out and congratulations on the success of it. We'll look forward to see what's going on in the next couple years. >> Great story. >> Of course. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE at UiPath Forward IV. Day two of our coverage. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> (Announcer) From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCube covering UiPath FORWARD IV, brought to you by UiPath. >> Good afternoon. Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We're on day two of our coverage. We've been talking a lot about automation, all of the opportunities that it's uncovering across industries. We're now going to be talking about a big company undergoing its own automation-led digital transformation. Joining us next, Mariesa Coughanour, head of Automation Advisory Services at Cognizant. Mariesa, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here today. >> So let's talk. So Cognizant is a part, both a partner and a customer of UiPath. >> Yes. >> We're going to talk about you in the customer realm today. Cognizant is undergoing its own automation-led digital transformation. Let's talk about that. Talk to me about some of the business outcomes that are, that you're expecting, how it's going to transform the employee experience, the customer experience. >> (Mariesa) Sure, absolutely. We actually started working with automation ourselves back in 2018, where we just put in a CoE, we said we want to drive it into our business operations. But about a year ago, we said, let's go further. I really wanted to play with all of our employees. We wanted to empower them. We talk about citizen development, of robot for every person. And we know that that's really the future. That's where we're going. We're digitally transforming our organizations. And so what we did is we sat down and we worked really closely with UiPath on how do we do this? What kind of training do we need? We're going to need some process, some governance in there. And so we put that in place and, you know, we said, let's get this going this year. So we went out, we did, our first Hackathon, went really well. It was Bring Your Own Bots. So BYOB, so, fun themes. And we got some good savings. We actually drove over 10,000, close to 20,000 hours back into the organization. And we said after that, let's go a bit bigger though. And we did what's called Game of Bots. So obviously we know where that came from, right? And we said, we're going to go a little bit longer and we want to go bigger. So we went and had 2,500 people participate over eight weeks. We built over a thousand bots. And guess what? We drove over 200,000 hours back into the organization in just eight weeks. So super big success story. People loved it. Our teams were excited. We recognized over 200 people out of that with team awards, who submitted the most ideas. And even our top leadership said, let's do a presentation. So the guys and gals who had the top, biggest impact automations got to meet with our top senior leaders and present out to them. It's been awesome. And now we're starting to move that force. We're scaling bigger. We're actually going pretty big in Cognizant. We have some big goals right now. >> That's a gob of hours. Game of Bots, get it? GOB. >> (laughs) >> Come on, with me. >> It is a gob of hours. >> How do you measure the hours? Is it a back of napkin kind of thing? We ask people, Hey, how much, how what, how do you actually measure it? >> No, we actually track it. We could see how many hours people were doing a certain tasks and things that they do every day, whether they're running reports, submitting claims for a customer. And so we're able to see that that time is actually going down. We're faster. We get better quality. People were also able to get hours back in their day so they could do more value added work in the organization. So we actually do track it. And we're able to really measure those tangible outcomes for the teams. >> Sounds like you guys have been moving pretty quickly on this. >> We are. >> So the appetite at Cognizant was there, the culture was there to embrace it. Those are probably, I imagine, two big facilitators of being able to move at the speed and the scale, >> Yeah >> that, with what you're doing. >> Culture was there. We're really digitally savvy. I would say we're digital at heart in Cognizant. We are, we're really a tech company and we really focus on how to be at the forefront of all things when it comes to technology. But we said, we also want to transform how we work. So starting to shift the conversation from, you know, do you want to automate, to why not? How do we actually start talking about, you know, I have this to do list, but you know what, actually, we can improve if we did some of this other stuff instead. So let's free up that time, but use automation there and we can actually grow things. We can add more value. We do all that stuff on your to-do list that I think everybody has and they want to get to, but you get caught up in your day-to-day job all the time. So we're actually getting people to be more excited about and have a real voice. And I actually think that's important. Is that, it's not just about giving people the tool, it's about shifting our culture to really embrace digital, embrace this technology, because we're trying to transform how we all work. And we want to lead by example. >> So we talk about BPO. Business Process Optimization, right? It was kind of the buzz word of the '90s and early 2000s. A lot of times it meant putting in SAP. (chuckles) >> (Mariesa) (laughs) Yeah. >> So that's evolved. And there's some companies that would say, "Hey, we specialize in that," technology companies, obviously, >> (Mariesa) Yep. >> you know, SI's as well. How do you think about the difference between end-to-end enterprise automation and, and sort of traditional BPO? >> I think it has to come together a bit, is one thing. So when you do the BPO, or you do shared services, or you outsource some of the work. We actually put into those contracts, because we do a lot of that for our customers. And we put in automation. The step we took further was we actually started to empower people to actually build the automations themselves, which meant we actually had to work with customers too. So they knew we were doing this. We wanted to make sure they understood, they were comfortable. We put any controls in place that they also needed, to make sure that, you know, we didn't impact any of their services. We want to make it better. We want them to feel nothing but bigger, better results in outcomes. And then as you think about the enterprise side, we have to compliment, because a lot of those processes do feed back into how you run a business. And so we focus on how do you bring both of those stories together so that you're driving synergies across the board. And actually some good lessons learned along the way because some of this stuff becomes reusable. You have best practices you could share across the board. And we want to make sure that we are connecting the dots from the shared services BPO work, back into the enterprise because really a process is end to end, an organization. And we want to help people think that way and also get the results that way too. >> Is that end to end automation, at enterprise automation, more tech heavy, or, or maybe it's tech light in a way, whereas BPO is maybe a lot more, sort of, lean thinking, a lot more chalkboard. Are we deep into the, so I, sometimes, you're saying they have to come together. >> They do yeah. >> But from, from where I guess is, is what I'm trying to better understand. >> So I would think about it this way. When you think about a process, right, from when you even placed an order, the whole way through when you fulfill it for a customer. There's work that we, we do outsource all the time, right? So maybe it's the, the PO process, some of the order transactions from the payment, but you also have the pieces is actually touching the customer, too. You have the pieces that are fulfilling the order. So we say end to end, that is really thinking about that beginning, from a conversation with the customer, the whole way to when we're delivering. And I do think there's a lot of technology. That is something I think everyone gravitates to because there is a lot. Especially if you're going to go end to end, you have to be able to take in documents. You have automation. You're not going to know all the rules, no matter how many times you ask, you're going to need machine learning to be able to help figure it out and get smarter as what, as you go along the way. But as you're putting this into place, what's important is: as you're thinking about, kind of, transforming that business so that they're feeling the results the whole way through, because if you just focus on one, you might create a bottleneck, right? You might've got super fast, but the guy who's going to get the work from you, they're going to feel like, oh my goodness, there's all this work on my plate. So we really want to make sure that we create that seamless experience for everyone across the board, as we put it in. >> And how does UiPath, help facilitate that? >> Across the board, I mean, we were sitting down, we were laying out our program. 'Cause we're actually trying to get to 60,000 strong. So we have 7,000 trained today. We're going to get to 60,000. That's our plan. So we're working very closely with UiPath on what does that training that you need to have in place? What's that model? How do we get people comfortable? Because one thing you'll find is not everyone's in the same spot. Some are going to jump in, dive right in, give me the tool. I want to build. I love this. Others might need a little bit more confidence boost. They might need more handholding. And I think that's really important. And it's probably the one thing I would add too, as you do talk a lot about the technologies, we put it in, but it's the people at the end of the day, it's how you help them adopt, feel comfortable with this technology and really embrace it. That's really going to be the difference on whether, how fast you get down that line for transformation. >> Is it a classic bell curve? You got your 10% early adopters, you got a big fat middle, and then you've got some laggards who come along. >> It kind of is. And I think what's important is that middle is all up in how you do it because 10% are always going to love it. You're always going to have a few people, they're a little extra nervous maybe. But in the middle, if you really think about it, and you're able to put in that culture, you're able to put in your leadership is engaged. You're putting us in gamification, make it fun. That's what we found is, if we got people really having fun up front with it, it gives people a reason to be a part of it. And also, why don't we let people partner up? We can give them the technology, but if someone's not as comfortable, let us do teams. Let's meet people where they're at and then move them along this journey. And let's try to accelerate the best we can. >> How did you gamify it? Crypto. No. (chuckles) >> (laughs) >> (laughs) No, no crypto. But I will say we have some really cool prizes and people were super excited to get to do the presentations because they got to show their, their bots live, their creations, to the team. And I think that was important. Not everyone always is able to capture all the results, but we wanted to actually talk about like, what were the ideas, share it across the board. Cause it also generated ideas. because what you'll find is, when you hear something like, you know what, that's kind of what I do. Wonder if I could do some automation too. At least submit an idea, and then, maybe they're moving down the line, they're getting their hands on the technology. And I think that's how we all push the needle forward and move this along faster. >> One of the most important things about automation is letting people be able to move away from the mundane, the repetitive tasks, that they probably don't enjoy. And being able to focus more on their core competencies or more strategic initiatives that really make them more relevant to themselves and to their company. And it sounds like you guys have achieved that pretty quickly and, and you have an aggressive plan >> (chuckles) We do. >> to go from 7,000 to 60,000. >> Yes. And that's really the power of automation, if you think about it. We all have things in our job we don't like to do. I don't know about you guys, but there's things that I'm like, oh man, like, can we please automate this? Expense reports, for example. All about automated expense reports. (laughs) But it's really about freeing people up. Think about it. These people went to school, they often have degrees and things, and they do get caught in a lot of the manual things, downloading reports, consolidating data, you know, submitting spreadsheets and forms. Imagine if we're able to make that easier for people, we give them what they need to do their job. So that all that stuff you would like to do, that you know would improve things. You know would make the company better. The culture better. Heck, maybe it's a new product that people know would be really awesome to go build, but everyone feels like they're so busy. They don't have the time to do it. I mean, that's one of the big values of automation. Is this value creation conversation that you get to have with people. And you get to start asking 'why not' a little bit more. >> You've mentioned a couple of times the IDC presentation this morning. And we were talking about earlier, and the pie chart of, of, of value benefits was cost savings, which was very large, new revenue, which was very large. And then I think 15% was quality improvements. And that, I think that's an underappreciated slice of the pie. Somebody, I think years ago, of the UiPath FORWARD said to me, I can very inexpensively apply Six Sigma to business process. >> (Mariesa) Yeah. >> And I could never afford to do that before RPA. And, and so I wonder if you could talk to the quality impacts that you're seeing. >> Absolutely. I actually spent a lot of time in Lean Six Sigma in my early career days. And one of the things about it too, is when you're doing automation, we actually asked that question upfront, can we just simplify, can we just stop doing this? Because you don't want to automate a bad process either. So you want to ask some of those questions. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> But you're spot on. There's a ton of quality benefits that you get from automation. And one of the things I've actually seen is if you focus on some of the quality upfront, process gets better. Get better impact, as when you get faster. If you have better quality, and get faster, you also get your cost out targets. And I, that really matters because quality also, beyond being able to drive the cost out, it also helps a lot with the experience that people face. Customers are frustrated if they have poor quality, something doesn't work the way it's supposed to, a site's not working the way it should. And also even employees, they go, how many times, if you try to do something and you try to follow a process and something's hung up or who knows what happened, right. It's frustrating. So if you're able to improve the quality in the process, not only do you get the cost savings, but you get these, it's softer tan, there's still tangible experiences that get better and actually motivates people to want to do more. >> And those motivated people are probably dealing with customers much, much better. >> Yes, yeah. >> I mean, it's, I always think the employee experience is so, is, is a critical component. >> It is. >> But the customer experience. So how has the customer experience improved at Cognizant as a result of building in automation and enabling all these people? >> Yeah, they're loving the results because we're giving them back efficiencies in their process immediately by putting this automation in. These are quick impacts they're feeling and we're able to do more for them as well. So we're actually having conversations now on how do we drive more efficiencies for you and also, you know, how can we do more? Is there more volume of work? Is there more we could be doing to add value back to your organization? And that's what you want to talk about with customers is we're able to give you this value. And by the way, we actually did X for you now as well, because we knew you needed it. And we have the capacity to do this for you. So it's a really positive conversation, but we did have to upfront talk to them about it, to make sure that we, everyone was on board. They're comfortable. And we're continuing to have those conversations because you know, sometimes you're in a regulated business and we did put a little extra control in. Absolutely okay. But we want to be able to drive these efficiencies back for them. So they feel it in their own operations internally too. And it hits their bottom line and oftentimes helps their employees too, because we interact with them. So those downstream benefits and sometimes even upstream get some nice returns there as well. >> We've heard from, well, we're going to have Daniel on soon. He's the CEO. We've of course heard from CFOs. We've, that's kind of one of the main springs of RPA in the early days. We've heard a lot more CIOs at this event and we have a CTO coming on later. Are these C suite executives totally aligned in their objectives? Do they have they have different agendas? What are you seeing in terms of serving the C suite? >> Yeah. They're all going to have a little bit different agendas, right? Cause that's, their roles have different objectives, but they all align back to the strategy, obviously, for their company. But they're going to have portions of it that they're trying to drive and deliver. What we do see is that there's still some merging that needs to happen between the operations, the more business focused side and the more technical side. But we do, we're starting to see that convergence happen. Because what happens is, is that, you have these technologists, who really are going to have to help move you forward. We're, you know, we're applying AI, ML. Very technical technologies, and we want to make sure we do it right, that we put the right governance in. And we think about the security that we have to have in place for this too. And but we also have the business outcomes and coming together is where you really see the results. If you look at all of those that have reached true maturity, it's where you see these agendas aligning a bit more because you also have to shift the culture too. And it's a collaboration point. You need to be able to have the tech savvy folks. It helps bring them along this journey, but you also have to have the business depth as because you're looking at a process and you're going really deep into it to apply the technology. So it's when people partner is when we really see the results become more exponential. >> So digital transformation, you know, we hear that term a lot. And automation-led digital transformation. >> Yep. >> I hear a lot of data led digital transformations are those parallel tracks, or they can talk a lot about convergence. >> Yeah. >> Are they? I mean, they're not competing. They're obviously very much related. How do you see the data agenda and the automation agenda coming together. >> They have to. Because you really need good quality data to be able to enable your automation at the end of the day. And, but they actually play nicely together. You can actually use automation to help go back and improve your master data management too, which is the core of your information because that's actually where a lot of the struggle sometimes comes, is in the quality of the data that everyone has to work with. So you see the data agenda working on, "How do I clean this? How do I get more insightful, predictful information?" And then from an automation standpoint, how do I then use that to go take action? So all we see is you bring it together, to be able to identify where do you need to get in the process? How do I get the right information? So the automation also is proven data behind it, that we drove the outcomes, because that's where you take it to the bank at the end of the day. Is that you see it in the data itself. But I think one of the things I've seen with automation that helps drive the digital transformation conversation is, the business and IT teams are coming together and having a joint conversation now. People are excited. They're understanding it. I think that's why people jumped on with RPA so quickly, was because they're like, I get this, this is rule-based, this is my business process. I just tell it what to do. I'll take that. I want to do that. And so people got excited about that. And then they said, let's do more. How do I make it more intelligent? How do I help it do things in my process that it's harder for me to explain because there's just so much information here. There's so many nuances. Well, we have the technology can help make it more intelligent, smarter, and learn, so that we're able to drive that back into the business itself to transform. >> You mentioned Master Data Management is, is the data agenda as it relates to automation, primarily reporting, is it moving? Is it transcending reporting into the building of data products, for example, data services that can be monetized either within Cognizant or in your customer base? >> So it's really evolving. I would say some start with reports. That's easy. That's where we'll start, but I'll just kind of give you maybe a little example. So we have a customer and we work with them. So they have customers where they need to, when they call in, the sales folks and the contact centers, they have to upsell. So they work with a lot of different restaurants and different, maybe, bars and, you know, different companies that have different type of like beverages and things like that. So we worked with them to show, how are they performing today with all their sales reps? And then we started to use some automation to be able to get them more helpful information the moment the customer's calling in. And we also did some semantic analysis on a voice, how people were, how were they sounding? How was their tone? Were they happy? Were they upset? Were they sad during the call? And we fed that information back to those teams, back to those managers, and went back even to their training programs. What they actually saw was a ton of top line growth. They saw all of their metrics starting to get better, and they also start to get more predictive on ways that they can use more data to drive the support for those teams and their customers. Like for example, if you know holidays are coming up or a certain time of year with weather, we're able to actually put that type of information in and helps those sales reps better serve their customers. >> Last question, some of the announcements that came out yesterday and some of the news today about UiPath, what excites you about the technology and how it's going to continue to enable you to, to foster this new culture that you've shifted? >> I think, so one thing about UiPath that we've always loved to be able to partner with them as we're still customer centric. And you see that in every announcement that they're doing, and also they're focused on this true process transformation, intelligent end to end thinking, because I think a lot of times when we've had conversations most get stuck in kind of point solutions. And that's just because people are trying to solve today's problems. But with where UiPath is moving and where we want to move to, is how do we help you to really transform how people work? We know automation is a part of our future. We know it's going to be how we work in the future. And we love about UiPath is to really think about how do we integrate it? How do we make those connections? So we can drive the bigger results, we can make it easier for people to adopt and really embrace it because we need to bring the people along this journey and we need to be able to actually impact our processes too, so we can transform them. So I think that's one thing that's been really exciting is just watching them in general. Involved with the announcements the last couple of days, we really see them continue to push that needle. >> Excellent. Well, Mariesa, thanks for joining us. Talking to us about the automation-led digital transformation at Cognizant. Good luck raising your trained individuals from 7K to 60K. It sounds like the momentum is there. The culture's there. We can't wait to hear what happens next! >> Awesome. Thanks again for having me today. >> Our pleasure. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio. UiPath FORWARD IV is the event we're covering. We'll be right back with our next guest. >> (bubbly outro music)

