(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE, in Palo Alto for "CUBE Conversation" with Chris Jones, Director of Product Management at Platform9. I've got a series of questions, had a great conversation earlier. Chris, I have a couple questions for you, what do you think? >> Let's do it, John. >> Okay, how does Platform9 Solution, you- can it be used on any infrastructure anywhere, cloud, edge, on-premise? >> It can, that's the beauty of our control plane, right? It was born in the cloud, and we primarily deliver that SaaS, which allows it to work in your data center, on bare metal, on VMs, or with public cloud infrastructure. We now give you the ability to take that control plane, install it in your data center, and then use it with anything, or even in air gap. And that includes capabilities with bare metal orchestration as well. >> Second question. How does Platform9 ensure maximum uptime, and proactive issue resolution? >> Oh, that's a good question. So if you come to Platform nine we're going to talk about always on assurance. What is driving that is a system of three components around self-healing, monitoring, and proactive assistance. So our software will heal broken things on nodes, right? If something stops running that should be running, it will attempt to restart that. We also have monitoring that's deployed with everything. So you build a cluster in AWS, well, we put open source monitoring agents, that are actually Prometheus, on every single node. That means it's resilient, right? So if you lose a node, you don't lose monitoring. But that data importantly comes back to our control plane, and that's the control plane that you can put in your data center as well. That data is what alerts us, and you as a user, anytime of the day that something's going wrong. Let's say etcd latency, good example, etcd is going slow. We'll find out, we might not be able to take restorative action immediately, but we're definitely going to reach out and say,, "You have a problem, let's get ahead of this and let's prevent that from becoming a bigger problem." And that's what we're delivering. When we say always on assurance, we're talking about self-healing, we're talking about remote monitoring, we're talking about being proactive with our customers, not waiting for the phone call or the support desk ticket saying, "Oh we think something's not working." Or worse, the customer has an outage. >> Awesome. Thanks for sharing. Can you explain the process for implementing Platform9 within a company's existing infrastructure. >> Are we doing air gap, or on-prem or SaaS approached? SaaS approach I think is by far the easiest, right? We can build a dedicated Platform9 control plane instance in a manner of minutes, for any customer. So when we do a proof of concept or onboarding, we just literally put in an email address, put in the name you want for your fully qualified domain name, and your instance is up. From that point onwards, the user can just log in, and using our CLI, talk to any number of, say, virtual machines, or physical servers in their environment for, you know, doing this in a data center or colo, and say, "I want these to be my Kubernetes control plane nodes. Here's the five of them. Here's the VIP for the load balancing, the API server and here are all of my compute nodes." And that CLI will work with the SaaS control plane, and go and build the cluster. That's as simple as it, CentOS, Ubuntu, just plain old operating system. Our software takes care of all the prerequisites, installing all the pieces, putting down MetalLB, CoreDNS, Metrics Server, Kubernetes dashboard, etcd backups. You built some servers. That's essentially what you've done, and the rest is being handled by Platform9. It's as simple as that. >> Great, thanks for that. What are the two traditional paths for companies considering the cloud native journey? The two paths. >> The traditional paths. I think that's your engineering team running so fast that before you even realize that you've got, you know, 10 EKS clusters. Or, hey, we can do this. You know, I've got the I can build it mentality. Let's go DIY completely open source Kubernetes on our infrastructure, and we're going to piecemeal build it all up together. They're, I think the pathways that people traditionally look at this journey, as opposed to having that third alternative saying can I just consume it on my infrastructure, be it cloud or on-premise or at the edge. >> Third is the new way, you guys do that. >> That's been our focus since the company was, you know, brought together back in the open OpenStack days. >> Awesome, what's the makeup of your customer base? Is there a certain pattern to the size or environments that you guys work with? Is there a pattern or consistency to your customer base? >> It's a spread, right? We've got large enterprises like Juniper, and we go all the way down to people with 20, 30, 50 nodes in total. We've got people in banking and finance, we've got things all the way through to telecommunications and storage infrastructure. >> What's your favorite feature of Platform9? >> My favorite feature? You know, if I ask, should I say this as a pre-sales engineer, let me show you a favorite thing. My immediate response is, I should never do this. (John laughs) To me it's just being able to define my cluster and say, go. And in five minutes I have that environment, I can see everything that's running, right? It's all unified, it's one spot, right? I'm a cluster admin. I said I wanted three control plane, 25 workers. Here's the infrastructure, it creates it, and once it's built, I can see everything that's running, right? All the applications that are there. One UI, I don't have to go click around. I'm not trying to solve things or download things. It's the fact that it's unified and just delivered in one hit. >> What is the one thing that people should know about Platform9 that they might not know about it? >> I think it's that we help developers and engineers as much as we can help our operations teams. I think, for a long time we've sort of targeted that user and said, hey, we, we really help you. It's like, but why are they doing this? Why are they building any infrastructure or any cloud platform? Well, it's to run applications and services, to help their customers, but how do they get there? There's people building and writing those things, and we're helping them, right? For the last two years, we've been really focused on making it simple, and I think that's an important thing to know. >> Chris, thanks so much, appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you, John. >> Okay, that's theCUBE Q&A session here with Platform9. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (light music)

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back. David Ante with David Nicholson. This is UiPath Forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, you know, the customers here, they're automating all the time, sucking work and the cube. We're sucking all the information out of the experts and the customers. A bar Toban is here. He's the global business, Shared services, leading automation and AI at PepsiCo. And Para Colan is back is the chief, He's the chief product officer, UiPath longtime Cube alum. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Great to see us all day. So you guys keynote today, you know, excited to have PepsiCo on. I'm not sure I've ever interviewed PepsiCo in the Cube, but tell us about your role there. >>Absolutely. So I'm part of a PepsiCo global business shared services team. I lead automation and AI capabilities. GBS has, you know, we started GBS portfolio back about three and a half years ago, and we have a six hubs across PepsiCo. And as, as a part of my role, we deliver transformational capability across the PepsiCo. >>When did it all start? >>About three and a half years ago, 2019. So >>Prior to the pandemic. Yeah. You know, versus the pandemic was a catalyst for this. Yeah. But it was at the catalyst, but maybe it sped it up a bit. Yeah. >>PepsiCo journey started with, if, if you look at the PepsiCo, you know, the automation journey, it started back in 2017, but the GBS portfolio took shape back in 2019. So prior to that, you know, PepsiCo was definitely, you know, working on lot of, you know, the automation capabilities and automation product across, you know, PepsiCo. But with the introduction of PepsiCo global business shared services team, we are, you know, centralizing a lot of transformation capability, you know, across the functions that, that we support within the >>PepsiCo and, and UI path. Was going to part of that journey all along? Or was there sort of other activities beforehand or how >>No, no, absolutely. Starting from 2017, if I, you know, remembered, you know, with the vision of our, you know, some of our senior leadership team and recognizing the value of, you know, automation in the core, you know, capability as a transformation at that time, you know, we started with just like anybody else, right? We started with, you know, proof of concept, showed some, you know, early wins and the value back to the business, start setting up some, you know, business processes and capabilities, stood up the platform, build a complete, you know, ecosystem around that, you know, platform and partnership with, you know, UI bot team. And you know, from there, here we are five years. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very critical component to our digital transformation capability and, and yes, leverage across >>Let's talk platform. So you, you guys have made some announcements this week. You talk about the business automation platform. I remember our first forward was, you know, RPA tool. Okay. Yeah. And then you guys made acquisitions. I was there for that. So the process process cold and then people started to really expand it and it's really come in amazingly long way in a short time. So what did you guys announce today? What'd you talk about on stage 20, 22, 10? Tell us more about it. >>Absolutely, Dave. So you've seen the journey, you've been with us since the early days. You know, we were in 2017 and RPA tool that could automate a representative task that happened over and over again in the environment. And then three years ago you were here when we announced the automation platform, we said, it's not just about a task, it's about involving humans in bots to manage end to end processes. It's about discovering what automation opportunities exist. It's about using ai. Pepsi Co was actually the pioneer of using AI along with automation. You know, we were in stage together with them in, in 2019. And where we are now is we're essentially seeing people want to take the next step with automation. They're saying that it's no longer just an automation tool, It's the way we operate. It's the way we innovate in the organization. So they're really making sure that it becomes a part of their digital transformation journey that they're on. >>And they're saying that we can do the digital transformation by consolidating multiple DRP systems and CRM systems. And that'll take us seven years to do, or we can go with UI path and we can leverage the core that we can leverage the GL system that exists today. We can leverage inventory tracking system that exists today and start to build processes on top of that that can adapt to what customers are trying to do in this digital age. And that's where, you know, we've made announcements today is, is really pivot the platform to be a business automation platform. And there's sort of three layers, you know, unique but you know, connected layers of the platform. The first one is discover. And Discover is all about finding your processes, identifying the opportunities, making sure that you are managing the return on investment. What is the process? You know, how are you getting ROI on it? >>The second one is automated, and that is really where we're applying semantic automation to identify the digital building blocks of an enterprise, which is your data, your document, your screens and communication. Like putting all of that together and saying you can automate our processes, leveraging a lot of intelligence that exist in how business processes are done. And the last one is operate, which is if you're trying to execute a business process at scale, you're processing not just, you know, a task thousand times, but you are fulfilling millions of transactions. You're, you know, you're looking at trillions of records to identify what processes you need. A scalable enterprise platform that's able to ingest a lot of data, report on metrics, reporting efficiency. So that's what we've announced today is an automation platform that companies can use to put at the center of the digital transformation >>Journey. So I about the interesting thing about PepsiCo, you guys started in 2017. Yeah. So kind of early, early on. Yeah. Yeah. And you kind of been there with the progression platform. So my question to you is end up, it was, you know, we've seen the e from primarily on-prem, now it's cloud first. Yeah. How disruptive or non disruptive was that for you? Did you have to rip and replace? Did you have to sort of retool or migrate? What was that like? >>No, I mean, significant disruption, right? I mean, I mean, as, as we started our journey back in 2017, just like, you know, PRM mentioned, right? With simple rule based, you know, the automation from then now to our journey where our continue to, you know, infuse, you know, AI capability, document understanding, conversation ai, right? As a part of our end to end portfolio. At the same time, I think the cloud is providing a fantastic opportunity for us to continue to scale, right? You know, scale at, at a large. So that I think is a fantastic, you know, fantastic platform and fantastic, you know, the