>> From New York City, it's theCUBE! Covering Automation Anywhere, Imagine. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in Midown Manhattan at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019. We were here last year, it's about 1,500 people who are excited to be back, the RPA space is really, really hot as evidenced by tons of investment coming into it and we're excited to have the CEO, fresh of the keynote but here Shukla the CEO and co-founder of Automation Anywhere. Great to see you and great job on the keynote. >> Thank you, great to see you too. >> Yeah, so I wanted to jump into some of the top level themes that you outlined that I think are so important and one of them was this whole concept of democratization of automation. We hear about it in Big Data, we hear about it at citizen developers and you guys are taking it really into the automation space and you had three things that were really important. One, it has to work for anyone. It's got to be available anywhere, which implies on anything. And it has to be available to any company, regardless of size. It sounds like you've really baked those concepts into a lot of the announcements that you've had today and where you're taking the company. So I wonder if you can dive a little bit deeper as to why those are guiding principles. >> Absolutely. I think what guides us there is that we believe that the power of technology lies when it impacts the lives of millions of people and makes them better. So you if you start with that premise, how do you make that possible. Now when you look at any technology that has affected, made millions of lives better, they had these three characteristics in common. Take an example of a personal computer or internet. It was available to anyone, for any kinds of people, any profile of people. It was available anywhere in any device and it was available for any sized company. So we have seen this play out a few times in our lifetime so, we have learned from that, that if our mission is to make power of RPA and AI reach millions of people and make their lives better, if that's the mission then we have to make this possible for anyone, for anywhere and for any sized company. >> And a big piece of that was the announcement of the community version which is free. So I'm sure there were some interesting discussions about moving to a freemium model and actually giving the software free for people that qualify. I wonder if you can talk about those discussions and clearly there's a bigger picture that you're focused on, versus just the revenue for one or two small customers. >> Right, so our community edition is free for small businesses, student and individual developers. And the reason why we did this is for two reasons. One is, we believe the students are our future and they will take this technology forward and we need more and more people with digital skills. So it seemed like the right place to invest and enable them with the next set of technologies. The reason to make it available free for developers is, we believe that today about 95% of processes that we automate are the processes that we do manually today. But that is changing very fast. In three to five years, 30% of things that we will automate will be the things that are not part of our lives today. It is things that we don't know yet, right? >> Right, right. >> And that happens every time. The way we use phones and everything, nobody could've predicted this. So we know that will happen like it happened in internet and other evolution. It will happen in our space as well. And developers are an amazing asset, they are the ones who will discover, find these new ways that none of us know about and they will create this new future in front of our eyes. So it makes sense to empower developers and especially developers are very picky, they want the best software available. They won't settle for anything less and because we have the complete intelligent digital workforce platform that includes the best RPA, artificial intelligence and analytics, (coughs) we thought they would love the power of this combined platform that is not available anywhere else. And true to the cause, as soon as we announced it we had an amazing success. The requests are pouring in from 120 countries worldwide and the adoption has been phenomenal. >> And you mentioned that on stage on the keynote that there's some examples out there where people are not doing automating of processes that they already did but are really starting to get creative in the uses of this tool and I think we see it over and over as you said, people miss the hype recurve, it's hard to see the future and it's hard to apply what we're doing today to what we're going to be doing in the future, because we really don't know. >> That's right. I think sometimes I describe this way to people, that when the new technology comes, people think that new technology is the train and the world is the stations. So the station remains where it is and the tain moves on, right? That's not how real world is. The real world is, the world is a train itself, that's moving forward and technology is one of the, you can say it's the first-- >> The locomotive. >> First locomotive or one of the pieces in it. But the whole world is moving as well. So we often, many of us get this wrong that, we make a mistake to think that, how will this new technology fill in a stationary world where that's not the case, the world is moving. >> The other thing you brought up I thought was pretty interesting is that, this is not to displace workers, it's to enable workers to do better and I couldn't help but think of, just like my PC helps me do my job better, the