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

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

>>from the bellagio hotel in Las Vegas >>it's the >>cube >>covering Ui >>Path Forward four brought to you >>by Ui Path. >>Welcome back to las Vegas. The cube is live with you. I Path forward four at the bellagio lisa martin with Dave Volonte. We're gonna be talking about you I Path integration suite, we have a couple of guests joining us here. Mark Jeannie is here the GM of Ui Path, formerly the co founder and Ceo of cloud elements and Peter Villeroy also joins us Director of Global I. T. Automation practice at UI Path guys welcome to the program. >>Thanks lisa. Great to hear. >>So Mark, let's go ahead and start with you. The Cloud elements acquisition was done in about the last six months. Talk to us about why you chose to be acquired by Ui Path and where things are today. Some big announcements yesterday. >>Yeah absolutely. So yeah if you go back six months ago um you know we have been in conversations with you I Path for for quite a while and um you know as we were looking at our opportunities as an api integration platform. So cloud elements just to step back a little bit um was a leader in helping companies take a P. I. S integrate applications together and bed that into their into their apps and um you know I Path approached us about the combination of what's happening in the automation world and you know these these have been a society as the marine Fleming from I. D. C. Mentioned this morning integration and DARPA have been separate swim lanes and what we saw and what you I. Path approaches with was ability to combine these together and really be the first company to take and take ui automation and seamlessly connected together with A. P. I. Automation or api integration >>Peter What's been some of the feedback? We know you guys are more than 9000 customers strong now we've had a whole bunch of amount yesterday and today. What's been the feedback so far on the cloud elements acquisition? So >>there's a huge amount of interest. We've had very positive feedback on that lisa the combination of Ui driven automation and A. P. I. Uh Native Integrations is is key especially to the I. T. Leadership that I work with. Um some of whom have traditionally compartmentalized you ipads platform in the Ui space and legitimately think about their own internal processes as being having very little to do with the user interface right. And so combining Ui driven automation together with uh api integration really helps too pick them up where they are and show them the power of that kind of a hyper automation platform that can deliver value in a number of spaces. And you guys ever >>see the movie Blindside? All right. You know what I'm talking about with joe. Theismann gets hit from the blind side and then his career is over and and that's when people realized oh my gosh the left tackle for right handed quarterback is so important and it's subsequent drafts when somebody would pick a left tackle like a good left all the rest went and that's what's happening in in the automation business today. You guys took the lead, you you set the trend. People said wow this is actually going to be a huge market. And then now we're seeing all this gonna occur. And a lot of it from these big software companies who believe every dollar of software should go to them saying hey we can actually profit from this within our own vertical stacks. So what do you make of all the M. And A. That's going on in particular? There was one recently where private equity firm is mashing together a long time R. P. A vendor with a long time integration firm. So it looks like you guys, you know on the right >>side of history in this regard. Your thoughts. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean if you think about automation right you've got to obviously help people do their jobs better. But if you're going to automate a process and a department you needed connect the applications that they use that those people use otherwise you can't accomplish it. And where ap is fit in as is automation and ui automation has become more and more mission critical and it's become bigger and bigger part of enterprise I. T. Wants to get involved. And so enterprise gets involved and what's their stack. It's api based their technology stack is how you connect back is through api so more and more companies are seeing what you I path saw is that if you're gonna automate every process and every department for every person you need to connect to every application that they're using and that's why this is now becoming right. Three companies now just recently have done these types of acquisitions of bringing an integration platform in and combining them together are trying to combine them together. >>All mps are not created equally as we know. Some are sort of half baked lot of them. Many of them don't have decent documentation so there's sort of a spectrum there. How do you, how do you think about prioritizing? How do you think about the landscape? Do you just kind of ignore the stuff that's not well documented and eventually that will take care of itself. How should we think about there have always >>been layers of integration right. Especially working with the ICTy organizations. So you've got our native integrations would make it easy to drag and drop activities and then you've got the A. P. I. Is that we can consume with various activities. That area has really grown through the acquisition of cloud elements and then you've got that third layer where when all else fails, you go on to the user interface and interact with the application like a human does and what you see is that our our interaction with college elements really enables a great enhancement of that lower base level um which is mildly interesting to the lines of business very important. I Yeah, for sure. >>So the reason I asked that question is I was talking to one of your customers this big ASAP customers said I love you ipad. The problem I have is I got so many custom mods and so it's just you know orally documented and I can't I wanna put automation in there but I can't. So to those parts of the tech stack become like the main frame of you know what I mean? And just sort of they live there and they just keep doing their thing but there's so much innovation that pops up around it. How do you how do you see that? >>Well that's part of the agility that comes with the platform like you ipads is that you can interact with the very clean uh swagger documented restful aPI s and you can interact with SCP on their proprietary ages old A. P. I. S. Um Those are things that we've traditionally done decently well, but again through this acquisition we could do that on a grander scale um with bidirectional triggering and all the goodness that you >>solve that problem today that your customer and this is a couple of years ago, you can solve that problem with cloud elements. Is that right? >>Yeah, absolutely. The the ability to integrate too these enterprise platforms like ASAP you need multiple tools to do the job. Right. So ui automation is great but if you've customized ui significantly or other things like that then the A. P. I can be a great structure for it and other cases where um that api provides a resiliency in a in a scale to it that um opens up new processes as well to those corporate systems. Right? So the balance of being able to bring these two worlds together is where you can unlock more because you got >>east west automation >>that's very good overhead and now >>you're going north south with cloud elements is deeper. Right, >>bottom line from the VP of its point of view, the more that can be done from a machine to machine communication the better. So sure. >>What's the opportunity for the existing cloud elements customers to take advantage of here? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um We've continued to support, brought our customers over with us. Uh Part of our customer base has actually been a significant number of software customers. Uh cos S. A. P. S. One of them doc you sign gain site, you know, so household names in the world of software as well as large financial services institutions like US Bank and Capital One and american Express, all of them had that common need where um they wanted to have an api centric approach to being able to connect to customers and partners and leverage our platform to do that. So we will continue to support that extend that. But we see opportunities where again we couldn't automate everything for our customers just threw a PS And uh you know for example one of our major financial services institutions were working with wants to take um and provide a robot for their uh customers and commercial payments to be able to automatically kick off in A. P. I. And so that seamless integration where we can combine that automation with robots leveraging and kicking off a P. I. S automatically takes us further into automating those processes for those >>customers. So you guys six months right. Uh talk about how that integration api integration company better gone smoothly. But what was that like you guys are getting the knack of M and a talk about that, what you learn maybe what you would do differently to even accelerate further, How'd it go? Uh >>That's the best answer from you having been on the >>acquisition side. Um Well we how well it went is six months later, which I think is really unheard of in the technology world, we're introducing our combined offering you I Path integration service that essentially takes what cloud elements built embeds it right into automation. Cloud studio in the Ui Path products. We and uh it's been a global effort. Right? So we had the Ui Path team was based in Hyderabad Denver and Dallas and then we've got um Ui Path engineers working with that cloud elements team that are in Bucharest Bellevue and bangalore and with the miracles of zoom and uh that type of thing, never meeting anyone in person, we were able to integrate the product together and launch it here today >>six months is a fast turnaround time frame was how much of that was accelerated by the, by the fact of the global situation that we're in. >>Yeah, well you know in some respects that that helped right? Because we um um we didn't have to waste time traveling and we could hop on zoom calls instantly. We spent a lot of time even over zoom making sure there was a cultural fit. You I path has a, you know, not only the humble, bold and type of values but it's a very collaborative environment, very open and collaborative environment as Brent can attest to. And that collaboration, I think in that spirit of collaboration really helped us feel welcome and move quickly to pull this together. And also >>the necessity is the mother of innovation right. Uh you ipad traditionally being popular in the CFOs organization were becoming the C I O s best friend and the timing was right to introduce this kind of capability to combine with what we traditionally do well and really move into their picking up like I said the customer where they are and leading them into that fully end to end automation capability and this was integral. So it wasn't time to kick the tires but to get moving >>and my right, there's a governance play here as well because I. T. Is kind of generally responsible for governance if you make it easier for them to whatever governance systems they're using >>governance privacy >>security that now you can just connect. They don't have to rip and replace. Is there an angle there? >>Sure, yeah. So nothing is more important than I. T. Than than control and governments and change management and half of the uh conversations we're having out there on the floor are around that right um uh ensuring that all of the good governance is in place um and we have a lot of the uh integrations and frameworks necessary to help that through your devops pipeline and doing proper ci cd and test automation um and you know introducing that integration layer in addition to what we already have just helps all of that to uh move more smoothly and bring more value to our customers. >>Mark talk to me about some of the feedback from customers that you mentioned, doc Watson. S A P probably I imagine joint customers with you. I path now there you're working together, what's the what's in it for them? >>Yeah, no the feedback has been tremendous. Right, so um api automation is not new to you. I path but customers have been asking for more capability. So one of them is in that governance area that we were just talking about, right, the ability to create connections centrally enable them disable them. Right? You got mission critical corporate applications. You want to be able to make sure that those applications are being controlled and monitored. Right? So that was one aspect. And by bringing this as a cloud based service, we can accomplish that. Um the other area is that this eventing capability, the ability to kick off workflows and processes based on changes to corporate applications, a new employees added in workday. I want to kick off a process to onboard that new employee and that triggered eventing service has been really well received and then um yeah, so that I'd say with the ability to also create new connections more simply was the third big factor. Uh we created a standardized authentication service. So no matter where you are in the UI Path product line, you get a consistent way to create a new connection, whether it's a personal connection by a business user too, you know, google docs or Microsoft office or your C O E R I T. Creating a connection to uh an important corporate system. >>How about the partner? I know you guys had partner day here leading into forward for they must be stoked about this gives you a lever to even add new partners. What was those >>conversations like? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. The partners are excited about those same features but um they're also excited about something in our roadmap which we expect to be previewing early next year and that's a connector builder. So the ability for partners to uh more quickly than ever create their own connectors. That'll work just like first party connectors that we ui Path build and add them into catalogs, share them in the market place. So there's new revenue opportunities, new opportunities for partners to create reusable assets that they can leverage and yeah so um lots of things, lots of work to continue to do, right? It's only been six months and uh but that's that's gonna be a big initiative going forward. >>So integration service as you mentioned, announced at this conference, we know that that's the first step obviously accomplished as we also talked about very quickly in a six month time period. But what does the future hold for api automation and integration service? >>So um one of the key areas just continue to expose the integration service um more broadly in the Ui Path product portfolio. Now that we have this service, more Ui Path products will be able to leverage it. Right? We're starting off with studio and orchestrator but that we can all use and share that common common capability. Um The other is to make access to complex business systems easier. So you think about it right. A uh to get a purchase order from net suite might take five or six api calls to do. Well, a citizen developer doesn't know what those five or six things you have to do. So we'll be creating these business activities or just get me open purchase orders that will work seamlessly in the studio product. And behind the scenes. Well, chain together those 56 aPI calls to make that a simple process. Right? So taking the integration service and making it even more powerful tool for that citizen developer than nontechnical user as well. So that's >>development work you're going to do. >>That's what we're gonna do as well as enable partners to do as well. So it's a key part of our road map over time. Because >>yeah I mean the partner pieces key because when net suite changes how it you're creating that abstraction layer. So but that's value add for the partners. >>Absolutely. And they have that domain expertise, right. They can create assets, leveraging the UI path automation capabilities but also bring their knowledge about A. S. A. P. Or workday and those oracle ebs and those core business systems and then combine that together into assets that enhance integration service that they build and I can I can share with their customers and share with our market >>because the work workday developer is going to know about that well ahead of time. No, >>it's coming and they know better than we do. Right. That's their business. That's what they know really well. >>Nice nice value at opportunity, peter >>One of the things that you iPad has been known for is its being very and I've said this on the program the last two days, that's being a good use case for land and expand. You guys have 70% of revenue that comes from existing customers. Talk to me about the cloud elements acquisition as a facilitator of because you kind of mentioned, you know, we're used to be really in bed with the cfos now we're going to see us and we've heard from a number of your customers where they started in finance and it's now Enterprise White, how is this going to help facilitate that? Even more? >>It really helps, you know, touching on what Mark just mentioned about the citizen developer, right, just as one of many examples, the empowerment of end users to automate things for themselves um is critical to that land and expand um successes that we've been seeing and where from an I. T standpoint, the frustration with the citizen developer is, you know, maybe what they're building isn't so top notch right? It works for themselves. What we can't replicate that, but put making it easy to make api integration part of what they do in studio X is so key to enhancing also the reusability of what's coming out of there. So that c uh C O E S can replicate that across teams are globally within their organization and that's part of land and expand because you may find something that's valuable in one line of business replicates easily into another line of business if the tool set is in place >>pretty powerful model lisa >>it is guys. Thanks so much for joining us today, talking about the club elements acquisition, what you're uh, doing with integration service, What's to come the opportunities in it for both sides and your partners? We appreciate your time. >>Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. I >>appreciate it. Thank you for >>David Want I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cube live in las Vegas at the bellagio Ui Path forward for stick around. We'll be right back. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm mm.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path >>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube. We are here with UI path at forward for I'm Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante and a lovely setting at the Bellagio. We're going to be talking about automation from the CFO's perspective. Our next guest is our jet guard group financial officer at landmark group, or just welcome to the program. >>Thank you so much. Thank >>You. Before we dig into your transformation strategy and how automation is a key to that, help the audience understand a little bit about landmark. >>Absolutely. So landmark is one of the largest, uh, non-food primarily retailer in the middle east and Asia, India, and now increasingly in Southeast Asia. So we've got about 50 brands, uh, more than half of them, which are homegrown our own brands and some franchise brands. So about 2,200 stores, uh, across 20 countries, 55,000 employees. Um, so 30 million square feet of retail space >>They company. When was the company founded, >>Uh, 48 years ago, >>Legacy institution you were mentioning before we went live that you guys have been working with UI path since 2017. So talk to me about that legacy institution, embracing cloud digital transformation and automation as a, from a visionary strategic perspective. >>Yeah. So look, I mean, you know, you get so many technologies that are being thrown at you. So I would say you have packed or robotic process automation was just another one like that. So I wouldn't say it was like part of a grand strategy. You know, it comes as it looks like, Hey, this is cool. You know, in the, in the back office, when somebody showed me first 10 desks with nobody sitting on them, it's kind of spooky. So he said, Hey, this, this looks very interesting. So it started off like that, but then it has just grown because we've stayed with it. So we've amongst things in the early part of your parts customers and, and it's been phenomenal, you know, what, uh, what we're able to do with, uh, with, uh, robotic process automation. Uh, I mean, you know, I've been in this industry with my past employers, like Proctor and gamble and Cadbury, Schweppes, and all, and essentially we used to follow the part of, you know, you eliminate all the non-value add you, then try and automate whatever your ERP system, then all allowed you to automate. >>Then what's left, you consolidate, and then you find the right shore, right. It can be offshore or wherever. So that was the sequence. But I think a lot could not be automated because there are huge gaps in the systems that are being offered and you have a mosaic of systems, every company will have. Right. Um, and then we would end up doing lot more offshore or, you know, other kinds of tactics, but then once RPA showed up on the scene, it's suddenly disrupted everything because now whatever the systems can do, or when you have to move data from one system to the other or make sense out of it, that's where this technology sits. And so that's, so that's very, I, you know, we've now got a pretty large, uh, robotic process automation practice. And, and, you know, we are touching started with finance and now we are pretty much enterprise wide. So all the, >>These technologies are coming together, automation, RPA, cloud AI, they're all sort of converging. And as a retailer, I'm curious as to what your cloud strategy is and how that fits and all, there's always a lot of sensitivity from retailers that don't want to be on Amazon, maybe some do. And they say, Hey, we've, we've we compete in other ways, what's your posture in