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

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

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath Forward Americas, 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Vellante. We're joined by Cathy Tornbohm, she is the distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Very welcome, nice to be here. >> And Guy Kirkwood, he is the Chief Evangelist at UiPath. Thank you so much. >> Thanks Rebecca. >> So, we're hearing so much of these mantras, these catchphrases of UiPath. "automation first", "a robot for every person", "we're re-booting work", these are the theme's that Guy was touting up on the main stage, Cathy. Beyond that, I'd like to hear from you a little bit about what you're seeing in the RPA space at the moment. What are the trends and the themes that you think are most salient? >> I think the most fascinating thing about RPA right now is that it's really highlighting the problems the organizations have. All their accidents of history are really being brought up by RPA. And then you've got these digital darlings that they're trying to compete with, the Greenfield site kind of people. And some of those don't have beautiful back offices, but let's not go there for a minute. So, it, RPA is an opportunity for companies to link their digital dreams with their existing legacy nightmares. >> And those legacy nightmares include all of the things that Guy was talking about today: the drudgery, the dreariness, those mundane tasks that take up so much of our time. >> Absolutely, and really, if you think about it, in organizations, typically less than 15% of the applications that they're using have got some sort of application programming interface. So if you don't have a way of linking them, you end up with this long turn of applications that aren't linked together, with people literally being swivel-chair integration between the applications. >> Well, why can't you just string a bunch of API's together and automate that way? >> Well, in fact, there's a guy called Ian Barkin who works for Symphony, one of their organizations, it was set up to create automations for organizations. So one of the services businesses since been acquired by Sykes. And he describes it as process sediment, and it builds up in businesses in the same way that sedimentary rock builds up over millions of years. And digging through that, so that you can actually become more efficient is very difficult to do. So doing it on API level means you got to join up all those things individually. Whereas, using RPA, if system 'A' has a user interface, and system 'B' has a user interface, you can just use RPA. >> So, Cathy, you've been following process automation as a category for a number of years. Why RPA, why is it so hot, and why now? We've heard that it's the number one software category... >> Cathy: Fastest growing, yeah. Fastest growing, from Gartner. We've seen spending data that confirms that. Why now? (sighing) >> It's the digital competition that companies are facing, and the recognition that they cannot continue to be quite as bad at some of the things that they are bad at. So it's really that business transformation story back again, business process re-engineering, the same story that we had with BPO like ten years ago, but now, with robots instead. >> Yeah, it's interesting, I was at a, we had a show last weekend, it was the CEO of Suze, Suze... How do ya say it? Anyway, Suze, she said to me, "Well, you know, digital transformation's really about business transformation." And you kind of said the same thing. I mean, thoughts on that? >> I mean, you look at the start of the outsourcing market, the BPA market, twenty years ago. The very first deals were actually IT outsourcing deals that then transformed the business using IT as the enabler. So the first deal that I got involved with ever, in the outsourcing market, was Perot Systems with a British and Asian company. And we were putting in business process re-engineering consultants who actually transformed the business using IT as the enabler for that. There is no difference now, in fact one of the, one of the partners here, one of our original customers, actually put together a plan where we did the implementation, you know, soup to nuts, so that we could find out how we fit in to that whole transformation piece. And our team put together a whole package on all the learnings that we got out of that. And I had to laugh, because they're exactly the same things that every transformation program has had for the last thirty years. >> You know, if you look at kind of the history of certain segments, and I wonder if, Cathy, if you see RPA as one of them, like if you could've figured out who was implementing ERP the best, you didn't know SAP was going to become the leader, but if you could've figured out who was adopting ERP, you could've made a lot of money in the stock market, 'cause those companies had a huge productivity boost. Kind of same thing with Big Data, nobody really made any money in Big Data, so-called 'Big Data', a dupe. But the guys who applied it probably did pretty well. Do you see RPA as similar where the practitioners are going to actually be the ones that add more value to the industry than the new, the newly minted billionaires? >> It's almost the opposite. So the more RPA a company needs, it means the worse they did at managing their ERP in the first place. >> So they're kind of a mess? >> Yeah, yes. That need to be cleaned up, yeah. >> Yes, if you've got a hundred and twenty four ERP's that don't talk to each other, and you want to close your books in any kind of reasonable time frame, you're going to be a massive adopter of RPA, which basically means the more rubbish you are and activity, the more opportunity there is to automate more of it. >> So, what are the metrics that matter when you talk to your clients? >> Well, what I try and encourage clients to do is to really focus on business outcomes. So, much as Guy probably doesn't want me to say this, I don't really care how many 'scripts', aka robots, you've built, or how many run times you've deployed. What I care about is the business impact that you've managed to achieve. So, whatever KPI's are important to you, so are you managing to collect more revenue? Are you managing to make your customers happier because you're managing to decrease average handle times? or increase right first time activities. So anything that you're doing that actually improves the good old business metrics, is just going to be fantastic. So those are the sort of metrics that, really, companies should be focusing on. Not how many scripts they've built, that's absolutely pointless. >> I mean, are they focusing on that? I mean, when you... >> Yeah, lots of people are. >> Yeah? >> Yeah. >> In terms of ROI, we hear from customers that it has had them more accurate, they're more efficient, they're cost saving on human hours of the mundane tasks. But, when you were up on the main stage talking about how we're rebooting work, we're changing this moment, is it sparking the creativity, the imagination, the time spent on strategy in the more higher-level things? Is that, I mean that seems like that's the goal of return on investment. >> It is, within those