internet helps me do my job better, my phone and my ERP system all help me do my job better. So, of course, why wouldn't I want a powered AI assistant to help me do my job better. >> That's absolutely true. Look, I have a very extraordinary privilege of seeing this transformation through the eyes of thousands of people who use our platform every day, and I've visited about, of the 2,800 plus customers we have, I have visited hundreds of them and talked to thousands of people on the ground who use this technology. And there is not a single one of them who would go back. And I invariably ask that, after a few discussions I would say "Would you ever consider going back?", and the answer is universal across any country, any verticle. People do not want to go back to, why would you, why would you do a robotic job? And so, it is more clear than ever before that this transformation is certainly not about us, certainly not about bots. It is about empowering people so that they're more productive unlike any other time in human history. Taking it a step further, as you said, compared to where PCs brought us. >> You said, again I could go on your keynote all day long, another great thing you brought up which was just crushing, I think you said that 4% of people have jobs that need some degree of creativity. That is horrible! >> Is it not? Is it not? >> That is horrible. And again to personalize it, you talked about your kids and this world that they're going to be coming into, why would we want to put them into a robotic job? >> Right. So the data shows that only 4% of US jobs require medium creativity. And as a parent that is, I'm troubled by it because we, like all parents, we tell our children they can do anything. What do we mean by they can do anything? If they get one of those 4% jobs, that's still a medium level of creativity so probably we hope they get 4.1% of those jobs that require full human capacity, yeah? >> Right, right. >> That's not anything they can do. They don't have as many opportunities that they should have. And I think we need to create a better world with more opportunities for our children. I'll settle at 40% but 4% isn't acceptable. >> So a little bit about the business, cause the deeper stuff I think is more interesting, but the business is doing well, again. Since we last met you had this huge A round, I think someone said "The largest A round ever.". You put over half a billion dollars into the bank. A, what is that show in terms of validation from the marketplace, for the opportunities you guys are addressing? And then B, with great resources comes great responsibility, you know? So what are you doing next as you look into 2019, what are some of your top priorities? >> So we have been very fortunate to get the, as you mentioned about 550,000,000 in our series A round and it is, if not the largest, one of the largest series A round ever. I think it shows, first of all it's a validation of our market leadership and the growth of the category both. We continue to invest heavily in three areas. First is our RND investment continues to grow, especially in AI and making RPA accessible to millions. So those investments continue. We are significantly investing in the global expansion across, now we have offices in about 30, 35 countries worldwide. And the third is, we will carefully look at acquiring maybe new technologies and new acquisitions to make our digital labor platform more complete and offer customers more similar solutions. >> Right. So last question before I let you go, I know they got you flying back to back to back all day. It's really about the ecosystem. The Partner Ecosystem, you've got obviously a bunch of system integrators here which validates that they see a huge opportunity, but talk about how you're developing an ecosystem to extend the reach beyond just the people that work at Automation Anywhere. >> So we have two important pillars to our ecosystem. We have our site system integrators. We bought 700 plus partners who provide invaluable experience in various domains all over the world. Many of them provide the bots and the bot store that are domain specific, process specific, ready to tax and audit and finance and accounting and supply chain and oil and gas and telcos, across all industries. So they bridge the gap between technology and the customer specific, domain specific process. That's one very important pillar. The second important pillar is the software companies. So we have a great deal of partnerships with many of them, for example we have a continued partnership with IBM, with their digital business automation group. We recently announced partnership with Workrave that is very important to us. It has an enormous potential of how when you combine best in class, HR and cloud finance with best in class intelligent digital workforce. The possibilities of value creation is enormous. We today announced our partnership with Oracle and we extended our partnership with Microsoft on multiple fronts, and there are many more as well. So the two key pillars to our creating an ecosystem. Again, all of this is, almost everything that we do comes down to a single mission statement which is, how do we take the power of RPA and AI to millions of people and make their life better? >> Great, great mission. So again, thanks for having us. Congratulations on a great event and we look forward to watching the next year unfold. >> Thank you, I look forward to it (laughter) >> Alright he's been here, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCube. We're at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019 in Midtown Manhattan, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.