that? >>So we've also been an early adopter of cloud, both. If I talk within the UI path thing, we were, I think the first ones to put it on the cloud, because we just saw, even before you are part, uh, we saw how people could tamper with it, you know, attended robots, you know, on the desktop one. So we went on the cloud and that was good, uh, way back. But overall, the company also has a very pro you know, Val defined cloud strategy. So we are, you know, pretty much all a large part of our systems are on the cloud with Azure. >>Yeah. So, which makes sense, right. As a retailer, go, go with Azure, plus somebody, Microsoft, you know, X, such a lot of Microsoft expertise out there that you can leverage. And I got to ask you because everybody's freaked out on wall street about power automate, you know, competing with UI path. And I've told people they kind of different parts of the spectrum, but I've talked to a lot of customers this week. So yeah, we use both. We use UI path for end-to-end automation. We use power automate for a lot of our personal productivity stuff. How do you guys, do you use, uh, the power automate? How do you see those two? Yeah, >>No, I think, look, it's inevitable. A lot of technologies will keep evolving. I think Microsoft is a fantastic company. I mean, the way they perfected teams right in time, you know, and pretty, always hit, uh, a year before COVID hit teams was not ready, you know? So I think I know power automate is good. We use it, but not as you know, it's not ready for enterprise wide. So I think more, I'm not an expert in power automate yet. Um, you know, what, it kind of seemed more like when it's linked to the office automation versus linking major enterprise wide or >>Which is really where you're headed. Yeah. Talk about the results that you've seen, the higher you're measuring the return and the whole business case. When you evaluate it as CFO, >>See it being a CFO, I wear two hats. Right. I'm trying to help digital transformation. Although I must say I'm not the only one our company has. Every function is these days talking digital. Right. Because it's almost like table stakes. Yeah. Uh, you, you can't be in business a leader and we are like a leader in all the markets we are, and there's no choice, but to be fully digital. Right. Uh, but being a CFO absolutely. You know, you do look at the hard dollars. Right. Um, and initially when you're pushing any technology to any functional head or your colleague or the CEO or the board, they do want to see the dollars because a lot of softwares talk about the soft benefits. Um, I think they gotta pay for themselves. So I think it's like, yes, if I can get the hard dollars and then I can demonstrate softer benefits, whether it is the quality of work, less errors, better compliance, right. >>Or I think employee, uh, work work-life balance, right. I mean, in, in, uh, we are, uh, in a growing company we've been growing for the last four decades and there's a constant struggle to help colleagues maintain better work life balance. So I think once the basic return is off the table, everyone's talking about the quality of work enabling. And I think now we've, we are proudly talking, you know, that, Hey, we've got a lot of people, um, we've hired them. But what we are using of them is their fingers, their eyes, ears, and that's about it. Can we now get them to use their brain? So it's like, Hey, it's a freebie. You got so many people let's start using the gray matter. And that's, I think what this technology does, it takes away the Gronk and you can then tell them, Hey, analyze the data, look at it, better business outcomes. And I think that's where the real value is. >>That is, so we've heard a lot about time saved hours saved. That's kind of the key, a key metric. And you look at that as hard dollars. How, how do you translate that to the income statement? >>So, so let's put it, uh, you know, I was looking at applied science, applied materials presentation, and they had a 150,000 hours saved. Uh, I just did our math. I mean, so we've so far saved 342,000 hours per annum removed out of the system. Right. But I would say not all I can say, I took them to the bottom line. So probably 70% of that, because the rest is probably gone back to people doing more value added stuff. >>So how does it hit the income statement? Is it hit it as new revenue or cost savings or savings reduction in >>Yeah. Or are you don't hire as many as you needed to? Uh, >>Yes. That's the missing link. Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. Is I was going to need to hire or what 1,100 people hire 10 or whatever it is. Okay. Now I'm sorry. Does that, is that, does that get into a debate? Like, cause I can see a lot of people, if we don't do this, we're going to, you know, and then as a CFO, you might say let's defend that a little bit. >>Seek cost avoidance is always debated. Yep. And that's why I said, as long as you can prove that the hard dollars taken to the bottom line are visible and you can put your finger on them, then people become more comfortable saying, okay, as long as you know, I've got my payback, I've got something I can, you know, make sure that my cost line is not going up because it's very easy to do, you know, kind of say, Hey look, all this soft benefits and now your cost has also gone up. So I think once the, the, the hard dollars that you can bank are out of the way, then you can talk about costs avoided, and then you can talk about the softer benefits. Are there, there is no doubt because you try and what we do is we tell people if they're in a cell, okay, we'll shut, shut it down. >>I say, Hey, wait, well, right then, you know, but so you have four years of data on this, so you can prove it. And by the way, soft dollars are where the real money is. I don't mean to denigrate that, but I get into a lot of discussions with CFO's like, okay, show me the hard dollars first and then the hard, the soft dollars or telephone numbers. Yeah. >>Yeah. I think I look at it as an inverted pyramid. Yeah. Where you start with the cost saved, which is the smaller part of the pyramid. And then you get speed, right. Because speed is actually a big thing, which is very difficult to measure. Right? I mean, I'll give you an example in none of our largest markets, right. In the middle of COVID, they announced all products that are being imported, which is for us about 80,000 of them, um, uh, need to have a whole bunch of compliance forms on the government portal, import certifications. And you got like a month to do all that work. So now you'll get an army of 20, 30 people train them. We did nothing. We built the barns and we were ready ahead of competition. And I think, and, and life continues. Now the supply chain officer will sign on the dotted line for you saying he would have had to hire 30 people. And he, it's not easy to hire suddenly, but we were compliant and, and now that's cost avoided. But I would say a big business benefit because we were the first ones to have all our products compliant with the market requirements. That's a >>Great example. >>I think about some of the IDC data that was, did you see that that was presented this morning, looking at, you know, the positive outlook as, as RPA being a jobs creator over time. Talk to me a little bit about how you've navigated that through the organization and even done upskilling of some of those folks so that they're not losing, but they're gaining. >>I think there is, you know, you have to take all these projections with a pinch of salt, you know, I mean, saying you will, the world will save $150 billion and all, I mean, if you add all the soft dollars. Yes. But in reality, you know, I lose joke about it. If you take all the technology initiatives in a company and you add all the MPVs and that they have submitted, that would be larger than the market cap of the company. >>It's true. All the projects add up to more value. >>I think, I think, you know, we don't get carried away by these major projections, but I think some of it is true. I mean, you know, I kind of talk about the Luddites, right? I mean, when the first, you know, weaving machines game in, in Northern England, near Manchester and these Luddites, they were called, they were going around breaking down these machines because they were supposed to take away jobs. Now reality is a lot of people did lose jobs who could not make the transition, could not retrain themselves. It is inevitable. It will happen. But over time I would say yes, there have been lot more employment. So I think both go hand in hand. Um, but yes, the more one can help retrain people, get them to, you know, say, Hey, you don't need to spend the rest of your life. Copy pasting and just doing data entry. Uh, you can look at the data and make sense out of it. How much >>Of that was a part of your strategic vision years ago? >>I think years ago we knew it, but it was more, let's get these, you know, simple. When you have hundreds of people in a, in a back office, how do I get them to do more work or have slate or meet my, you know, my productivity goals? I would say it starts with that. Okay. Uh, if you start, uh, deep down because I, I am, you know, I believe in technology, I knew it, it would happen that we would eventually go from, let's say, robotic process automation to intelligent process automation. Right. Which is coming for us. It's we are able to see it, you try and sell that as the lead in and people shut down >>Because they're seen by intelligent process automation. W what do you mean? And, and >>So it's look, if I've got, uh, my robots and the tech, the RP infrastructure, which is processing whole bunch of transactions right now, if I'm able to add in some machine learning or AI, or what have you on top of it, and then I can read the patterns I can, for example, you know, we, we now have built on top of all the various security in our payment systems. If you've got a bot, which then does a final check, which goes and checks the history of that particular vendor as to what is the typical payments being done to that. And then it flags, if it's V out and it stops the payment, for example, right? So, or it goes and does a whole bunch of tests. We're building constantly building tools. So that's kind of, you know, a bit more intelligent than just a simple copy paste or, or doing a transaction >>Because why that's their job or because they it's a black box. They don't know how that decision is made. Or >>I think a lot of these have been sold previously similar technologies and things that would be, you know, the next best thing since sliced water and people have lost fit. So you got to show them the money and then take them along the journey. If you go too fast and try and give this whole, you know, people are smart enough and it, it turns them off. >>It's one of the failures of the tech industry is the broken promises. I can, I can rattle many off >>Cultural shift. It is. It is. How did you help facilitate that? See, I mean, we, we took, you know, the bottoms up and top down approach, uh, you know, the top down was, uh, I have my whole leadership team and as a joke, we locked them up in the boardroom and we got them to build bonds a long ago. And we said, let each of you, you know, download your bank statement and send yourself, uh, you know, if you say any transaction above 10,000, whatever, um, send, send an email to yourself. So as simple as that, or download the electricity bill and, and send it to your wife, you know, something like that. And half of them were able to build a bot in that couple of hours. The other half looked at it, and obviously are, you know, many of them are not as tech savvy, but it helped build the kind of it's aha moment three years ago that, wow, you know, I can build a bot. Um, for some people it was like, oh, they taught these metallic 10 bots are going to walk into the room. >>I love it. The bottom who's responsible for governance. >>So we've got a, we've got a team across it and finance. Um, I mean, somehow I have kind of, you know, created the skunkworks team. The S the center of excellence sits with me. Um, uh, but overall it's a combination and they now run governance, uh, you know, 24 7, >>Uh, you know, sorry, I got to get my crypto question. I ask every CFO's, when are you going to put crypto in the balance sheet? I know I'm teasing, but what you see companies doing this? Has it ever come up in conversation? Is it sort of tongue in cheek joke? Or what do you make of the crypto? >>Yeah, I think personally I'm a big believer, uh, but not for, uh, for a company. I think the, the benefit case of a company, we are not that, you know, we have enough other face too, you know? Um, uh, I think, uh, it's a bit further out for a company to start taking balance sheet position because that's then a speculation, right? Because, so I'm a believer in the benefit of the blockchain technology. We actually did a blockchain experiment a couple of years ago, moving goods, uh, from China to Dubai and also making the payments through a blockchain to, um, so we see huge benefits. We are working with our bankers on certain other initiatives, but I think on the balance sheet sounds like speculation and use of capital. So yeah, if it brings efficiency, if it brings transparency, which is what blockchains do, uh, I think absolutely it's, it is here to stay >>Last question. And then the last 30 seconds, or so for your peers in any industry who are it was, we saw some of the stats yesterday, the amount of percentage of processes that are automateable that aren't automated. What's your advice, recommendations to peers about pulling automation into their digital transformation strategy? >>I think, um, digital transformation can be hugely aided and accelerated if you first put RPLs, because that is the layer, which goes between the humans and whatever technology is out there or whatever you keep buying. So I think because they will be in every area, new technologies coming up, it's better to put RPA first because you can then get more benefit from whatever other technologies you're bolting on. So I would say it's a predecessor to your broader digital transformation, rather than just a part of it. >>Got it. A predecessor, or just thank you for joining Dave and me on the program today, talking about what you're, how you're transforming landmark. Good luck in your presentation this afternoon. I'm sure a lot of folks will get some great takeaways from your talk. >>Thank you so much. It's been >>Great. Our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas UI path forward for it. We'll be right back after a break.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to the Bellagio and Las Vegas. The cube is live. I love saying I'm going to say again and again, the cube is live. We are a UI path forward for, at an in-person conference. Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante. We're going to be talking about the vision of the UI path platform. We're very excited to welcome to the program. Ted kart, the executive vice president of products and engineering at UI path, Ted, welcome to the program. >>Thank you. It's great to be here with you and it's, it is great to be live. It's been so fun over the last couple of days to spend time with our customers. Uh, it's just been so great for the team and everyone, >>I can imagine what it was like for you yesterday on main stage, looking out to a standing room, only crowd for the first time in probably 20 months. >>Yeah. And that was, that was actually quite fun. As, you know, speaking to a camera, you just don't get the same energy. You got to muster all of the energy yourself. And so it was so great just to be back in front of, uh, uh, live people again, humans. >>Exactly. Well, from a customer perspective, I know that the number is now over 9,000, you guys have an incredibly high retention rate. We're talking 96 plus percent. A significant portion of revenue comes from those existing customers. We talked to a whole bunch of em yesterday. We've got more of them on today. We're hearing that validation from the voice of the customer on what UI path has been doing. Talk to us about the vision that you unveiled yesterday, strategically, what some of the feedback has been from some of those folks that are here in person. >>Great. Well, so let's start the story by looking back first and talking about the phases of the market. Uh, because I really see us entering phase three of the automation market. Uh, phase one I describe is the core RPA platform. Uh, and that was, you know, the elements of that are the runtime, the robot, the thing that knows how to execute these workflows, it knows how to do UI automation. It knows how to do API integration. It knows how to do long running workflows and interact with humans, developer experiences, low code visual developer experiences. Plus the orchestration then that that gives the enterprises, the manageability and the governance. I'd say that was phase one. Okay. Daniel and the team. Then at forward three, the last this community got together right here, the Bellagio I at the end of 2019 rolled out an expanded vision, which we talk about as the platform for the full automation life cycle and that Ella added elements of let's let's help end users engage more easily with their automations. >>They engage with them on their desktop. So they need to think of it like a start menu, like experience with the UI path assistant, they need rich user interfaces. So we introduced a low code application platform, UI path apps. They want to interact with natural language. So we integrate with chat bots. And then we find a lot of customers. When we initially start their journey, they have a lot of knowledge right away of opportunities. They see things in the call center, front office, back office, finance department, they see things to do, but then they say help us find more opportunities to automate. So we have this old discovery area to help them find more opportunities to automate. So this vision of this end to end life cycle, that that covers the core platform plus engagement in discovery. That's the journey we've been on over the last two years. >>And I think, you know, part of what we talked about yesterday was just how we're continuing to fulfill that vision. And then that set the stage for us to talk about a few innovation themes. As we look forward to two phase three, that I would emphasize, we still, we're still building out this end to end automation platform covering the full life cycle, but we do see some pretty important themes going forward. Well, we'll start with four, um, kind of four key themes. Um, one is enterprise grade platform. Uh, the second is, uh, platform expansion, you know, healthy platforms grow and expand what you're able to do with them. What developers are able to build for the notion that discovery becomes more continuous. I liken it to a nervous system for the processes and the work of the enterprise. It's always there watching, helping you find opportunities. Um, and then we talked about this last concept, which is semantic automation, which is the, I'd say the real big idea in the forward-looking vision. >>I wonder if we could, um, and your keynote yesterday, you talked about the fragmentation of the enterprise software business and of course perpetuate advice, the SAS easy button. Great. I got all these different SAS products and you're sort of creating a layer across them. Sort of a couple of questions there. Maybe you could just sort of describe that dynamic and how you guys think about it. And then I got to follow up. >>Yeah. I think if you're a historian, you look back and say in the past a lot of business process centered around the deployment of a few monolithic applications, your ERP, your CRM system. And then if somebody in another department wanted something different, another part of the process you might customize or deploy an ad-on. Now what's great about the SAS era is we have a lot more solutions that are now purpose-built toward a lot more functions. A lot more processes are being automated and that's fantastic, but what's that done is it's expanded the landscape of applications now than enterprises hold typically. And that's where you get to the issue of fragmentation. And the reality is, is the real work in the enterprise. The real work people do every day and the process, it, it spans all of that stuff. And I think as an end user, you can, you resonate with this because you will work with desktop apps. >>You will work with these SAS apps. You'll work with these line of business apps. You'll, you'll have to navigate to this one, cut some data, you know, copy it, paste it over here, you'll work in Excel. You'll send an email and you know, that type of work, nobody really wants to do that. And especially if it's something you have to do all the time. So automation, we are, in fact, not the first platform to walk in the enterprises door and say, Hey, we can help you integrate your systems. We can help you automate business process. This is, is, uh, you know, this goes back to the early two thousands and the arrival of, you know, the, the first-generation integration prod products. So what's so different about RPA and these automation platforms and our automation platform. The difference is really being centered on UI automation, because it's got three key attributes that I think are super important to understanding why this is such a different phenomenon. >>The first is because it, it automates via the UI. It can capture the actual work people are doing so we can emulate the actual work people are doing that's number one and that's critically important. Uh, the second thing is it can reach anything your way. If you've got an integration problem, you don't want connectivity to 82% of your systems. You actually want to cover everything you need to, you need to cover. And UI automation can reach anything that has a user interface. Uh, and then the third thing is because it it's emulating the work people do. It's very intuitive to develop for and as such. The developer experience is a very easy to use. Uh, don't require traditional coding skills. Customers tell us that unleashes more capacity and they get really fast time to value and that's kind of a win-win win. And the interesting thing then is if you think about it, the business wants to move forward at a certain rate, but that applications estate is only going to move forward. It's going to move forward kind of at its own pace as well. And this automation layer can really deal with the sheer between that. It can help you move forward quickly up here while you're waiting for, you know, at this layer to evolve as well. Uh, >>I wonder if you've mentioned, you know, kind of history, if you look back and, and, and, and you're somebody who spent two decades plus, you know, one of the great software companies, if you think about the great software companies, Microsoft, we know how they got there with the PC ascendancy and then took it to new levels. Oracle SAP, Salesforce is vying to become a next great software company. Go. McDermott wants to take service now in that realm. And I have a sense that with your vision of a fully automated enterprise, you guys could aspire to be a next great software company. I think, you know, you're, you're, you're humble, but you're bold. So when somebody who has a historical perspective on great software companies, what do you, what does it take architecturally specifically to be that next great software company? >>Well, it's a great question. Uh, you know, I, I said yesterday to the audience that, you know, the reason I came to UI path is because I do believe this is one