organizations that are the most mature. So, what we're seeing, is the bifurcation, really, of the market between those organizations that are just starting and scaling up what they can, internal senses of excellence. Those organizations that are using the partners behind us. Those organizations that are using external parties to help them develop that. So Delight, for instance, they are sort of a managed service business. And instead of using people, they're using automation. So, Delight, by accident, has a BPA business in Spain, but then they'll turn that into an automation-heavy business and then providing that managed service. And then, the smartest customers, including SNBC, who we heard from yesterday, are actually turning their back office cost operations into a front office of revenue generator. Now, that is radically different from what we've seen prior. >> So Cathy, I got to ask you, when I was on a plane out here, somebody texted me a picture of the latest hype cycle. And they said, they knew I was going to UiPath, they said, "RPA has entered the trough of disillusionment." I said, "Oh, awesome, Gartner's, Cathy's coming on, and I can ask her about that." Well, what's your take on that? >> I think as Guy says, some people have already sailed through the trough, they've already gone through the challenges, or some of the challenges, and they've already found these fantastic productive things. I mean, we're estimating that people will save close to a million dollars for a large company, and just not having to do re-work of getting it wrong first time with re-keying that data. So, where there's some fantastic savings available, that you know, some of the ones have gone through the trough and done that, a lot of the other ones, they kind of, they don't understand the limitations of RPA and all those other partner tools that they need to put with it. So, don't understand it, can't handle unstructured data by itself. It needs a sister tool, so, what Gartner's talking about right now is this concept of hyper automation where you look across all the different activities that you would need to, sort of replace a person. So the people that are heading into the trough as sort of this second wave of adopters that Guy talked about, that will really struggle because they didn't understand the limitations in the first place. >> Well then, you know the, sometimes, things like the Magic Quadrant, and the trough of disillusionment, they're somewhat misunderstood sometimes, people, you know they see 'em, Gartner's very clever with the way it works things, but, so how should we think about that hype cycle? It's actually, in a way it's progress, isn't it? For an industry where they start... Entering that trough. >> Its, what Gartner says, is all industries have to go through that type of growing pains. And I think that we're seeing that, UiPath's expanded massively, and that's always a challenge for companies as they grow very rapidly. And as companies try and, as they say, take these wrong metrics. So I think things like UiPath buying ProcessGold is fantastic, it's a really, really good move for them. And I expect to see a lot of other process mining companies acquired, brought in to the RPA fold, because, there's four reasons why companies are going to go into this disillusionment, right? These are the main challenges with companies trying to use RPA properly. One is, they don't know what the processes are. So ProcessGold will give you a really good indication, they don't know about the microscopic level, and they don't know about the macro level. So things like digital twins will be something else that we would expect to see very closely partnered with companies like UiPath. And they don't know how to orchestrate their resources. So, other companies, like Innate, that can help you figure out how to do that will become... So its kind of like we're sort of breaking down a lot of what happened in other software categories and re-building them all up, in the way that the business can actually adopt them, hence, the AI Fabric sort of idea. So they don't know the processes, politics, people will lie to you about what they do all day, so they can sabotage your process, and there's a lot of silos within organizations that hate each other and throw things over the wall. So that all needs streamlining, and the more you can do across silos, the more successful any automation project would be. Then you've got, when you take a person out of a process, you take their eyes, their ears, the mouth, the nose. How are you going to replace that when you're trying to take them out, because you've got the keyboard fingers thing with the RPA tool? You need all these other activities replaced, replicated, supported. And then you've got the economics of production, so actually making sure that the scripts that you've built are actually worthwhile and are going to be cost-effective. It's something that we're studying at the moment. So you've got all these, all these different barriers, from all these different angles that are really going to push this thing into the trough for a little bit. And that's why it's great that RPA companies are looking at ways to mitigate that for their customers. >> Now, remember we said, as the understandings. So RPA is really good at dealing with structured data. Rule-spaced activities, deterministic things. That's why in regulatory, highly regulated environments, it's very effective, and the regulators love this sort of stuff. Because it's deterministic. When you look at AI, then we look at it in four ways. So you've got process understanding, which is the ProcessGold acquisition, you look at conversational understanding, 'cause ultimately robots are going to be controlled by voice. So you have to understand, the system has to understand that, let's say you're sitting in a bank, and the robot doesn't understand something, you say, "Okay, robot, stick that in the Well's account." It has to understand that Well's, in this case, means Well's Fargo. It does not mean a hole in the ground, water at the bottom, or a town in Somerset, in the UK, 'cause they're well's. So getting those ontologies correct is so important. So, that's conversational understanding. Document understanding. Because, as Cathy said, companies are still wading around in paper. So, understanding what those different documents are and how to action them is going to be really important. And finally, you're looking at visual understanding. So understanding and viewing things on the screen exactly the same way that humans do. So it's getting that combination right. >> So for RPA to live up to the hype, and there's a lot of hype, and it's a good thing, it's fun to track. It's got to go presumably beyond cleaning up the crime scene, if you will, to this new vision that you and Guy just laid out. What is the distance between, I dunno, sometimes I say 'paving the cow path', which gives you a nice hit, but as you say, it's 'cause companies... Ya know, they're messed up, to this vision of this, actually the guy from Pepsi today talked about it, this fabric of automation across the organization. How big of a gap is that? >> It's very different by every different company on the planet, really, in terms of their accidents of history, what their IT application