>> Narrator: Live, from Miami Beach, Florida it's theCUBE covering UiPathForward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. We got all the action going on behind us. We are seeing the ascendancy of Robotic Process Automation, software robots. one of the leader's in that industry, one of the innovators, Daniel Dines is here, he's the founder and CEO of UiPath. Hot off the keynote, Daniel, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Daniel: Thank you for inviting me. >> Dave: You're very welcome, so, the great setup here, the Fontainebleau in Miami's an awesome venue for a conference this size; about 1500 people. In your keynote, you talked about your vision and we want to get into that but, go back to why you started UiPath. >> Daniel: I started UiPath to have joy at work, to do what I like, and to build something big. >> Dave: And you're a Developer, right? I mean you code-- >> Daniel: I am a Software Engineer. >> Dave: I mean, I can tell by the way you're dressed. (laughter) Developer CEO. >> Daniel: Yeah. >> Dave: Yeah, okay, so but you have a vision. You talked about a robot for every person. You mentioned Bill Gates, the PC for every person. I said a chicken for every pot, Harry Truman. What is that vision? Tell us about it. >> Daniel: Well, in our old day they work, we do a lot of menial stuff, repetitive, boring stuff. It's-- that is not human-- it's not human-like. Why not having this robot that we can talk to, we can command and just do the boring stuff for us? I think it's no-brainer. >> Dave: Right. >> Daniel: We just didn't think it's possible. We showed with our technology this is possible, actually. This is an angle of automation that people didn't think it was possible before. >> Dave: Well, so I neglected to congratulate you on your early success, I mean, you said one of your tenants is you're humble. So you got a lot of work to do, we understand that. But you've raised over $400 million to date, you just had a giant raise, we had Carl Eschenbach on in our Palo Alto studios. He was-- he was one of the guys in the round. So that's confirmation that this is a big market, we've pegged it at around a billion dollars today, 10x growth by 2023, so very impressive growth potential. What's driving that growth? >> Daniel: It's all from the customers. When they see it working, it's a "wow," it's different, they won't go back to the same way of delivering work. It's changing how people really work. You see people becoming joyful when we show them the robot, and they say, "I don't need to do this stuff anymore? Wow." Imagine people doing the same reports every day, going through hundreds of page and clicking the same-- this is, this is nirvana. >> Dave: And we saw customers, UnitedHealth was on stage today, Mr. Yamamoto has a thousand robots, Wells Fargo's up there, you had some partners. So you're doing that hard integration work as well. Stu, you noted that the global presence of this company was impressing you. You're thoughts on that. >> Stu: Yeah, absolutely, I mean first of all, company started in Romania, we had-- you know you don't see too many American keynotes where there's a video up there in a foreign language. It's Japanese with English subtitles, you've got customers already starting with a global footprint. What's it like being a founder in a start-up from Europe playing in a global marketplace? >> Daniel: Well, actually it help us to become-- we've been born global. We are one of the first start-ups born global from day one. We've been this company, with Japanese talent, Indian talent, Romanian talent, American talent. And being from this remote part of Europe help us... think big, because really are-- we cannot build this start-up only with Romanians. That's clear, we don't have the pool of talent. So why not just go in global, get the best talent we can and spread global? And we are one of the few companies in the world that has their revenue split equally across the three big continents. >> Stu: Yeah, Daniel, the other thing that struck me-- you're growing the company very fast. We talked about the money, but you said you're going to have over 4,000 employees by 2019. You know, I play a lot in the open source world, it's often small-team, you've got to go marketplace, how come you need so many employees for a software company? Maybe explain a little bit that relationship with a customer, how much you, you're technical people, what they need to do to interact and help them to grow these; is it verticals, you know, what's that dynamic? >> Daniel: Well, first of all, we hire more than 1,000 people in last year alone. We started from 200 and now we are 1,400. We need all these people because this technology is at the intersection of software and services. We need to help our customers scale, and we need to inject a lot of customer success people making our customer successful. My, my way of building a company is customer first. We want to offer this boutique type of approach to our customers, and they are happy. And they-- and we build this trust relationship. This is why we need so many-- We have 2,000 customers. Next year, we have 5,000 customers. We need our people to help them grow. >> Dave: We're going to have Craig Le Clair on a little later. He's the Vice President of Forrester Research. They've done a deep dive in this marketplace in the last couple years now. UiPath has jumped from number three to number one in the Forrester wave, and when you look at that report, really, the feature and function analysis shows you guys lead in a number of places. In listening to your keynote, I discerned several things that I wonder if you could explain for our audience. It sounds like computer vision is a key linchpin to your architecture, and there seems to be an orchestrator and then maybe a studio to enable simple low code, or even no code automations to be developed. Can you describe, so a layperson-- your architecture, and why you've been able to jump into the lead. >> Daniel: Well, we've done everything wrong as a start-up. We spent like seven years building a computer vision technology that-- it was of little use, back then. We did it just because we liked it. And now, this is our powerful weapon, because, what's important for this robot is to be accurate, and to be able to work in any situations. Why our technology works better, is that we do way better the extra mile of automation. 80% of the job anyone can do, even with free software. But the last 20% is where the real issues is. And with the last 20% there is no automation. And we are doing way faster. So all our signal sources-- the fact that we've done something against Lean, against every principal in start-up, we had the lecture in building so many years technology, without even envisioning the use. But when we found the market, and it was a great product market, then we scale the company. >> Dave: There are a couple key statistics that I want to bring up and get your thoughts on. We know that there are now more jobs than there are people to fill those jobs. We also know that the productivity hasn't been increasing, so your vision is to really close that gap through RPA and automation. So your narrative is really that you're not replacing humans, you're augmenting humans, but at the same time, there's got to be some training involved. You guys are making a huge commitment in training. You're going to train a million people, that's the goal, within three years. We have Tom Clancy on next. We're going to ask him how he's going to do that. But talk about that skills gap and how you're embracing re-training. >> Daniel: Well, we realize that at some point that change management, it's kind of the key-- it's the cornerstone of delivering this technology. Because there is inertia, there is fear, and-- if we bring, at the same time, automation and training, it solves this-- that solve this issue. And we have to think big; this is why: one million is a big goal, but we will achieve it because we-- I love my way to think big. I was thinking small for so many years, and thinking big it's like, it's like liberty. You sat down and realize, "Yes, you can." >> Stu: Daniel, we talk a lot about digital transformation. The automation often doesn't get talked, but in big companies; Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, seems a natural fit, I saw some of them are your partners, you came from Microsoft, maybe talk about that dynamic about how some of the, you know, big players that, you know, have the business process applications, how your solution fits with them, you know, are they going to be paying attention to this space? >> Daniel: Well, digital transformation, it's a big initiative for everybody. And RPA, it's actually right now, recognizes the first step in digital transformation. And obviously that if was RPA, AI, big business applications, it's not one single angle, but we covered the last mile of automation. We've covered the impossible, before, before this. And our automation first view of the world is beyond digital transformation because companies will exist after they build for digital transformation. But automation first is a, is a mindset. It's rethinking your operations by applying automation first. >> Dave: You have an open mindset, which is interesting. You even said on stage that, "Look, our competitors are beginning to mimic "some of our features and functions and our approach." And you said, "That's okay." I was surprised by that, especially given your Microsoft background, which was like, grind competitors into the ground. What's changed? Why the open mindset and why do you believe that's the right approach? >> Daniel: Look at Microsoft, Microsoft has changed. This is the-- it's much better, it's-- you feel better as a human. When you can offer something, "This is up, take it, give me feedback." We've been able to build way faster than them, having our open and free community. Open the software-- It gives you more joy as a developer seeing thousands of people than just guarding my little secret just for fear someone will copy it. It's way better. >> Dave: Now, you said on stage that a lot of people laughed at you when you were starting this company, you dream big. Somebody once said, Stu, that, "If you believe you can do it, "or you don't believe you can do it, you're right." "So you got to believe," was one of the things that you said. >> Daniel: That's the first thing. >> Dave: Yeah, so share with the young people out here who are dreaming big, everybody in their early 20's, they're dreaming big. Tell us about your story, your dreams, people who laughed at you, what were they laughing about and how did you power through that? Where did you get your conviction? >> Daniel: Well, first of all, they don't dream big enough. It's very difficult to big dream enough because you have your, you know-- it's the common sense that comes into the picture and it's the fear of other people laughing at you. And we haven't dreamt big enough. For 10-- for the first 10 years, we just wanted to make a good technology, the best technology that we can but that's not big enough. Big enough is change the world, big enough is bring something that makes people life better. This is big enough. If they think making people lives better, that's big enough. Nothing else is big enough. >> Dave: Well I love the fact, Daniel, that your mission-driven; that's clear. You're having some fun. You know this-- these apps are really a lot of fun. Do you still code? >> Daniel: No but I do a lot of software design and review. >> Dave: Okay, so you help, so the coders, they-- how do-- what's that dynamic like? You have-- obviously experienced developer. Do you sort of, tell them which path to go down or which path not to go down? Do you challenge them? What's your style, as a leader? >> Daniel: I challenge them to do things faster, always. They-- I ask them, let's do this feature and they say, "Two month." "No, two days." Why not? And then we go and break that one and it's a lot of conversation but usually we will deliver. Fast-- fast is also a way of being. Fastest company wins, and fast is a-- it's not easy to change the mind. Because you want-- maybe you want to be very organized, very sophisticated. If you are fast, you have to be ready to make mistakes, reverse your decision going, but you will go fast in the end. >> Dave: So that is kind of Steve Jobs-like, set a really challenging goal, and people somehow will figure it out, but culturally, you seem friendlier, nicer. It's not grinding people anymore, it's inspiring them. Is that a fair assessment? >> Daniel: My goal is to have the happiest team employees everywhere. Hap-- I like to be happy. I started this company for the joy of doing what I like, why not, this is, this is what I want for everyone. And we are-- we recently scored in comparably as one of the best company in terms of people happiness. >> Dave: Well congratulations, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Daniel: Thank you very much for inviting me. >> Dave: Really a pleasure having you. Alright, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, we're live from UiPath... in Miami, you're watching theCUBE. Stay right there. (electronic music)

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

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