of the most significant platforms of this time. And I do believe as we just talked about it's UI automation is the central element. That's really making it different. Now, all these other technologies and capabilities are super important. Uh, we announced yesterday a new service in our platform called the UI path integration service. Uh, we acquired a company named cloud elements six months ago, uh, an API integration company. And that is now landing in the UI path integration service. Uh, we have always had API integration as a part of our platform, but now we've got this richer catalog, we've got new services for developers, and that only expands what they're able to do. >>Um, and, and as we talked about the themes, the future themes of innovation, we talked about this platform expansion, and I served as this historian, you know, healthy, vital platforms grow, and they grow on their own just naturally because there's always some adjacency where if I bring that in, I can enable my community to do something different. They can build something different. And so that was why, for instance, let's embrace more API integration surface area. Why did we enter low code application space? It it's because we thought there was a lot of power for our community to now be able to re build rich user experiences. Um, why did we bring AI and ML in as a first-class citizen with an ML ops platform? We're not trying to be a general hosting of bottles, but we want to make it easy for those skills to be used. >>So there is a thing just about just continuing to expand what you're able to do, but there's an important thing you gotta do as well is you got to stay true to your personas and your user community. So anytime we do this, we think, yes, we're bringing in API integration, but we're not trying to be an I-PASS. We're trying to serve our RPA developer community. And we have to be true to that developer experience and the thing that's made us special. So we really focus on landing it in an integrated way, really helps our community. Do, do you know, more and more with the platform >>You're seeding a new breed of developer, or maybe your ascendancy is coinciding with a new breed of developer. >>Let's say there's a general trend. And we, we labeled the general trend. Now, low code, no code, which I frankly think is this historian is, is just a new way. We're talking about the idea that we, you want to continue to simplify developer experiences. And if you do that, everybody likes it. And it does. It enable you to grow the pool of developers that you have. And in our case, there is a new, you know, this is, this is a large and growing discipline. If you looked on LinkedIn community of RPA developers, there are new personas, new jobs being built around this platform. Today, we have, we're blessed with a very, very large community of developers. This is a new piece of, yeah, I think those are the, those are the range we're talking about. Yes. Um, and it's amazing asset for us as well as we do new things. Uh, we've got community ways they can engage with community builds previews. It gives us a lot of expertise to tap, tap into is we're deciding to do new things, >>Ask how influential that large community is and the product direction roadmap, the vision execution, how influential is that >>They're immensely influential. And that, that goes from when we're early on and we're ideating, and we're talking to our customer advisory boards or customers one-to-one, or as features are starting to come out in community previews. Uh, customers are an instrumental part of that journey. I think that's, this is one of the things. If you spend any time with Daniel at all, uh, you'll understand how important customer centricity and true customer centricity is to him. Um, and I think that's, uh, I only joined the company 18 months ago, but I, I walked into a company that I really understood knew what that meant. The words are easy to say, but really being that and having customers shape who you became, I think that's something that the company has done actually quite well. >>The crowds CrowdStrike announcement was notable. Um, I'm interested in how you're integrating that. I know, you know, that's endpoint security. I know you've done a lot of work historically in identity access with zero and doing some deep integration there, or how should we be thinking about the CrowdStrike gets it's more than just a press release. It's it's, it's there's engineering going on there. What can you tell us? >>Yeah. Yeah. That's a very important thing for us. We, I talked about another one of the key innovation themes is enterprise grade platform. And that one might seem like, well, of course, he's going to say that, but we do want our customers to understand, we know this is a mission critical platform, and you know, now it's now integral to the work people do. It's integral to the process. If it ever fails them, that's a mission critical failure. Yeah. And so we were making deep investments like this. Um, this partnership had CrowdStrike is about delivering a solution that an endpoint protection solution that understands robots and they are not unique in that. Unfortunately, they are subject to a lot of the same forms of attacks that humans can be subject to. Um, and, but they're also unique and then need unique protection. And so, as we came together with CrowdStrike, one of the important elements for us was let's enable their, in this case, Falcon platform to understand robots and let's do it as a seamless part of that experience. >>And so there's a few elements we deliver together. They, they have a lightweight agent that gets deployed with a robot. Um, and then most importantly, we provide metadata. We provide data back to log information, back to CrowdStrike. So now a security analysts sitting in the Falcon console knows when there's an activity that's related to a robot versus related to a human. And then there's also specific mitigation actions that are relative to a robot. You may want to just block that instance of that automation from running again, or you might want to block all instances from running again. And so there's specific mitigation there specific, um, visibility we're providing to the security analyst, but then it's all done in a seamless way. The customer, when they have 2110, they have the latest Falcon release. There's no extra licensing. They just have those two products and it just works. >>How much was that accelerated the last year, 18 months we've seen the tremendous change in the security landscape. Um, ransomware has become a household word. Everybody knows about colonial pipeline. We're seeing so much activity there. It's a matter of when customers get hit, not if how much of the events of the last year have accelerated that partnership with CrowdStrike and how you're enabling RPA to be that protected asset that the organization needs to ensure >>It's protected. It'd be fantastic. If we ever got to a point where we felt like, you know, security was a solved problem and it won't ever be. Um, and, uh, you know, and this is why we felt like we needed a world-class, uh, company to partner with who's an expert in this landscape and they do their part. And we do our part. Um, that was why we took this approach because we know we're not going to build, we're not going to have and build that expertise. We know about robots. We know what we know about that side of thing. They understand security. And by working together, we can connect the dots and we can hear everything. They understand that we're never able to replicate. How unique is that, that, that sort of robot >>Optimized, you know, sort of security, >>Uh it's as far as I know, it's the industry's first solution. It's important to know that endpoint protection does provide protection for robots today. Sure. And all of them do, but it doesn't know about them. It can't tell the security analysts that was an action. A robot took versus a human. Um, and it doesn't know how to take specific mitigation steps. And that's the exciting thing to we've done here. So it's, to my knowledge, that's the first point security offering built for, as we say, the robot workforce. >>And so you bring engineering resources to, to create that value and, and, and collaborate with CrowdStrike. Yeah. >>Yeah. We, we both did work on both sides. It's, it's been a really fantastic partnership and it was great. We had a video from their chief product officer as a part of our discussion yesterday. It's been fantastic relationship and partners. >>So it's one of those tricky thing. I mean, that's IP that you're developing with cross at the same time, you know, you've nailed it, right. It's never going to be solved, but, but one of the ways in which we can counteract the adversaries who are extremely capable is sharing. So it was that IP that gets shared or is that IP that you keep for yourself? >>We're both doing what we do, their IPS, their IPR IPS, our IP. And so it's all, it's all good there. >>Focusing on your core competencies. Well, Ted, thank you for joining Dave and me today, talking about the vision where things are going, the excitement, the partnership expansion, a lot of that activity since the IPO, we appreciate your time today. >>Very exciting times. And then as I said at the open it's, it's great to be here with you. Great to be live. >>Great to be alive. Really is for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. We're live in Las Vegas with UI path forward for, at the Bellagio, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Good morning. Welcome to the cubes coverage of UI path forward for day two. Live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Velante, Dave. We had a great action packed day yesterday. We're going to have another action packed day today. We've got the CEO coming on. We've got customers coming on, but there's been a lot in the news last 24 hours. Facebook, what are your thoughts? >>Yeah, so wall street journal today, headline Facebook hearing fuels call for rain in on big tech. All right, everybody's going after big tech. Uh, for those of you who missed it, 60 minutes had a, uh, an interview with the whistleblower. Her name is, uh, Francis Haugen. She's very credible, just a little background. I'll give you my take. I mean, she was hired to help set Facebook straight and protect privacy of individuals, of children. And I really feel like, again, she, she didn't come across as, as bitter or antagonistic, but, but I feel as though she feels betrayed, right, I think she was hired to do a job. They lured her in to say, Hey, this is again, just my take to say, Hey, we want your help in earnest to protect the privacy of our users, our citizens, et cetera. And I think she feels betrayed because she's now saying, listen, this is not cool. >>You hired us to do a job. We in earnest, went in and tried to solve this problem. And you guys kind of ignored it and you put profit ahead of safety. And I think that is the fundamental crux of this. Now she made a number of really good points in her hearing yesterday and I'll, and we'll try to summarize, I mean, there's a lot of putting advertising revenue ahead of children's safety and, and, and others. The examples they're using are during the 2020 election, they shut down any sort of negative conversations. They would be really proactive about that, but after the election, they turned it back on and you know, we all know what happened on January 6th. So there's sort of, you know, the senators are trying that night. Um, the second thing is she talked about Facebook as a wall garden, and she made the point yesterday at the congressional hearings that Google actually, you can data scientists, anybody can go download all the data that Google has on you. >>You and I can do that. Right? There's that website that we've gone to and you look at all the data Google has and you kind of freak out. Yeah, you can't do that with Facebook, right? It's all hidden. So it's kind of this big black box. I will say this it's interesting. The calls for breaking up big tech, Bernie Sanders tweeted something out yesterday said that, uh, mark Zuckerberg was worth, I don't know. I think 9 billion in 2007 or eight or nine, whatever it was. And he's worth 122 billion today, which of course is mostly tied up in Facebook stock, but still he's got incredible wealth. And then Bernie went on his red it's time to break up big tech. It's time to get people to pay their fair share, et cetera. I'm intrigued that the senators don't have as much vigilance around other industries, whether it's big pharma, food companies addicting children to sugar and the like, but that doesn't let Facebook. >>No, it doesn't, but, but you ha you bring up a good point. You and I were chatting about this yesterday. What the whistleblower is identifying is scary. It's dangerous. And the vast majority, I think of its users, don't understand it. They're not aware of it. Um, and why is big tech being maybe singled out and use as an example here, when, to your point, you know, the addiction to sugar and other things are, uh, have very serious implications. Why is big tech being singled out here as the poster child for what's going wrong? >>Well, and they're comparing it to big tobacco, which is the last thing you want to be compared to as big tobacco. But the, but the, but the comparison is, is valid in that her claim, the whistleblower's claim was that Facebook had data and research that it knew, it knows it's hurting, you know, you know, young people. And so what did it do? It created, you know, Instagram for kids, uh, or it had 600,000. She had another really interesting comment or maybe one of the senators did. Facebook said, look, we scan our records and you know, kids lie. And we, uh, we kicked 600,000 kids off the network recently who were underaged. And the point was made if you have 600,000 people on your network that are underage, you have to go kill. That's a problem. Right? So now the flip side of this, again, trying to be balanced is Facebook shut down Donald Trump and his nonsense, uh, and basically took him off the platform. >>They kind of thwarted all the hunter Biden stuff, right. So, you know, they did do some, they did. It's not like they didn't take any actions. Uh, and now they're up, you know, in front of the senators getting hammered. But I think the Zuckerberg brings a lot of this on himself because he put out an Instagram he's on his yacht, he's drinking, he's having fun. It's like he doesn't care. And he, you know, who knows, he probably doesn't. She also made the point that he owns an inordinate percentage and controls an inordinate percentage of the stock, I think 52% or 53%. So he can kind of do what he wants. And I guess, you know, coming back to public policy, there's a lot of narrative of, I get the billionaires and I get that, you know, the Mo I'm all for billionaires paying more taxes. >>But if you look at the tax policies that's coming out of the house of representatives, it really doesn't hit the billionaires the way billionaires can. We kind of know the way that they protect their wealth is they don't sell and they take out low interest loans that aren't taxed. And so if you look at the tax policies that are coming out, they're really not going after the billionaires. It's a lot of rhetoric. I like to deal in facts. And so I think, I think there's, there's a lot of disingenuous discourse going on right now at the same time, you know, Facebook, they gotta, they gotta figure it out. They have to really do a better job and become more transparent, or they are going to get broken up. And I think that's a big risk to the, to their franchise and maybe Zuckerberg doesn't care. Maybe he just wants to give it a, give it to the government, say, Hey, are you guys are on? It >>Happens. What do you think would happen with Amazon, Google, apple, some of the other big giants. >>That's a really good question. And I think if you look at the history of the us government, in terms of ant anti monopolistic practices, it spent decade plus going after IBM, you know, at the end of the day and at the same thing with Microsoft at the end of the day, and those are pretty big, you know, high profiles. And then you look at, at T and T the breakup of at T and T if you take IBM, IBM and Microsoft, they were slowed down by the U S government. No question I've in particular had his hands shackled, but it was ultimately their own mistakes that caused their problems. IBM misunderstood. The PC market. It gave its monopoly to Intel and Microsoft, Microsoft for its part. You know, it was hugging windows. They tried to do the windows phone to try to jam windows into everything. >>And then, you know, open source came and, you know, the world woke up and said, oh, there's this internet that's built on Linux. You know, that kind of moderated by at T and T was broken up. And then they were the baby bells, and then they all got absorbed. And now you have, you know, all this big, giant telcos and cable companies. So the history of the U S government in terms of adjudicating monopolistic behavior has not been great at the same time. You know, if companies are breaking the law, they have to be held accountable. I think in the case of Amazon and Google and apple, they, a lot of lawyers and they'll fight it. You look at what China's doing. They just cut right to the chase and they say, don't go to the, they don't litigate. They just say, this is what we're doing. >>Big tech, you can't do a, B and C. We're going to fund a bunch of small startups to go compete. So that's an interesting model. I was talking to John Chambers about this and he said, you know, he was flat out that the Western way is the right way. And I believe in, you know, democracy and so forth. But I think if, to answer your question, I think they'll, they'll slow it down in courts. And I think at some point somebody's going to figure out a way to disrupt these big companies. They always do, you know, >>You're right. They always do >>Right. I mean, you know, the other thing John Chambers points out is that he used to be at 1 28, working for Wang. There is no guarantee that the past is prologue that because you succeeded in the past, you're going to succeed in the future. So, so that's kind of the Facebook break up big tech. I'd like to see a little bit more discussion around, you know, things like food companies and the, like >>You bring up a great point about that, that they're equally harmful in different ways. And yet they're not getting the visibility that a Facebook is getting. And maybe that's because of the number of users that it has worldwide and how many people depend on it for communication, especially in the last 18 months when it was one of the few channels we had to connect and engage >>Well. And, and the whistleblower's point, Facebook puts out this marketing narrative that, Hey, look at all this good we're doing in reality. They're all about the, the, the advertising profits. But you know, I'm not sure what laws they're breaking. They're a public company. They're, they're, they have a responsibility to shareholders. So that's, you know, to be continued. The other big news is, and the headline is banks challenge, apple pay over fees for transactions, right? In 2014, when apple came up with apple pay, all the banks lined up, oh, they had FOMO. They didn't want to miss out on this. So they signed up. Now. They don't like the fact that they have to pay apple fees. They don't like the fact that apple introduced its own credit card. They don't like the fact that they have to pay fees on monthly recurring charges on your, you know, your iTunes. >>And so we talked about this and we talk about it a lot on the cube is that, that in, in, in, in his book, seeing digital David, Michelle, or the author talked about Silicon valley broadly defined. So he's including Seattle, Microsoft, but more so Amazon, et cetera, has a dual disruption agenda. They're not only trying to disrupt horizontally the technology industry, but they're also disrupting industry. We talked about this yesterday, apple and finances. The example here, Amazon, who was a bookseller got into cloud and is in grocery and is doing content. And you're seeing these a large companies, traverse industry value chains, which have historically been very insulated right from that type of competition. And it's all because of digital and data. So it's a very, pretty fascinating trends going on. >>Well, from a financial services perspective, we've been seeing the unbundling of the banks for a while. You know, the big guys with B of A's, those folks are clearly concerned about the smaller, well, I'll say the smaller FinTech disruptors for one, but, but the non FinTech folks, the apples of the world, for example, who aren't in that industry who are now to your point, disrupting horizontally and now going after individual specific industries, ultimately I think as consumers we want, whatever is going to make our lives easier. Um, do you ever, ever, I always kind of scratch my nose when somebody doesn't take apple pay, I'm like, you don't take apple pay so easy. It's so easy to make this easy for me. >>Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out. I, I do think, um, you know, it begs the question when will banks or Willbanks lose control of the payment systems. They seem to be doing that already with, with alternative forms of payment, uh, whether it's PayPal or Stripe or apple pay. And then crypto is, uh, with, with, with decentralized finance is a whole nother topic of disruption and innovation, >>Right? Well, these big legacy institutions, these organizations, and we've spoke with some of them yesterday, we're going to be speaking with some of them today. They need to be able to be agile, to transform. They have to have the right culture in order to do that. That's the big one. They have to be willing. I think an open to partner with the broader ecosystem to unlock more opportunities. If they want to be competitive and retain the trust of the clients that they've had for so long. >>I think every industry has a digital disruption scenario. We used to always use the, don't get Uber prized example Uber's coming on today, right? And, and there isn't an industry, whether it's manufacturing or retail or healthcare or, or government that isn't going to get disrupted by digital. And I think the unique piece of this is it's it's data, data, putting data at the core. That's what the big internet giants have done. That's what we're hearing. All these incumbents try to do is to put data. We heard this from Coca-Cola yesterday, we're putting data at the core of our company and what we're enabling through automation and other activities, uh, digital, you know, a company. And so, you know, can these, can these giants, these hundred plus year old giants compete? I think they can because they don't have to invent AI. They can work with companies like UI path and embed AI into their business and focused on, on what they do best. Now, of course, Google and Amazon and Facebook and Microsoft there may be going to have the best AI in the world. But I think ultimately all these companies are on a giant collision course, but the market is so huge that I think there's a lot of, >>There's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I think one of the things that was exciting about talking to one, the female CIO of Coca-Cola yesterday, a hundred plus old organization, and she came in with a very transformative, very different mindset. So when you see these, I always appreciate when I say legacy institutions like Coca-Cola or Merck who was on yesterday, blue cross blue shield who's on today, embracing change, cultural