landscape looks like, and what their business landscape looks like. And when you try and put the two things together, that's where you find the opportunities for any type of automation. >> Well come on, that's such an 'it depends' answer. (laughing) At the macro, will... In your expert opinion, will RPA live up to the hype? So many trends haven't, enterprise data warehousing, Big Data, Doob, all that stuff. You think RPA has the potential to crack through that. >> You mentioned a very good point. I think the most successful companies are the ones that actually will take the person that's managing the data and analytics of how their process is performing, and doing that with their automation strategy. And there are very few companies that've actually worked that out. They've still got totally two walls and they just meet up here at the CEO. So, unless companies actually take a more active business outcomes approach, and look at their end-to-end processes of order to cash and source to pay, these problems will carry on for some time. >> Well that's a great point, I mean, so it's data, it's machine intelligence, I guess Cloud for scale, you guys made a SAS announcement today, it's "automation first", to use your buzz word. >> Cathy: You need it all to come together. >> And it's really developing those best practices in your role as Chief Evangelist in helping understand what the most successful companies do, and then making sure that's implemented. >> Well that's why I spend more of my time listening than I do talking. Because the very nature of being a Chief Evangelist is the best job and the worst job title in the world. It's the best job because I spend my entire time talking to people like Cathy who know about what's happening within the market, and then feeding it back into our organization so we can make the right bets, so we can make the right acquisitions, but develop the right things. The bad thing about the job, is that I keep getting an inordinate number of people on LinkedIn saying, "So pleased that Jesus has entered your life." And I'm not that type of evangelist. (laughing) >> It's in the title. >> You know there's always this age-old debate in the industry of best of breed versus kind of a sweet approach. You see in SAP, for instance, acquired an RPA company, In Four talks about it. And then you get the specialist, UiPath. How do you see that shaking out, as the industry gets kind of more consolidated, how do you see a company like UiPath thriving, continuing to thrive? >> Gartner's going to predict coming in our new prediction series, but... Roughly 20 to 30% of enterprise adoption of AI, machine learning activities for process-based activities, will go through the RPA market. So, and with the IBPMS market, sort of combined together, that process management, because RPA has managed, cleverly, to capture the imagination of the business person. So, actually, there's a lot of IT departments that are talking to us about, how do we, how do we enshrine this activity, foreshadow IT, that's happening in the business, and make it successful, put governance plans in place so it will actually be successful in the way that it's actually now dealing with its own crime scene... (laughing) (mumbling) Its own rubbish, in a much better way. And I think that responsibility of business to understand how it can automate things and how it can manage things will really help a lot. So, I think the RPA players are well-placed to either be acquired into that bigger set of the established, large... Software providers, all to kind of keep blazing a trail for independence of the business. I'm not so sure about this idea that everybody should be programming their own scripts, I think that's a challenge. And I think the new interfaces will help mitigate some of the problems that we've seen with that approach, that hasn't been, haven't been very well done historically, so that's another area that will probably be a bit trough of disillusionment, but, actually, well-managed RPA projects have actually got a really good chance of delivering back very interesting benefits for businesses. >> Yeah, as a discreet innovation category, it does kind of feel that way, and often times, those markets are winner take most, the winner makes a ton of dough, number two makes a little bit of money, number three kind of breaks even, and everybody else gets consolidated or goes out of business, so, you guys go big or go home. That's kind of... Your posture. >> Tomorrow morning I'm doing, I'm doing my predictions for next year, and one of them is that the challenger RPA vendors, and indeed the service organizations that are small, are going to continue to consolidate and get acquired next year. So that's the 2020 prediction for us. >> Great. Well, Guy and Cathy, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great conversation. >> Oh, good, thank you. >> Thank you very much, indeed. Thanks Rebecca. >> Dave: Thanks you guys. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, stay tuned for more of theCUBES live coverage of UiPath. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas, brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. You're watching theCUBE. We're at UiPath Forward Americas. Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. TheCUBE is the leader of, what are we the leader of? (laughs) >> Live tech coverage, Dave. >> The leader in live tech coverage. I've been blowing that line every week. Thanks for watching, everybody. We've got a great segment here. Jean Younger is here. She's the vice president, Six Sigma Leader, Security Benefit. She's to my near left, and Donna O'Donnell is here, director of key accounts at UiPath all the way from New York. Donna, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Great to see you guys. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> All right, so we're well into day one. We're getting the Kool-Aid injection from customers and UiPath constituents, but Jean, let's start with you. Talk about your role, what's the company do, fill us in. >> Our company is an annuity company. We sell financial products for life insurance and annuities. We have about 30 billion under management, so it's a fairly large company out of Kansas. So, my role there is as a Six Sigma leader. We go in and we look at areas that need improvement or across the company, and one of the things I found, I'd been with the company almost five years now, and what I found is a lot of times, we're really good about putting manual processes in and never getting rid of 'em. We have day two issues of a tech. A tech goes live and you got a list of day two stuff that didn't get fixed, never gets fixed. It's just easier to do it, and cheaper, to leave it manual. So we have a lot of that in the company. With my job, seeing the various processes throughout the company, I was like what can we do to get rid of some of this stuff, get rid of that, get knowledge work back on the worker's plate instead of manipulating a spreadsheet or creating a report that they do every morning and it takes 'em the first 30 minutes or the first seven hours of their day is creating this one report every single day. We started looking at technology and came across UiPath. >> See, we call it GRS, getting rid of stuff. >> Jean: Yep. >> So, Donna, your job is to make these guys successful, right? >> Absolutely, so basically I just facilitate the smart people within the company. I listen to the business needs that Jean and other large clients have. We bring the resources, the products, and if we can't find it, we will absolutely find it and do everything we can to meet the needs. >> So, what's your automation story? When'd you get started? Paint a picture for us, the size, the scope. >> Okay, so last year about this time is when I started looking into it. I had just rolled out of another area that we had completely destroyed and built back up, and I was on to my next escapade in security benefit. >> Dave: Are you a silo buster, is that the new-- >> Yeah, I kind of go in and fix things. I'm kind of a fixer is basically what my job is. We'd rolled out and came back into Six Sigma to start looking and this came up. I'd seen the technology and I was like I wonder if it could work in our company. And so, we started doing kind of dog and pony show. We'd pull the different silos in, talk to 'em and say hey, here's what RPA can do for you. Is that something that you have some processes that might work? And we knew that there were processes in there, but we brainstormed with 'em for about 30 minutes. And out of that 30 minute, hour long conversation, we came out of there with about a hundred processes that people had already identified. And we kept going through there, I took that information, I built a business case, 'cause I knew to get the money, I needed to show them that there would be cost out potentially, and/or that I could take resources and move 'em into more critical areas that we didn't have the staffing. And so I had instances where, one of them that we're doing is out of our HR department. During the raise and salary time, they had two individuals that spent 60 hours a week for four months doing the same thing, same report over and over, and that's one of the processes we're actually going to implement here pretty soon. So, I came up with 'em and put the business plan together and asked for the money, and after kind of a long journey, I got the money. >> Long journey. (Jean and Donna laugh) >> It's never short enough is it? Jean, I mean, one of the things, Six Sigma is really good at measuring things. I mean, that's how you understand everything. You want to reduce variation. There was a line that really jumped out at me at the keynote is I want to go from pretty accurate to perfectly accurate, and when you were describing that there were a lot of things that were manually done. I mean, I lived in engineering for a lot of years and it was anything that somebody had to manually do, it was like oh wait, how can we change that? Because we didn't have RPA 10 years ago when I was looking at this, but how are you measuring these results? You talked about people doing repetitive tasks and the like. What other things are you finding to help get you along those reducing the variation inside the company? >> You know, it's interesting because I also teach the Six Sigma courses there, and one of my slides I've had for years teaching that class is most business processes are between 3.2 and 3.6, 3.8 sigma, which is like 95 to 98% accurate, and I said that's all the better we can usually do because of the expense that it would normally be to get us to a Six Sigma. You look at the places that have Six Sigma. It's life threatening, airplane engines. You hope they're at least Seven Sigma, those type of things, but business processes? 3.5, 3.2. But now, I get to change that because with RPA, I can make them Six Sigma very cheap, very cheaply, because I can pull 'em in, I got my bot, it comes over, pulls the information, and there's no double-keying. There's no miskeys. It's accuracy, 100% accuracy. >> So, what's the ripple effect in terms of the business impact? >> Cost savings, efficiency, customer experience. I mean, think about it. You're a customer, you get your policy, your name's wrong. How happy are you? You're not real happy. You send it back. So, no more of that. I mean, that's huge. So anything touching the customer going out of our business should be exactly how they put it on the application, especially if it was typed. Now, if it was handwritten, all hands are down on that, but if it was typed, it should be accurate. >> Donna, that's really powerful. I worked in a large corporation, we had a Six Sigma initiative and we know how much time and effort and people we were going to put in to have this little movements. >> Incremental change. >> An incremental change here to say. >> Donna: Pretty amazing. >> Blown away to tell you, Six Sigma and it's cheap. Well, what are you seeing? >> And I absolutely see. So, in addition to cost savings, it makes her more agile. But the big thing is, it makes it error free. The robots work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Runs on itself, and Jean's going to get those efficiencies that she needed. >> How about let's talk more about the business case? I'm interested in the hard dollar piece of it. I've talked to a number of people at this show and others, and they tend not to just fire people. They got to redeploy 'em. Sometimes the CFO goes well, where's my hard dollars come from? So, where did your hard dollars come from? (laughs) >> From the CFO. (laughs) And right now, I have to prove that out yet. We're just in its infancy. We're just starting to bring up processes. In fact, yesterday and today we're dealing with several processes coming up, and so realistically, right now I've got about 300 processes. We haven't timed 'em all out yet, but I know right now that's between probably 12 and 15,000 hours of time savings that we will get on an annual basis. >> Okay, what one of the customers said today is, one example they used is they actually put it in next year's budget >> Correct. >> Which I loved. In other words, we're going to do more revenue for the same headcount, or less cost or whatever it is. That's a reasonable justification, maybe even better, right? Because it's got some forward motion to it. Is that kind of discussion and thinking come up? >> Headcount is under discussion right now. We're going through budgeting right now, and so yeah, that was part of the way that we justified the less headcount. Instead of hiring to fill another position, we would remove jobs from a certain person and be able to shift them into another role. And so that savings, non-hiring, as well as one of the processes we're doing is in our investment area. They couldn't afford to get another person. They couldn't get another headcount, so I gave them a headcount with a bot. I'm doing all their processes that they've only been able to do on a monthly basis, we're doing 'em every day. It's 52 processes they're going to do every day. It's an amazing, I gave 'em a head right there, bam. >> But we're also finding that the folks that were doing the mundane and repetitive tasks can focus on more creative work, more interesting work that they believe in and that they're motivated to do. We see that happening all the time. >> What does that mean for culture inside your company? Was there resistance at first? I have to think it's got to improve morale that it's like oh wait, I'm not getting in trouble