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida It's theCUBE! Covering UiPathForward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to South Beach everybody. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman is here. This is UiPathForward Americas. UiPath does these shows all around the world and they've done, I don't know how many. But they've reached 14,000 customers this year. But Bobby Patrick knows, he's the CMO of UiPath. Bobby, great to see you again. >> It's great to be on again. >> So, how many of these events have you done in the last 12 months? >> We've probably done a dozen, all major cities. We still have Beijing and Dubai coming up. Over 14,000 people at our events alone. We go to a lot of other industry events obviously, but yeah, at our own events, every single event we break our records. We're always undersizing our events, it drives everyone nuts. >> You're always riding the wave, Bobby. You hit Cloud, right as the wave was building. How did you find this company? >> Yeah, so I was the HP of Cloud, they were, split assets off and took a little time, got a call and robotic process automation. Of course, I thought of physical robots. I look online and say wow that's interesting. I did some search terms on it and I saw RPA kind of sky rocketing in search and my background is actually in integration, data integration before Cloud. And then I met Daniel and I fell in love with Daniel and this was a year ago. I was employee 270, right? We'll have 2,000 by the end of the year. So, it's been everything I expected which was a rocket ship, has completely, constantly I've underestimated, it's amazing. >> So, you're the one who turned me onto this whole space. You sent me the Forrester Wave, >> Bobby: Right >> Where it was last year's and you guys were third this year, you leapfrogged into first. >> Bobby: Right. >> And then we said wow that's kind of cool. Let's download this and play with it. And we tried to download the other ones but we couldn't. You, know it was kind of too complicated. They wanted us to talk to resellers and, it was like, no no no. you guys were, like, really open. >> Bobby: It's part of our culture. >> And we found it super simple to use. It was, one of our guys wasn't a coder. Smart dude, but it was low code, no code type of situation. You were explaining to me at Legal Seafoods last week that you actually have written some automations. So, it's pretty simple to get started but there's a spectrum, right, and it's pretty powerful too. >> Yeah, it's an epiphany that hits everybody. This is the part where I see it, even in myself, when I realized every morning I was getting up and going to Google Trends and I was looking at us versus Automation Anywhere versus Blue Prism and we're pulling away. It's great, I'll get happy in the morning and I'll screen shot it and then I'll go to Slack and send it to the comp team. Why am I doing this? So, in 20 minutes now I have a robot everyday, every morning that does it for me. And I get a text and I get an email. We have, in marketing, a dozen of these. I've got one that does our Google Ad Words around the world. I've got one that takes all of our 30,000 inbound new contacts a month, in different languages, translates, finds out what country they are in, and routes them to the right country. These are simpler examples, but once you realize that anything you do that's routine and mundane that a robot can do for you. It brings, it makes you happy first of all, right? And you realize the vision we have for a robot for every person, its a very realistic vision and its two, three years out. >> Bobby, one on the things that has really interested me today is talking about what this means for jobs and careers. Dave and I were at Splunk earlier this week, talking about Splunkers, data is at the center of what they do and everybody comes to them, how do I leverage my data? I did operations for a bunch of my career and I'd spend lots of time with my team saying, what do you hate doing, what are you manually doing? What can you get rid of and there's a collaboration between, I hear, that your customers. It's not just oh some consultancy comes in and they cut something away and they took it away from you. Oh no wait, you're actually involved with this, it seems like an ongoing process and you're making people's jobs better. Can you talk a little about that dynamics of how this transforms a company? The vision for, I hear from UiPath, is that you're going to change the world. >> Yeah, so you have to sit in, you're talking about the future of work, or digital, you have to sit in a conference room and watch a bunch of workers sit around and I'll give you an example. At DISA, big federal government agency, federal government has lifetime workers, right? In the room, where 30 workers, who everyday download assets and then they compile them and then they analyze them. They have their best, fastest kind of human go against the UiPath robot that they automated. In 15 minutes, the human downloaded two assets or archives and the robot did 17. The entire room of 30 cheered! Cheered. No longer do we have to do that crap ever again. And this is, we see this in every industry. It's so much fun because you see just, people just radiating with excitement, right? Because, I was out with a customer today that says they can't even fulfill today with the humans they have, the 25% of the work they got. So, your robots are creating capacity, they're filling the void. You probably heard about Japan, right, and the aging population? And RPA and UiPath addressing suicide rates. This about making society better. This is about robots doing the work that we hate, right? One of our great customers, Holly Uhl from State Auto, said on stage that, you know, robots do the work nobody misses. And, I think that's trivial. Now what about job impacts, right? So, we worry everyday about what this means, right? So, we spend a lot of time on our academy, making it easier to train people, build digital era skills. We announced our academic alliance, right? We hired an amazing Chief of Learning Officer. You saw Tom Clancy. You know him and his team. We're going to train a million students in three years. You know, we're worried about the middle class. We're worried about people who are farther along in their careers and helping them re-skill. So, we take that as a part of our job as a company to figure out how to up-skill people and make them a part of this. And I'm really excited because a year ago when I joined, everybody said, the big problem you have is people going to worry about taking away jobs. I don't hear that from the 1500 customers in here today. >> Well, isn't a part of that re-skilling? Learning how to apply automation, maybe even learning how to apply RPA? Maybe even doing some automation? >> Yeah, so obviously there is-- World Economic Forum came out two weeks ago with a study that said, automation will add net 60 million jobs, I think that was for the people that losses, it will two x gains in jobs. Now those are different jobs in some cases. Some of those jobs are digital era skills, some of those jobs are AI, data science. So, I think that there's... But there are some cubicle jobs that will be affected, right? There are some swivel chair jobs that will be affected, but no different than when they automated toll booths, right? Or automated different parts of mundane work that we've all seen throughout our lives, right? So I think the speed at which this is happening is what worries people. Unlike, in the past, it took a little longer for automation or industrialization to impact jobs. But we're focused on this, right? We're going to put money towards this and we're just not seeing that today. Maybe it's because the economy is doing so great. People have a workforce shortage, but we're just not hearing it. >> Well, I mean, maybe a number of factors. I mean, there's no question, machines have always replaced humans. This is the first time in history of replacing humans in cognitive functions. >> Bobby: Augmenting >> Yes, absolutely, but It does suggest that there's opportunities for whether it's for education, you guys are investing there, training, and re-skilling whether it's around creativity and that's really where the discussion, in our view anyway, should be. Not about, okay lets protect our future, the past from the future. You don't want to just repave the cow path and use another bromide. You got to move forward and education is a key part of that. And you guys are putting your money where your mouth is. >> Yeah, we are and I think our academy that we launched a little over a year and a half ago has a quarter of a million people in it. They are already diplomas on LinkedIn. I watch everyday, people post their new diplomas, the different skills they've earned, right? Go through the courses, it's free. Democratization runs at the heart of this company, it's why we're growing so much faster than at automation anywhere, right? It's why we are a different kind of company. They're a very commercial minded kind of company. They're a marketplace, you have to be a customer. If your URL when you type in your email isn't a customer, you can't go to their store and do anything. We're free, open, share your automations and it's a very different mindset and community runs at our heart. If you're a small business, you know, under a million dollars, you get to use our software for free. And you can run your robots and we have one of our orchestrators run a manager. So, I think all of this is helping get companies and people more comfortable with our technology. There are kids and students now, we had University of Maryland up here. The professor, he's building whole classes now at the University of Maryland. All in the business school, all using our technology. Every student should have a robot, through their entire career, through their entire time at University of Maryland. That's every university, this is going to go so fast, Dave and Stu, so fast. And when I think back again, a year ago, I mean next year when we do this again, right? At our big flagship event, at three or four thousand people, you'll have felt that progression but the year I've been here, it's night and day already. >> Alright, so Bobby you know we're big fans of community. The open source stuff, you've for a long background in that. Help us put together some of these stats here. When I looked in your keynote, you said there's 114,000 certified RPA developers out there across the globe. 139 countries, 250,000 people have downloaded. You've only got at UiPath about 2,000 customers. So, you know, we talk business model and how your business grows, the industry grows, you know? Help us understand that dynamic. >> These are going to go exponential. So, we have large companies now that are committing to deploy UiPath to every employee. Every employee becomes a user then, so you're going to see that user number go like this. While the enterprise customer number goes like this. We're adding six new customers a day right now. The real opportunity for us is every one of our customers, very few are down their journey like an SMBC is. SMBC, RPA is in their annual reports, right? They say 500 million dollars already, right? It's a societal thing. They actually in Japan share together, to help each company. Here, in the U.S., we're a little competitive, right? Banks don't share with other banks typically, right? But, this is kind of what we're driving. It's, when you make an automation at UiPath. While we're not open source as a platform, the automation is open source. You put it on go, I can take that, you can take that. I had the same kind of problem. Put in the studio right away, modify it a bit and you're good to go. Now you've sped your implementation which is already fast by 70, 80, 90%. This is, we're just getting started. So, you're going to see companies adopting across HR, across supply chain, contact centers, you know. Today we're, for the most of our customers we're in one division. So, the opportunity to grow within a company, where we were barely 5% penetrated in our biggest client. >> And you've seen my prediction. A lot of the market forecast are under counting this space. >> Bobby: Right. >> There is a labor shortage, a skilled labor shortage There's more jobs than there are people to fill them. They don't have the right skills today. There is a productivity problem >> Bobby: Right. >> Productivity line is flat. RPA is going to become a fundamental component of digital transformations. It's about a billion dollar business today. I got it pegged at 10X by 2023. >> Craig at Forestry upped his guidance today, he may have told you all, to a 3.3 billion dollar market in 2021. Now I was a little disappointed, it was 2.9 before. I think he's still way under shooting it. But nevertheless, to grow 10% in one year, in his mind, is still pretty big. >> Yeah, a lot of those market forecasts are kind of linear. You're going to see, you know, an S curve, like growth in this market. I think there's no question about it. Just, in speaking to the customers today, we've seen this before in other major industry trends. We certainly saw it at ServiceNow, we saw it at Splunk, we saw it at Tableau. UiPath feels like a very similar vibe here. In Tenex, when we did the show here. I just feel an explosion coming, I already see it. It's palpable. >> One other reason for the explosion which is a little different than say most of the open source tech companies is that they were in IT sales. You don't have to use code to automate your tasks, right? The best developers for us are actually the subject matter experts in finance, in supply chain, in HR. So suddenly we've empowered them. Because IT everywhere is constrained, right? They're dealing with keeping systems current. So suddenly this these tools of software is available to any employee to go learn and automate what they do. The friction we've removed between business have to go to IT, IT be understaffed, IT have to get the requirements. All that's gone! So you create robots overnight, over the weekend. And make your life better. Again, most of the world still does not understand what's going on. I mean you can feel it now. But it's an epiphany for anyone when they see it. >> Well the open mindset that Daniel talked about today, he said, you know our competitors are doing what we do and that's okay. The rising tide lifts all boats kind of thing. That puts pressure on you guys to stay ahead of the pack. Big part of what Tom Clancy is doing is the training piece. That's huge. Free training. So you got to move faster than the market. You're confident you can do that. What gives you confidence? >> I think, one, is our product is simpler to use. So I think, you know, you go to Automation Anywhere and you need the code, right? You don't have to code with our design tool. We're told, we're about 40% faster to implement. And that's, look at the numbers. We shared our numbers again today. 