change going. We can't do things the way we used to do, because there are competitors in that review mirror who are smaller, they're more nimble, they're faster. They're going to be, they're going to take our customers away from us. We have to deliver this exceptional customer and employee experience. And Coca-Cola is a great example of one that really came in with CA brought in a disruptor in order to align digital with the CEO's thoughts and processes and organization. These are >>Highly capable companies. We heard from the head of finance at, at applied materials today. He was also coming on. I was quite, I mean, this is a applied materials is really strong company. They're talking about a 20 plus billion dollar company with $120 billion market cap. They supply semiconductor equipment and they're a critical component of the semiconductor supply chain. And we all know what's going on in semiconductors today with a huge shortage. So they're a really important company, but I was impressed with, uh, their finance leaders vision on how they're transforming the company. And it was not like, you know, 10 years out, these were not like aspirational goals. This is like 20, 19, 20, 22. Right. And, and really taking costs out of the business, driving new innovation. And, and it's, it was it's, it's refreshing to me Lisa, to see CFOs, you know, typically just bottom line finance focused on these industry transformations. Now, of course, at the end of the day, it's all about the bottom line, but they see technology as a way to get there. In fact, he put technology right in the middle of his stack. I want to ask him about that too. I actually want to challenge him a little bit on it because he had that big Hadoop elephant in the middle and this as an elephant in the room. And that picture, >>The strategy though, that applied materials had, it was very well thought out, but it was also to your point designed to create outcomes year upon year upon year. And I was looking at some of the notes. I took that in year one, alone, 274 automations in production. That's a lot, 150,000 in annual work hours automated 124 use cases they tackled in one year. >>So I want to, I want to poke at that a little bit too. And I, and I did yesterday with some guests. I feel like, well, let's see. So, um, I believe it was, uh, I forget what guests it was, but she said we don't put anything forward that doesn't hit the income statement. Do you remember that? Yes, it was Chevron because that was pushing her. I'm like, well, you're not firing people. Right. And we saw from IDC data today, only 13% of organizations are saying, or, or, or the organizations at 13% of the value was from reduction in force. And a lot of that was probably in plan anyway, and they just maybe accelerated it. So they're not getting rid of headcount, but they're counting hours saved. So that says to me, there's gotta be an normally or often CFOs say, well, it's that soft dollars because we're redeploying folks. But she said, no, it hits the income statement. So I don't, I want to push a little bit and see how they connect the dots, because if you're going to save hours, you're going to apply people to new work. And so either they're generating revenue or cutting costs somewhere. So, so there's another layer that I want to appeal to understand how that hits the income state. >>Let's talk about some of that IDC data. They announced a new white paper this morning sponsored by UI path. And I want to get your perspectives on some of the stats that they talked about. They were painting a positive picture, an optimistic picture. You know, we can't talk about automation without talking about the fear of job loss. They've been in a very optimistic picture for the actual gains over a few year period. What are your thoughts about that? Especially when we saw that stat 41% slowed hiring. >>Yeah. So, well, first of all, it's a sponsored study. So, you know, and of course the conferences, so it's going to be, be positive, but I will say this about IDC. IDC is a company I would put, you know, forest they're similar. They do sponsored research and they're credible. They don't, they, they have the answer to their audience, so they can't just out garbage. And so it has to be defensible. So I give them credit there that they won't just take whatever the vendor wants them to write and then write it. I've used to work there. And I, and I know the culture and there's a great deal of pride in being able to defend what you do. And if the answer doesn't come out, right, sorry, this is the answer. You know, you could pay a kill fee or I dunno how they handle it today. >>But, but, so my point is I think, and I know the people who did that study, many of them, and I think they're pretty credible. I, I thought by the way, you, to your 41% point. So the, the stat was 13% are gonna reduce head count, right? And then there were two in the middle and then 41% are gonna reduce or defer hiring in the future. And this to me, ties into the Erik Brynjolfsson and, and, and, uh, and, and McAfee work. Andy McAfee work from MIT who said, look, initially actually made back up. They said, look at machines, have always replaced humans. Historically this was in their book, the second machine age and what they said was, but for the first time in history, machines are replacing humans with cognitive functions. And this is sort of, we've never seen this before. It's okay. That's cool. >>And their, their research suggests that near term, this is going to be a negative economic impact, sorry, negative impact on jobs and salaries. And we've, we've generally seen this, the average salary, uh, up until recently has been flat in the United States for years and somewhere in the mid fifties. But longterm, their research shows that, and this is consistent. I think with IDC that it's going to help hiring, right? There's going to be a boost buddy, a net job creator. And there's a, there's a, there's a chasm you've got across, which is education training and skill skillsets, which Brynjolfsson and McAfee focused on things that humans can do that machines can't. And you have this long list and they revisited every year. Like they used to be robots. Couldn't walk upstairs. Well, you see robots upstairs all the time now, but it's empathy, it's creativity. It's things like that. >>Contact that humans are, are much better at than machines, uh, even, even negotiations. And, and so, so that's, those are skills. I don't know where you get those skills. Do you teach those and, you know, MBA class or, you know, there's these. So their point is there needs to be a new thought process around education, public policy, and the like, and, and look at it. You can't protect the past from the future, right? This is inevitable. And we've seen this in terms of economic activity around the world countries that try to protect, you know, a hundred percent employment and don't let competition, they tend to fall behind competitively. You know, the U S is, is not of that category. It's an open market. So I think this is inevitable. >>So a lot about upskilling yesterday, and the number of we talked with PWC about, for example, about what they're doing and a big focus on upscaling. And that was part of the IDC data that was shared this morning. For example, I'll share a stat. This was a survey of 518 people. 68% of upscaled workers had higher salaries than before. They also shared 57% of upskilled workers had higher roles and their enterprises then before. So some, again, two point it's a sponsored study, so it's going to be positive, but there, there was a lot of discussion of upskilling yesterday and the importance on that education, because to your point, we can't have one without the other. You can't give these people access to these tools and not educate them on how to use it and help them help themselves become more relevant to the organization. Get rid of the mundane tasks and be able to start focusing on more strategic business outcome, impacting processes. >>We talked yesterday about, um, I use the example of, of SAP. You, you couldn't have predicted SAP would have won the ERP wars in the early to mid 1990s, but if you could have figured out who was going to apply ERP to their businesses, you know what, you know, manufacturing companies and these global firms, you could have made a lot of money in the stock market by, by identifying those that were going to do that. And we used to say the same thing about big data, and the reason I'm bringing all this up is, you know, the conversations with PWC, Deloitte and others. This is a huge automation, a huge services opportunity. Now, I think the difference between this and the big data era, which is really driven by Hadoop is it was big data was so complicated and you had a lack of data scientists. >>So you had to hire these services firms to come in and fill those gaps. I think this is an enormous services opportunity with automation, but it's not because the software is hard to get to work. It's all around the organizational processes, rethinking those as people process technology, it's about the people in the process, whereas Hadoop and the big data era, it was all about the tech and they would celebrate, Hey, this stuff works great. There are very few companies really made it through that knothole to dominate as we've seen with the big internet giants. So you're seeing all these big services companies playing in this market because as I often say, they like to eat at the trough. I know it's kind of a pejorative, but it's true. So it's huge, huge market, but I'm more optimistic about the outcomes for a broader audience with automation than I was with, you know, big data slash Hadoop, because I think the software as much, as much more adoptable, easier to use, and you've got the cloud and it's just a whole different ball game. >>That's certainly what we heard yesterday from Chevron about the ease of use and that you should be able to see results and returns very quickly. And that's something too that UI path talks about. And a lot of their marketing materials, they have a 96, 90 7% retention rate. They've done a great job building their existing customers land and expand as we talked about yesterday, a great use case for that, but they've done so by making things easy, but hearing that articulated through the voice of their customers, fantastic validation. >>So, you know, the cube is like a little, it's like a interesting tip of the spirits, like a probe. And I will tell you when I, when we first started doing the cube and the early part of the last decade, there were three companies that stood out. It was Splunk service now and Tableau. And the reason they stood out is because they were able to get customers to talk about how great they were. And the light bulb went off for us. We were like, wow, these are three companies to watch. You know, I would tell all my wall street friends, Hey, watch these companies. Yeah. And now you see, you know, with Frank Slootman at snowflake, the war, the cat's out of the bag, everybody knows it's there. And they're expecting, you know, great things. The stock is so priced to perfection. You could argue, it's overpriced. >>The reason I'm bringing this up is in terms of customer loyalty and affinity and customer love. You're getting it here. Absolutely this ecosystem. And the reason I bring that up is because there's a lot of questions in the, in the event last night, it was walking around. I saw a couple of wall street guys who came up to me and said, Hey, I read your stuff. It was good. Let's, let's chat. And there's a lot of skepticism on, on wall street right now about this company. Right? And to me, that's, that's good news for you. Investors who want to do some research, because the words may be not out. You know, they, they, they gotta prove themselves here. And to me, the proof is in the customer and the lifetime value of that customer. So, you know, again, we don't give stock advice. We, we kind of give fundamental observations, but this stock, I think it's trading just about 50. >>Now. I don't think it's going to go to 30, unless the market just tanks. It could have some, you know, if that happens, okay, everything will go down. But I actually think, even though this is a richly priced stock, I think the future of this company is very bright. Obviously, if they continue to execute and we're going to hear from the CEO, right? People don't know Daniel, Denise, right? They're like, who is this guy? You know, he started this company and he's from Eastern Europe. And we know he's never have run a public company before, so they're not diving all in, you know? And so that to me is something that really pay attention to, >>And we can unpack that with him later today. And we've got some great customers on the program. You mentioned Uber's here. Spotify is here, applied materials. I feel like I'm announcing something on Saturday night. Live Uber's here. Spotify is here. All right, Dave, looking forward to a great action packed today. We're going to dig more into this and let's get going. Shall we let's do it. All right. For David Dante, I'm Lisa Martin. This is the cube live in Las Vegas. At the Bellagio. We are coming to you presenting UI path forward for come back right away. Our first guest comes up in just a second.

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante >>UI path has always been an unconventional company. You know, it started with humble beginnings. It was essentially a software development shop. And then it caught lightning in a bottle with its computer vision technology. And it's really it's simplification mantra. And it created a very easy to deploy software robot system for bespoke departments. So they could automate mundane tasks. You know, you know, the story, the company grew rapidly was able to go public early this year. Now consistent with its out of the ordinary approach. While other firms are shutting down travel and physical events, UI path is moving ahead with forward for its annual user conference next week with a live audience there at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, it's also fast-forwarding as a company determined to lead the charge beyond RPA and execute on a more all encompassing enterprise automation agenda. Hello everyone. And welcome to this week's Wiki bond Cuban sites powered by ETR in this breaking analysis and a head of forward four we'll update you in the RPA market. >>The progress that UI path has made since its IPO and bringing some ETR customer survey data to contextualize the company's position in the overall market and relative to the competition. Here's a quick rundown of today's agenda. First, I want to tell you the cube is going to be at forward for, at the Bellagio next week, UI paths. This is their big customer event. It's live. It's a physical event. It's primarily outdoors. You have to be vaccinated to attend. Now it's not completely out of the ordinary John furrier and the cube. We're at AWS public sector this past week. And we were at mobile world Congress and one of the first big hybrid events of the year at Barcelona. And we thought that event would kick off the fall event season live event in earnest, but the COVID crisis has caused many tech firms. Most tech firms actually to hit the pause button, not UI path. >>They're moving ahead, they're going forward. And we see a growing trend for smaller VIP events with a virtual component topic, maybe for another day. Now we've talked extensively about the productivity challenges and the automation mandate. The pandemic has thrust upon us. Now we've seen pretty dramatic productivity improvements as remote work kicked in, but it's brought new stresses. For example, according to Qualtrics, 32% of working moms said their mental health has declined since the pandemic hit. 15% of working dads said the same by the way. So one has to question the sustainability of this perpetual Workday, and we're seeing a continuum of automation solutions emerging. And we'll talk about that today. We're seeing tons of MNA, M and a as well, but now in that continuum on the left side of the spectrum, there's Microsoft who in some ways they stand alone and that Azure is becoming ubiquitous as a SAS cloud collaboration and productivity platform. >>Microsoft is everywhere and in virtually every market with their video conferencing security database, cloud CRM, analytics, you name it, Microsoft is pretty much there. And RPA is no different with the acquisition of soft emotive. Last year, Microsoft entered the RTA market in earnest and is penetrating very deeply into the space, particularly as it pertains to personal approach, personal productivity building on its software state. Now in the middle of that spectrum, if you will, we're seeing more M and a, and that's defined really by the big software giants. Think of this domain as integrated software plays SAP, they acquired contexture, uh, uh, they also acquired a company called process insight service now acquired Intella bought Salesforce service trace. We see in for entering the fray. And I, I would put even Pega Pega systems in this camp, software companies focused on integrating RPA into their broader workflows into their software platforms. >>And this is important because these platforms are entrenched. They're walled gardens of sorts and complicated with lots of touchpoints and integration points. And frankly, they're much harder to automate because of their entrenched legacy. Now on the far side of that, spectrum are the horizontal automation players and that's being led by UI path with automate automation anywhere as the number two player in this domain. And I didn't even put blue prism prism in there more M and a recently announced, uh, that Vista is going to acquire them. Vista also owns TIBCO. They're going to merge those two companies, you know, tip goes kind of an integration play. And so again, I'm, I might, I would put them in that, you know, horizontal piece of the spectrum. So with that as background, we're going to look at how UI path has performed since we last covered them at IPO. >>And then we'll bring in some ETR survey data to get the spending view from customers. And then we'll wrap up now just to emphasize the importance of, of automation and the automation mandate mandate. We talk about it all the time in this program, we use this ETR chart. It's a two dimensional view with net score, which is a measure of spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share, which is a proxy for pervasiveness in the dataset. That's on the horizontal axis. Now note that red dotted line at signifies companies with an elevated position on the net score, vertical axis, anything over that is considered pretty good, very good. Now this shows every spending segment within the ETR taxonomy and the four spending categories with the greatest velocity are AI cloud containers and RPA. And they've topped the charts for quite a while. Now they're the only four categories which have sustained above that 40% line consistently throughout the pandemic. >>And even before now, the impressive thing about cloud of course, is it has a spending has both spending momentum on the vertical axis at a very large share of the, of the market share of presence in the dataset. The point is RPA is nascent still. It has an affinity with AI as a means of more intelligently identifying and streamlining process improvements. And so we expect those to, to remain elevated and grow to the right together, UI path pegs it's Tam, total available market at 60 billion. And the reality is that could be understated. Okay. As we reported from the UI path S one analysis, we did pre IPO. The company at that time had an AR annual recurring revenue of $580 million and was growing at 65% annually at nearly 8,000 customers at the time, a thousand of which had an ARR in excess of a hundred K and a net revenue retention, the company had with 145%. >>So let's take a look at the picture six months forward. We mentioned the $60 billion Tam ARR now up over 725 million on its way to a billion ARR holding pretty steady at 60% growth as is an RR net revenue retention, and more than a thousand new customers in 200 more with over a hundred thousand in ARR and a small operating profit, which by the way, exceeded the consensus pretty substantially. Profitability is not shown here and no one seems to care anyway, these days it's all about growing into that Tam. Well, that's a pretty good looking picture. Isn't it? The company had a beat and a raise for the quarter early this month. So looking good, right? Well, you ask how come the stock's not doing better. That's an interesting question. So let's first look at the stocks performance on a relative basis. Here, we show you I pass performance against Pega systems and blue prism. >>The other two publicly traded automation, pure plays, you know, sort of in the case of Pega. So UI path outperformed post its IPO, but since the early summer Pega has been the big winner. Well, UI path slowly decelerated, you see blue prism was the laggard until it was announced. It was in an acquisition talks with a couple of PE firms and the prospects of a bidding war sent that yellow line up. As you can see UI path, as you can see on the inset has a much higher valuation than Pega and way higher than blue prison. Pega. Interestingly is growing revenues nicely at around 40%. And I think what's happening is the street simply wants more, even though UI path beat and raised wall street, still getting comfortable with which is new to the public market game. And the company just needs to demonstrate a track record and build trust. >>There's also some education around billings and multi-year contracts that the company addressed on its last earnings call, but the street was concerned about ARR from new logos. It appears to be slowing down sequentially in a notable decline in billings momentum, which UI pass CEO, CFO addressed on the earnings call saying, look, they don't need to trade margin for prepaid multi-year deals, given the strong cash position while I give anything up. And even though I said, nobody cares about profitability. Well, I guess that's true until you guide for an operating loss. When you've been showing a small profit in recent recent quarters, which you AIPAC did, then all of a sudden people care. So UI path, isn't a bit of an unknown territory to the street and it has a valuation that's pretty rich, very rich, actually at 30 times, a revenue multiple greater than 30 times revenue, multiple. >>So that's why in, in my view, investors are being cautious, but I want to address a dynamic that we've seen with these high growth rocket ship companies, something we talked about with snowflake. And I think you're seeing some of that here with UI paths, different model in the sense that snowflake is pure cloud, but I'm talking about concerns around ARR from new logos and in that growth on a sequential basis. And here's what's happening in my view with UI path, you have a company that started within departments with a small average contract size in ACV, maybe 25,000, maybe 50,000, but not deep six figure deals that wasn't UI paths play it because the company focused so heavily on simplicity and made it really easy to adopt customer saw really fast ROI. I mean breakeven in months. So you very quickly saw expansion into other departments. >>So when ACV started to rise and installations expanded within each customer UI path realized it had to move beyond being a point product. And it started thinking about a platform and making acquisitions like process gold and others, and this marked a much deeper expansion into the customer base. And you can see that here in this UI path, a chart that they shared at their investor deck customers that bought in 2016 and 2017 expanded their they've expanded their spend 15, 13, 15, 18 20 X. So the LTV, the lifetime value of the customer is growing dramatically. And because UI path has focused on simplicity, it has a very facile freemium model, much easier to try before you buy than its competitors. It's CAC, it's customer acquisition costs are likely much lower than some of its peers. And that's a key dynamic. So don't get freaked out by some of those concerns that we raised earlier, because just like snowflake what's happening is the company for sure is gaining new customers. >>Maybe just not at the same rate, but don't miss the forest through the trees. I E they're getting more money from their existing customers, which means retention, loyalty and growth. Speaking of forests, this chart is the dynamic I'm talking about. It's an ETR graphic that shows the components of net score or against spending momentum net score breaks down into five areas that lime green at the top is new additions. Okay? So that's only 11% of the customer mentions by the way, we're talking about more than 125 responses for UI path. So it's meaningful. It's, it's actually larger in this survey, uh, or certainly comparable to Microsoft. So that says something right there. The next bar is the forest green forest. Green is where I want you to focus. That's customer spending 6% or more in the second half of the year, relative to the first half. >>The gray is flat spending, which is quite large, the pink or light red that's spending customer spending 6% or worse. That's a 4% number, but look at the bottom bar. There is no bar that's churn. 