for making mistakes now and I can go focus on things that fit better. >> You know, I think ultimately it will. Initially, there was a feeling gosh, the bots are going to take my job. But that was one thing we were pretty careful about initially going out and just saying what is it that you can't do? We all work 50, 60, some of them people are working 70 hours a week, and if I can take 10 or 20 hours away from them, they are lovin' us. There's individuals that are saying come here. I'll show you what I need. They also realize the ability of the bot to do it right all the time takes a little stress off of them, because they know they're going to get the right numbers, then, to analyze, 'cause that's a big thing. In the finance area, in the close, in the accounting area, what we're doing there is we're taking a lot of those simple process that somebody has to do and do them for them so then guess what? We can close earlier, get our books closed earlier in the month, as well as allow them longer time to analyze the results. So instead of the book's closed and then we go uh-oh, found a problem. Got to reopen the ledger and make an entry, we have less and less of that. Those are expectations that are set right now for our teams is that hey, let's get rid of the stuff that we can, and then let's see what's left. >> And Dave, I used to meet with clients and they used to say wow, this is a really interesting technology. Tell me about it. And now they're like holy crap, I'm behind the eight ball with my competition. How do we get this going quick? How do we get it going fast? In 2016, it was a $250 million industry, and by 2021, it's going to be a $3 billion industry we learned today. So it's pretty powerful. >> I think those numbers are low, by the way. >> I think they're low, too. What they said today, it's going to be a $3.4 billion industry. >> I think it's a 10x factor, probably by 2023 to 2025, I think this is going to be a $10 billion business. I've done a lot of forecasting in my life. That's just a gut feel swag, but it sort of feels like that. I think there's some pieces that are, there's some blind spots in terms of use cases and applications that we can't even see yet. Culturally, the light bulb moment, just listening to you, Jean, was the, first of all you're saying, you want your weekends back? Yeah! And then the second is it sounds like the employees are involved in sort of defining those processes, so they own it. >> And that's how we're scaling. I mean, we already realized we're a bottleneck. Our COE is a bottleneck and so we're like hey, right now, finance, it's not the end of the year. It's end of quarter, but those process are lighter than end of the year. So hey, can we get anything done? They're doing our documentation for us. They're actually taping themselves doing it, they're writing up the documentation. We come in and we look at it, and then we have a programmer doing it, but we're talking about how do we move that programming piece down to them as well, so we can get our scale up? Because I can't get through 300 processes in my small COE without a lot of help from the business. >> But Dave, most of our clients, the way that they scale very quickly is through partners. So, partners can do one of many things. They can be the developers, they can be the implementers, they could create the center of excellence, or they could pick which are the low-hanging processes. When we started off with Jean while she was going through the approval process, I brought out four partners, I gave 'em my own little mini RFP. They each had a four-hour time slot. They presented in front of Jean and we narrowed it down to two, and two of the partners are here at this event today. Most clients need to depend on partners. >> Well, that's key Donna, right? And I've said before, when you start seeing the big names that are around here, you know it's an exciting space. They don't just tiptoe and play around and games. They do some serious work for businesses. We got to turn the conversation to diversity, generally, but I also want to ask you specifically about women in tech. So, Stu and I were in a conference at Splunk earlier this week. The CEO of Carnival had a great line about diversity. He said, a big believer in diversity, of course. He's African American, and he said 40 years ago when I cracked in business, there weren't a lot of people I worked with that looked like me. I thought that was striking, Stu. I think there's always been women in tech, but not enough and a lot of stories about things that have happened to women in tech. It's changing slowly. A lot of women enter the field and then leave because they don't see a path to their future in things they like. What do you guys think about the topic, two women here on the panel today, which is our pleasure to have you. You can see, we need help. We have women working for us, (Jean and Donna laugh) but there's an imbalance there. >> You're right. >> What do you tell someone like us who's trying to find more women or more diversity and bring them into their-- >> Jean has many opinions in this space. Go ahead, Jean, I love your opinions in this space. >> I told the story at one of the UiPath events. I've been, as a lawyer, chemist, I've always been in pretty much a man's world. That's been my life in corporate America, and all along as I looked back, Donna was the first woman that sat across me to negotiate a contract. The entire time that I've been in the tech world, in the business world in corporate America, I had women working for me when I was at an insurance company negotiation very large contracts and stuff. They were on my side of the table. She was the first woman that I negotiated with on the other side of the table, and I think that's really sad, and I think we all have to look and say, how can we do better than that? How can we make us diverse? I look around here and you have all colors, all sizes, it's wonderful and it energizes you. And I am really a true believer in a really diverse workforce. I look at that and I think, 'cause they bring so many cool ideas, they think differently. Young, old, you put 'em all in a room and it's just amazing what they come up with, and I think if business leaders would hear that and think about that instead of hearing the same type of person, what's that same type of person that has your same background going to give you? He's not going to give you the transformation, or he or she. It's going to be kind of the same, what you're used to. You need that jolt, and I believe the more diverse people that we have around the table trying to solve the problem, it's amazing. I sat, last week, and I had a 22-year-old woman come into my office, Shirat, who's 30-ish and from India, and I had Amy who grew up in Topeka, hasn't left Topeka, myself. We were sitting around a table and another guy came and he probably 30. So you had a big, broad range. Somebody just out of college, me that's been out of college a long time, sitting around the table and we came up with, they thought they were dead in the water, and within 30 minutes of us just throwing different ideas out, we came up with a solution that we could continue going with. I mean, their faces were downtrodden and everything when they walked in, and when they left, we