100 million we announced in July 1st, for our first half of in ARR, 140 now, right? We are telling our numbers, we're open and transparent. Our competitors, well Blue Prism is public, right? We know they're growing slower. Another difference is the market, requirements are not created equal. Blue Prism only works in an unattended robot fashion, only in the back office. So, if you have front office automation, with call centers and customer service, they don't have the concept of an attended robot. You know, this idea of so, they lack the ability to serve all the requirements of a customer. I, think, it's just architecturally, I think what we're seeing in terms of simplicity and openness. And then market coverage very different then either Automation Anywhere or BluePrism. >> Alright Bobby, let me poke at something. So, if I look at, you came out this morning and said accelerate everything. One of the concerns I have is say okay, if I take existing processes, a lot of the time if you look at them, they're not ideal. They were manual in nature, it's great to do that but, how much do you need to wait and revisit and get consultants in to kind of fix things rather than just say oh okay. Faster is better for some things but not necessarily for all things unless you can make some adjustments first. >> You don't want to automate a bad process, right? So, we're not encouraging anyone to do that. So, you see a combination of... One thing about RPA is which great, is you don't have to go in and say, I'm going to go do procure to pay like Traditional IT guy. And so you can go into that process and say, oh look at all these errors, these tasks, these sub processes, these tasks. Where this huge friction and you can go automate that and get huge value. >> Almost like micro services. >> Yes, exactly. You're able to go in and that's really what people are doing. On the more ambitious projects, they're saying I'm also going to go optimize my process, think differently. But the reality is, people are going in, they're finding these few parts of a bigger process, automating it, getting immediate outcomes, immediate outcomes. And paying back that entire project in six months, including the fees on extension or PWC or other. That doesn't exist anywhere in technology. That kind of, you know, speed to an outcome and then payback period. It just doesn't exist. >> Well, the fact that the SIs are here. Yeah, we heard 15 day payback today. Super fast, ROI. The fact that the big SIs are here, especially given the relatively early days says a lot about the potential market size. I always joke, those guys like to eat at the trough. This is big business and it's important for you guys because they're strategic, they're at the board level. You need the top down support, at the same time, it sounds like there's a lot of bottom up activity. >> Bobby: Right. >> And that's where the innovations going to come from. What's next for you guys, you taking this show on the road again? >> Right, so the next Forward is in London. So, we had one in Europe and one in the U.S. We do what we call togethers, which is more intimate. Or all around the world, which are country specific or industry. I mean, we're going to go and call it the Automation First Tour. And we're going to go start our next tours up all through next year. Hit all the cities again, probably three times this size, each city. You know, I looked at Washington D.C. with federal government, we started federal government in January. Federal government for us next year should be a 60 million software business. For our partners, give them 6, 8, 10X on services on top of that. That's meaningful, that's why you see them here. That same calculation exists in every vertical and in every country. And so it's good for our partners. It's great, we want them to focus on building their skills though. Getting good skills and quality. So, we do a lot with them. We host a partner Forward yesterday with 500 partners, focusing on them. Look, we are investing in you, but you got to deliver quality, right? So, I think we amplify everything we did this year because it worked for us well. We amplify it big time and Forward in a year from now, whether it's Vegas or Orlando or we'll announce it soon, willl be substantially larger. >> Well, any company that's digitally transforming is going to put RPA as part of that digital transformation. It's not without its challenges but it's a tailwind. You better hop on that wave or you going to end up driftwood as Pat Gelsinger likes to say. Bobby, thanks so much. >> Bobby: Thank you Dave. >> Thanks for having us here. This has been a fantastic experience and congratulations and good luck going forward. >> Thank you. >> Alright guys, that's a wrap from here. This is theCUBE. Check out theCUBE.net Check out SiliconeANGLE.com for all the news. Cube.net's where all the videos are, wikimon.com for all the research. We are busy Stu, we're on the road a lot. So again, look at the upcoming events. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPathForward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody. This is theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage and we're here covering UiPathForward. Looking, unpacking... Software robots, robotic process automation, Jeff Aldridge is here. He's advisory principal for EY. Great to see you Jeff. Thanks for coming on. Stu Miniman, myself: Dave Vellante. We're excited to have you. Thanks for coming. >> Great. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >> So I was at a chief data officer conference early this year, and the speaker asked, "How many of you are involved in robotic process automation projects?" I would say, two-thirds, maybe even three-quarters of the hands went up. So, these are guys in suits, right? >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Kind of staid individuals. But, I've seen data that suggests that, while everybody's interested in, you know, kicking the tires, that there's not a lot of companies that are at scale. Single digits at scale. What are you seeing? Does that match and why do you think that is? >> Yeah, I think that's pretty consistent with what we see in the market. I think a lot of folks have bought a few licenses. They've done a few exploratory pilots, but very few companies have gone to production with more than 30 bots. We do think that's going to change dramatically in the next 12 to 24 months based on what we're seeing in the market. So it's an exciting period of time. >> What's the headwind to scale? And how do you... Reducing friction? >> Yeah, I think it varies, but I think change is just hard for organizations right? So I think they've started a little bit slow. Trying to figure out what's their purpose? Why are they doing this? Is is about headcount reduction? Is it about trying to scale? Is it about accuracy? So trying to define that common purpose and common metrics to measure success, I think, has been slow for some organizations, but I think once they have that purpose, and they can kind of see what the potential is, then I think it starts to pick up speed. So, we've certainly seen more and more companies going to scale. >> It's always something new. It's, right, how do I measure success? What was the outcome you're expecting? We talked to a number of customers today already and the answer's been different for every one of them. They are all very similar as to what they're doing, but what it means to their business, I thought I was going to reduce cost, but oh wait. I'm going to drive more revenue. >> Jeff: Right. >> I thought I was going to so this, oh wait. It's great ROI. It turned around really different. How do you deal with that in the field? >> Yeah, I think you're right. I think at some point, to do a few pilots, and kind of kick the tires, you don't have to know what the purpose is. So it's pretty easy to do that. But I think, once you start thinking, we're really going to do this, you got to coalesce around what our purpose is. And so we like to talk to people about different examples of what other companies have done and in particular, how do you measure success? For some companies, they're looking at the same goal. For example, cost reduction. They look at that differently so, we've had a very large client who said, "We're going to measure cost reduction based on next year's budget. So if we're able to not have to hire additional resources, we get to count that. If we're able to find hard dollar savings, we get to count that." So, for example, in peak periods of the year, when we hire a lot of contingent labor, if we automate something that keeps us from having to hire that amount of contingent labor, then we get to count that. Others will count against the prior year. So, I think even when you have similar goal, you can have different metrics of how you measure it. >> That next year's budget is actually quite interesting, cause if you could do more with the same, now you're getting operating leverage, that's almost as good as like dropping to the bottom line to a CFO. >> Yeah, and some would say it's better. Because you don't have a disruption of your current workforce. It's not about reducing heads that we have today, but it's how can we grow and how can we scale without having to add back office cost and other cost in the organization? So I think that's going to become pretty common for fast-growing companies. >> What's your interest, Jeff, in automation? Robotic process automation? How did you get here? Kind of, what's your background? >> Yeah, so I'm a CPA, finance person by background. Went to law school, but I've always been about process improvement and helping organizations improve. And so I think this is just the next step in that, right? Technology has taken a leap and now organizations can take a leap in terms of additional process improvement. And I think the best companies are looking at it as, how do I use my top resources to do more? And so I think that's another objective of some of the better companies is, you know, how do I free up my people to do what they were hired to do? >> Jeff, one thing I'm trying to understand, when I think about process, one of the challenges, I think back to outsourcing is. When I outsource something, it made me not be able to change as much as I might want to. I lost some skill set and therefore I had a disconnect between the business and keeping operations going. How is this different? How do I make sure that when I put a robot in place, that I'm not frozen into, kind of, the way things were before? >> Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, first of all, I think outsourcing is great in the right situation, but you're right. For a lot of organizations it was sort of, out of sight, out of mind. And once I off-shored cost, it just seemed to grow and never reduce right? And we never improved the process. >> I thought it would be my mess for less, but it turned out not to be the case. >> Yeah, I think this is fundamentally different because the bots are sort of part of your on-shore team. They're a virtual workforce and I think as companies see what they can do, it's actually the opposite. They find more things that the bot can do so that humans can focus on the higher value-added decision support. >> Do you think RPA will reverse some of the outsourcing trends and the pendulum will swing back? >> I think we're already seeing it. I do think it will do that. I think is allows you to in-source some of those things and reduce cost in the process. >> And then, just talking from a parochial US view, those software robots are global, presumably, but it reduces the need to ship jobs overseas, to use the pejorative. >> It does, which obviously is popular in the current, kind of current political environment. But you know, there's also entire industries like healthcare where because of HIPAA laws, they can't off-shore activities. So they by and large, have not been able to take advantage of outsourcing and so this is now an opportunity to reduce cost through bots. >> Yeah, I mean there's two sides to that coin, right? The political rhetoric says, oh outsourcing's bad, bad, bad, but you remember Jack Welsh, he's like, "Listen, this is actually really good, you know." And of course GE is going through some troubles now, but under his reign, their profitability was pretty substantial so, your point about healthcare is quite interesting because, first of all, that's an industry that's ripe for transformation. It really hasn't transformed. I think you'd agree, every industry is going to get digitally transformed in some way, shape, and form. Healthcare, financial services, defense haven't yet. Maybe cause they're high risk. But what are you seeing? >> Yeah, I think this is coming and it's not going to stop. I think you're going to see all industries taking advantage of automation. And frankly, I think RPA is just the beginning. I think that we all see this moving into artificial intelligence but for most organizations, they want to learn with RPA. They want to capture some low-hanging fruit, so they can move then to the next level. So it's about training employees. It's about setting up a governance structure and kind of preparing for that future. >> When I see companies like yours at an event like this, I say okay, there's big dollars in this event. And big dollars means that... Big dollars not just for you guys and not just for guys like UiPath, but for customers. Certainly ERP was that way. I mean, you hear all the jokes about