0% of the respondents in the survey are churning and churn is the silent killer of SAS companies, 0% defections. So you've got 46% spending, more nobody leaving. That's the dynamic that is powering UI path right now. And I would take this picture any day over a larger lime green and a smaller forest green and a bigger churn number. Okay. So it's pretty good. It's not snowflake good, but it's solid. So how does this picture compare to UI pass peers? Well, let's take a look at that. So this is ETR data, same data showing the granularity net score for Microsoft power, automate UI path automation, anywhere blue prism and Pega. >>So as we said before, Microsoft is ubiquitous. What can we say about that? But UI path is right there with a more robust platform, not to overlook Microsoft. You can't, but UI path, it'll tell you that they don't compete head to head for enterprise automation deals with Microsoft. Now, maybe they will over time. They do however, compete head to head with automation anywhere. And their picture is quite strong. As you can see here, it has this blue Prism's picture and even Pega, although blue prism, automation, anywhere UI path and power automate all have net scores on this chart. As you can see the table in the upper right over 40% Pega does not. But again, we don't see Pega as a pure play RPA vendor. It's a little bit of sort of apples and oranges there, but they do sell RPA and ETR captures in their taxonomy. >>So why not include them also note that UI path has, as I said before, more mentions in the survey than power automate, which is actually quite interesting, given the ubiquity of Microsoft. Now, one other notable notable note is the bright red that's defections and only UI path is showing zero defections. Everybody else has at least even of the slim, some defections. Okay. So take that as you will, but it's another data 0.1. That's powerful, not only for UI path, but really for the entire sector. Now, the last ETR data point that we want to share is our famous two dimensional view. Like the sector chart we showed earlier, this graphic shows net score on the vertical axis. That's against spending velocity and market share or pervasiveness on the horizontal axis. So as we said earlier, UI path actually has greater presence in the survey than the ever-present Microsoft. >>Remember, this is the July survey. We don't have full results from the September, October survey yet. And we can't release them until ETR is out of its quiet period. But I expect the entire sector, like everything is going to be slightly down because as we reported last week, tech spending is moderated slightly in the second half of this year, but we don't expect the picture to change dramatically. UI path and power automate, we think are going to lead and market presence in those two plus automation anywhere are going to show strength and spending momentum as well. Most of the sector. And we'll see who comes in above the 40% line. Okay. What to watch at forward four. So in summary, I'll be looking for a few things. One UI path has hinted toward a big platform announcement that will deepen its capabilities to go beyond being an RPA point tool into much more of an enterprise automation platform rewriting a lot of the code Linux cloud, better automation of the UI. >>You're going to hear all kinds of new product announcements that are coming. So I'll be listening for those details. I want to hear more from customers to further confirm what I've been hearing from them over the last couple of years and get more data, especially on that ROI on that land and expand. I want to understand that dynamic and that true enterprise automation. It's going to be good to get an update face to face and test some of our assumptions here and see where the gaps are and where UI path can improve. Third. I want to talk to ecosystem players to see where they are in participating in the value chain here. What kind of partner has UI path become since it's IPO? Are they investing more in the ecosystem? How to partners fit into that flywheel fourth, I want to hear from UI path management, Daniel DNAs, and other UI path leaders, they're exiting toddler Ville and coming into an adolescent phase or early adulthood. >>And what does that progression look like? How does it feel? What's the vibe at the show. And finally, I'm very excited to participate in a live in-person event to see what's working, see how a hybrid events are evolving. We got a good glimpse at mobile world Congress and this week, and, uh, in DC and public sector summit, here's, you know, the cube has been doing hybrid events for years, and we intend to continue to lead in this regard and bring you the best, real time information as possible. Okay. That's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you do is search braking analysis podcast. We publish each week on Wiki bond.com and siliconangle.com. And you can always connect on twitter@devolanteoremailmeatdaviddotvolanteatsiliconangle.com. Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn. And don't forget to check out E T r.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Volante for the cube insights powered by ETR be well, and we'll see you next time.

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

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante at UI path forward for, we have had it all today. Lots of great guests. We've had weather, we've had rain. We are outside and lots of great conversations going on. Next up, we're going to be talking about automation at healthcare giant. Merck. Joining us from merch is Dan Boyd automation leader, and from CGI partner of UI paths, bill angles, senior automation architect, guys, welcome to the program. >>Thanks for having us. >>So Dan, we'll go ahead and start with you. Let's talk about Merck and the implement and the adoption of automation, such a history company. >>Yeah. Thank you. Um, our journey started about two years ago and started with the small team and has evolved ever since we started just the handful of folks we've evolved, uh, from the size of our team, matured, operationally and expanded our capabilities along that journey to where we are today. And it continues to evolve as the technology changes. And it's been exciting to see the adoption at Merck over, you know, across the enterprise. Um, it's been an educational process, but it's been exciting just to see that understanding of the power that automation can deliver to them. And they see the value in making it real to them has been key. Um, then once it's real and they get excited and the word spreads and they appreciate the value right before their eyes and bill, are you, >>Uh, industry specialized or more automation specialist? >>Yeah. Yeah. So I'm more, uh, automation specialized, but uh, you know, CGI, we partner with our industry experts to identify use cases for automation and I help kind of, you know, solution the best approach to automation. Uh, and you know, so I actually started, you know, with, with Merck a little bit earlier before it was really formalized and, uh, just CGI is a large partner of merch and embedded within various areas of business. And, you know, I, I ended up educating, uh, CGI on automation and here's what to look for, you know, in a, in a, in a great use case for automation and, you know, really, we started to drum up some internal excitement and then came up with some actual real use cases within Merck, proved it out early. And then we began to partner with, uh, Dan and his team. >>Can you share a little bit about some of those use cases? Yes. >>So, you know, the ones that, uh, we've worked on are really specific within, uh, various areas, uh, within the division. So Dan, you want to talk about some of the >>You're working on yeah, I'll share one use case within a specific market of merch, and it's a commercial area where they were embarking on a revision in their customer engaged engagement approach in this market and where the, they had a problem. They, they needed to get the invoices out of SAP for customers. So that was on the one side of the process on the other was a customer portal where the customers needed access near real time to those invoices. So when they came to us, they had the invoices kind of set up to be emailed out of SAP. So they had that process set up. The problem is how do they get them over here into this customer portal? Say the backup plan was to have a temporary workers come on and do that manually handle the open emails with the invoices attachments and get them loaded. >>So we came in, uh, they called us in, in the 11th hour and we were able to, fortunately that the process was straightforward, uh, whereas invoices were coming through, uh, an email attachment and that was set up. So basically we automated the reading of the emails, the processing of the PDF attachments and saved them into a shared drive where there was another process to load them into SAP. So the volume was really large on a daily basis. Initially it was estimated at approximately 2,500 emails per day with these invoices. Um, so that would estimate it would take about 125 hours of people time to do that manually. Um, so that's what we automated. And in the end it was the averages it's over 3000 a day. So, um, the solution really came in and, and we were able to deliver that. And it's been a really, they were, they were static with what they could do, and then they saw the art of the possible with, with this automation. So it's a good success story. And, um, it's exciting to see, and they were thrilled >>And it's not an uncommon story, right. Where you're automating mundane tasks that was pushing a lot of paper, a lot of copy and pasting. Um, do you see how far away, and maybe we're there already? You think about mark it's it's uh, in a, in a unique industry, we've got, got highly skilled scientists too in serious R and D high risk trials. You got partners, you do some organic, some inorganic, you've got the manufacturing components. So a lot of different parts to the business. And when you think about saving time, as you think about some of the, the scientists that are working on various pipeline products, highly paid, if you can save more of their time, wow. That even drops more to the bottom line. Are we at that point yet? We heard the stats this morning. It was 2% or some single digit percentage of our processes are automated. How far away are we from attacking those types of automations? Are we there today? >>Uh, we do automations for all the, all the functions across Merck. Um, in some places adoption is farther along than others in their journey, but yeah, um, from the shop floor and the manufacturing sites, we found opportunities to, to introduce automation there. And even in the, in the labs in various capacities, see the use cases continue to grow and the adoption continue. We see that growing as well. >>Do you find that the, the highly skilled, uh, automations targeted at highly skilled folks are, are harder to sort of get your hands around, but they give you bigger ROI? Or is it not the case? Is it all sort of earn and burn? >>Yeah, from my perspective, I think it's, you know, use case by use case. Like if it's a, a complex use case, it requires, you know, more advanced capabilities, uh, you know, machine learning models, you know, leveraging, uh, you know, AI center within UI path, uh, you know, those they can, you know, provide, you know, fairly sizeable ROI, but I think is for those highly skilled workers, I'll give one example is, you know, out in, out in the labs, we, we helped, you know, automate some things that, you know, just made their life easier, right. Uh, you know, tests running overnight, if something failed, uh, with, with a test that was happening, then, you know, they, they wouldn't know about it and they lose critical data for, for these early tests that they're doing in, in the, in the preclinical cycle. So we actually put in a UI path robots to, to monitor and send alerts and provide recovery to make their lives a lot easier. Uh, so they don't have to worry about things, you know, failing in the middle of the night, you have a UI path robot, you know, supporting them in that map, that aspect, >>What's an automation, architecture look like we, where do we start architecting automation? >>Well, I think the journey, uh, so where do you start with an automation? Right. It's really understanding the use case. It comes down to what is the, the end to end process, and then where, where can we automate, uh, within that process and what is the right set of automation capabilities? So, you know, RPA is great for, you know, um, where we get, where we need to interact with user interfaces. But if we can, uh, you know, interact with API APIs, we would do that. You know, preferably over a UI is, is to keep, keep it more of a seamless integration. But I think it's about understanding the process, laying out the right solution, uh, if there's an opportunity to improve the process prior to automating it, you know, if there's, if there is that ability, then we'll look to do that. And we've done that. We may change that process, uh, up a little bit, just to make automation more efficient, more effective. Uh, and so, and then it just, we built it and we deploy it and they start to realize the value >>Hard. Is it dental prove the, on the versus just automating what's, what's known. In other words, you've got dependencies and there are complexities there w what's your experience in terms of how you approached it >>From my experience and what we found to be best practice and bill touched on it. But every use case is of course different than the, the corresponding process. Very, very varied, but really what's key, I think, is to right upfront, understand the end to end process. And a lot of cases, my team it's new to us, right. But the process owners, they live it every day. So understanding, partnering with them to really understand the end to end solution in the form of like a process map. So you can kind of echo back your understanding of their process and get that nod of the head from them and say, yes, you understand that this is an accurate representation. Then we can with the spirit of trying to get it right the first time. And, but it really, I think is incumbent upon us to really get that in-depth understanding upfront. And a lot of cases, if there's time sensitivity in the end, it's just more efficient and saves a lot of rework. So, >>So working backwards, sorry, at least working backwards from the known existing process and then implementing an automation is probably the best starting point, as opposed to trying to work backwards from some kind of the outcome that you envision. But, but I would think there's attractiveness in the, in the ladder. Right. So that you're not just repeating a process that may be outdated. >>Yeah. So your, uh, it comes down to a couple of things. So when you're initially looking at a process, you know, should we automate this or not? And how complex is it? You need to understand what is the potential benefit. So, you know, how much, uh, you know, how much time am I able to, uh, you know, have those workers reinvest into other areas of work, right. Or what other, what are some other benefits? Uh, you know, there, there may be some, uh, you know, compliance fines that were experienced through automation, we're able to, you know, to make sure we're meeting SLS and so on. Uh, so you is a lot to, you know, defining the benefits, the automation, putting a value to that. And then the process of going through the actual process, understand the complexity, right? And then you can come up with, you know, here's, here's what it's gonna take to build this thing. Here's the potential value. And then we have ways where we track, you know, what's, how has that ROI trending once it's in production? Uh, so we'll be, that gives us more insight. >>Dan, I've got a question for you. One of the conversations that Dave and I had earlier on the program was about automation as a boardroom topic. I'd love to get your perspectives. Merck is a history organization, been around for a long time. Cultural change is incredibly challenging, but I'd love to get your perspective on where is automation at Merck's board. Is that something that is really key to transformation? >>I'd say automation falls under our strategic initiative, just around digital digital transformation, right? So it's a sub pillar of that. So that is a strategic imperative and very important. And just being a more efficient and, and leveraging technology effectively, um, just to make merch more efficient and, and, and optimized and RPA and automation plays a part in that. I mean, >>That's what I suspected Lisa this morning when we have in that conversation, it seems to me that you wouldn't necessarily create an automation stove pipe at the board meeting. You might want to report on how these automations have affected, whether it's the income statement or the health of the company, et cetera. But it seems to me to be a fundamental part of the digital transformation, um, which involves a lot of different things, data and cloud and strategy and it et cetera. So is that pretty >>Common bill? Yeah, I, yes, it is. I mean, when, when an organization is looking to automate there's, you know, various angles are coming out, they're coming from the top-down approach where, you know, management saying, Hey, we need to, we need to automate what's, let's look across all the divisions and, and figure out where, where we should go. But then it's also, you know, bottom up where, you know, folks out in, out within the various lines of business know, they, they know the problems. They know, they know the business processes. So there's a couple of different angles where, you know, you you're able to discover new opportunities to automate. Uh, but those also those smaller ones opened the door to understanding, you know, much larger processes where we can look, you know, automate more of the upstream or downstream in that process. Are there variations of the process? So >>Was, was merch more bottom-up or top-down or middle out? I wouldn't say it's >>Started bottoms up. That's really out there. It came from the top-down. So as bill touched on, I think it's really key that we do have, uh, from, from this coming from the top, from our leadership is endorsing it and advocating it, but also we're on the, on the ground floor and educating. So the people with the hands-on doing the process, they understand it and the word is spreading. They see we've, we've made it real for them. Now it's real for them, and they can appreciate the value. And they're happy to be able to do more, to be freed up from the tedious tasks and do more interesting work. >>So we did start in the department, there was a champion with a budget who said, Hey, I'm going to try this and then look what I got. Yeah, >>Yeah. You definitely need the champion. So part of that is creating champions out in the different business lines to truly own the pipeline and understand the opportunities are out there and say, yeah, this is a good opportunity. This, this one let's look at it later. So you definitely have to have those folks out there that, that understand the technology, but also understand the business. >>How has that changed in the last 18 months with healthcare care undergoing such? I mean, my goodness, the things that have happened in a healthcare organization, how has that accelerated the need for things like automation, Christian, for both of you and for mark as well? Yeah. >>Yeah. So mark initiated, uh, like most companies that digital transformation, three, three plus years ago, and this just became an extension of that. And, and it's, it's a, it's a must, right? Just to stay up with the, the digital transformation and everything that's happening in this world. And, and obviously, uh, COVID accelerated, helped accelerate it in certain areas and made it real for a lot of people and appreciate the value and the need for it. >>Yeah. W within CGI, just across all of our clients, it's automation is really towards the top of the list of strategic priorities. So it's, so we've seen this massive just acceleration of, of needing to automate more and more and more, you know, which is, which is great. >>What's it like inside a merch these days, you guys must be really excited with all that. I mean, I know it's early days and nothing has been fully blessed yet, but I mean, you know, some of the big has got a lot of headlines and obviously, you know, we've been taking jabs, et cetera, but, but now here's Merck in the headlines. It's, it's gotta be an exciting time for you guys. >>Yeah. It's, it's great to be part of a company whose mission is to save and improve lives and right. It's um, with today, it's, it's really becoming real and more relevant, uh, of that mission and vision. So it's exciting. >>There were any gotchas when you go into this, I'm sure there are into this automation journey. What kinds of things would you advise people, Hey, make sure that you deal with these, whether it's an audit scope, consideration or things that you definitely don't want to do, or do you want to do? >>Yeah. It just comes down to the, you know, choosing the right use case to start with. Right. Making sure that you, if you're just starting out in your automation journey, you know, start with those use cases that you can quickly prove value for and then tackle the more complex ones. That's good >>For folks to know where to start, especially when there's still such a tumultuous environment that we're living in. Dan and bill. Thank you for joining Dave and Manet, talking about automation, the innovation that you're doing at Merck partnering with CGI really appreciate >>Your time. Thanks for having us >>For Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin, coming to you from windy, chilly Las Vegas. We are at UI path forward for stick around Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.

