>> 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)