SAP implementations, but if you could have bet on the companies that bet on ERP early, SAP specifically, you could have made some decent money in the stock market, cause those guys drove efficiencies. Are we seeing the same thing here? Is this kind of big dollar transformations? And my real question is, does it apply for all companies? Like Amazon, AWS. Lot of small companies can take advantage of that. Can smaller companies take advantage of RPA, or is it a big, giant enterprise trend? >> Yeah, I think they can. I think if you talk about a smaller company, you've got to activate multiple functional areas, so it's not going to be a single automation and a single function like finance, that's going to bring you the ROI that's big. So in a smaller company, I think you've got to activate other back office areas like HR and supply chain and procurement whereas a larger company, we worked with some very large companies, where even a single process area can generate significant savings. >> What does a successful... The profile of a successful customer look like? A couple that we've talked to, it's like, well I know I need the executive support and I usually have somebody that's operations, maybe six sigma, that focuses on that kind of environment, and they're like, "oh, this is a new tool that will help me accomplish what I've been trying to do for years." >> I think there's a few things. I think, number one, having that common purpose. We know why we're doing this and we have specific goals, but I think to your point, it's having that executive sponsor. When this gets hard, they push through it and everybody knows they're behind it. Be it a CEO or someone of that stature. And so, what I've seen is, when that's in place, you'll see multiple functions jumping on board. And one of the things we've used is media for example. So doing videos where the people that have been involved, kind of get highlighted for what they've done and that tends to spur efforts and now you want to be a part of it right? And you want to show that you're looking for improvement in your area. And so, we're definitely seeing some people have some pretty tremendous success. >> You said, when things get hard. What are some of the headwinds that you're seeing? Is that just the natural aversion to change inside of an organization or? >> Well I think there's, in addition to the natural aversion to change, I think there's this idea about, I don't want my team to lose their jobs right? And I'm worried about what that means. I don't want to get to a situation where I've reduced so many heads that I'm afraid I can't be effective in the future as we grow, right? And so there's naturally, people wondering why are we doing this? What's the purpose? What's it mean to me? And so, I do think it's important to do that strategy phase up front. Identify the opportunities. Identify the ROI so that we can all see why we're doing this and it really is pretty impactful. >> So we started this segment talking about how most companies aren't at scale with RPA. Are there any examples you can share with us that... Where your clients are either headed there or actually have scaled? >> Yeah, there are actually several now, right? And so, I always start with ourselves. I mean believe it or not, EY over three years ago started automation in our own back office and today, we're one of the largest users of RPA, robotics, as well as chatbots, machine learning, NLP. We think we've save two million hours a year, out of our own back office, which has been fantastic for us. And so we took those learnings, at scale, and have now started applying those to clients. But there are some big-name clients. I think... Like you mentioned a few industries like oil and gas, and consumer products. We have some big clients that have gone to scale in those areas. So you know, I think there's several examples that people can learn from. >> And that's primarily squeezing the back office lemon, or are there... >> You know, it's been more of that to begin with. I think now what's really next for this, is next generation use cases that include the front office, and how do we make our sales force more effective? How do we improve our supply chain? I think there's bigger opportunities for next generation RPA and first generation AI. >> Hey, I wonder. Jeff, you look at the market forecast, and they're like the classic market forecast. They're a straight line and you're looking at how many people will get replaced by robots. But it feels like there's this sort of blind spot, where you don't really know where the innovation is going to come from, but like you said, it could be sales. It could be marketing. It could be, you a customer in the field. But, it feels like there's a lot of revenue potential in other parts of the organization that are hard to forecast. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, we have really come up with a pretty exhaustive list of use cases from some of our clients and every day we're kind of thinking of new applications. And so, I think you're going to see a lot more front office applications that are going to drive revenue as opposed to just reducing cost. And then, of course, as you move into the AI realm, I think there's a lot more there in terms of revenue generation. But, I think we've just scratched the surface. There's a lot of opportunity out there. >> What's your relationship with these guys at UiPath? >> You know, we've had a tremendous relationship for quite a while with UiPath. Some of our largest clients... Two of our Fortune five companies have gone to scale with UiPath. As Bill just mentioned in the overall session, we've created some solutions with them around SAP migrations. We've also done some things around document recognition, where we've combined ABBYY with UiPath and some other tools from Microsoft. So we think that these guys... They are on the right track. They've gotten some investment dollars. They're partnering with the right people. And we like their strategy of knowing where they play and integrating with others who are better at other things as opposed to trying to build it themselves. So it's a great relationship and we look forward to continuing it. >> Well it's certainly attracting a lot of money. I think these guys have raised over 400 million. I think is the number. 225 was the latest round so the VCs are paying attention. Google's in there, throwing money at it and so Jeff, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Dave: Good luck with everything. >> Appreciate it. >> Alright take care. >> Thank you. >> Keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. We're live from Miami. UiPathForward. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas, brought to you by UiPath. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Miami Beach, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is UiPathForward Americas. We're talking about robotic process automation. We're seeing the ascendancy of a new marketplace. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Let's see, let's get into it. So Param Kahlon is here. He's the UiPath's Chief Product Officer. Welcome, so we're going to get into some of the product stuff. We haven't really dug down deep today, so that's great. >> Thank you. >> Jairo Quiros is here. He's the Vice President of Global Shared Services, an RPA COE, center of excellence, leader at Equifax. Welcome, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Jairo, let's start with you. Tell us about your role. I love the title. (Jairo laughs) You got automation in your title. Do people embrace you when they see you coming or run? >> No, no, no. Actually, that's very interesting. I've been with the company for 20 years now, so I'm responsible to lead Global Shared Services all across from business operations, financing, accounting, you name it, IT security, right? So, coming along with automation has been quite a journey for us. First of all, we love the product so thank you, Param for everything you guys do at the service, as well. But truly, automation, what it means to us is pushing our workforce to do stuff that is of more valued added to our customers, removing the but out of the human which is critical to us, so no fear of buts anymore. And it's been two years. >> The product's at the tip of the iceberg, I'm hearing. There's a whole lot of other stuff beneath it, culture, obviously process, mindset. >> Jairo: Yeah, correct. >> We will get into some of that. But Param, tell us about your role as Chief Product Officer. You make it all happen. (Param laughs) >> I'm responsible for making sure we can listen to what our customers want, what the market wants, translate that into requirements, and deliver that in the form of products. That's all I do, it's very simple. >> You're a translator. >> We translate it, transform it into requirements that can be given to the product team, their development team that can go write software for it. >> Kind of like that AI layer in UiPath that translates all this data into something that's actionable, right? >> Param: Absolutely. >> Jairo, you were saying you liked the product before. I mean, our personal experience is we could actually download it and play with it, and we're not ultra technical, some of our guys are. What do you like about the product? >> Well, I think many things. I mean, first of all, I think it's very easy to use, right? So, it's built for execution, right? For instance, in our case, we're having a lot of junior engineers coming on board. So we go out to colleges and recruit people that are passionate about process. So what UiPath offer us is a way for them to entry our operation and actually perform tasks and do, and realize results pretty easily. So then, they can see the work being done and appreciate it. >> So who are the users in your organization? Is it a spectrum? You got the sort of RPA developers and then you got business users, as well? Describe that. >> Well, it's a combination, right? So we built the COE over the past couple years. It's inclusive of not only configurators, but also analysts and people that can understand the business. So when you look at through the process, start thinking about how do you design for automation? So this tool allows a very comprehensive very easy to use and we see they make progress release after release, so it's very exciting. >> Alright, Param, why don't you walk us through the announcements that you made? What's new to the platform? Some enhancement to the community. >> Yeah, so we've done some really key announcements in this event today. The first one that we're very excited about is UiPath Go, which is our marketplace that enables broad innovation across our entire ecosystem of customers and partners. We can create on a platform or we can put it in a marketplace and then everybody else can easily access the innovation that's available there. We also released 2018.3 which is the third release we've done this year, but probably the most comprehensive release that we've done 'til date in the history of Enterprise Automation. So we're very excited about launching that release today, as well. And third, we've announced a $20 million fund that will fund our partners that will co-innovate together with us in bringing out new RPA capabilities, new machine learning and AI capabilities into the marketplace. Those are three key announcements. >> What are the-- >> I'm just-- Sorry, but from my understanding, you run on a quarterly cadence for the release of the primary product, correct? >> We're in a quarterly cadence, yes. >> What are the critical aspects of the new release? >> So, there's a few things we've done in the main release. One of the first things we've done is we've allowed for re-usability of the software. So if you're using a lot of components, if you've built a way to automate a certain process, it could be as simple as, here's how I log into a application, a financial application. The rest of the people in my organization don't have to go reinvent that thing themselves. They can reuse the component, the way I've built it, so they can be reused to process every single aspect of the customer, as well. We've made it very easy for our customers to upgrade to new versions of the software, as we're releasing very rapidly, we want to make sure that the upgrades are easy, but the upgrades are also seamless as in they don't affect any of the existing processes that are running in production. So we support version management and package management so we make it easier for people to manage that. There's some other capabilities that we've done. We've supported internationalization of the platform, so now customers in Japan can use our product in Japanese, customers can use it in Spanish, they can use it in Deutsche, German, so we've allowed that in this release, as well. Another cool thing we've done is allowing humans to provide input to what the robots need to do by putting a form that they can use to provide input to them, so it can provide a better symbiosis of humans working together with robots to achieve more processes and more automation in the ecosystems. There's a lot of stuff, this is some of the highlights. >> So what do you think? I mean, what of those, what of that compendium is of interest to you? >> I think, you know, I've been a member for a year now, from, of their customer advisory board, so they truly listen to what we need to say, right? Because the robotic aspect of it is critical, but there's so many other aspects, such as the analytics. So, understanding the business outcome, right? What's the bot producing? Not necessarily the bot that's up and running, but really, what's the impact to the business? I think that's part of the feedback that we've been given in UiPath, they're really working hard on that. The other aspect which is important also is how do you move forward from simple RPA to more complex automations? So, the human in the loop