>> From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath FORWARD IV, brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, live at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante, we are with UiPath at FORWARD IV. The next topic of conversation is going to be a good one. And that's because it's automation for good. I've got two guests here joining Dave and me. James Droskoski, strategic account exec at UiPath joins us, and Brian Klochkoff, head of automation at Dentsu. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah. Happy to be here. >> We're going to, we're going to dig into automation for good, which is going to be a really feel good conversation. We're going to get into what you're doing. But Brian, I wanted you to give the audience an overview of Dentsu as an organization. Who are you? What do you guys do? >> Sure. So Dentsu is a large network of advertising agencies. We're about 45,000 people large, $10 billion plus in revenue, going across about 125 markets. So we're a large enterprise advertising media, creative CXM type business. We're really focused on helping to elevate our clients' value when it comes to the value proposition around marketing, advertising, and media. >> So you think about that as a, as a, as a, a business that maybe, you know, it's hard to understand where automation might fit in. On the other hand, it's like a lot of moving parts, a lot of arms and legs. >> Brian: Mm-hmm. So how are you applying automation to the business? >> Sure. So when we first started doing proof of concepts level approaches, we approached things in a traditional, Hey, let's go look at the shared services groups. Why are we having invoice processing delays? Things like that. And we started being a bit more prescriptive and proactive about how we were applying the limited POC budget we had to go after these problems. And we started doing some root cause analysis to understand the interaction between the back office functions and the mid-office functions. And what we uncovered was that we could actually be really good custodians of budget and enable people at the same time by solving for problems at a root cause analysis level. So what I mean by that is maybe an invoice is coming down the pipe, and it's not getting processed because it's missing critical information that could be easily added six processes upstream. So what really helped elevate the conversation that we're having around automation for good and be a catalyst for we're going to talk about a bit later is we just started connecting people from the mid-office to the back office, helping them understand, Hey, if we actually follow a process properly, put the right controls in place with RPA to generate critical data elements on those invoices, Shaler in the back office doesn't have to work the weekends because there's not a pipeline back load of invoices for him to process. So we actually connected those mid-office people with the back office people, and it really drove that human connection to drive the change management within our automation journey. And that's kind of been the crux of what we've wanted to do over the past four years, finding ways to elevate our people's potential by integrating automation and AI into their actual day-to-day work. >> Hmm. So tech for good is a theme that you hear a lot and as a, as a media company, that, that, that kind of, we're not gotcha media, you know, we more want to tell the story of tech athletes, and I think we've done a pretty good job of that over the past decade, but so it goes to tech's under fire constantly, especially big tech. We hear the Facebook hearings today and so forth, but so automation kind of early days, oh, you're going to take away my job. I think generally speaking with the fatigue of Zoom and the perpetual workday, people begin to understand that, Hey, maybe automation is a good thing. But automation for good, what, what is that, James? >> Yeah, well, it's, it's not doing technology for the sake of technology. You know? At the end of the day, when we implement solutions with our customers like Dentsu, it's about, what's the impact, what's the change, what's the benefit? And what's unique about Dentsu is because they've grown through acquisition and there are lots of different companies come together, you have to focus on the people first because there is no one process or one system that we can look and just automate that system or process. So automation for good is about focusing on the people, and how do we take the solutions and the programs and the technologies we have and make an impact so that somebody's day is better. Their, their, their job is better. The process they're doing is easier and they can focus on more of the things that make them different. You know? Specifically as we'll uncover in the conversation, you know, we looked at a program that Dentsu is doing around working with different types of people, as far as people with autism, and what was the impact we could do there? And that's uncovered a journey that we've been together for the last two years around seeing how we can make an impact with those types of folks who might not get the same types of opportunities as everybody else. >> Brian, talk about the, the catalyst for that program at Dentsu a couple years ago. >> Sure. So it goes back to that foundational layer of elevating people's potential. So the testimonial that we had from our own employees around applying automation in meaningful ways to progress their day-to-day came from an employee in the mid-office who said, I didn't go $160,000 in student debt to copy paste stuff from Excel into this proprietary platform that we use for media. And that really resonated with us, as leaders in this space, and with our executive leadership, because there was a gap between what our peoples' skills were and what they were actually doing. They wanted to do Mad Men type stuff. They want it to be the Don Drapers and the Peggy Olsons of our industry. And they were losing that opportunity because we weren't tapping into the skills that they had to drive human centric solutions for our clients. So taking that concept, we looked at the partnerships that we have with our outsourcing providers and Autonomy Works, which we're going to doing a session later tomorrow with the CEO, Dave Friedman, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about how the unique skill sets of that company and those people can actually elevate them to do more tech enabled work, but also enabling our own team to focus on building solutions with the skills that we have by allowing them to use the skills that they have to do the machine learning training of models and things like that, which they really excel at from a detail oriented perspective. And that's not only a feel good story, but it's, it's great for our business because the resources on my immediate team are building product, they're building solutions, and we can rely on an excellent partner in them to help us with the maintenance overhead that we're creating through those solutions. And eventually through automation cloud, driving better outcomes through positive, negative reinforcement within machine learning. >> And there are specific examples with individuals with autism. Correct? >> Correct. That's right. >> Yeah. >> Add some color to that. What is that all about? >> Yeah. Let me tell you a little story. So when, when they first brought the conversation to me, I was terrified because I, the type of work that they were outsourcing was very repetitive rule-based. And I'm like, this is perfect for automate. This is exactly what we automate. I was terrified that the program we were going to work on together was going to eliminate the program. And so I was, you know, cautiously, you know, approached it. >> How ironic. >> Yeah. I was like, Hey, that sounds like a great idea. And I hung up. I was like, oh, how are we going to, how am I going to figure out this one? But through the conversation, and we just started, you know, brainstorming and putting our heads together. What was interesting is because of the way that automations work, as far as being very structured and repetitive, it lends itself well to workers with autism. It's exactly the way they think. And what we actually found after kind of coming up with the collaborative ideas, hey, wait a second. We were already doing these kind of botathon hackathon type programs with the Dentsu employees, teaching them the skills, how to build automations for themselves. What if we kind of modified it and adjusted it to cater to these types of individuals who learn differently, and we have to approach it differently. And we went through the program, we adjusted everything. And what was incredible to see was they thrived with the ability to learn how to work this way. They built things that made them more productive, that created more capacity. They could do more with less now, work with more customers, do more work for, for their, for their customers because they had this almost assistant that was kind of like them. And it was, it was just so rewarding. You know, we talk about, again, what's automation for good all about? It's about that personal reward. >> Brian: Yeah. >> I mean, for me, you know, we didn't sell any more licenses or it wasn't about the commercial transaction. It was about, you know, catering to the segment of the workforce that, first of all, it was very educate, enlightening to me to see how many folks are out there that are unemployed. And I got to meet these first 15 individuals that couldn't have been more amazing and more smart and more diligent and hardworking. And the numbers are something in the lines of between 50% and 90% unemployed because they just don't get the same opportunities as people without autism. It's kind of the world's set up for us. So to know that we could do this kind of program together to go have an impact in this community, was the reward in and of itself. And, you know, we've since been working together on how we continue to expand that, how do we, you know, take that forward and, and bring that everywhere. Cause that's, the end of the day, I think beyond, you know, revenue, this is the stuff that really matters, especially in an organization at Dentsu that this is important. >> Yeah. And I think building on the missed opportunity piece around 50% to 90% being unemployed, that's a missed opportunity for business as well. So those skills are so niche and they're so necessary for us to thrive within an environment that's moving as rapidly as we are. Because we just can't keep pace with the change of feature sets that are being released coupled with maintaining existing solutions that we've built. So it's in cross enabling people to really complement each other's unique skills and strengths based off of strong, true partnership. So it really became a beautiful three-way partnership between Dentsu, Autonomy Works and UiPath that we continue to evolve as UiPath makes additional releases with emerging tech that we're officially hearing about right now. So we have a ton of different ideas of how we can bring that into the fold. And what resonates with us the most is hearing different perspectives on how to apply that coming from that working group. So just a different way of thinking about things and the diversity of thought really resonates with, Hey, are we actually applying this thing the right way? Should we be thinking about this differently? Because you get a lot of yes people, you know, when we come and talk to people about how to apply this technology. And when you have somebody with a different perspective, it's able to help us figure out what our long-term strategy is actually going to look like, by taking advantage of the resources and partnerships that we already have in place. >> In terms of that strategic vision, how do you think this three-way partnership that you mentioned is going to influence that percentage of those, these individuals who are unemployed? What are you, any predictions on how much you can bring that down with automation? >> I think that depends on Dave's staffing plan. But, but the goal is to grow, right? So I mean this, this is a, a startup out of Chicago that has, you know, a healthy amount of staff. But finding ways to apply those skills in new ways with technology that's emerging, the horizon is your, is your end point. Right? And I think with the advent of low-code no-code machine learning coming into this type of a platform, it's, it's only opportunistic. There's only, there's only things ahead of us to do that. We just have to make sure that we train people properly and give them that opportunity because they're going to run with it with the right leadership and those skills. >> Yeah. What's exciting also is, is, you know, what started as an idea and a conversation that's now turned into a pilot program and a little bit of expansion of the stuff we're working on together, we've taken some of the excitement and spread it beyond that now. So we've got partners like ENY and PWC and Revature that are saying, and Special Eastern and Automatic, who helped in the initial program saying, how can we help? What can we do? How can we broaden this? And how can we go out to the larger community and make a bigger impact? So, you know, I think it's exciting. We know, we can see how fast RPA and these types of technologies are causing change. And we've got to make sure that people don't get left behind. Especially, you know, someone as this important part of a segment of a workforce. If we can equip them with these skills to be relevant to their current employers or future employers, I think it's, it's critical. You know, another like moment for me during this process was I took for granted, you know, what working actually means, right? It creates independence for us, right? So you get a job, you get paid and generate income. You have the independence now to go live on your own, provide for yourself. A lot of these individuals, I learned, are still living with their parents because they can't get employment. They don't have that independence that we take for granted. So I think, again, that's the essence of what automation for good is all about, is, is being able to go make an impact like that, to that community. And it's, you know, we talk about cultures and brands and you know, it's also great to work with an organization like Dentsu cause they get it, right? Their product is ideas. It's human capital is their, their main ingredient of what they generate value for their customers. And so be able to take that and help people is just, I think what it's all about. >> You're lucky both to be in a business that the incentives are aligned. >> Yeah. >> You're not in businesses that are designed to appropriate data and push ads in front of our face. >> Yeah. >> In a lot of big companies, it's almost like, okay, we got to do this. I don't mean to overstate this, but we have to do this because we're big and we're rich. >> Yeah. >> And so, and if we don't, we're going to get attacked. >> Yeah. Okay. And it's sort of more like a check, check box and to put somebody in charge of it. >> Yep. >> You know, oftentimes a woman or a person of color. And I shouldn't be negative on that. >> Yeah. >> That's fine. That's good to do. But it just seems like there's a nice alignment with automation. AI could be similar because I mean, AI could be used for really bad. Automation. Okay, it maybe takes, the perception is it takes jobs away, but it's a really nice alignment that you can point at a lot of different initiatives. >> Yeah. >> So I think that's really a fortunate dynamic. >> And that's, you know, that's what defines a partnership, right? It's that alignment of long-term interests that, you know, you make the investments now and the sacrifices now to drive that. It's not just commercial. It's not just transactional. >> Dave: Yeah. >> I mean, we were talking about the opportunities for these types of people and for us as a customer and for UiPath. It's it exists within that AI conversation that you were just talking about >> Dave: Yeah. >> Because from a technical perspective, you want to mitigate as much algorithmic bias within your training models. That's what these people are doing. It's helping to train models much more rapidly and effectively and objectively than we could have done otherwise. And that's, having that as part of our extended partnership within our network is going to accelerate the type of work that we want to do within the releases that we're seeing coming out of this conference. Because we don't have to worry about, oh, well, we've got to focus on tax forms and training the models to notice a signature. Because Autonomy Works has us covered there. They're enabling us to do more. We're enabling them to do a little more. And that's, that's the beauty of this intersection between the partners. >> Brian, I presume you talk with prospective customers of UiPath. And I presume also that you probably looked at some of their competitors. If you think about what differentiates this fast moving company, they talked this morning about the cadence of releases. Woo. Very fast. >> Brian: Yeah, it's a lot. >> Why UiPath for Dentsu? >> UiPath has been a tremendous partner for us since about 2017. And we've been able to move on that journey with UiPath. We've been able to help understand the products roadmaps and move at a similar pace as each other. So we're really lucky in that we have the flexibility as an advertising and media company that we're not beholden to internal audits, external audits, and really defined regulatory bodies. So we made a decision, I don't know what, six, seven months ago to collapse six UiPath on-prem instances and migrate to cloud with the sponsorship of our global CTO and our America CTO, just because it was the right thing to do. And because it would enable this type of partnership with external providers. So being able to move at that similar pace from a release cycle, but also from a feature adoption perspective, it's, it just makes the most sense for us. And we have that liberty to go to go do those things as we need to. >> Yeah. So the move to the cloud, you get, you're able to take advantage much faster. >> Yeah. >> Because what did we hear this morning? You release every six months. >> James: Yep. >> Yes. Which is typical for an on-prem. >> James: Yeah. >> And then, but you got to prepare for that. >> James: Yeah. >> I don't know how many N minus ones you support, but it's not infinite. >> James: Yeah. >> You got to move people along, so people have to prep. Whereas now in the cloud, there's the feature. Boom. >> Yeah. >> So being invested in automation for good topic, it's not, it's about automation for good across people in general, within internally to us and externally to us. For our clients, for our employees, and for our partners. The automation cloud enables that to happen much more seamlessly because we don't have the technical debt in place that requires people to VPN into our network and go through the bureaucracy of security, legal, and privacy. Which we've already done by the way, but those conversations bureaucratically still need to happen. With automation cloud, we're able to spin up Autonomy Works employees in real-time and give them the right set of access to go pursue the use cases that they want to, and that we need them to. So that, that technical debt release that we've experienced through the automation cloud is what's enabling us to do this type of good work. >> That makes sense. A bit more, less friction, obviously greater scale. >> Yeah. >> Easier to experiment. >> Yeah. >> Fail fast. >> We went from 12 separate programs to one program in a matter of a couple of months. >> It was wild. >> Yeah. >> And I imagine you're only really scratching the surface here with what you're doing with automation, that really, the horizon is the limit, as you said. Guys, thank you for joining us, talking about automation for good, what you're doing at Dentsu RPA with autistic adults. There's probably so many other great use cases that will come from this. Guys, we appreciate your time. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Thanks, you guys. >> Awesome. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you from Vegas UiPath FORWARD IV. (upbeat music plays)