opportunity that we are looking forward >>To know. So how do you affect adoption inside of the organization? Can you talk about that? What's working? What's, >>It's always value driven as you know, right? I mean, the business business has to see the value. It it, it was, I mean, I would, you know, admit it was not as easy as before, but as the mindsets have started to shift, right? As the people have started to realize the value that, you know, the automation brings to, you know, the, I mean, you know, not just the, the value for the business, but actually transforming the entire portfolio, right? And, and people have started to see now that not every automation project is going to be transformation product, but for every transformation project you will find the automation at the heart and the core of it. So I, I, I think that's what has started to shift the mindset of, of uniforms. >>So how do you know when you have end to end? What are you wake up one day and say, Wow, we've achieved it. You know, is it pieces that come together? Yeah. What do you say? >>Yeah, You know, we wanna look at customers from, you know, from an end to end perspective. It's not just about piecemealing mealing finding a problem, solving it, really what does it deliver from, from an end to end perspective. Did you actually, you know, because a lot of times companies will say, we wanna automate X number of processes, and, and they do that and they're like, Well, we've automated a lot of processes. We're not sure what value we're getting out of it. It's the ability to measure like, what impact is this automation having on your business from an operational metric, but from a business metric as built. But then going back and saying, Well, where is the biggest pain point? Where do we have the largest value that we can give to the business back? So one of the things we actually announced today is the ability to take at an look at an idea and look at what was the estimated benefits of that idea, and then map it all the way through execution to say, what are we getting? >>We estimated we were gonna save a million dollars by doing those automation, or what have we achieved till now? Have we achieved a million dollars? Have we achieved half a million dollars by having achieved? That's true. That never happens. That, and, and, and, and it's hard to do that, like the data existed, but it's really hard for people to pull that data out. So we build out the box dashboards that give you the ROI bag, and that's why it's really important to, to make sure that, you know, you look at it not just as a technology project, but more as a investment from a business side. And so you can making a business more efficient. Yeah, >>That's, I just, I know you were jumping in, but that's super important. Cause you know, you run a lot of projects. Yeah, absolutely. And each of those projects has zone roi, then you jam it into the application portfolio. Exactly. And then everybody sort of forgets about it. You can't really track what impact it had because there's always, you know, some things that are benefit, some things are sometimes a negative. And so it's that holistic picture that you >>Trying to achieve, extremely critical point, what you hit on, right? From it's measuring the benefit and measuring the continuous benefit across, and not just from start and end, Okay, what I promised I delivered or not, but, but you have to have this continuous mindset. And so I think Yeah, definitely that that's a very, very critical to our finance team and our cfo, >>They organic mechanisms. It's constantly >>Evidence. Absolutely. Yeah. So abar, yeah. Global business shared services. Yeah. When you think of PepsiCo, yeah, of course people immediately think of Sure, Pepsi. But PepsiCo is a multi tentacled absolutely beast of a company. Absolutely. In a good way. Yeah. For organizations that are in that same category, holding companies, companies that have all sorts of different entities that are working together under one umbrella, how shareable is this idea of automation and business automation process moving forward? How, how shareable is that on the share oter? Yeah. Yeah. As far as, as far as, as far as you're concerned, are you, are you talking to some people where you're saying, Hey, I'm here, I'm here from GBS and I'm here to help, and they look at you like you're crazy because you don't understand their business? Or is this something that relatively easily applies across businesses >>That No, to your point, I mean, very valid point, right? I mean, it's, that's, that's the gbs, global business shared services mindset, right? As you move the functional areas into the Pepsi, into the Pepsi, gbs, like hr, procurement, commercial sales, supply chain, right? That's where you wanna start to find those, you know, the optimization, you know, opportunity. You wanna start to ize your processes, and that's where you will, you know, as you transition this processes within the gbs, that's what create those, you know, opportunities for you. So >>What, >>What about automation opportunities? Not in the sh I know you're in the shared arena. Yeah, yeah. But each of those business units has processes that could probably be optimized and automated. Sure. Is that something that's under your purview? We've heard, we've heard a lot about citizen developers. Yeah. I don't know if that, if that >>Applies to No, that definitely. I mean, you cannot just have focus on end to end, you know, automation. I mean, that's, that's a huge portfolio for gps at the same time supporting, you know, automation through the citizen development capability. That that's where, once again, you know, you have not provided a lot of capability and solution tools that we use, right? To continue to empower the folks who are part of our, you know, GBS team inside or outside gbs, right? It, it, it's, I think it's very, very critical. It, it, it helps people transform their career even in one ways, right? And, and, and, and you have that muscle, you have that resource, and you have the power. You definitely want to utilize that. >>So let's talk about metrics for a minute. So more data, the better. Usually I like data. Yeah. But, but if you're trying to optimize for 15 metrics, I feel like you're not gonna optimize on any, So how do you deal with that from both, as par was saying, an operational standpoint and a business standpoint? What are the things about how do you sort of get the, the teams focused on the right things? >>B business, functional leadership team drive those alignment for us as a part of a global business, shared services, we, we are hip to have connected with our business, you know, functions, right? They, they have to help us prioritize those. And to your point, I mean, yeah, you cannot attack 15 metrics at once. You have to prioritize, you have to make sure that you bring the focus to the product, you know, project, right? So, so definitely, I mean, it's, it's, it's not often 15 metrics, but top three metrics, let's, let's focus, let's zoom in and ensure we are driving it. But, >>And if you think about the system, I mean, at the end of the day, the p and l manager, he or she cares about ebit, let's say. Sure, okay. But there are so many factors, you know, in that complicated organization that are gonna affect ebitda and they're gonna be different. But somebody's gotta figure out, okay, how do they fit together in a system? And can, can UiPath help me understand that, those relationships and those dependencies? >>Absolutely. I mean, I think there's a, there's an aspect of human relationships and, and making sure that you get the right level of sponsorship from the business and, and there's a business stakeholder and, and looking at every investment and, and outcomes that you're driving based on that. But, but that is something that we, from a tools perspective, we're trying to make sure that you can measure the value throughout the entire value chain. But then getting the business sponsorship, like where we've seen automation scale is always because there's a business sponsor that's essentially saying, Here's what I'm trying to achieve and here's the, here's my goal, here's a North star and go get it and let me know how you're tracking against it. And, and our job is to make sure that we can provide the visibility, the people that are operating the, the programs to make sure they get that level of visibility. >>What's the scope of automations in your, you know, organization? Is it dozens, hundreds, >>Huge. >>That is thousands. >>We are getting there. Okay. No, definitely. I mean, we have definitely, you know, realized that it's, it's a core component to our digital transformation, right? So, so there is no, there's no stopping on it. There, there, there, there's plenty of support from top down and you know, it's a fantastic time to be at PepsiCo. Right? Especially at the PepsiCo gbs. Right, >>Right. Thanks for sharing your story. Congratulations on all the progress you guys have made. It's actually quite remarkable to see where you guys have come from. So I really appreciate it. Thank you, Dave. Thanks. Thank you Dave. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson. We are right middle of day two at forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, we're right back.

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back. David Ante with David Nicholson. This is UiPath Forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, you know, the customers here, they're automating all the time, sucking work and the cube. We're sucking all the information out of the experts and the customers. A bar Toban is here. He's the global business, Shared services, leading automation and AI at PepsiCo. And Para Colan is back is the chief. He's the Chief product officer at UiPath, longtime Cube alum. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Great to see us all day. So you guys keynote today, you know, excited to have PepsiCo on. I'm not sure I've ever interviewed PepsiCo in the Cube, but tell us about your role there. >>Absolutely. So I'm part of a PepsiCo global business shared services team. I lead automation and AI capabilities. GBS has, you know, we started GBS portfolio back about three and a half years ago, and we have a six hubs across PepsiCo. And as, as a part of my role, we deliver transformational capability across the PepsiCo. >>When did it all start? >>About three and a half years ago, 2019. So >>Prior to the pandemic. Yeah. You know, versus the pandemic was the catalyst for this. Yeah. But it was at the catalyst, but maybe it sped it up a bit. >>Yeah. PepsiCo journey started with, if, if you look at the PepsiCo, you know, the automation journey, it started back in 2017, but the GBS portfolio took shape back in 2019. So prior to that, you know, PepsiCo was definitely, you know, working a lot of, you know, the automation capabilities and automation product across, you know, PepsiCo. But with the introduction of PepsiCo global business shared services team, we are, you know, centralizing a lot of transformation capability, you know, across the functions that, that we support within the >>PepsiCo and, and UI path was kind of part of that journey all along? Or was there sort of other activities beforehand or how did that >>No, no, absolutely. Starting from 2017, if I, you know, remembered, you know, with the vision of our, you know, some of our senior leadership team and recognizing the value of, you know, automation in the core, you know, capability as a transformation at that time, you know, we started with just like anybody else, right? We started with, you know, proof of concept, showed some, you know, early wins and the value back to the business, start setting up some, you know, business processes and capabilities, stood up the platform, build a complete, you know, ecosystem around that, you know, platform partnership with, you know, UI bot team. And you know, from there, here we are five years. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very critical component to our digital transformation capability and, and yes, leverage across >>Let's talk platform probably. So you, you guys have made some announcements this week. You talk about the business automation platform. I remember our first forward was, you know, RPA tool. Okay. Yeah. And then you guys made acquisitions. I was there for that. So the process process cold and then people started to really expand it, and it's really come in amazingly long away in a short time. So what did you guys announce today? What'd you talk about on stage 2022 dot 10? Tell us more about it. >>Absolutely, Dave. So you've seen the journey, you've been with us since the early days. You know, we were in 2017 and RPA tool that could automate a representative task that happened over and over again in the environment. And then three years ago you were here when we announced the automation platform, we said, it's not just about a task, it's about involving humans in bots to manage end to end processes. It's about discovering what automation opportunities exist. It's about using ai. Pepsi Co was actually the pioneer of using AI along with automation. You know, we were in stage together with them in, in 2019. And where we are now is we're essentially seeing people want to take the next step with automation. They're saying that it's no longer just an automation tool, It's the way we operate. It's the way we innovate in the organization. So they're really making sure that it becomes a part of their digital transformation journey that they're on. >>And they're saying that we can to the digital transformation by consolidating multiple RP systems and CRM systems. And that'll take us seven years to do, or we can go with UI path and we can leverage the core that we can leverage the GL system that exists today. We can leverage the inventory tracking system that exists today and start to build processes on top of that that can adapt to what customers are trying to do in this digital age. And that's where, you know, we've made announcements today is, is really pivot the platform to be a business automation platform. And there's sort of three layers, you know, unique but you know, connected layers of the platform. The first one is discover. And Discover is all about finding your processes, identifying the opportunities, making sure that you are managing the return on investment. What is the process? >>You know, how are you getting ROI on it? The second one is automated, and that is really where we're applying semantic automation to identify the digital building blocks of an enterprise, which is your data, your document, your screens and communication. Like putting all of that together and saying you can automate in our processes, leveraging a lot of intelligence that exist in how business processes are done. And the last one is operate, which is if you're trying to execute a business process at scale, you're processing not just, you know, a task thousand times, but you are fulfilling millions of transactions. You're, you know, you're looking at trillions of records to identify what processes you need, a scalable enterprise platform that's able to ingest a lot of data report on metrics report and efficiency. So that's what we've announced today is an automation platform that companies can use to put at the center of the digital transformation journey. >>So like about the interesting thing about PepsiCo, you guys started in 2017. Yeah. So kind of early, early on. Yeah. Yeah. And you kind of been there with the progression of platform. So my question to you is, and it was, you know, Yeah, we've seen the e from primarily on-prem now it's cloud first. Yeah. How disruptive or non disruptive was that for you? Did you have to rip and replace? Did you have to sort of retool or migrate? What was that like? >>No, I mean, significant disruption, right? I mean, I mean, as, as we started our journey back in 2017, just like, you know, PRM mentioned, right? With simple rule based, you know, the automation from then now to our journey where our continue to, you know, infuse, you know, AI capability, document understanding, conversation ai, right? As a part of our end to end profile. At the same time, I think the cloud is providing a fantastic opportunity for us to continue to scale, right? You know, scale at, at large. So that I think is a fantastic op, you know, fantastic platform and fantastic, you know, the opportunity that we are looking forward >>To. So how do you affect adoption inside of the organization? Can you talk about that? What's working? What's, >>It's always value driven as you know, right? I mean, the business business has to see the value. It it, it was, I mean, I would, you know, admit it was not as easy as before, but as the mindsets have started to shift, right? As the people have started to realize the value that, you know, the automation brings to, you know, the, I mean, you know, not just the, the value for the business, but actually transforming the entire portfolio, right? And, and people have started to see now that not every automation project is going to be transformation product, but for every transformation project you will find the automation at the heart and the core of it. So I, I, I think that's what has started to shift the mindset of, of uniforms. >>So how do you know when you have end to end? What are you still wake up one day and say, Wow, we've achieved it. You know, is it pieces that come together? Yeah. What do you say? >>Yeah, You know, we wanna look at customers from, you know, from an end to end perspective. It's not just about piecemealing finding a problem, solving it, really what does it deliver from, from an end to end perspective. Did you actually, you know, because a lot of times companies will say, we wanna automate X number of processes, and, and they do that and they're like, Well, we've automated a lot of processes. We're not sure what value we're getting out of it. It's the ability to measure like, what impact is this automation having on your business from an operational metric, but from a business metric as well. But then going back and saying, Well, where is the biggest pain point? Where do we have the largest value that we can give to the business back? So one of the things we actually announced today is the ability to take at an look at an idea and look at what was the estimated benefits of an idea, and then map it all the way through execution to say, what are we getting? >>We estimated we were gonna save a million dollars by doing those automation, or what have we achieved till now? Have we achieved a million dollars? Have we achieved half a million dollars by having achieved? That's, that never happens. That, and, and, and, and it's hard to do that, like the data existed, but it's really hard for people to pull that data out. So we build out the box dashboards that give you the ROI bag. And that's why it's really important to, to make sure that, you know, you look at it not just as a technology project, but more as a investment from a business side. And so you can, making a business more efficient. You >>Know, that's, I just, I know you were jumping in, but that's super important. Cause you know, you run a lot of projects Absolutely. And each of those projects has zone roi, then you jam it into the application portfolio. Exactly. And then everybody sort of forgets about it. You can't really track what impact it had because there's always, you know, some things that are benefit, some things are sometimes a negative. And so it's that holistic picture that >>You trying >>To achieve, extremely critical point, what you hit on, right? From it's measuring the benefit and measuring the continuous benefit across, and not just from start and end, Okay, what I promised I delivered or not, but, but you have to have this continuous mindset. And, and so I think yeah, definitely that, that's a very, very critical to our finance team in our cfo, >>Organiza, they're organic mechanisms and it's constantly >>Absolutely. Yeah. So abar, yeah. Global business shared services. Yeah. When you think of PepsiCo, yeah, of course people immediately think of Sure, Pepsi. But PepsiCo is a multi tentacled absolutely beast of a company. Absolutely. In a good way. Yeah. For organizations that are in that same category, holding companies, companies that have all sorts of different entities that are working together under one umbrella, How shareable is this idea of automation and business automation process moving forward? How, how shareable is that on the share oter? Yeah. Yeah. >>As >>Far as, as far as, as far as you're concerned, are you, are you talking to some people where you're saying, Hey, I'm here, I'm here from gvs and I'm here to help, and they look at you like you're crazy because you don't understand their business? Or is this something that relatively easily applies across >>Businesses that No, to your point, I mean, very valid point, right? I mean, it's, that's, that's the gbs, global business shared services mindset, right? As you move the functional areas into the Pepsi, in, into the PepsiCo gbs like hr, procurement, commercial sales, supply chain, right? That's where you gonna start to find those, you know, the optimization, you know, opportunity. You wanna start to standardize your processes, and that's where you will, you know, as you transition this processes within the gbs, that's what create those, you know, opportunities for you. >>What, >>What, what about automation opportunities? Not in the, I know you're in the sharing arena. Yeah, yeah. But each of those business units has processes that could probably be optimized and automated. Sure. Is that something that's under your purview? We've heard, we've heard a lot about citizen developers. Yeah. I don't know if that, if that >>Applies to No, that definitely. I mean, you cannot just have focus on end to end, you know, automation. I mean, that's, that's a huge portfolio for gps at the same time supporting, you know, automation through the citizen development capability. That that's where, once again, you know, you have had, provides a lot of capability and solution tools that we use, right? To continue to empower the folks who are part of our, you know, GBS team inside or outside gbs, right? It, it's, I think it's very, very critical. It, it, it helps people transform their career even in one ways, right? And, and, and, and you have that muscle, you have that resource, and you have that power. You definitely want to utilize that. >>So let's talk about metrics for a minute. So more data the better. Usually I like data. Yeah. But, but if you're trying to optimize for 15 metrics, I feel like you're not gonna optimize on any, So how do you deal with that from both as Paramo saying an operational standpoint and a business standpoint? What are the things about how do you sort of get the, the teams focused on the right things, >>Bi business, functional leadership team drive those alignment for us as a part of a global business, shared services, we, we are hip to have connected with our business, you know, functions, right? They, they have to help us prioritize those. And to your point, I mean, yeah, you cannot attack 15 metrics at once. You have to prioritize, you have to make sure that you bring the focus to the product. You have a project, right? So, so definitely, I mean, it's, it's, it's not often 15 metrics, but top three metrics, let's, let's focus, let's zoom in and ensure we are driving it. But then >>If you think about the system, I mean, at the end of the day, the p and l manager, he or she cares about ebit, let's say. Sure, okay. But there are so many factors, you know, in that complicated organization that are gonna affect ebitda. Yeah. And they're gonna be different. Yeah. But somebody's gotta figure out, okay, how do they fit together in a system? And, and can, can UiPath help me understand that, those relationships and those dependencies? >>Absolutely. I mean, I think there's a, there's an aspect of human relationships and, and making sure that you get the right level of sponsorship from the business and, and there's a business stakeholder and, and looking at every investment and, and outcomes that you're driving based on that. But, but that is something that we, from a tools perspective, we're trying to make sure that you can measure the value throughout the entire value chain. But then getting the business sponsorship, like where we've seen automation scale is always because there's a business sponsor that's essentially saying, Here's what I'm trying to achieve and here's the, here's my goal, here's the North star and go get it and let me know how you're tracking against it. And, and our job is to make sure that we can provide the visibility, the people that are operating the, the programs to make sure they get that level of visibility. >>What's the scope of automations in your, you know, organization? Is it dozens, hundreds, huge. That is thousands. >>We are getting there. >>Okay. >>No, definitely. I mean, we have definitely, you know, realized that it's, it's a core component to our digital transformation, right? So, so there is no, there's no stopping. I mean there, there, there, there's plenty of support from top down and you know, it's a fantastic time to be at PepsiCo. Right? Especially at the PepsiCo ubs, Right. >>So, Right. Thanks for sharing your story, Pam. Congratulations on all the progress you guys have made. It's actually quite remarkable to see where you guys have come from. So I really appreciate it. Thank you Dave. Thank you Dave. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson. We are right middle of day two at forward five from Las Vegas. We're live, we're right back.