approach to things is important. We call that those small black boxes, you know people with 20 years of experience, they understand how to make decisions but those aren't documented, right? So, now we're giving the opportunity for that human to become part of the process, right? So that is very powerful to us. >> So one of the aspects we've been looking at, the marketplace seems interesting. I'm wondering if you've had a chance to look at that, are there things that you would consider using, and anything that you might even consider contributing in the future? >> I think so. I think this is a whole movement, it's a community today, so no matter where you are, developers, they love it. My guys are telling me, "When is this out?" Because, you know, they have I mean, they're so much hungry to get stuff done and to share what they can do, it makes a difference not only for our company, but for the world, right? So it means something. >> That's interesting. Your company's been around for a long time. You're not worried about, I mean, this open mindset is really intriguing to us, you're not worried about putting your IP in there? Or do you feel like, this open community, we're going to get back as much as we give? >> No, of course. Of course, there are controls in place, and of course, there'll be a protocol in place, but you know, at the end, you're making a difference in the world. So if someone wants to, for instance, have a mortgage because they're wanting to buy a house, you want to make it easy, right? At the end, that's the end goal. You know, for EquiFax and for all the institutions that are in the same sector. >> So from a product standpoint, we just have Craig LeClair on, he couldn't directly call out UiPath. It's not cool, right? I mean, he has to be independent. But, look, he wrote the report, UiPath went from third on the list to first on the list, out of I don't know, 10, 15 vendors. It's like the Gardiner magic quadrants, all these rating systems, right? We don't do 'em, but we read them because they're good, and they're informative. He said in there that last year's features have become this year's table stakes. And some of the things that are differentiating companies, and obviously UiPath won so I presume you have the differentiation ears. Analytics and governance. Those are two big areas, I see the heads nodding. Maybe you guys could each talk about that, Jairo let's start with you, why are those things important? You address the analytics, you kind of address governance, as well, but maybe you can summarize. >> I mean, we address governance as the get-go, and it's an evolution. So for instance, you know, really, truly when we're looking into RPA, it's not only so much about a tactical approach to a specific problem, but it's really turned into a strategy, right? So if you want to scale, you need to have the proper controls in place. So, these guys have done an amazing job integrating with tools such as Cyberart, for instance which is reall important for many companies. They're trying to secure their systems and make sure that the bots are operating on their very secure environment. >> So you guys not only you were in the place position, now you're in the lead. Now the pressure's really on. It's like the Red Sox, Stu. (laughs) So, how'd you get there? What is that enables that? Architecture? Mindset? Culture? You know, give us the insights there. >> Yeah, first of all, let's say we're super excited about being in the first place. I think it's really good, it's a really good testament to the hard work the team is putting in there, so we're super excited about that. We believe that our success and the product roadmap depends upon hearing a lot from customers and making sure that we're responding to their customers. So I think that's what we have done for the most part is ensuring that if there are things that our customers need, if there are things that our customers think our platform and technology is moving toward, we're actually doing the kinds of things that'll actually take us there. So a lot of the innovation that we've done on the platform has come from a direct result of engagement and working with customers and bringing their success into there. Specifically, the governance and analytics, those are very important aspects of what we're doing on a product. Most of our customers are very large corporations like Equifax, other corporations. They will not use our technology if we couldn't support the level of governance and compliance that they need from the ability to run those processes, especially when they're running autonomously without having a human look over what's happening. So that was a core part of what we've invested in. Analytics is also something that we've invested but we'll continue to make more investments there. We're now hearing from Equifax and other customers that people don't want to just get analytics that is responding to what the robots are doing but they want to understand what sort of business impact the robots are having on the corporation. So we want to build an analytics platform that is ingesting not just the robot workloads but bringing in information about line of business systems, as well, to be able to give the reports and perspectives that somebody can look at that and say the robots have done so much for me. Not just in terms of number of hours, but in terms of the business outcomes that I've achieved through the work the robots are executing. >> Jairo, I want to ask you about innovation at Equifax. We've observed many times in theCUBE that innovation in the tech industry used to march at the cadence of Moore's Law. Oh, new chip's out! We've got to do, we can now put better, faster data warehouse. You know, more storage, whatever it was. The innovation model is changing dramatically. And we've observed that it's a combination now, it seems, of data plus AI plus cloud, for scale. So, what do you think about that sort of innovation sandwich? Do you buy into it? How are you guys applying innovation in your business? >> I mean, I'll tell you I got a similar question the other day, you know. It's about, you know, I live in Costa Rica, right? So we surf all the time, right? So it's about riding, you know, the wave, right? So it's not about riding it, right? If you don't ride it, then you're going to drop, right? And then you're going to fall behind. >> Dave: You're going to be driftwood. >> So, yeah, innovation is there, you know. It's that demand for all companies. For us, innovating not only about how do we approach customers and consumers and we put them first in everything we do, but in how we operate internally. Creating a culture that drives automation, right? So giving time for people to think about stuff, you know, that makes a difference, right? I think that's how I can summarize innovation as of this moment. >> So, Stu had a question. >> So, if I understand this right now, we can blame the robots if our credit score isn't good enough now, right? (laughs) >> What do you think? Blame the robots, right? >> Blame the robots, always. >> Blame the innocent, as we say. Well, guys, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. >> Param: Thank you. >> Param and Jairo, it was great to have you, appreciate it. >> Thank you again. >> Alright, keep it right there. Stu and I will be back with our next guest from UiPath Forward Americas. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPathForward 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. A lot of noise here but the signal's all around automation and robotic process automation. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Stu Miniman, my co-host. Guy Kirkwood's here he's the UiPath chief evangelist otherwise known as the chief injector of Kool-Aid. Welcome. (guests chuckling) And Craig LeClair, the Vice President at Forrester. Covers this market, wrote the seminal document on this space. Knows it inside out. Craig, great to see you again. >> Yeah, nice to see you again. It's great to be back at theCUBE. >> So let's start with the analyst perspective. Take us back to when you first discovered RPA, why you got excited about it, and what Forrester Research is all about in that space. >> Yeah, it's been a very a interesting ride. Most of these companies, at least that are the higher value ones in the category they've been around for a long time. They've been around for over a decade, and no one ever heard of them three years ago. So I had covered at Forrester, business process management and some of the business rules engines, and I've always been in process. I just got this sense that there was a way that companies could make progress and digital transformation and overcome the technical debt that they had. A lot of the progress has been tepid in digital transformation because it takes tremendous amount of time and tons of consultants to modernize that core system that really runs the company. So along comes this RPA technology that allows you to build human equivalence that patch up the inefficiencies without touching. I came in on American Airlines and the system that cut my ticket was designed in 1960. It's the same Sabre reservation system. That's the big obstacle that a lot of companies have been struggling to really take advantage of AI in general. A lot of the more moonshot and more sophisticated promises haven't been realized. RPA is a very practical form of automation that companies can get a handle on right now, and move the dial for digital transformation. >> So Guy we heard a vision set forth by Daniel this morning. Basically a chicken in every pot, I call it, a robot for every person. Now what Craig was just saying about essentially cutting the line on technical debt, do you have clear evidence of that in your customer base? Maybe you could give some examples. >> What we're really seeing is that as organizations have to deal with the stresses, what Leslie Wilcox professor at LSE describes as the stresses within organizations and particularly in environments where the demographics are changing. What we're seeing is that organizations have to automate. So the best example of that is in Japan where the Japanese population peaked in 2010. It's now falling as a whole, plus all the baby boomers, people of Craig's and my age are now retiring. So we're now in a position where they measure levels of dangerous overwork as being more that 106 hours a week. That isn't 106 hour a week in total, that's 106 hours a week in addition to the 60 hours a week the Japanese people normally work. And there is a word in Japanese, which is (speaking in foreign language), which means to work oneself to death. So there really is no choice. So what we're seeing happening in Japan will be replicated in Western Europe and certainly in the US over the next few years. So what's driving that is the rise of the ecosystems of technologies of which RPA and AI are part, and that's really what we're seeing within the market. >> Craig, sometimes these big waves particularly in infrastructure, you kind of saw it with virtualization and some other wonky techs, like data reduction. They could be a one-time step function, and not an ongoing business value creator. Where does RPA fit in there? How can organizations make sure that this is a continuous business value generator as opposed to a one time hit? >> Good question. >> Well, I like the concept of RPA as a platform that can lead to more intelligence and more integration with AI components. It allows companies to build an automation center or a center of excellence focused on automation. But the next thing they're going to do after building some simple robots that are doing repetitive tasks, is they're going to say "Oh well wouldn't it be better "if my employee could have a textual chat with a chatbot "that then was interacting with the digital worker "that I built with the bot." Or they're going to say "You know what? I really want to use that machine learning algorithm "for my underwriting process, but I can use these bots "to go out and collect all the data from the core systems "and elsewhere and from the web and feed the algorithms "so that I could make a better decision." So again it goes back to that backing off the moonshot approach that we've been talking about that AI has been taking because of the tremendous amount of money spent by the major players to lay out the promise of AI has really been a little dysfunctional in getting organizations' eye off the ball in terms of what could be done with slightly more intelligent automation. So RPA will be a flash in the pan unless it starts to embed these more learning-capable AI modules. But I think it has a very good chance of doing that particularly now with so much investment coming into the category right. >> Craig, it's really interesting. When I heard you describe that it reminds me of the home automation. The Cortanas and Alexas and consumer side where you're seeing this. You've got the consumer side where you can build skills yourself, you know teenagers people can do that. One of the challenges always on the business side is how do you get the momentum when you don't have the consumer side. How do those interact? >> It's the technical debt issue and it's just like the mobile peak in 2011. Consumers in their hands had much better mobility right away than businesses. It took businesses five, they're still not there in building a great mobile environment. So these Alexa in our kitchen snooping on our conversation and to some extent Netflix that observes our behavior. That's a light form of AI. There is a learning from that behavior that's updating an algorithm autonomously in Netflix to understand what you want to watch. There's no one with a spreadsheet back there right. So this has given us in a sense a false sense of progress with all of AI. The reality is business is just getting started. Business is nowhere with AI. RPA is an initial foray on that path. We're in Miami