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. Live the cube. Yes, it's live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio. Lisa Martin, with Dave Alante, we are covering UI path forward for very excited to be here, talking with customers, UI path, employees, partners, lots of great conversations going on about automation and the acceleration that we're seeing, especially in the last 18 months. We've got two guests here with me today to talk about emerging technologies, specifically continuous process discovery. Please welcome Paula Katikia VP of product management at UI path and Layla Deleage CIO and digital officer at Coca Cola. Ladies, welcome to >>The program. Thank you. It's great to be here. So let's >>Talk about public. Let's start with you. Continuous process discovery. Define that for us. What does that mean? >>So process discovery has been, um, a concept that's been around for awhile, right? It's enterprises have a bunch of processes that are deployed and people are following them. Um, the concept of discovery has existed. What we're trying to do with continuous process discovery is enable you to identify the processes, figure out how to optimize them and then automate them once they're automated, we want to monitor them and then keep doing that cycle over and over again, using technology rather than having fill in, having people fill in paperwork and then having those processes go out of, um, out of, um, status, like right away, because they're just becoming stale with continuous process discovery. They don't become stale. You're getting that real time feedback loop and you're getting the processes to work and to end continuously. >>So I wonder if I could follow up on that because I remember when you guys made the acquisition of process gold. And so as somebody who's heavily involved in product management, how did you go about, I mean, it's been, sounds like it's seamless, but it never is. Right. But how did you go about integrating and making it appear as though it's just kind of part of the platform? >>I mean, there's a lot goes into that right. Process gold was a great technology to begin with. So it wasn't a huge stretch for us to take it and integrate it and make it part of the platform. Um, typically when we acquire companies, we look for product market fit. We look for a technology fit. We look for people fit and we had that with process gold. The other thing to add there is a process discovery, um, specifically with Parsis gold and automation go hand in hand, you can't having one without the other is kind of leaving half of your solution on the table and just focusing on understanding and not focusing on implementation. And so it was very easy to take that technology and make it part of the hyper automation platform. >>Well, the reason why I asked that question is because it sort of coincides with a customer's journey where you go from sort of a individual department. And then now you're saying, I always say pave the cow path. And I kind of take a process that I know I'll just implement that even might not be the best I'm going to repeat and takes you to a new realm. And so this is, to me, this is all about how incumbent companies, a hundred plus year old companies can actually be digital disruptors as opposed to being disrupted themselves. Right? A lot of smart people running these big companies. So last time we talked, you were relatively new inside of a year. So how's the journey going. And, and how does it tie in to some of the advancements that UI path has made? Yeah, >>Absolutely. So the journey is going great. I like to work to use accelerate. So I'm here to accelerate and transform and why we have to do it is so that we don't become obsolete and we continue to be relevant for our customers, for our employees. They're important and for our community. So the are doing a lot of finished running a lot of initiatives. When you look at being relevant for the customer, that means we have to transform the way we operate and our business models. We have to generate new revenue streams now that are enabled and based on data and technology, while you do that, you have to create efficiency internally. You cannot create great experiences with customers and you work with very monolithic and very old school, traditional processes or based off working and systems. So you have to make sure that you adapt and change and transform the way you work internally to meet the customer's needs and demand and generate these new business models. >>So our starting position was automation. We have to automate at an extreme speed, but we also wanted to go really far without automation, not just fast and hit with task automation and just automate these traditional 50, 60 year old processes, but have Doobie identify what else is there? There's a wealth of opportunity when you look at an end to end process. So that's where process mining as Polak described, comes into play. And actually we started affiliating with process mining during process gold. So your question around how the integration went, we actually went through that. I think the UI pads, one key value that they have, and they should never use is listening to the customer. So the got to get her with iPads. And we said, there's more to what we can do with automation. And we implemented process mining for one end to end process, amazing results, just one country, one end to end process, amazing results. But it's because of the partnership. We know what we need to achieve, but we have to do, and they know how to help us to get the technology up and running or adapt to technology and improve the technology. So that's where we are achieving outcomes. We are generating new business model, new revenue stream, automating internally re-skilling and up-skilling our people, which is extremely important that comes along with automation that redesign exciters sorry, but that redesign a work is >>Very important in the CEO's role is very important in that as well. I wanted to talk though about something that you just said with respect to the listening piece that you have is so good at this morning in the keynote. Mary said too, you know, all that, which was standing room only, which was amazing to see, um, in this day and age, but that they wanted to hear from customers. What are we doing? Right? What are we not doing that you want to see more of? What do you want to see less of? Talk to me about the direction and advice that you, as the CIO of Coca-Cola is able to provide to flock and the team about where you I've had this going, right. It's really on a very fast cadence. >>Absolutely. So as Coca-Cola TJ, we started the journey with two iPad, three years of work. Exactly. I was on the job and the second big technology decision I made was the iPad. And since then it was fear consistently think. But during our cab meeting, Daniel said something, he said, I'm not welcoming the request. He said, we welcome. He said, no, no, sorry. I am not welcoming. I'm requesting you to give us insight. And I think that's very critical. That's what we want to hear. At the end of the day, we are technologists. We are total leaders, but the are better taught leaders with our technology partners. So we want technology partners to show us the way sometimes. And with low code, no code type of approaches. And the evolution of the technology that UI path is, has been running since the past three years is helping us remove so many barriers. >>When it comes to people, they are listening to us in terms of the roadmap and what should be implemented and what should be prioritized VR, providing with them, our roadmap, our vision on where we want to go in automation and hugged battle. We want to integrate with other ecosystem and environments that we have. They are listening to us in terms of, for the existing products, what can be improved, what can work better? And we don't need a cab actually for you iPad to listen to us. We work hand in hand with two iPad team continuously be coil, you know, eight sometimes. So, and that's what we want them to continue to do. They are great technologists, as long as they continue to listen to us, they're going to be greater technology. >>Yeah. And I'll share my perspective on this, this, this, you know, these partnerships actually make us build better products, right? We get to, this is how we stay ahead of the curve by listening to our customers, because they're the ones who are doing the implementations. They understand how our product works. We can design it, we can test it. But that's the extent to which we can go once they implement it is when we know what's working, what's not working. And how do we take that feedback and make better products. So it's a two-way street. We love hearing from them constantly. >>You have to decode what the customer is saying sometimes, right? Like Steve jobs said, yeah, if you just ask the customer what they want, you'll never build, you know, something that's game changing the world changing. And so, so you have to talk to Layla, you get the input from COVID, Coca-Cola maybe many and then other customers to figure out, okay, how can I apply this? So that actually can scale and meet the needs of many customers. Not just so, because otherwise you end up being, you know, a custom development shop, which ironically is what you guys were 20 years ago. Right? So it's kind of some art involved in the science of listening. Isn't it? >>There is definitely, I mean, most of our job as product managers is to design the product, right? It's very much art and the feedback that we get from Layla and others, it really just helps us focus on a vision. But, you know, keeping up with new technology trends, figuring out how to figuring out how to, um, bring AI into our product vision and looking beyond what we're being told and asked for and looking forward at what the next trends are going to be in technology is what helps us continue to innovate. So it's both, it's the balance of what we're hearing, but also technologies. And what's possible with what's available >>Question for you. You said three years ago, you guys brought in UI path, right after you joined the company as it's CIO, why U I path, clearly you looked at some of the other folks, you mentioned that company that they acquired, but what in your mind differentiates what they're able to deliver on the partnership side and the technology side? >>Yeah. Very important question. We have a definition for a technology partner for us, the technology partner needs to meet criteria of innovating. So how much do you invest in innovation? And Daniel says, I don't even know the number, right? So because we want them to be on the forefront. Sometimes they have to pull us and sometimes we have to pull them. The second one is very important for a company to be successful in automation or in any advanced technology, you have to build intellectual property within your enterprise. And we did not want to art source technology. We wanted to insource technology and we asked you, I pad, if they would be reeling to co-innovate, co-develop collaborate with us. They were the only ones who allowed us to build the intellectual property within my enterprise, because that's the way I'm going to innovate. And that's the way I'm going to help product leaders like Pollock to create better products. Right? So, and the third one is just building expertise. Low-code no-code the technology company needs to, you know, wait where they remove some of the barriers for me to find the skills or develop talent, how easy it is to find the talent and skills to develop this technology. Right. And what, what does the technology company do to develop skills? So these are a few criteria that we have, and then when the company takes all of those, they are in, >>I'm interested in, um, to kind of shift the conversation. If I may, in your, your role, it's not uncommon to see a CIO and a chief digital officer together, but it's quite uncommon at a, at a large firm like Coca-Cola. And, and I'm wondering, is that how the company, cause your group sees information in digital? Is that how the company's organized? You know, that you plug into somebody who has that to a role. Can you talk about, >>Yeah, absolutely. So cocoli too. Jake is within the Coca-Cola system. We are one of the leading butlers within the Coca-Cola system. The reason I merged the two roles is to be successful in the digital era. When you have the digital and it separated. If it goes a little slower, you can not be successful in digital and you cannot be successful in generating new revenue streams or new business models. So you have to orchestrate that evolution and transformation of it and the rest of the business together. And that's why I merged the two roles. We are unique as Coca-Cola >>Merged them. You say you merged those roles, like, did you come at it from the, where you digital first and then CIO first >>Digital first. Okay. Great point. I built from scratch and started with the digital strategy. And then we went into defining what roles, what skills do we need? And then we redefined, what are the improvements we need on the it side? But it was all digital product based >>Because I think, uh, I think it would be much harder for a CIO, let alone a woman CIO, no offense, but I don't think there's any offense there, but oh, she's trying to do a land grab. I could see that happening, but the digital officer title, because that's the hot title and it's the visionary. Right. And it's a lot of times it's undefined. Yeah. So that's that and that, and that that's the structure of the organization. So you roll up into it. >>Uh, so yeah, because I came into the ex-con role. I had the privilege to kind of shape it from scratch. >>Exactly. And >>Like Shankar was talking about hidden brain and all the change this morning, it was a change in terms of how are we going to approach digital? It was a change in terms of all the people who are part of the company and people who have been in technology or it before right now, the expectations are very different. You have to be product organization, you have to be outcome centric. You have to generate the revenue streams. So it's very different from the world of it. I think any it or any technology leader can do this, if they are willing to transform themselves first and then their organization, and then they can transform the rest of the company, >>Chief digital officer data is a big part of your role. You're not the chief data officer, >>The organization, that's >>Part of your, okay, so the CDL reports into, okay, and that individual sure is responsible for governance and compliance. >>Well look, the data management, data governance, the foundation, and all the database solutions, I think >>You got it right. I think this idea of creating stovepipes, it just it's, it's not as productive and it's harder to make decisions that are aligned with the organization's goals, >>Boulder. So we're going to disrupt further. Our goal now is to create platforms and then democratize the platforms. So our operating partners can learn the new skills and they can develop their own use cases on the platforms. And that way they'll go much, further and much faster in terms of the generational new revenue, streams, changing, operating models, data and technology. I call it the new operating system of any business and everybody must learn >>Well. And that's what I want to ask you about, because if you think about, uh, uh, a company and incumbent, like Coca-Cola your processes over the years have in your data, maybe they were organized around the bottlers or the distribution channel, et cetera. And that might not be the best process. So you have to take a look at that and then use process mining to say, actually, what is the best process, reinvent yourself? Okay. >>Absolutely VRD and re-engineering and reinventing in a lot of places. Process mining helped us in short order to cash cycle. Everybody, every company has ordered to cash process. We took an order to cash process, which we recently standardized, by the way we thought we did. And every process mining told us that very few times you go through the happy path. Most of the times you go out of the happy path. So gave us a lot of tangible outcomes where we improve the cycle time. And it's an interesting process because you touch the customer it's impacts your delivery and your commitments to the customer. And it makes life easier for the employees. When you improve the process, this is only one piece VR also transforming the way we are interacting with our customers using digital means and digital channel. But one thing is very valuable with us while we do all of this staying hybrid is very important. Like with everything else, they do that human touch and personal relationship with our customers and consumers is invaluable. So we going to keep that doesn't matter how digital we go or how much technology we implement. They're going to keep the customer and consumer connect the most valuable asset that we have. >>Absolutely. It is. I'll go ahead. >>I was going to say, this is the one thing that, that we think about when we're designing our products, right? It's how can process my mining help you optimize your workflows, such that you can spend more time with the customer such that you can spend more time and get back to them faster. >>Yeah, that's critical. They, I always say the employee experience is inextricably linked to the customer experience. And so what you just talked about, you talked about so much stuff that I'd love to unpack. We probably don't have time, but coming in as with a transformation mindset, one being, you mentioned, you know, leaders need to be willing to embrace that. Obviously you were, but as a CIO, >>Working with UI path, you're really helping to redefine work. And also that customer experience, to an extent, how's your iPod helped facilitate that. So because they are listening and they are willing to partner with, and I think the most importantly, they're going to be part of our outcomes. They care about our outcomes. And going back to your question, how do we select a technology partner? That was one of the critical items. Outcomes are very critical. If there's no outcome, there's no point in it are not doing technology for the sake of doing it. We are, yes. We are all excited with what technology can bring and removing barriers very important, which is a huge, another huge topic. But if you don't generate an outcome it's meaningless and you AIPAC is willing to understand the outcome we are generating. So it's less of a commercial discussion, more of a technology and outcome conversation. >>So whether it's an customer outcome or an employee outcome or a cash outcome, financial outcome, I think that's why we have been successful. And they have been on the journey with you, iPad process mining. I think they are one of the very few clients, right? Customers of UI path who are using it. And because we are very progressive organization, you AIPAC is listening to our feedback and implementing back to your earlier question, you have so many customers who do you listen, right? So when you are progressive and when you really know what you are doing, you're also pulling your iPad, a big technology company into a direction that is more meaningful. So they listen to us in terms of what to improve with process mining. And that's why we were able to achieve the outcomes. And now they are listening to us further on further improvements on process mining so that we can capitalize on further outcomes and benefits of process mining >>In order to cash is common use cases. So what, what, uh, were there any diamonds in the rough, or do you suspect there are with, >>We already realized, yes. We realized multiple tangible outcomes. We discussed this with Polak earlier today. One of them is some very interesting, I'm not able to share, but the most critical one is be focused on improving cash cycle. It's scent. You can imagine extremely full flow business, even within FMCG, right? We as Coca-Cola system, we are an extremely flow business. It's an instant consumption business. Hence your delivery and cash cycles are very different compared to other industries. So we said, we want to improving cash. We discovered that the improved, the invoice due date change, which impacts the payment terms by 20%, we improved credit limits approvals by 5% by removing unnecessary approval steps. We realized there were unnecessary approvals. These two are directly impacting our customers as well because it's waiting in somebody's queue to handle those approvals. And the customer is not getting to delay delivery because it's payment, payment and delivery go hand in hand. >>And the third one is, and I'm not able to articulate it exact outcome, but it's a very critical day, every day gain on getting cash. So it's a cash game. The next big outcome is the cycle time improvements. So we significantly improve the cycle time of the process. And this means efficiency for our employees. We are making life easier for them. The last one is again, a tangible one 30,000 hours back in terms of productivity, one process, one country, 30,000 hours. And that translates into exactly that translates into benefit for the customer. You increase customer satisfaction, you increase employee satisfaction. 'cause you remove all the non-available for it. So going back to Pollock's point around continuous discovery, that's why we love it. It's like good old lean six Sigma lean six Sigma is exactly that you continuously, you want to continuously improve the process. You don't do it once with process mining. We don't want to do it once. We want to do it continuously, but this time with automation, >>But before we go, I'm the lone male on the panel. So I have to ask. So, so you CIO seat, chief digital role, very uncommon, let alone uncommon for a woman. Big time product management person. Okay. That's cool check. Right? You've been in the industry for a while now, a celebrity on the, on the cube and elsewhere. So has the pandemic, how has the pandemic affected the whole women in tech trend? Has it slowed it down? Has it accelerated? We were talking earlier about the working moms feeling like way stressed out more than the working dads, double 30% versus 15%. Has the pandemic in your minds altered in any way, was women in tech meme? How so positive. Negative. >>So we are trying to turn the negative into a positive. It is negative. Absolutely. I think it's impacted everybody, all, all women in all industries and in all areas of operation and workforce women in technology is already a very slim, right? It's a very tiny layer within any company and out there in the society. And unfortunately the challenges that came with COVID impacted and some of them had to leave and they couldn't stick around. Right. So we are trying to turn that into positive. As a digital function, we have a big give back initiative. It's a priority of the digital team. I'll be talking about that very in, in, and our technology removes barriers. So we have to turn this into a positive, yes, COVID has impacted everybody personally and directly or indirectly. But now with technology, we can remove barriers. We have now flexible working and hybrid working models, being ramped up across all geographies and all industries and all companies, technology removes barriers. >>We can teach technology to a lot of people and our communities and they can join because we have huge skill gaps in technology that would sat is we have huge scarcity of skills in technology. And we have very few people, but we are talking about women dropping out or any type of minor to dropping out, right? So we can leverage and improve and turn it around. I hope we'll accomplish to do that. We started doing that in our company and in Turkey. And we are trying to expand that across multiple other countries with NGO partnerships, helping women to gain certain skills so that they can join the economy again from wherever they are. >>And from my point of view, I think there are two aspects to it. As Layla said, it has affected women a little bit more, but I've also seen, in some cases it has leveled the playing field a little bit because there's, you know, everybody's on zoom. The kids show up on zoom cameras for men, just as much as they do for women. So it helps shine a light on things that we would normally go through that nobody would know about. And I thought that was a really cool outcome to some degree of this. You know, my manager prom has little kids and they'd be in his background all the time, just as my little kids would be by background. And I'm like, oh wow. So you know how it feels to be the caregiver at home. And I thought, I thought that was a positive outcome of the whole being a female in technology. I liked that >>That's something that I hadn't thought about in terms of leveling the playing field like that there's in this situation, there are both positives and negatives. I like how you're seeing the playing field level a bit more and how you're at. Coca-Cola looking to, how can we turn this negative into a positive lots of opportunities there we uncovered a lot in the last, I'm going to guess 20 minutes talking about continuous process discovery, all the way to women in technology, how you're each doing that and what your perspectives are. I wish we had more time. We could keep going, but ladies, thank you for joining David. >>It's been a pleasure >>For Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio UI path forward for it. We'll be right back.