were excited, we were ready to go. Now, if we don't nurture that type of conversation, we're never going to get diversity. That's what diversity's about. If you think about it that way, wow. We went from having a problem that was a total dead stop and we weren't going to be able to proceed to 30 minutes later having a great solution and keeping running. And I truly believe it was because we had a diverse group of people around that table. >> Studies have been done of the clear value of diversity, the decisions that are made are better and drive business value. One of the challenges is finding the people, and it was pointed out to me one time, it's just because you're looking inside your own network. You got to go outside your own network, and it takes longer, it's more work. You just got to allocate the time, and it's good advice. It's hard work, but you got to do it to make change. >> And sometimes you got to take a chance. Sometimes, because it is outside of your network, you're not comfortable necessarily with the answers they give you or the way they approach a subject. I mean, you've got to feel comfortable, and CEOs and CFOs and the C-suite has to start thinking about that, because if you wanted to be transforming, that's how you transform. You don't transform thinking the same way every day. You're not going to transform. >> Let me ask you a question. You said you're a fixer, so I wrote down the adjectives that I would use to describe a fixer, and I want to know if this has been the way in which people have described you. You got to be smart, you got to be a quick study, you got to be a good listener, you got to be confident, self-assured, tough, decisive, collaborative. Are those the adjectives that have described you as a fixer over the years? >> Yes, I think those are you qualities, by the way. >> I don't doubt they're your qualities. Is that how people refer to you in business? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean, I've done the test where they say are you a collaborator or do you push? And I get the mix. I'm either a collaborator or I'm a person that's pushing her own belief, and I know exactly who said I was a person that was only pushing her own belief, and I know the ones that said I was a collaborator. But that is, you got to be collaborative. >> I believe you have those attributes, but the reason for my question is a lot of times when it's a woman fixer, those aren't the adjectives that they would use to describe you. It would be abrasive or combative. I mean, you hear adjectives like that. Same exactly attributes as a male fixer, just described differently. Has that changed in your view? >> I go about things probably a little bit differently than men do, and I've had to adapt. Like I said, I've been a chemist. What was I? 8% of the community of chemists is a woman, so I've had to adapt my style. And I do a lot of drive-bys, I do a lot of one-on-one discussions over the lunch, over hey, do you have a few minutes? I need to talk to you. So, I do a lot of that type of collaboration before I ever get into that big meeting where I'm pushing my one direction. I've got my buddies all lined up already, and so I don't think it feels like I'm abrasive or that I'm, because I've fought those battles privately already. So maybe I've adapted my style that I don't get those types of reactions, but that's what you got to do. You've got to learn how to work the system. >> At the same time, I think that, and this is a compliment, I think Jean on the outside, it's tough to earn her respect in the beginning, but if you do, there's nobody more fiercely loyal than Jean. So you got to earn your way in there, and that's got to be consistent, like a 15-step process to get there. (Jean laughs) >> Yeah. >> And you can't let go because if you let go-- >> Dave: They're hard to get, huh? >> She's going to make you think on number six day you're not good enough, and then you just got to keep on going. So I understand what you're stating, Dave. You have to keep on going, and if you get there there's nothing that Jean wouldn't do for you. As she's here, she's on the advisory board of UiPath. She is the most, once you prove yourself, that's it. It's going to be hard to change that, but it's not easy to get there. >> So this inherent bias, people are tribal in nature and they're biased. Does things like automation and RPA, AI, does it eliminate that bias or does it codify it? >> Wow, interesting question. I don't know, I don't know the answer to that. >> Dave: I don't think anybody knows. >> I don't know that either. >> I've never really thought about it. I mean, to me RPA is just another tool in my toolkit, you know? And if I can fix it with AI, great, or UiPath, if I can use that to fix it with RPA, great. If I need another toolkit, I'll go use that toolkit. But I do know that it's a way that individuals, you can get a lot of young people into your organization that have great ideas. I'm stocking up with interns and I'm using, like I said, woman we hired, she was my intern, graduated in May, and the next day she had a full-time job. And she's done a phenomenal job. And that's what RPA has done for our business, because it's an entree in that then they're in and they're doing this simpler technology, then people see how wonderful they are and they can go and move into bigger and better roles. And that's what I'm trying to encourage is get some really smart people in with this tool, and that's what UiPath has enabled, I think, people that maybe they're not the best coders, or maybe they're not the best BAs, but you put that together and they're knocking it out of the park. The young ones are knocking it out of the park on this technology. It's amazing. >> We did several blockchain and Crypto conferences this year, you want to talk about diversity, and I mean it's old money, it's new money, it's women, it's people in turbans, it's people with color. It's actually quite amazing, and one of the older investors, I asked him what's your secret? He said, "I surround myself with millennials." (laughs) >> Jean: Correct. >> That was good advice, but very diverse crowd in Crypto. You don't have to be Ivy League, Silicon Valley and white, Caucasian, to be successful, right? >> Dave, I was representing RPA at a Women in Tech conference last week in the FinTech environment, and I was talking, sitting next to Crypto and Bitcoin and at the end, the lines lined up for RPA. And I would say to the girls, why are you lined up for RPA? And they basically said you are the disruptor. RPA is the disruptor. There was a speaker here today that says RPA's the gateway drug to artificial intelligence, which is absolutely true. RPA is operational right now, it's working today, and there's elements of AI that are here today, but there's elements that are future technology. But RPA's completely ready to go, operational, mainstream in most enterprise companies. >> And I know we kind of went off topic there but it's relevant and it's important and it's a passion of ours, so really appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Stu. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from UiPath Forward in Miami. Right back. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to events, we extract the signal from the noise. The signal here is all about automation, robotic process automation, software robots, we're seeing the ascendancy of that market space. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is UiPath's Forward conference, big user conference, UiPath Forward Americas, about 1500 people here, Stu. They have conferences all over the world, I think I heard 14,000 people in the last year have attended such shows. They're intimate, there are a lot of partners here, they're loud, they're a lot of good energy. Ana Cinca is here, she's the Vice President of Enabling Technologies, and she's joined by old friend Tom Clancy, who's the Senior Vice President of UiPath Learning, both folks from UiPath, welcome. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> So Ana, let's start with you. VP of Enabling Technologies. What does that mean, what's that role? >> Well, my role in the organization is to generate a set of non-core products and programs that are creating an ecosystem that is actually contributing actively into accelerating the adoption of the core platform. And that would be through learning, through generating new products like the UiPath Go!, the Marketplace, or constantly engaging the community of users and so on. >> Okay, so you started the training program, correct? >> Ana: Yeah. >> How did that get started? What was your kind of mission, how'd you do it? >> Well it started from a very simple need. Back then, about two years ago, we were, a bunch of my team members were a bunch of RPA developers, who were losing their time only delivering training, so, two years ago about 500 trainings, five days per week, per year. That were a lot of training, so we said, we need to automate this, we need to do something about it. And the only thing that could come into our mind was to, we got inspired by the Udemy, by Coursera, by all the right courses out there, like platforms out there, which were very democratic in sharing the knowledge. So we said, how about we actually create a set of online courses that are really, really good, RPA focused, UiPath focused, courses, and put it out there? That's how it all started, we just wanted to get rid of these repetitive trainings, ultimately. >> Alright, so you had to do it for yourselves and then. >> Ana: Absolutely, yeah. >> So Stu, we heard today from Daniel, he kind of did the moon shot. He said we are going to train a million people in three years, right? >> Well, Tom, it seems like you've got a challenge in front of you to really scale this business. We've talked with you for years, back in your EMC days, your not just storage but new architectures, this convergent approach to the silos, and then cloud architects, really training kind of next generation of the work force in IT, give us a little bit, what's the same, what's different between what you did back at EMC and what you're doing now here with RPA? >> So the biggest difference between EMC and UiPath is EMC had a technology that a lot of people thought was kind of commodity, right? So, the excitement wasn't there when you started going outside of your partners and customers, right? This technology, there is passion about this throughout the entire globe. This is the next big wave, and so, if you're going to scale a program like this, you have to have a bunch of different factors on your side. What Ana just talked about is the academy, you have to bring value somehow, and that starts with having the right courses. If you don't have the courses built up, then you're starting from zero, right, from scratch. But, the other thing that's even more important, is the passion from the CEO. You know, when I first met with Daniel, it was actually sort of an interview, he was, he talked about, you know, employee training, partner training, customer training, but his passion and forty-five minutes of the hour was talking about educating the planet, right? And so he started with universities, which that was kind of a no brainer. And then he went to Youth in Action, under-represented groups, and so forth. The other factor that's really important is having the right team, so, at UiPath, the team is the company, everybody wants to do this. If you're the leader in India, Japan, China, the US, they're all coming to us saying "We need this program." Not just universities but all the way down to the youths. And then, you need a good academic alliance team. So the team that we're building is going to leverage academy, but we are bringing in some of those EMC academic alliance people, we're bringing in a person from Salesforce.com that was running a big piece of it, starts today. We're bringing in a VMware person, a Cisco person, so we're getting all the best. Those are the best programs in the industry. >> Tom, there's one underlying thing, that I saw, a similarity, is back when you talked about convergence or cloud, there was an underlying fear of "Oh my gosh, I'm not going to have the skills, I'm going to be out of a job." Automation's always been that thing "Oh wait, if I automate it, what's that mean for me?" How do you address that? >> Well, first of all, there's a report all that says by 2030, 1.5 billion jobs will be impacted. It doesn't say negative, it just says impacted. So, everybody is going to have to understand that this is coming, and how does it impact me? We're going to put together, as part of this, we'll have an upscaling rescaling, so everybody, it doesn't matter who you are, will be able to leverage the academy, and we'll be tweaking the academy courses, so if it's upscaling rescaling, they will take the courses in a different way, in a different format, than the university students, than the Youth in Action, so we'll target those different audiences, and the other, one other thing is marketing is hugely important, because you can't rely on the training group to get the word out. So, Bobby Patrick and his team, are working hand-in-hand with us to drive the awareness across the globe. >> So Ana, when we first heard about RPA and UiPath, we read the Forrester report, and said "Okay, there's a few leaders out there, let's "play with it, let's go download the software "and see how hard it is to do." Turned out, we could only get our hands on UiPath software, it was very easy to get our hands on the software, it was very open. Some of the other guys were like, "Why do you want to use it?" Forget it. But then we built some automations, and it was kind of, you know, it took a little, there was a little bit of a learning curve, but it was not a developer who did it, so it was relatively low code, or even no code. So, when you started this program and as you scale it, who are you targeting? Is it the hardcore developer, is it the, you know, RPA developer, is it the citizen developer, both? And how do you adjust the training correspondingly? >> Yeah, so, first of all, the way we set up the trainings, were, we wanted to make sure that, exactly like we did with the core platform, that was the first RPA software that had a trial version that was available for everyone, right? We had to do the same thing in learning and we're an academy, so what we said were we're launching courses which are free of charge, online, for everyone to use. But, moreover than that, what we wanted to do, is to, have courses that take