so I'll call it a gateway drug. >> In fact there's also an element that the Siris, the Cortanas, the Alexas, are very poor at understanding specific ontologies that are required for industry, and that's where the limitation is right now. We're working with an organization called Humly, they're focused on those ontologies for specific industries. So if the robot doesn't understand something, then you could say to the robot Okay sit that in the Wells account, if you're in a bank, and it understands that Wells in that case means Wells Fargo it doesn't mean a hole in the ground with water at the bottom or a town in Somerset in the UK, 'cause they're all wells. So it's getting that understanding correct. >> I wonder if you guys could comment on this. Stu and I were at Splunk earlier this week and they were talking up NLP and we were saying one of the problems is that NLP is sometimes not that great. And they made a comment that I thought was very interesting. They said frankly a lot of the stuff that we're ingesting is text and it's actually pretty good. I would imagine the same is true for RPA. Is that what you see? >> You were talking about that on stage. With regards to the text analytics. >> Yes. So RPA doesn't handle unstructured content the way that NLP does. So NLP can handle voice, it can handle text. For the bots to work in RPA today you have to have a layer of analytics that understands those documents, understands those emails and creates a nice clean file that the bots can then work with. But what's happening is the text analytics layer is slowly merging with the RPA bots platforms so it's going to be viewed as one solution. But it's more about categories of use cases that deal with forms and documents and emails rather than natural language, which is where it's at. >> So known business processes really is the starting point. >> Known business-- >> One example we've got live is an insurance company in South Africa called Hollard, and they've used a combination of Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, plus IBM Watson and it's orchestrated doing NLP and orchestrated by UiPath. So that's dealing with utterly unstructured data. That's the 1.5 million emails that that organization gets in a year. They've managed to automate 98% of that, so it never sees a human. And their reduction in cost is 91% cost in reduction per transaction. And that's done by one of our implementation partners, a company called LarcAI down there. It's superb. >> Yeah, so text analytics is hard. Last several years we have that sentiment out of it, but if I understand it correctly Craig, you're saying if you apply it to a known process it actually could have outcomes that can save money. >> Yes, absolutely yes. >> As Guy was just saying. >> I think it's moving from that rules-based activity to more experience-based activity as more of these technologies become merged. >> Will the technology in your view advance to the point, because the known processes. okay, there's probably a lot of work to be done there, but today there's so many unknown processes. It's like this messy, unpredictable thing. Will machine intelligence combined with robotic process automation get to the point, and if so when, that we can actually be more flexible and adapt to some of these unknown processes or is that just decades off? >> No, no, I think we talk at Forrester about the concept of convergence. Meaning the convergence of the physical world and the digital world. So essentially digital's getting embedded in everything physical that we have right. Think of IoT applications and so forth. But essentially that data coming from those physical devices is unstructured data that the machine learning algorithms are going to make sense of, and make decisions about. So we're very close to seeing that in factory environments. We're seeing that in self-driving cars. The fleet managers that are now understanding where things are based on the signals coming from them. So there's a lot of opportunity that's right here on the horizon. >> Craig, a lot of the technologies you mentioned, we may have had a lot of the technical issues sorted out, but it's the people interactions some things like autonomous vehicles, there's government policies going to be one of the biggest inhibitors out there. When you look at the RPA space, what should workers how do they prepare for this? How do companies, make sure that they can embrace this and be better for it? >> That's a really tough and thoughtful question. The RPA category really attacks what we call the cubicle population. And there are we're estimating four million cubicles will be emptied out in five years by RPA technology specifically. That's how we built the market forecast 'cause each one of the digital workers replacing a cubicle worker will cost $11,000 or what. That's how we built up the market forecast. They're going to be automation deficits. It's not all going to be relocating people. We think that there's going to be a lot of disruption in the outsource community first. So companies are going to look at contractors. They're going to look at the BPO contract. Then they're going to look at their internal staff. Our numbers are pretty clear. We think they're going to be four million automation deficits in five years due to RPA technology specifically. Now there will be better jobs for those that are remaining. But I think it's a big change management issue. When you first talk about robots to employees you can tell them that their jobs are going to get better, they're going to be more human. They're going to have a much more exhilarating experience. And their response to you is, What they're thinking is, "Damn robot's going to take my job." That's what they're thinking. So you have to walk them up the mountain and really understand what their career path is and move them into this motion of adaptive and continual learning and what we call constructive ambition. Which is another whole subject. But there are employees that have a higher level of curiosity and are more willing to adapt to get on the other side of the digital divide. Yep. >> You mentioned the market. You guys did a market forecast. I've seen, read stats, a little over a billion today. I don't know if that's consistent with your numbers? >> Yeah that's about right. >> Is this a 10X market? When does it get to 10 billion? Is it five, seven, 10 years? >> So we go out five years and have it be close to three billion. I think the numbers I presented on stage were 3.2 billion in five years. Now that's just software licenses and it's not the services community that surround that. >> You'd probably triple it if you add in services. >> I think two to three times service license ratio. There's always an issue at this point in emerging markets. Some of the valuations that are there, that market three billion has to be a bit bigger than that in eight or nine years to justify those valuations. That's always the fascinating capital structure questions we create with these sorts of things. >> So you describe this sort of one for one replacement. I'm presuming there's other potential use cases, or maybe not, that you forecast. Is that right? >> Oh no for the cubicles? >> Yes, it's not just cubicle replacement in that three billion right? It's other uplifts. >> No there are use cases that help in factory automation, in supply chain, in guys carrying around clipboards in warehouses. There are a tremendous number of use cases, but the primary focus are back office workers that tend to be in cubicles and contact center employees who are always in cubicles. >> And then we'll see if the non-obvious ones emerge. >> I think ultimately what's going to happen is the number of people doing back office corporate functions, so that's both finance and accounting procurement, HR type roles and indeed the industry specific roles. So claims processing insurance will diminish over time. But I think what we're going to see is an increase in the number of people doing customer experience, because it's the customer intimacy that is really going to differentiate organizations going forward. >> The market's moving very fast. Reading your report, it's like you were saying yesterday's features are now table steaks. Everybody's watching everybody else. You heard Daniel today saying, "Hey our competitors are watching. "We're open they're going to steal from us so be it." The rising tide lifts all boats. What do you advise clients in terms of where they should start, how they should get started? Obviously pick some quick wins. But what do you tell people? >> I always same pretty much the same advice you give almost on any emerging technology. Start with a good solution provider that you trust. Focus on a proof of concept, POC and a pilot. Start small and grow incrementally, and walk people up the mountain as you do that. That's the solution. I also have this report I call The Rule of Fives, that there are certain tasks that are perfect for RPA and they should meet these three rules of five. A relatively small number of decisions, relatively small number of applications involved, and a relatively small number of clicks in the click stream. 500 clicks, five apps, five decisions. Look for those in high volume that have high transaction volume and you'll hit RPA goal. You'll be able to offset 2 1/2 to four FTE's for one bot. And if you follow those rules, follow the proof of concept, good solution partner everyone's winning. >> You have practical advice to get started and actually get to an outcome. Anything you'd add to that? >> In most organizations what they're now doing, is picking one, two, or three different technologies to actually play with to start. And that's a really good way. So we recommend that organizations pick three, four, five processes and do a hackathon and very quickly they work out which organizations they want to work with. It's not necessarily just the technology and in a lot of cases UiPath isn't the right answer. But that is a very good way for them to realize what they want to do and the speed with which they'll want to do it. >> Great, well guys thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing your knowledge. >> Thank you. >> Pleasure. >> Appreciate your time. >> Thanks very much indeed. >> Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back from UiPathForward Americas. This is theCUBE. Be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath Forward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody. UiPathForward Americas. #UiPath. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Dave Vellante, here. For my co-host, Stu Miniman. Anthony Abbattista is here. He's a principal in robotics and intelligent automation at Deloitte; a big consultancy, SI. Anthony, thanks for coming on theCUBE >> Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. >> So, when the SIs and the consultancies lean in, you know it's a big business, you know it's strategic, and it's sort of, life changing, world changing. What's your role at Deloitte? And, then we'll get into what you see in the market space. >> So, my role now is, broadly, in intelligent automation and really scaling our practice, looking at what's next. And, if you think about automation, in and of itself, an RPA, if you're not careful, it can a race to the bottom, is our view. And just automating things, without a business case, without sustainability, without thinking about what's next, you know, is probably a race to the bottom from a results perspective. So, what we like to do is think about what intelligent components could we have, not just in technology, but around the business case. Around the actual implementations, and say, you know, how do we, just not take people out? How do we think about the future of work? What's the impact on industry? And, how can we make something more of that, and make this a sustainable part of the technology landscape, not just a "let's go take some bodies out." >> Yeah, so the race to the bottom, I'm inferring, would be the hollowing out of the employee base, without a plan to sort of retrain and redeploy people, and actually have business value. Just, pure cost cutting for automation for automation's sake, versus what? What do you advise your clients? >> Well, the race to the bottom also would include just doing automation for the sake of doing automation. And, you know my joke here with the theme of the conference of accelerate everything. Yeah, so I'm not sure that's exactly right. It's accelerate the right things. It's accelerate things that have the highest value. So, I do think the race to the bottom is, if you're not careful, you could just be doing automations, putting in bots, and I've seen a lot of programs start to fail or people start to question them if you don't have that longer view of automating the right things, and accelerating the right things. The second part of that is, there's context. There's interactions. And, without some of the advanced cognitive components, without text, without speech, without machine learning and getting smarter as you do this, It will be a race to the bottom if you're not doing these things. >> Yeah, I mean, Anthony, it's everything in business. If you start having meetings for meetings sake, they get out of hand. You know in the infrastructure space, we have sprawl of every single technology out there. Maybe, give us a little insight. What are you seeing as some of the real ways that companies get value out of this, help propel their business forward, help their employees be more fulfilled and not be doing drudgery work? >> So, that's a lot all in one question. I think first of all, this is not a technology or a business problem and this goes back to, you know, my 30, almost 35 years of working in technology. You still need business and technology alignment to make the real programs work. And, I know some vendors that have come out and said, "This is easy, just go build a bot." And