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>We're back the cube's coverage of UI path forward. Five. And we're live. Dave Velante with Dave Nicholson. AJ Gupta is here. He's the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the Motor Vehicles of California dmv. Welcome Jay. Good to see you. >>Thank you. >>Good to see you. Wow, you, you have an interesting job. I would just say, you know, I've been to going to conferences for a long time. I remember early last decade, Frank Sluman put up a slide. People ho hanging out, waiting outside the California dmv. You were the butt of many jokes, but we have a happy customer here, so we're gonna get it to your taste >>Of it. Yeah, very happy >>Customer, obviously transform the organization. I think it's pretty clear from our conversations that that automation has played a role in that. But first of all, tell us about yourself, your role and what's going on at the dmv. >>Sure. Myself, a j Gupta, I am the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the dmv. Somewhat of i, one would say a made up title, but Governor's office asked me, Okay, we need help. And that's what >>Your title though? >>Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, well we are doing business and technology transformation. So that's, that's what I've been doing for the last three years at the dmv. Before that I was in private sector for 25 years, decided first time to give back cuz I was mostly doing public sector consulting. So here I am. >>Okay. So you knew the industry and that's cool that you wanted to give back because I mean obviously you just, in talking off camera, you're smart, you're very cogent and you know, a lot of times people in the private sector, they don't want to go work in the, in the public sector unless they're, unless they're power crazy, you know? Anyway, so speaking with David Nicholson, the experience has gone from really crappy to really great. I mean, take >>It from here. Yeah. Well, am I gonna be, I'm, because I'm from California, I was just, I was just, you know, we >>Got a dual case study >>Eloquently about, about the, the, the change that's happened just in, just in terms of simple things like a registration renewal. It used to be go online and pray and weed through things and now it's very simple, very, very fast. Tell us more about, about some of the things that you've done in the area of automation that have increased the percentage of things that could be done online without visiting a field office. Just as an >>Example. Yeah, what's the story? >>Yeah, so first of all, thank you for saying nice things about dmv, you as a customer. It means a lot because we have been very deliberately working towards solving all customer po pain points, whether it's in person experiences, online call centers, kiosks, so all across the channels. So we started our journey, myself and director Steve Gordon about three years ago, almost at the same time with the goal of making Department of Mo no motor vehicles in California as the best retail experience in the nation across industries. So that's our goal, right? Not there yet, but we are working towards it. So for, for our in person channels, which is what you may be familiar with, first of all, we wanna make sure brick and click and call all the customer journeys can be done across the channels. You can decide to start journey at one place, finish at another place. >>All that is very deliberate. We are also trying to make sure you don't have to come to field office at all. We would welcome you to come, we love you, but we don't want you to be there. You have better things to do for the economy. We want you to do that instead of showing up in the field office, being in the weight line. So that's number one. Creating more digital channels has been the key. We have created virtual field office. That's something that you would become familiar with if you are not as a DMV customer. During Covid, the goal was we provide almost all the services. We connect our technicians to the customer who are in need of a live conversation or a email or a text or a, or a SMS conversation or chat conversation in multiple languages or a video call, right? >>So we were able to accomplish that while Covid was going on, while the riots were going on. Those of your, you know about that, we, our offices were shut down. We created this channel, which we are continuing because it's a great disaster recovery business continuity channel, but also it can help keep people away from field office during peak hours. So that's been very deliberate. We have also added additional online services using bots. So we have created these web and process bots that actually let you do the intake, right? You, we could set up a new service in less than four weeks, a brand new service online. We have set up a brand new IVR service on call centers in less than a month for our seniors who didn't want to come to the field office and they were required certain pieces of information and we were able to provide that for our customers by creating this channel in less than less than four. >>And the pandemic was an accelerant to this was, was it the catalyst really? And then you guys compressed it? Or were, had you already started on the >>Well, we were >>Ready. I mean you, but you came on right? Just about just before the pandemic. >>Yeah. Yeah. So I came on in 2019, pandemic started in 2020 early. So we got lucky a little bit because we had a head start at, I was already working with u UI paths and we had come up with design patterns that we gonna take this journey for all DMV channels with using UiPath. So it was about timing that when it happened, it accelerated the need and it accelerated the actual work. I was thinking, I'll have a one year plan. I executed all of the one year plan items in less than two months out of necessity. So it accelerated definitely the execution of my plan. >>So when you talk about the chat channel, is that bots, is that humans or a combination? Yeah, >>It's a, it's a combination of it. I would say more AI than bots. Bots to the service fulfillment. So there is the user interaction where you have, you're saying something, the, the chat answers those questions, but then if you want something, hey, I want my, my registration renewed, right? It would take you to the right channel. And this is something we do today on our IVR channel. If you call in the DMV number in California, you'll see that your registration renewal is all automatic. You also have a AI listening to it. But also when you are saying, Yep, I wanna do it, then bot triggers certain aspects of the service fulfillment because our legacy is still sitting about 60 years old and we are able to still provide this modern facade for our customers with no gap and as quickly as possible within a month's time. How >>Many DMVs are in the state? >>Okay, so we have 230 different field locations out of which 180 are available for general public services. >>Okay. So and then you're, you're creating a digital overlay that's right >>To all of >>That, right? >>Yeah, it's digital and virtual overlay, right? Digital is fully self-service. Bots can do all your processing automation, can do all the processing. AI can do all the processing, but then you have virtual channels where you have customer interacting with the technicians or technicians virtually. But once a technician is done solving the problem, they click a button and bot does rest of the work for the technician. So that's where we are able to get some back office efficiency and transaction reduction. >>When was the last time you walked into a bank? >>Oh man. >>I mean, is that where we're going here where you just don't have to >>Go into the branch and that is the goal. In fact, we already have a starting point. I mean, just like you have ATM machines, we have kiosks already that do some of this automation work for us today. The goal is to not have to have to, unless you really want to, We actually set up these personas. One of them was high touch Henry. He likes to go to the field office and talk to people. We are there for them. But for the millennials, for the people who are like, I don't have time. I wanna like quickly finish this work off hours 24 by seven, which is where bots come in. They do not have weekends, HR complaint, they don't have overtime. They're able to solve these problems for me, 24 >>By seven. And what's the scope of your, like how many automations, how many bots? Can you give us a sense? >>Sure. So right now we are sitting at 36 different use cases. We have collected six point of eight point, well, we have saved 8.8 million just using the bots overall savings. If you were to look at virtual field office, which bots are part of, we have collected 388 million so far in that particular channel bots. I've also saved paper. I've saved a million sheets of paper through the bot, which I'm trying to remember how many trees it equates to, but it's a whole lot of trees that I've saved. And >>How many bots are we talking about? >>So it's 36 different use cases. So 36 >>Bots? >>Well, no, there's more bots I wanna say. So we are running at 85% efficiency, 50 bots. Oh wow. Yeah. >>Wow. Okay. So you, you asked the question about, you know, when was the last time someone was in a bank? The last time I was in a bank it was to deposit, you know, more than $10,000 in cash because of a cash transaction. Someone bought a car from me. It was more of a nuisance. I felt like I was being treated like a criminal. I was very clear what I was doing. I had just paid off a loan with that bank and I was giving them the cash for that transaction as opposed to the DMV transaction transferring title. That was easy. The DMV part was easier than the bank. And you're trying to make it even easier and it shouldn't, it shouldn't be that way. Yes. Right. But, but I, I have a, I have a question for you on, on that bot implementation. Can you give us, you've sort of give it us examples of how they interact. Yeah. But as your kind of prototypical California driver's license holder, how has that improved a specific transaction that I would be involved with? Can >>You, so well you as a Californian and you as a taxpayer, you as a Californian getting services and you as a taxpayer getting the most out of the money Okay. That the DMV spending on providing services, Right. Both are benefits to you. Sure. So bots have benefited in both of those areas. If you were used to the DMV three years ago, there was a whole lot of paper involved. You gotta fill this form out, you gotta fill this other form out and you gotta go to dmv. Oh by the way, your form, you didn't bring this thing with you. Your form has issues. We are calculated that about 30% of paper workloads are wasted because they just have bad data, right? There is no control. There's nobody telling you, hey, do this. Right. Even dates could be wrong, names could be wrong fields, maybe incomplete and such. >>So we were able to automate a whole lot of that by creating self-service channels, which are accelerated by bot. So we have these web acceleration platforms that collect the data, bots do the validation, they also verify the information, give you real time feedback or near real time feedback that hey, this is what you need to change. This is when you need to verify. So all the business rules are in the bot. And then once you're done, it'll commit the information to our legacy systems, which wouldn't have been possible unless a technician was punching it in manually. So there is a third cohort of Californians, which is our employees. We have 10,000 of those. They, I don't want them to get carpal tunnel. I want them to make sure they're spending more time thinking and helping our customers, looking at the customers rather than typing things. And that's what we are able to accomplish with the bots where you press that one button, which will have required maybe 50 more keystrokes and that's gone. And now you're saving time, you're also saving the effort and the attention loss of serving the best. >>Jay, what does it take to get a new process on board? So I'm thinking about real id, I just went through that in Massachusetts. I took, it was gonna be months to get to the dmv. So I ended up going through a aaa, had to get all these documents, I uploaded all the documents. Of course when I showed up, none were there. Thankfully I had backup copies. But it was really a pleasant experience. Are you, describe what you're doing with real ID and what role bots play? >>Yeah, sure. So with real id, what we are doing today and what I, what we'll be doing in the future, so I can talk about both. What we are doing today is that we are aligning most of the work to be done upfront by the customer. Because real ID is a complex transaction. You've gotta have four different pieces of documentation. You need to provide your information, it needs to match our records. And then you show up to the field office. And by the way, oh man, I did not upload this information. We are getting about 15 to 17% returns customers. And that's a whole lot of time. Every single mile our customer travels to the DMV office, which averages to about 13 miles. In my calculation for average customer, it's a dollar spent in carbon footprint in the time lost in the technician time trying to triage out some other things. So you're talking $26 per visit to the economy. >>Yeah. An amazing frustration, Yes. >>That has to come back and, and our customer satisfaction scores, which we really like to track, goes down right away. So in general, for real, id, what we have been, what we have done is created bunch of self-service channels, which are accelerated by workflow engines, by AI and by bots to collect the documentation, verify the documentation against external systems because we actually connect with Department of Homeland Security verify, you know, what's your passport about? We look at your picture and we verify that yep, it is truly a passport and yours and not your wives. Right? Or not a picture of a dog. And it's actually truly you, right? I mean, people do all kind of fun stuff by mistake or intentionally. So we wanna make sure we save time for our customer, we save time for our, for our employees, and we have zero returns required when employees, where customer shows up, which by the way is requirement right now. But the Department of Homeland Security is in a rule making process. And we are hopeful, very hopeful at this point in time that we'll be able to take the entire experience and get it done from home. And that'll give us a whole lot more efficiency, as you can imagine. And bots are at the tail end of it, committing all the data and transactions into our systems faster and with more accuracy. >>That's a great story. I mean, really congratulations and, and I guess I'll leave it. Last question is, where do you want to take this? What's the, what's your roadmap look like? What's your runway look like? Is it, is there endless opportunities to automate at the state or do you see a sort of light at the end of the tunnel? >>Sure. So there is a thing I shared in the previous session that I was in, which is be modern while we modernize. So that's been the goal with the bot. They are integral part of my transition architecture as I modernize the entire dmv, bring them from 90 60, bringing us from 1960 to 2022 or even 2025 and do it now, right? So bots are able to get me to a place where customers expectations are managed. They are getting their online, they're getting their mobile experience, they are avoiding making field off his trips and avoiding any kind of paper based processing right? For our employees and customers as well. So bots are serving that need today as part of the transition strategy going from 1960 to 2022 in the future. They're continue gonna continue to service. I think it's one thing that was talked about by the previous sessions today that we, they, they're looking at empowering the employees to do their own work back office work also in a full automation way and self-power them to automate their own processes. So that's one of the strategies we're gonna look for. But also we'll continue to have a strategy where we need to remain nimble with upcoming needs and have a faster go to market market plan using the bot. >>Outstanding. Well thanks so much for sharing your, your story and, and thanks for helping Dave. >>Real life testimony. I never, never thought I'd be coming on to praise the California dmv. Here I am and it's legit. Yeah, >>Well done. Can I, can I make an introduction to our Massachusetts colleagues? >>Good to, well actually we have, we have been working with state of New York, Massachusetts, Nevara, Arizona. So goal is to share but also learn from >>That. Help us out, help us out. >>But nice to be here, >>Great >>To have you and looking for feedback next time you was at dmv. >>All right. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Get that, fill out that NPS score. All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Valante for Dave Nicholson. Forward five UI customer conference from the Venetian in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to UI Path Forward at five. You're watching the Cubes coverage. Everybody here is automating everything. Mundane tasks, Enterprisewide Automation Platform Beats product. Dave Nicholson. Dave Ante, Garish Pie is here. He is the Global head of Intelligent Enterprise Automation at Cognizant Global. Si, good to see you. Thanks for coming to the queue. Thank you for having me. Tell us about your role. What are you focused on? So, >>So I lead the enterprise automation practice at Cognizant, and we are focused on three broad segments, right? So we help customers anchor to business outcomes in, in looking at the business outcomes, what we look to do is help them drive transformation at a process level, looking at it from a technology standpoint, and then helping them look at how they're trying to drive change across their entire enterprise and bringing that together, you know, and helping them harmonize both at a technology and at a process level in terms of, you know, the outcomes they're trying to achieve. So >>You guys are a partner, I see your booth over there, and you're also a customer, right? Yes, we are. So are you involved in the both sides? One side, what, what, what's your purpose? >>So we do, so we, we sort of work, So we have a full 360 degree relationship with the i p. So we work with them, you know, in a professional services capacity. They, they support us as a partnership in the marketplace where we go into a number of our customers jointly to drive turnkey transformational engagements from an automation standpoint and second from a, as a, as a, as a customer to UiPath, they've been supporting us, you know, drive a number of automation initiatives across our operations book over the course of the last two years. >>Okay. So tell us more about that. So you started your internal journey, we had you guys on last year. Yep. It were just getting started I think, I think I think you, your head count is what, 60,000 somewhere around? Yeah. 70,000. Yeah, $70,000 growing. I think at the time it was maybe less than 10% of the workforce was kind of automated and the goal was to automate everybody. How are you guys doing along >>The, I think it's starting to in industrialize quite significantly. So over the course of the last year since we last spoke to you, probably, you know, we've doubled the head count in terms of the number of people that are now, you know, officially what we call quote unquote citizen developers. And you know, how they are driving automation at a personal level, we've probably gone about 2.5 x in terms of the number of RS we've saved. So we've done about, I think 450,000 rs, you know, in terms of actual saves at a personal automation level. And look, it's, it's been a great, you know, last 12 months too, right? Because, you know, as we've sort of started to get the message percolated more and more, our teams have started to get energized. They are happy that they are, you know, getting a release in terms of what they're doing on a day to day basis, which is largely repetitive at times, very mundane. And now they have the ability to bring in technology to be able to embrace that and drive that, that you know, much more efficiently. >>Are you talking dozens of bots? Thousands of bots? What's the scope of? >>So I think we've, we've scaled to about 3,500 today in terms of the bots and, and it's, it's a journey that continues to evolve. For me, the number is probably something which I wouldn't anchor to because it's, look, it's end of the day what you end up releasing and what you end up freeing and what the teams are doing. And I think, you know, that's the way we are >>Leading. So you're saying like, we always talk about number of boss, but you're saying it's largely in a relevant metric? Well, and not if it's five versus a thousand. Okay. That's meaningful, right? But, but >>Yeah, I think look a number for me, I think it's not about the number, right? It's about the outcome and it's about what impact you're having in, in terms of, you know, what you're trying to get done at the end of the day, right? Because ultimately you're trying to better, you know, what you do on a day to day basis and you know, whether it's done through 10 or whether that's done through 10,000. >>Yeah. But you pay >>Form, >>Right? Exactly. So, so you better get some value out. Exactly. It's about the value. >>But is there, is there a, is there a curve in terms, you know, an s-curve in terms of scalability though? I mean we, we, we've heard organizations doing, from organizations doing an amazing amount of modernization and automation and they say they've got 15 bots running, you have 3,500. Is there a number where it becomes harder to manage or, or is there scalability involved? >>So look, for me, so let me answer it this way, right? I think, I think there are two aspects to it. I think the, the, the, the more you have, you know, the bigger the challenge in terms of how you run the controls, the governance and the residency in terms of, you know, how you manage the, you know, the, the setup of the bots itself. So I think, yeah, I mean we want to have it to a manageable number, but for us, in the way we've looked at the number of bots, one of the things that we've done is we also look at, you know, what's foundational versus what's nuanced in terms of the kind of use cases that you're trying to deliver. So, so any program of this nature, you need to have a setup, which is, you know, which allows you to sort of orchestrate it in the right manner so that as you sort of scale and you bring more people into that equation, you, it's, you're not just creating bots for the sake of it, but you're actually, you know, trying to look at what you can reuse, what you can orchestrate better. >>And then in the context of that, figuring out where you have the gaps and then hence, you know, sort of taking the delta approach of what else and what more you need to build it. >>So you guys have a big observation space. You work with a lot of customers and, and so what are you seeing as the trends when you look out there? How are you applying it to your own business and your customer's businesses? >>So look, for me, I think the last two years, if anything, the one thing I've taken away is that transformation is now extremely, extremely compressed, right? So, so it's almost, you know, what's true today is probably irrelevant tomorrow. So, which means you have to continually evolve in terms of what needs to be done, right? Second is experiences have become extremely, extremely crucial and critical and experiences of, in, in my mind, you know, two or three kinds, right? One the end customer second from an employee standpoint, and third, in terms of the partner ecosystem that you will have as an enterprise that you have to cater to, right? The other element that you know, which becomes true will always remain true is the whole outcome story in terms of, you know, how we have an anchor to why you're trying to do what you're trying to do. >>And that is, you know, core to what you need to get done. So in the way we've looked at it, as we've said, you know, as you sort of look at how transformation is now evolving and how compressed it's starting to become, the more you are able to orchestrate for what the enterprise is trying to get done in terms of modernization, in terms of digitization, in terms of end goals and end outcomes that they're trying to achieve. And the more you're able to sweat what sits within, you know, the enterprise bring that together as you think about automation is, you know, where the true value lies in terms of being able to create an agile enterprise. >>When you think about digital transformation, digital experiences, if it's, if it's a layer cake, where is automation in that, in that layer? Is it, is it sort of the bottom of the stack? Is it, is it the whole stack? >>So for me it's, I mean it's, it's evolved. If you take today's view, I think what's emerging is a very pervasive view of how you think about automation. It sits across, you know, the entire enterprise. It, it, it, it takes a people process, technology dimension, which is age old. It has to cover, you know, all forms of transformation. You know, whether you're looking at end, how do I say, impact in terms of how you're dealing with customers, whether you're looking at the infrastructure, whether you're looking at the data layer in between, it has to be embedded across the base, right? It, it, you have to take a pervasive approach. And for me, I think automation increasingly in the days ahead is gonna be an enterprise capability. You know, it has to be, you know, all pervasive in the way it needs to be set up. >>The key, the operative word there is pervasive. And that seems to be, you know, the era that we're entering, I don't know what you call it, call it the metaverse, I mean, you know, it's more than cloud and cloud is basically just the infrastructure, right? You're building on top of that, whether it's natural language processing or cryptography or virtual, I mean, there's so many different, you know, technology dimensions, right? But it, but the point about pervasive, okay, it's everywhere. It's sensing, it's anticipatory, it feels like there's this new, you know, construct, emerging of platform that is the basis for digital business, right? And I, and I feel like every 15 years our industry goes through some big transformation. How, how do you see it? You know, do you agree that you, it feels like, okay, something new is happening. It's, it's not gonna be the social media, you know, Facebook's not gonna continue to dominate the world as it does. You already seen some cracks in that armor. We saw Microsoft after the pc, and then of course it came back with cloud Amazon looks, you know, indestructible. But that, that's never the end story, right? In our, in our world, how do you see that? >>No, I think all of what you said, I, I would sort of tend to agree with, for me, look, I don't have a crystal ball to say, you know, what's gonna happen with Facebook or Amazon or >>Otherwise. Yeah. But that's what makes this fun. But >>I, Yeah, but, but I think for me, the, the core is I think you're dictated by, you know, us as end consumers, if you're a B2B or a b2b, b2c, you know, depending upon what business you're in, I think the end customer value dictates, you know, what evolves in terms of, you know, the, the manifestation of, you know, how you will two minutes sort of deliver services, the products that you'll get into. And in that context then, you know, whether you take a, a TikTok view to it or whether you take an Amazon view to it, or whether YouTube becomes relevant in the days ahead, I think it's gonna be dictated by, >>By customer, but it tends to be a technology that's the disruptor, it's the microprocessor or it's the social capability or, or maybe it's ai that, that is the catalyst for that. And then the customer adoption dictates, oh, you're right about that. But there, but the, the match is usually technology. Is that fair or not necessarily? Yeah, >>I still look, I mean you talked about metaverse earlier, right? I think we are, I think we are, it's probably hype more than it is reality right now, at least in my view. And it's, I think we are significantly out in terms of, you know, large scale adoption in terms of what needs to be done. You talk about blockchain, blockchains been around, you know, for at least a decade if not more in, in, right. The way it's being talked about, the adoption, you know, in terms of the, the, the applicability of the, you know, of what is that technology I think is understood, but the actual use cases in terms of how it can be taken into the market and how you can scale it across industries, I think is, you know, is still because >>The economics determine ultimately exactly the outcome. So, Okay, that makes sense. >>Yeah. Now you said you don't have a crystal ball. I, I have one, but when I look into it, it's sort of murky when I try to figure out the answer to the question, Is a platform necessary for this, for automation? I mean, this is really the direction, the question, the existential question in terms of the trajectory of UI path. It seems obvious that automation is critical. It's not as obvious where that automation is going to end up eventually because it's so critical. It feels like it's almost the same as, okay, there's an interface between my keystrokes and filling in a box with text. Well, of course there has to be, there has to be that interface, right? So why wouldn't everyone