someone from a very basic foundation level, of basic programming, and actually guide him or her through a learning curve that will get them to an expert level. So, the way we built the courses, are in such a matter that it is very easy to be followed by anyone, actually. And now, that's the reason why, now we're having not only courses for the RPA developers, the techie guys, or solution architects, or infrastructure engineers, but, moreover than that, we're tackling into the space of non-technical people who are equally very important in the RPA journey. Like business analysts, the RPA project managers, and so on. So we're trying to cover all the personas that are critical in an RPA COE set up. >> So it's interesting, Tom, hearing you say you're recruiting people from Cisco, Vmware, some EMC folks, a lot of the traditional, some would say legacy, enterprise companies, who are constantly in the process of reskilling, so I would think that these folks would be very receptive to that. Now you think about Vmware admin, Cisco certified engineers, Microsoft certifications, they sort of led to full employment for at least some period of time. Do you think RPA skills are going to be similar, in that they are going to be in such demand, if young people start to get trained in RPA they're going to essentially have full employment for life, or do you think it's more fleeting that that? You're thoughts? >> So I've been here for three months now, so I guess that makes me a veteran at UiPath, but robotics is going to be in everybody's job. So one of the things that it took me a while to kind of grasp when I was talking to Daniel the first time, the first meeting I mentioned, is he said that there will be at least one robot on every desktop moving forward. This is going to be, you know, when you had the flip phone before, well actually, when people went from the big cell phones and people were saying everybody's going to have a cell phone, you know, everybody looked like "That's kind of crazy," but then, next thing you know, you have a computer on your phone, and everybody has at least one phone. This is going to be the same way with robots. It's going to be ubiquitous across the entire industry. So, people will grow up understanding what robots are. That's why we're going after the youth, so they understand robots right from the get go. And then, it will integrated into everybody's job across the globe, so it's not fleeting at all, it's actually the complete opposite. >> How do you guys measure success? Obviously, you got to get to a million in three years, that's a lot of training. How else do you measure success? What kind of parameters do you set? Tests you take, how do you measure it? >> Want to take that one up for scaling? >> So, one of the things we did, well Ana, one of the things that Ana did before I got here, was they built certification. Certification is going to continue to get more and more important for us. You know, so, think Microsoft, Cisco, certification, and so forth, and so, we believe we will have the industry standard certification program, period. But one of the things we did, was we built our own certification platform, high stakes certification. So what that does is, we do not have to charge, or charge much, any of the people going through our courses and certification. So, today, because we had to go through a third party, we're charging 850 dollars per test. This quarter, through the end of the year, it's going to be zero, just to bring more people in. And then, going forward, it would be significantly lower than 150. What we want to do, and what we will do, is democratize learning and certification for robots. >> I think this is huge, go on you want to add something? >> Yeah, I really want to add one more thing, because what we're doing together, is actually, through the way we're approaching community, and through the spaces that we have already built so far like the academy, the forum, we're bringing now the UiPath Go! in October, the end of October, the project space, all holistically wrapped up in a new version of the community. What we're trying to get out there is an RPA developer getting trained on the academy, being certified, but then practicing within the UiPath universe. Ultimately, where we want to get to, is to measure success also through the number of community users, of end-users, who are not only certified, but we will be able to see what is their activity status, like reputation, and recognition, within the community itself. And, hence, ultimately, reaching up to a stage, where we will be able to pinpoint to a true UiPath expert elite of people throughout the world. >> I love that it's a community driven measurement. >> Everything goes into building up a holistic and global community. >> Very open-- >> If I could just say one thing on community if you just look at the education and the different audiences, you know, let's say, you know, people that do robotics and they get certified, all the way down to youth, we will have a community, where all these different organizations are talking to each other, and to professionals. So, you might have a ten year old in Bangladesh, that is on the community asking questions, and you might have an engineer in Romania at UiPath answering those questions because they're part of the community. Or, it could be a customer or partner, you know, in Philadelphia, but they're all part of the community, we're bringing all these people together. So, things like STEM, Women in Coding, one person came up to me last night, he was so excited, he said "I represent a lot of the black community when "it comes to education and I really want to get my teams "across the country involved in this." >> Phenomenal, now, the no cost training is available roughly when? >> Yeah, right now. >> It's today? >> Well no cost training has been available-- >> Since the beginning. >> That was a decision that Ana made 18 months ago. If somebody, if a customer wants to have a seminar, or something like that, we have third-party training companies that will go in, and they'll charge, but if you go online to the academy, 100 percent free. And the certification for the next quarter is going to be 100 percent free. >> That's unbelievable, because, you know, I got three kids in college and one of them is he's doing Python, he's doing R, he's doing Tableau and he's texting me, "Hey, these Tableau courses "are really expensive, can you pay for it?" And I'm like well, what's the ROI? And I'm sayin' learn about RPA, because it's going to change the world, you know, visualizations important and all that stuff's important, but that's, I think, a huge investment that you guys are making, and then also, helps me understand how you guys plan on staying ahead. So congratulations on getting this started, Tom, you basically came out of retirement, you know, quasi-retirement so it had to be pretty alluring. Extremely successful career at EMC, so great to have you back in the game. >> Thanks, it's great to be here. >> Thanks so much, you guys, for coming on theCUBE. >> Okay, thank you. >> Right there, everybody, you're watching theCUBE, live, from the Fontainebleau in Miami. We'll be right back, right after this short break, you're watching UiPathForward Americas, we'll be right back.