business people can do this. And quickly, it becomes a technology problem if you're successful or if you're not successful, it becomes a technology problem. So, I do think, one thing I'm seeing is the best programs have business led and technology enabled, but the leadership is aligned around how to do these programs. The second piece is having a business case. If we're going to automate some things that are low hanging fruit, understanding the difference between that and where their places were taking in, leaning in to some good old fashioned process work, or asking the question, "Am I going to do best practice? "Am I going to get some industry "consultants in that know the difference "between good and great, or what I'm doing "and can maybe guide me there quickly?" I think people who are taking that approach and sort of, knowing why they're doing the program. If it's low-hanging fruit, that's fine, you might do some throw-aways. But, also having a long view of if I'm going to dig in, how do I get that value? How do I bring people in to help me get that value, and not just repave the cow path? >> So, take us through the business case. Maybe we can go through some examples, but what's the frame work look like? Obviously, you know, save money, make money. Okay, but you guys are going to get a lot more sophisticated than that. But, with something like this, I presume you don't want to initially boil the ocean. You want to have a long-term view, get some quick wins that are maybe you know, gain shares going forward. Maybe take us through a framework using some of the examples that you've worked with on clients. What does it look like? The business case? >> So, first there's the back-office business case, and I think those are the best understood. So, how do I automate financial processes, or HR processes? A lot of those are pretty easy to do on the industry agnostic basis for the most part. And those typically do have the can I close the books faster? Is there value in maybe, taking some people out or redeploying them? And I think those are pretty well understood across the various industries. >> So, expense reporting. You know, approval is an obvious one, right? Here's you pushing the button every time. Approved, approved, approved. Let's say reporting, gets to be a little, gets to be more interesting. So, you're compressing the time to reporting. Again, doing sort of, manual tasks. >> Does that have a value to the street or to your investors, or just to not elongating the whole process? >> Okay. In a company I worked in, we moved from a 10 day close, to a one day close. It took us seven years of working hard to do that. Now, people are thinking about continuous closes. You know, what do my books look like everyday? Can I do valuations in certain industries? So, I do think, that if there's business value to do that, again, these business cases are pretty well understood. I think where it gets interesting, is where you get to industry-specific business cases. So, if I'm running an insurance company, for example, can I improve customer sat and does it matter that I move the needles, as far as renewals? Again, can I improve customer sat by maybe, adjudicating a claim quickly? Getting you the check and not having it be a big hassle? If there's no bodily injury or something you have to dig into, can I use robotics and other technology to help have a happier customer, maybe save some costs, redesign the process, not have an inspector go out or an adjuster go look at things. So, I think technologies play together well. The other is creating capacity, in that same model. I have a client who really was about to go out and build some new buildings. Their business was growing very nicely, but they were about to undertake a major capital investment to build buildings and service their business the way they were doing it. They'd make money doing that, but they made more money by not building the building, and not hiring the 1000 or 1500 people that would fill it and said, "How can we use automation "to stave off that investment?" So, CAPEX, OPEX, now you start getting into some models that are not traditional. It's not just save some heads, but it's great capacity. >> I think I could probably count on one hand, I think so, yeah, the number of companies that have the capabilities of Deloitte, in terms of its global presence, its industry expertise. Other than that sort of cartel, if you will, how do you differentiate? >> So, one thing is very, deeply, technically competent, and one of the reasons I came back out of industry, and joined the firm was our bench in technology competency. So, we can go with the best of them, about sizing and scaling. Not just filling a school bus, but making size and scale with industry expertise in our technical people. So, I do think our technology bench is really strong because everybody has a love and business savvy. We like our business people to be tech savvy, and our tech people to be business savvy. And that's sort of part of the culture. I think the second piece is our ability to think from an industry perspective. Even if we're screwing some things in, we're going for a go-live. I think our continuous industry points of views, our deep knowledge, means we can bring an expert in at any time in any place to weigh in on some of the work we're doing. And, sometimes that happens, as a matter of course. It might be a technical project; go build 40, 50 bots. But, while we're there, we bring something more on a regular basis. I also think we don't just do work for the sake of doing work. We're very focused on the business case, sharing success. We've got some major automation projects, intelligent automation projects, that were at risk, and our fees, and we've got aligned rewards. So, I think that makes us different and, maybe worth a little more premium in the market. >> Yeah, so that's, I mean, often times, clients are afraid to sign up for those deals, because the business case could be so attractive, they could be writing a bit check. They want to keep the upside for themselves, and have more operating leverage. But, you've found that certainly, you're willing to take that risk because, you understand (laughs) the reward, and that's kind of cool. I mean, the payoff must be pretty good. Maybe better than normal in an engagement? >> Oh, it is. That's real interesting. We brought several of these to the door, and said, "How about we go into a risk sharing "or rewards sharing kind of situation?" And people said, "We're going to give you a lot of money if this works." And they've had exactly, you know, let's just move back to a fixed price, or a bond and scale project. So, we don't mind that either. >> Great negotiating tactic, right? (laughs) >> I want to go back to the industry discussion we were just having before. >> Sure. We saw in the big data world, one of the biggest challenges was when you looked at deployment, everything was custom. It wasn't very repeatable. I was at the Microsoft show two weeks ago, and they said, for AI, they're going to great industry specific groups to be able to really focus on AI, IOT and the like. In this space, for the robotic automation, are there certain industries that you're seeing ahead of the curve in this? Are there things that, you know, is it going to be very industry specific? You said, you know, that HR is very generalized. Give us little more color if you can. >> So, it's interesting you mentioned big data because, I think the best automation is driven with data and analytics and feedback in the background. So, I think the best industries are the ones that are most promising in places where there is a massive amount of data that we can apply automation and intelligent automation to. So, a couple of stand outs: healthcare, life sciences, massive amounts of data, a massive data channel, and, they're used to working with data and investing in data and automation. You can pretty quickly close the loop. The second is financial services. We're using automation to run more models, to handle more calls, to handle more interactions. Then, certainly in consumer focus things. Can we have a good experience in a retail channel or customer support channel by using automation? Again, sometimes people are happier interacting with a bot, or an intelligent agent than they are ... >> Do those bots pass the Turing test yet? >> Excuse me? >> Do they pass the Turing test? >> Some of them are getting close, right? But, I still think there's some work to do there. (laughs) >> So, some of the mistakes people made, I'm inferring from your comments, people don't have a plan, they don't have the business case, they don't have the business technology alignment. What are the big mistakes that You know, what are we missing here that people should try to avoid? >> Well, I think alignment, and then the sponsorship, right? Having that business case and not getting lost on the way. Or, we get x-million dollars into a program, and somebody starts sniping at it. I also think booking the benefits and having your CFO or some operator on board who is actually booking the benefits, whether they're take-outs, redeployments, or even customer sat or other things. If you're going to push the needle, somebody needs to measure it. >> And then, advice. Let's flip it around and sort of positive side, advice for people who want to get started. Obviously, it sounds like you've got to have the sponsorship. What? Pick something that's going to give a fast return? You want quick hits, is that right? >> Yeah, you want some early success. And, I'd say don't boil the ocean, to use your words before. Find some, but also understand the longer term picture, and don't get, again onto this. Let's go live, and let's pick the first 500. You know, pick 10, get going, have some success. I think, two years ago, we spent a lot of time on looking at technology, doing POCs. I think people are getting beyond that now. You can quickly say, "Alright, if we're going to do a POC, "let's make it real. "Let's not make it "a science project, but, let's get a real area, "where there's real sponsorship, and let's "go build the first 10 bots." >> So, I'd infer from that the POC, the investment, might be a little larger but the payback is going to be more substantive, and people are willing to take that chance. The economy's good, so why not? >> And, also, why spend two, or three months doing science projects, or more in some companies? >> And, when you do these early projects, are you narrowly focused on sort of a part of their organization or are you involving more constituencies and herding more cats, or does it sort of, just depend and both? >> I think what's typical is, if there's a business person or tech person thinking about this probably, typically might do a strategy piece of work that says, "Is there a business case at a high level?" Typical consulting. Then, are there ways that we could find sponsorship in an area and start somewhere? Now, assuming the big business case can be worked out, and you have some learning, start somewhere. But, I think the ones that try to start broadly, and do too much in too many areas, unless you are very careful, it might make no one happy and prove nothing to anyone. And, that could be a failure. But, we do have some customers where we've gone out and gotten in multiple areas; HR, finance, some of the back-office places, all at once. So, we're going to do a POC in each one. If they've got the discipline, and they want to work on those things at once, it just makes it into a program rather than a project. And, that's what we're good at doing. >> Yeah, okay. >> Anthony, any feedback you have on the go marketplace? How important is that to customers? We were wondering how much you know, co-creation will happen from the users, you know, that kind of dynamic? >> So, you know I worked in a place where all we had was our people, and their intellectual capital. so, I can say personally I'm suspicious of marketplaces and places you post your wares. And I don't think it's that easy. With that said, I do think there's opportunities to help each other. I sort of think of it as an open source opportunity or a way to show eminence and thought in the market. So, I think we'll participate cautiously in those kinds of environments. We like to see some structure around that. I think other vendors have similar marketplaces, not just in the RPA space, but in the technology space. But, I have to think, what's in recreating a false expectation if we put solutions there. So, I think it's good to be in the market, it's good to open source some things and play, but, I think we always want to be careful about that. And, I really like what I'm seeing from UiPath's marketplace, the way they're thinking about it, which is having certain levers. This is an internal marketplace. Can we have customers and people use it in a controlled environment, rather than just being a bazaar or a -- >> Stu: Free-for-all. >> Free-for-all. >> What is the relationship with UiPath? >> So, we've been working with UiPath probably for, since they started. Both as a customer, and with our customers. And we have various ... Our relationship is deep, you know? We sponsor events like this, we are a reseller, and we are working on formalizing some of that, potentially as an alliance partner in the future. But, our relationship is deep, hands on, going to clients, going to, you know, working together to serve our joint clients. >> Great Anthony. Love the independent perspective. You guys are always about, you know, technology's important, but the people side, the process side, the business outcome is really what you're all about. So, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Great being here. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back, right after this short break. We are live UiPath Forward from Miami. You're watching theCUBE. (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.