deliver that by default? So as you gaze into my crystal ball with me, tell me about the things that only a platform can do from your perspective. >>So, >>So, so, so think of it this way, right? I mean, any enterprise probably has hundreds of technologies that they've invested in some platform, some applications that you would've built and evolved over time, which are bespoke custom in nature. So for me, I think when you think about automation, I think it's the balance between the two. What a platform allows you to do is to be able to orchestrate, given the complexity and the, the spa that is any enterprise, you know, that's probably got the burden of, you know, what they've done over the course of the, the previous years. And then in that context then, you know, how do you sort of help get the, the best value out of that in terms of what you want to deliver as the end, end outcomes, if I can call it that, right? So for me, I don't think you can say it's, it's her platform versus the rest. >>I think it's gonna be, it's always gonna be a balance and to the question that you asked earlier. And in terms of saying where does an automation end up at? I think if it's gonna be a pervasive view, look, you know, if, if clients are trying to modernize and get onto the cloud, you can do automation at a cloud level too. Now, you know, do I say then, you know, is it, is it sort of inclusive or it's native to what the cloud providers offer? Or do I then go and say automation needs to be something which I will, you know, sort of overlay on top of what the cloud providers offer. So I think it depends upon what dimension that you come at it. So I don't think you can say it's one or the other. You have a platform, I think it helps you orchestrate quite significantly. But there are gonna be aspects within any enterprise, given the complexity that exists that you will have to balance out, you know, platform versus, you know, how you have to address it maybe in a more individual capacity. >>Garris, gotta go. Thank you so much. Appreciate your perspectives. Good conversation. All right, keep it right there. But trains will back it up. We'll be right back right after this short break. The cube live at UI path forward, five from Las Vegas.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're winding down. Day two, a forward five UI Path customer conference. This is the fourth time the Cube has been at a forward. Dave Nicholson, Dave Ante. Maureen Fleming is here. This is a program Vice President idc. She's got the data fresh survey data. We'd love to have the analyst on. And Kevin CRO is back on the cube. He's a partner for intelligent automation and digital. Upscaling is the operative word. Kevin, good to see you again, pwc. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on you guys. Yep. All right. We, we love idc. We love the data. You guys are all about it. So you've just completed a recent study. Tell us all about it. Who'd you survey? What was the objective? What'd you learn? >>Yeah, what we wanted to do was try to learn more about people who are adopting robotic process automation. So mainly large, you know, larger to midsize, enter midsize, large enterprises. And we wanted to figure out how many of them had a citizen developer program. And then we wanted to compare the difference between people who do not have that program and people who do, and what the difference is in terms of how, what kind of reach they have inside the enterprise, and also the different ways that, that they valued it. So the difference, so we asked the same questions of the, of these people without them knowing that we were actually looking for a citizen developer. And then we compared the results of that to see is it more valuable to have citizen developer and enterprise, or is it more valuable to have enterprise only? So what was the impact >>Global survey? >>It was North America. >>North America. Was it, was it we any kind of slice and dice in terms of industry or targets or you, >>We, we kept it across industry, cross industry. We're finding that RPA is adopting cross >>Industry way. Was it, was it UI path specific or more Any tech, Any automation, >>Any rpa. >>Okay. And top two or three findings. >>So one thing was, first off, the rapid growth rate in citizen, citizen developer programs grew 47% over a two year period. And so now for people who've adopted rpa, it's the majority there. They're, you know, it's a pervasive trend to >>See you're taking over, >>You know, right now the conclusion from that, and some other studies that I did that have similar conclusions is that we have to start learning to live with this idea that business users can learn how to develop. They are developing their driving value. And so now we just need to figure out how to build these sorts of programs accurately. And the other, the really key finding of it was that, that there was much more significant reach for people that were doing citizen developer plus enterprise automation, more reach, more processes touched, more employees impacted by it. And then on top of it, the, they rated the value, the people who had the combination rated the programs at a higher value across different measures. So effectively the, the combination is working out better than standalone top down automation. >>So Kevin, from what, what's your takeaway here? What does this mean to you and your customers? >>So I guess a, a couple things and just anecdotally, you know, building on what Marine found in the, in the survey, the concept of citizen development is a real concept and it's something that organizations are applying and trying to figure out how to apply at scale. The reason why they're doing it is twofold. One, early automation efforts struggled to get scale and they struggled to deliver value from a scale perspective. There were two major problems. The ability to identify the right opportunities and the ability to tackle a wide range of, from the little to the very large, often teams focus on the very large, but don't focus on the little, the little is important. The second part is thinking about how you create a better culture of innovation and actually drive identifying opportunities for the, the more, I'll call it technology professionals to focus on. And so, you know, there's been, you know, based on that big drive to say, okay, not how do we replace automation professionals with business users, you know, the random accountant, the random operations analyst. It's more around how do you actually engage them in innovation. And that in, in that engagement may involve actual hands on building of bots and technologies like UiPath or it might just involve generating ideas to get further engaged. >>So 47% growth. What's the catalyst for that kind of growth? Where's that come from? >>I scarcity? So, well there are a couple things. One is, you know, we all know about developer scarcity and it's strive to automate. You know, if you have an automation strategy in place, you wanna do this quickly and aggressively. But if you've got a shortage of, of people, you know, developers don't have enough, they're turning over. Then you go to, you go and figure out, well this is low code. And so why can't we train our business users who are the subject matter experts to do automation for themselves or their teams? So sort of think about this as the long tail, the things that that top down like enterprise, I think UiPath is calling it enterprise automation versus people automation. So, you know, so there's just different things that they work on as well. And there's also, you know, fearlessness on the part of a lot of people on the business side, they're not afraid of technology, they're not afraid of getting trained. >>And the other piece to me that made, like, I've covered this topic for a long time, and what I found originally when people started talking about citizen developers is that they, they were calling me and having inquiry about why these programs were failing. And when we would decompose the failure was because the ma their managers didn't give them any, they didn't put 'em in trading but wouldn't get, give 'em time to develop. And so they just could not, you know, they just were running into problems. And so with things that, things like PWC and what they're doing, they're sort of saying, here's the, here are the features of a program that matter, including being given time to develop and do that as part of your job. So >>Maureen, is there a minimum level size of organization that you find taking advantage of this? I mean, you know, where's the sweet spot for the value delivered from this kind of automation? >>Do you have an idea? Right. So we, we tended in some of the surveys, we tended to do like thousand employees up. So we were screening for that. But I also met with the, our, our analysts who covered smb, small midsize. She said that they've had that for a long time because they don't have these clear distinctions between IT and business. So then the question is, who are adopters of rpa, for example? And you know that that's still a little bit at, at, you know, the enterprise level, but, but citizen developer at it, it, it is SB is just a given concept. So, >>But is it, is there, is there an economy of scale that kicks in at a certain point? Have we been able to figure that out? I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of business process automation being such a competitive advantage that there becomes almost a divide because of smaller organization. Yes, they could go out and they can buy, they have access to the same software packages, but you have to build all of those processes. Yes. You have to develop those processes over time. So is there any sense for a divide possibly happening or what the, >>It's a really good question because they, you know, in a way people have to understand what a business process is, you know, and they need to understand what the technology can do. And so from that perspective, people who have thought leaders inside their organization and maybe have a chance to get out and look at broader topics might be more inclined to try this out and also identify directly as a problem. SMB also tends to try to buy package solutions. And you see larger enterprises say, well, you know, what we do is unique and so we should just sort of use horizontal technology and apply it at will where it's needed. And so for me that's kind of why we organize toward higher, you know, higher si, larger sizes. As it gets simplified, it's gonna go down into the SMB market though. >>So Kevin, when it comes to you guys, your client engagements, upscaling keeps, keep coming back to that word low code. Is it fundamental component of upscaling? Is it, is it, I don't say synonymous, but is it a prerequisite to have low code capabilities to scale? >>You know, from our perspective, I think the two biggest challenges with making this work, one is learning and development. How do you actually teach the skills in a way that allows people to apply them very quickly and give them the time to actually function right to the finding about managers not necessarily being supportive. And so you have to figure out, you know, what, you know, how do you actually create that right environment and give people the right tools? It's an area that we invested really heavily in from the PWC side with the, with the launch of our pro edge platform and really thinking about how to solve that. But then the problem that you're ultimately getting at once you solve the people equation is how do you get scale and how do you move quicker? And so the, you know, the, the, the, the biggest challenge is not should you let a, a business user build a bot. It's, you know, how do we actually build many bots, generate many ideas for the professional developers and actually create an ecosystem to move faster. Every client that we work with, it's all about, you know, how we're not moving fast enough. A COE cannot, you know, by itself automate an entire organization. And so, you know, the, you know, the, the this theme of scale really becomes, you know, the critical aspect of this >>Is the former other words, the the teaching and individual how to build a bot. Is that trivial or, or is that really not the big gate is what you're saying? It's, >>We don't think it's a big gate. I think the, you know, to the original question, I think the, the, the low code space is a ripe spot for this, you know, upskilling construct because you're not, you're not, you're, you're gauging with employees who don't have an undergraduate degree in computer science who are not IT professionals. And so giving someone, you know, a book on job and saying, go build an application's, probably not gonna be very productive. But with, with tools in the, in the low code space, be it RPA or be it other forms of lower code technology, you get people opportunity where they need to learn some technical concepts. You need to understand how the technology works and how basic programming techniques work, but you don't need to understand everything. And again, going back to the, the simple versus the complex, the goal here is not to turn people into professional developers. The goal is to get them engaged and, and create, you know, make them part of that company's digital transformation. >>But from what you just described, that's, to me it's basic logic skills. I mean you don't have to be, like I say, a assembly language programmer. Yeah. But you gotta understand and you gotta know the business process, right? I mean you have to be a domain expert. Yeah. >>But that, but that's the, that's the biggest advantage of this. You're engaging the people closest to the business process, right? You look at how most big IT projects failed was the same reason a lot of early automation efforts failed. You're creating, you know, a function that essentially lives in an ivory tower that's focused on, you know, where can I go out and find opportunities and automate. But you're not, those aren't the people that run the process day to day. Yeah, okay. You, you put it, you make those people that run the process day to day accountable, you're gonna get a different outcome >>And they'll lean in and get excited. Exactly. >>So where, where, where is that transition? I know it's easy to say, oh, you know, it's logic and people can do it, but what about having a bot whisperer in your, in your organization who's who, who literally says, you know, Maureen, I'm gonna come and sit with you on Friday and you're going to explain your frustrations to me and I'm gonna sit right next to you and I'm gonna code this bot for you and we're gonna test it and you're gonna tell me if it does what you want it to do. And Maureen doesn't need to understand how to move the widgets around and do anything. >>It's, you know, it's a great question cuz I think it's changing the nature of how you accelerate these efforts, right? I think you know, the, and if I go into early RPA days, the initial kind of thought process was let's just get a factory in here and build as many bots as possible. A lot of our client engagement today isn't always around our bot development services. It's around can you bring in coaches? Can you hold office hours? Exactly. We have an office hour construct, which I've never really had in my consulting career where we put, you know, I mean this obviously post covid when when people are in their offices, we put someone in a room and people can come by and get help. And I think having that, that coaching and mentoring construct is very helpful. What we've also seen, and I think it's a really critical success factor for clients to make this work, is thinking about how they pick a subset of their population and making them, you know, digital accelerators, digital champions, pick your word, not it professionals, peers who will actually get realtime dedicated. Right. And maybe a full time or a halftime job where that's exactly what they do. >>Maureen, we're out of time, but my last question for you is, when you do a survey like this, you know you have open ended sometimes and you analyze a survey, you take a bath in the data, write it up. There's always something that you wish you'd asked, which is great cuz then you could do it on the next one. What, was there anything in there that you wish you'd asked that you're gonna ask in the next one? Are you gonna explore in the next survey? >>Yeah. One of the things that I asked, one thing that I was glad I asked was, I, I, we, we spent time finding what were considered business side product champions or RPA champions and then we ask 'em what they did, how often they did, how much time they spent. But what I want, what I really, really wanna ask of my next survey, and I will, I've got a planned, is to find out how, how what percentage of population is involved with, with big a citizen developer and what activities are common and what are less common and you know, what their challenges are. So we'll be looking at a different kind of audience with this next >>Survey. Well, we'd love to have you back to talk about that. Just invite, Thank you very much. Come queue. Really appreciate it Kevin. Good to see you again. >>Good to see you. >>All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante. We're here wrapping up day two of UI path forward. Five live from the Venetian, all Las Vegas. Super right back.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to The Cube's, continuous coverage with day two of UI Path forward. Five. My name is Dave Ante. I'm here with my co-host Dave Nicholson. And you are watching The Cube. It's all about the robots, the automations, the transformations and beyond. Audi Gana is here. She's group executive at Vodacom and Niva is back. She's senior director of telecommunications industry for UiPath. Ladies, welcome to the Cube. >>I thank you very much. >>So Vodacom a leading telco in in Africa across the continent. Tell us more about the company. >>The company is a traditionally telecommunications company, but our vision 2025 is first to transition from being a telco to a technology company. So you'll find that a lot of the use cases that we've actually started embarking on, combined the combination of telco and FinTech. And we've got a lot of RPA bot also supporting the FinTech platform, which is quite a major step in our strategy. >>So, you know, it's interesting Mark Andreessen's famous comment, Every company's a software company. I like to think every company's a technology company, technology driven. So what does that actually mean for you? Is it like a split brain between FinTech? Cuz it's pretty clear that FinTech is always a highly, you know, technology oriented and telecom. Are they sort of together driving a, a technology business? How does that >>Work? It's, it's a, it's a converge use of the technology to add value to the customer. So what we wanna do is to get to the point where we have converged services where the Telecommunicate, cuz at the end of the day in the African market, you'll find that there's a lot of markets that are unbanked. So you find that a cell phone is a means of communication and a a mobile platform for the users. So it's a natural progression for our company to actually play in both spaces. And I think one of the things I find quite interesting is the levels of trust that a lot of citizens have in our financial platform. In that even some of the governments are paying social grants using the platform. And so it almost becomes, without the phones a lot of people cannot function type of scenario. >>Nevas is your role a global role? >>Yes, it is a global role. >>Okay. So it's interesting cause you're I think based down under, right? I am. Is that true? Okay. Obviously spent some time in, in, in the African continent. How are you, what are you seeing in terms of the, the trends in, in telecommunications that, and are you noticing there's gotta be differences across different regions? You know, a lot of times you hear, oh no, there's really kind of a global world out and I know it is, but telco seems to be one of the industries that has some uniqueness within the different breaches. What are you seeing? >>Look, we are privileged to work with more than 200 telecoms around the world. But clearly from a technology perspective, there are some regions that have embraced technology sooner than the others, particularly when it comes to automation. Now we do have use cases with all of them that we are, you know, the 200 we are working with. But the extent to which they become strategic partners, Varie is, you know, what I find is in, in the US we are doing a lot in the customer experience space with the telecoms in aj it's more back of house. And with telecoms like Vodacom, it's really strategic. You know, automation is being applied practically in every facet of work. And you know, sometimes that could be because the demand is just so great for connectivity, you know, at times there's a skills gap, but it does vary. But what's reassuring is that there is a journey and you know, at this event what I have seen is telecoms wanting to learn from other telecoms. And I must say Artie has been in huge demand. We did about 22 meetings yesterday with others wanting to know, which again is that strategic trend. >>Artie, my understanding is you've been at this for a while, this automation journey for quite some time and p i pass. Interesting. I mean it's a company that's founded in 2005 and kind of did sort of its own thing for a long time and then realized it had lightning in a bottle Yeah. For a mid last decade. But my understanding is you've seen it all. You've seen the, the legacy platforms. And so tell me about your personal journey with automation and then the companies. >>Okay, so there's the automation pre rpa, which was strangely enough, I come from banking, got a finance degree, did automated ations in one of the bigger banks. And somehow I transitioned. And I mean from a history perspective, the one of the previous platforms, which was the biggest one at the time, that's where I got to learn about rpa. And then there's another vendor that we then use in another company. So this is almost my third vendor that I'm experiencing in the RPA space. Having joined RPA space in 2015, apparently I'm kind of a veteran, >>So, So what are you seeing is what's the difference between, I mean let's call UI path, that was sort of a modern focus on simple to deploy. That's really how they get started when I first found them. How do you compare what UiPath has? And there are others, there are other modern platforms to sort of the legacy platforms. What's the >>Difference? I think it's the diversity and the applicability of the technology across multiple industries is something that still amazes me up until today. Because the kind of customers I've been meeting today, I, I would not, I met a guy who owns an ice cream company and I'm like, where would automation come in here? But he's actually quite a big customer of, of UiPath, you know. So I think that's one thing I appreciate. I think the ease of use, it has actually allowed for a lot of people to be part of the digital transformation. I think in the his, in the past technology has been seen as something that was a bit elite and that you needed to have X amount of skills and level of education. Whereas the RPA industry has almost bridged that gap in actually bringing along as many people in the journey in terms of digital transformation. And the fourth industrial revolution is now starting to become more inclusive >>Horizontal across industries. >>Yeah. >>So Vodacom headquartered in South Africa. Okay. But presence throughout the continent. Yes. I imagine that various geographies have various twists and quirks to them and different needs. But as a general premise, the African continent has led the rest of the world in terms of embracing these little mobile devices for the most mission. Critical from a personal perspective things, right? Yeah. So if you, if you're already trusting all of your finances and even interaction with your government from a financial perspective. Yeah. When you say technology platform technology is moving forward, what's more critical from that? Or how do you, how do you, how do you branch off from that? What are some of the other things that you can share with us that you're looking towards in the future that may, that that may trickle over here eventually? >>So I think what one of the things we started playing around with quite well is actually the convergence of machine learning, AI and rpa. You would find that a lot of research will tell you that this is the future of the automation and for us, we are actually living the future in that we have civil use cases that are actually extracting a lot of business value. Where we've realized that RPA in of itself, and this is obviously oversimplifying the technology is almost the unlimited hands on keyboards that you could ever have, right? And then machine learning and AI almost the becomes the unlimited brains. So when you then combine the tool, you almost have this strong technology that can revolutionize how we operate and service our customers. >>Well how do, how does that translate? Can you translate that into a user experience at this point? So I mean, we're talking about people who they, they have a motor license, they don't have a desktop computer at home. Yeah. This is their portal into the world. >>So you find that if you're speaking pure telco, and I'm obviously over simplifying there some nowhere an engineer, right? But I think at, at a very simplified level, there's a lot of legacy technology that is used in the telco space and you'll find that because of that, there's a lot of lack of integration. And you'll find that the reasons why a lot of customers call corners is because there's poor integration in a lot of instances. And it's, it's, it's, it's ad hoc. So it's not as if the system is failed completely. So what we've now done is to try and see how do we use machine learning to pick up on those anomalies on the network, right? And because each time something breaks, right, it's almost a fixed way to fix it and therefore the machine learning picking up there normally almost the hands over to the RPA bot to fix the problem within the network element. But that means is that from a customer experience perspective, instead of you actually realizing there's a problem, we've fixed it before you even know that there's a problem. And therefore, and as you can imagine, it means that you then call the course into less because now you don't have the reason to complain because we've proactively identified the problem and we proactively use RPA then to fix it. So we almost have the almost like a self-healing element in within the, the, the RPA AI space. >>You know, I think of, we don't talk about the data, we haven't talked about the data much this week. I think in many respects this industry is, is data industry. Our automation is all about what you can do with the data. You said unlimited hands, unlimited brains. Cuz to me you have unlimited data and a lot of times you just can't handle it. Yeah. So what's the data angle on all this? >>So firstly, I know a lot of people will say data is the new oil. No, >>Right? So I would never >>Say that. I always though, I think I always ask people if I give you a bucket of brain crude oil, right? What are you gonna do with it? Right? Right. And similar to data, right? So I want to almost equate data to that crude oil element, but if you don't know how to refine it, process it, get it to be reliable, it's very useless in of its natural sense. So I think one of the things we've realized is that leveraging of the analogy of the, the