(energetic music) >> Live from Miami Beach, Florida. It's theCUBE covering UiPathForward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome to Miami everybody. This is theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage. We're here covering the UiPathForward Americas conference. UiPath is a company that has come out of nowhere, really. And, is a leader in robotic process automation, RPA. It really is about software robots. I am Dave Vellante and I am here with Stu Miniman. We have one day of coverage, Stu. We are all over the place this weekend. Aren't we? Stu and I were in Orlando earlier. Flew down. Quick flight to Miami and we're getting the Kool-Aid injection from the RPA crowd. We're at the Fontainebleau in Miami. Kind of cool hotel. Stu you might remember, I am sure, you do, several years ago we did the very first .NEXT tour. .NEXT from Nutanix at this event. About this same size, maybe a little smaller. This is a little bigger. >> Dave, this is probably twice the size, about 1,500 people here. I remember about a year ago you were, started buzzing about RPA. Big growth in the market, you know really enjoyed getting into the keynote here. You know, you said we were at splunk and data was at the center of everything, and the CEO here for (mumbles), it's automation first. We talked about mobile first, cloud first, automation first. I know we got a lot of things we want to talk about because you know, I think back through my career, and I know you do too, automation is something we've been talking about for years. We struggle with it. There's challenges there, but there's a lot of things coming together and that's why we have this new era that RPA is striking at to really explode this market. >> Yeah, so I made a little prediction that I put out on Twitter, I'll share with folks. I said there's a wide and a gap between the number of jobs available worldwide and the number for people to fill them. That's something that we know. And there's a productivity gap. And the numbers aren't showing up. We're not seeing bump-ups in productivity even though spending on technology is kind of through the roof. Robotic Process Automation is going to become a fundamental component of closing that gap because companies, as part of the digital process transformation, they want to automate. The market today is around a billion. We see it growing 10 x over the next five to seven years. We're going to have some analysts on today from Forester, we'll dig into that a little bit, they cover this market really, really closely. So, we're hearing a lot more about RPA. We heard it last week at Infor, Charles Phillips was a big proponent of this. UiPath has been in this business now for a few years. It came out of Romania. Daniel Dines, former Microsoft executive, very interesting fellow. First time I've seen him speak. We're going to meet him today. He is a techy. Comes on stage with a T-shirt, you know. He's very sort of thoughtful, he's talking about open, about culture, about having fun. Really dedicated to listening to customers and growing this business. He said, he gave us a data point that they went from nothing, just a couple of million dollars, two years ago. They'll do 140 million. They're doing 140 million now in annual reccurring revenue. On their way to 200. I would estimate, they'll probably get there. If not by the end of year, probably by the first quarter next year. So let's take look at some of the things that we heard in the keynote. We heard from customers. A lot of partners here. Seen a lot of the big SIs diving in. That's always a sign of big markets. What did you learn today at the keynotes? >> Yeah, Dave, first thing there is definitely, one of the push backs about automation is, "Oh wait what is that "going to do for jobs?" You touched on it. There's a lot of staff they threw out. They said that RPA can really bring, you know, 75% productivity improvement because we know productivity improvement kind of stalled out over all in the market. And, what we want to do is get rid of mundane tasks. Dave, I spent a long time of my career helping to get, you know, how to we get infrastructure simpler? How do we get rid of those routine things? The storage robe they said if you were configuring LUNs, you need to go find other jobs. If you were networking certain basic things, we're going to automate that with software. But there are things that the automation are going to be able to do, so that you can be more creative. You can spend more time doing some higher level functions. And that's where we have a skills gap. I'm excited we're going to have Tom Clancy, who you and I know. I've got his book on the shelf and not Tom Clancy the fiction author, but you know the Tom Clancy who has done certifications and education through storage and cloud and now how do we get people ready for this next wave of how you can do people and machines. One of my favorite events, Dave, that we ever did was the Second Machine Age with MIT in London. Talking about it's really people plus machines, is really where you're going to get that boom. You've interviewed Garry Kasparov on this topic and it's just fascinating and it really excites me as someone, I mean, I've lived with my computers all my life and just as a technologist, I'm optimistic at how, you know, the two sides together can be much more powerful than either alone. >> Well, it's an important topic Stu. A lot of the shows that we go to, the vendors don't want to talk about that. "Oh, we don't want to talk about displacing humans." UiPath's perspective on that, and we'll poke them a little on that is, "That's old news. "People are happy because they're replacing their 'mundane tasks.'" And while that's true, there's some action on Twitter. (mumbles name) just tweeted out, replying to some of the stuff that we were talking about here, in the hashtag, which is UiPathForward, #UiPathForward, "Automation displaces unskilled workers, "that's the crux of the problem. "We need best algorithms to automate re-training and "re-skilling of workers. "That's what we need the most for best socio-economic "outcomes, in parallel to automation through "algorithm driven machines," he's right. That gap, and we talked about this at 2MA, is it going to be a creativity gap? It's an education issue, it's an education challenge. 'Cause you just don't want to displace, unskilled workers, we want to re-train people. >> Right, absolutely. You could have this hollowing out of the market place otherwise, where you have really low paid workers on the one end, and you have really high-end creative workers but the middle, you know, the middle class workers could be displaced if they are not re-trained, they're not put forward. The World Economic Forum actually said that this automation is going to create 60-million net new jobs. Now, 60-million, it sounds like a big number, but it is a large global workforce. And, actually Dave, one of the things that really struck me is, not only do you have a Romanian founder but up on stage we had, a Japanese customer giving a video in Japanese with the subtitles in English. Not something that you typically see at a U.S. show. Very global, in their reach. You talked about the community and very open source focus of something we've seen. This is how software grows very fast as you get those people working. It's something I want to understand. They've got, the UiPath that's 2,000 customers but they've got 114,000 certified RPA developers. So, I'm like, okay, wait. Those numbers don't make sense to me yet, but I'm sure our guests are going to be able to explain them. >> And, so you're right about the need for education. I was impressed that UiPath is actually spending some of it the money that it's raised. This company, just did a monster raise, 225-million. We had Carl Ashenbach on in theCUBE studio to talk about that. Jeff Freck interviewed him last week. You can find that interview on our YouTube play list and I think on out website as well. But they invested, I think it was 10-million dollars with the goal of training a million students in the next three years. They've hired Tom Clancy, who we know from the old EMC education world. EMC training and education world. So they got a pro in here who knows to scale training. So that's huge. They've also started a 20-million investment fund investing in start ups and eco-system companies, so they're putting their money where their mouth is. The company has raised over 400-million dollars to date. They've got a 3-billion dollar evaluation. Some of the other things we've heard from the keynote today, um, they've got about 1,400 employees which is way up. They were just 270, I believe, last year. And they're claiming, and I think it's probably true, they're the fastest growing enterprise software company in history, which is kind of astounding. Like you said, given that they came out of Romania, this global company maybe that's part of the reason why. >> I mean, Dave, they said his goal is they're going to have 4,000 employees by 2019. Wait, there are a software company and they raised huge amounts of money. AS you said, they are a triple unicorn with a three billion dollar valuation. Why does a software company need so many employees? And 3,000, at least 3,000 of those are going to be technical because this is intricate. This is not push button simplicity. There's training that needs to happen. How much do they need to engage? How much of this is vertical knowledge that they need to get? I was at Microsoft Ignite two weeks ago. Microsoft is going really deep vertically because AI requires specialized knowledge in each verticals. How much of that is needed from RPA? You've got a little booklet that they have of some basic 101 of the RPA skills. >> I don't know if you can see this, but... Is that the right camera? So, it's this kind of robot pack. It's kind of fun. Kind of go through, it says, you got to reliable friend you can automate, you know, sending them a little birthday wish. They got QR codes in the back you can download it. You know, waiters so you can order online food. There's something called Tackle, for you fantasy football players who help you sort of automate your fantasy football picks. Which is kind of cool. So, that's fun. There's fun culture here, but really it's about digital transformation and driving it to the heart of process automation. Daniel Dines, talked about taking things from hours to minutes, from sort of accurate to perfectly accurate. You know, slow to fast. From very time consuming to automated. So, he puts forth this vision of automation first. He talked about the waves, main frames, you know the traditional waves client server, internet, etc. And then, you know I really want to poke at this and dig into it a little bit. He talked about a computer vision and that seemed to be a technical enabler. So, I'm envisioning this sort of computer vision, this visual, this ability to visualize a robot, to visualize what's happening on the screen, and then a studio to be able to program these things. I think those are a couple of the components I discerned. But, it's really about a cultural shift, a mind shift, is what Daniel talked about, towards an automation first opportunity. >> And Dave, one of the things you said right there... Three things, the convergence of computer vision, the Summer of AI, and what he meant by that is that we've lived through a bunch of winters. And we've been talking about this. And, then the business.. >> Ice age of a, uh... >> Business, process, automation together, those put together and we can create that automation first era. And, he talked about... We've been talking about automation since the creation of the first computer. So, it's not a new idea. Just like, you know we've been talking on theCUBE for years. You know, data science isn't a new thing. We sometimes give these things new terms like RPA. But, I love digging into why these are real, and just as we've seen these are real indicators, you know, intelligence with like, whether you call it AI or ML, are doing things in various environments that we could not do in the past. Just borders of magnitude, more processing, data is more important. We could do more there. You know, are we on the cusp of really automation. being able to deliver on the things that we've been trying to talk about a couple of generations? >> So a couple of other stats that I thought were interesting. Daniel put forth a vision of one robot for every person to use. A computer for every person. A chicken for every pot, kind of thing (laughs) So, that was kind of cool. >> "PC for every person," Bill Gates. >> Right, an open and free mind set, so he talked a about, Daniel talked about of an era of openness. And UiPath has a market place where all the automations. you can put automations in there, they're all free to use. So, they're making money on the software and not on the automation. So, they really have this... He said, "We're making our competitors better. "They're copying what we're doing, "and we think that's a good thing. "Because it's going to help change the world." It's about affecting society, so the rising tides lift all boats. >> Yeah Dave, it reminds me a lot of, you know, you look at GitHub, you look at Docker Hub. There's lots of places. This is where code lives in these open market places. You know, not quite like the AWS or IBM market places where you can you can just buy software, but the question is how many developers get in there. They say they got 250,000 community members already there. So, and already what do they have? I think hundreds of processes that are built in there, so that will be a good metric we can see to how fast that scales. >> We had heard from a couple of customers, and Wells Fargo was up there, and United Health. Mr. Yamomoto from SNBC, they have 1,000 robots. So, they are really completely transforming their organization. We heard from a partner, Data Robot, Jeremy Atchins, somebody who's been on theCUBE before, Data Robot. They showed an automated loan processing where you could go in, talk to a chat bot and within minutes get qualified for a loan. I don't know if you noticed the loan amount was $7,000 and the interest rate was 13.6% so the applicant, really, must not of had great credit history. Cause that's kind of loan shark rates, but anyway, it was kind of a cool demo with the back end data robot munging all the data, doing whatever they had to do, transferring through a CSV into the software robot and then making that decision. So, that was kind of cool, those integrations seemed to be pretty key. I want to learn more about that. >> I mean it reminds me of chat box have been hot in a lot of areas lately, as how we can improve customer support and automate things on infrastructure in the likes of, we'll see how those intersections meet. >> Yeah, so we're going to be covering this all day. We got technologists coming on, customers, partners. Stu and I will be jamming. He's @Stu and I'm @Dvellante. Shoot us any questions, comments. Thanks for the ones we've had so far. We're here at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. Pretty crazy hotel. A lot of history here. A lot of pictures of Frank Sinatra on the wall. Keep it right there, buddy. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break. (energetic music)