machine learning in the brain, if you are in the sales space, you forever trying to push new sales, right? And then chances are when a customer leaves you, you are almost in a reactor state. So, and I imagine a world where you could proactively identify a customer with the propensity to leave your company because a lot of customers don't just, they are situations where they'll be walking down the street competitor calls them, they leave, not because they were unhappy, but a lot of customers actually had several engagements with us that were not pleasant, whatever the definition is. >>So we then saw there was almost five types of attributes that resulted in customers leaving us. So what then that said was imagine if you are an account manager, right? And you got told UiPath P two I limited has experienced 1, 2, 3, 4. Right? Actually, please go engage with them because something is happening. It means that as an account manager, you are then equipped to have a meaningful engagement with the customer because you're saying, hi UiPath, I see you've had X amount of job calls and you've had x amount of complaints in our call center. What is happening is it could be, could be your network, maybe the tower where you are, do you, And then the conversation becomes so meaningful. And I think even during covid what we found is lot of customers started using less of our data, not because they were unhappy, but it became an affordability thing, right? >>Because this is a thousands and thousands of, of data elements and pieces around Yeah. About customer transactions. There's no way one human would be able to go through all of the data and make me meaningful decisions out of it. So we then found that some customers were complaining about affordability. So we then built another model that says if an account manager is talking to a customer and they're struggling from an affordability perspective, what's the next best offer you can make to your customer while you're engaging? And then if in, if, if now your UiPath takes up that offer, then you'd find that the bot does the post engagement provisioning on the system. Because now if you then said, I've only, I can only afford 10 lines, but only pay 10 gigs, but not 10 lines and 20 gigs, that is at least better than us losing the customer. >>Yeah. Right? And we offering them almost a downward migration type of situation. Then the bot does that on the system. So you would find that we almost playing in the space of a human, human centered, intelligent automation where machine learning becomes the brain, the person is amplified in how they operate at the customer. And then the RPA bot becomes the hands that executes on that. And as the account manager you focusing on engagement and convincing, which is really what people are great and selling as opposed to going through all of the pro cause VOCA is a lot of products. So as opposed to having a person going through the products and trying to find the best product for you, you know, so we, we are using machine learning to assist the >>Humans. I I mean in every, every interaction is consistent in that case. I know I sometimes have to call three or four times to find a professional that knows enough that can help me. Yes. Such a frustrating thing as a consumer. So you are, are you, you're attacking churn with automation. So we haven't even talked about how you guys are working together, your journey and all that stuff, but, but how are you guys working here? What are you, what are you doing? You know, in addition to what you just described with with ui. iPad? >>So I think my portfolio's quite wide. So I am, my team is in every single vertical in the organization from customer care to the consumer enterprise business units to finance technology, network compliance. And we do all of this in about six countries, right? So one of the things we've actually realized is that if we are looking at customer service, we wanted to understand why do customers call us? And I think I came from a point of ignorance because I'm not from telco, so I actually realized that if we're talking billing and finance revenue assurance, customers call us because we build them arly. But technically speaking it's our systems that there's something that resulted in the customer calling us. So why do we not know about our own systems? Why are we waiting for the customers to call us? And literally those are the questions I was asking cuz I felt like why are we, why are we waiting for the customers to call us? >>So we then then found a way to try and see within the billing systems where do the breakages happen, right? So that we fix them before the customer has to call us again. So then again from a billing perspective, it means that cuz it the billing element can come in two ways where we are giving you a service and not charging you for it. We then have revenue leakage or we, you are consuming something and we are overcharging you. Then you call us and say, Whatcom is stealing my data. Yeah, you're right out there. I promise you nobody wakes up in the morning and wants to take one gig of your data. So it almost becomes a day integrity initiative that results in good customer service but then result in eradication of course. As opposed to us waiting for customers to tell us what the problem is and trying to help them fast. Cuz that's generally always been what I've picked up the energy around customer service. How do we help you fast? I'm saying why must you call us when our systems had fail that? So we almost trying to see how do we use the technology internally to give customers a better experience and then also have the financial benefits that we are now starting to see happening in the, >>What's the scope of, of your like how many automations, how many bots? Can you give us a sense >>Of this? So right now I think we over on with all of the four, five countries that we are in, we over 400 bots. Wow. Okay. So we started in 2004 years ago, this is my fourth year in Voca. We, and we are not using just one product with UiPath. It became a platform because as we became across more kinds of problems, I think what I've appreciated about part is how we've actually created a partnership. Instead of them trying to sell me products for the sake of consuming products, it became a, this is my problem, right? And then somehow they would whip out the product that solves my problem type of thing. So it became a ecosystem of solutions that >>You must love hanging out with Artie. >>I absolutely do and love, you know, I've spent a career in telecommunications myself and you know, the best days were when you could deliver an outstanding customer experience. And as you can see from what Artie has achieved when you were more proactive and predictive, you can serve your customers so much more effectively and that just lift the morale of the team because we all, you know, have this purpose in doing our jobs. But this is automation and AI built into every part of that customer journey. So end to end, you know, the customer's much happier. You know there's a problem before the customer knows you can solve the problem in most cases before they even know. And that's just what we are all in business to do to make things better. >>Great story. Thank you so much for sharing. Appreciate coming back >>In the queue. Thank you very much. Thank >>You. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Don't forget, go to silicon angle.com, all the news, go to the cube.net. You'll see me all these videos are available on demand as well as the other events that we do. Dave VTE for Dave Nicholson. Keep it right there. Right back at forward five UI.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to Las Vegas. You're watching the Cube's coverage of UI Path Forward. Five. We reach cruising altitude on day two. Christina Seacrest is here. She's the process Artificial intelligence and automation GPS automation leader at ey. And Bob PCIs, executive director for Intelligent Automation for the state of Tennessee. Folks, welcome to the cube. Thank you for Adam. >>Good >>To have you. Okay, I don't know if I messed up that title, Christina, but it's kind of interesting. You got process, you got ai, you got automation, you got gps. What's your role? >>I have a lot of rules, so thank you for that. Yeah, so my focus is first and foremost automation. So how do you get things like UI path into our clients, but also I focus specifically in our government and public sector clients. So sled specifically. So state local education. So that's why I'm here with the state of Tennessee. And then we also like to take it beyond automation. So how do you bring an artificial intelligence and all the technologies that come with that. So really full end to end spectrum of >>Automation. So Bob, when you think about the sort of the, the factors that are driving your organization of, how did you describe that, Those sort of external factors that inform your strategy. What, what's, what are the catalysts for how you determine to deploy technology? >>Well, it was primarily that we know tendency has a tendency to provide good customer service, but we want to get to a great status best in class, if you will. And we had an external advisory review where it said, Hey, you know, we could make automation to improve our customer experience. And so that was like a directive of the, the state leaders to go across the board and automate all processes statewide, starting with the 23 executive agencies. >>So where's the focus from that standpoint? Is it on just providing better interfaces to your constituents, your customers? Is it cutting costs or you actually have more budget to invest? Kind of a combination of >>Those? Yeah, so it's, it's really both qualitative and quantitative, right? So quantitative is where we're able to reduce hours and therefore we can redirect people to more less mundane work, if you will. And then qualitative is where we're able to reduce the errors, improve data quality, reduce cycle time for our citizens, you know, when they're making requests, et cetera. So it's, I think it's a combination of both of those quantitative and qualitative metrics that we are mandated in, in micromanaged, quite frankly to, to bring, make those >>Numbers. So I'm from Massachusetts, when I go to a a mass.gov website, I say, all this was done in the 1990s and you could just see where the different stovepipes were, were. But then every now and then you'll hit one and you'll say, Wow, okay, this is up to, it's such a great experience. And then the flip side of that is you want your employees to be happy and not have to do all this mundane work so you can retain the best people. You don't have to. So you're living that in, in state and, and local. So where did you start your automation journey? What role did EY play? Let's go. Yeah, >>Sure. So I, I, I think the thought for process automation was probably three or four years ago, but then we started the program about 18 months ago and there was a lot of, let's say behind the scenes work before we could bring EY in, you know, like what resources was I gonna have in, in the state that were gonna help me address all of the agency simultaneously, right? Cuz normally you'll see a project that'll do be more siloed across the state and say, we're gonna do this agency, we're gonna do this division. Well, you have 40 other agencies that are, you know, the momentum is it's just gonna fall, it wayside. So how we looked at it was let's blanket it and go across all 23 agencies at the same time, you know, identify common processes that are used across 40 divisions, for example, right? >>So, so what we basically did is we procured the software, you know, did the contracts, and then it was really about, I designed, I'm gonna say a multistream approach where they were, we could run multiple work streams, independent define all the architectures, required dev tests, production, the disaster recovery at the same time in parallel developed the center of excellence, the operation model, the processes, methodologies. And the third one was, let's go out to a few divisions, business administration, health, you know, health, human resources, and be able to do a process inventory to see what was there. And then based on that, there's all this theory of well let's do a proof of concept. Let's do a proof of technology, let's do apply. Well, the bottom line is rpa technology's been around for a long time. It's proven there's nothing to prove. But really what was important to prove before we decided to go, you know, full tilt was, you know, develop a proof of perceived business value. >>Are we gonna bring in the, the business value, the hours and the qu qualitative metrics that is expected by our ex executive team, The leadership, we were able to do that, you know, with the help of help of ey, we built out the prototypes and we got the green light to go forward, got ey to start, and then we just basically went pedal to the metal. We had our foundation already defined. We built up the architecture in less than one to two months. Now, in, in a public sector or private sector, it's just not heard of, right? But we have a tendency with EYs technical team, myself, we look around the, the road around the rock instead, the rock in the road, right? So we ended up coming up with a very unique, very easy to easy to handle architecture that was very scalable. And then were able to hit the ground running and deploy in production by December where head of >>Was EY involved in the whole, you know, dev test production, dr. Center of excellence, the, the process inventory or did you bring them in? Did you kind of do that internally then bring EY in for the proof of >>Value? EY was actually awarded the contract for soup to nuts, basically the first phase, which was those four work streams I told you about. And they worked with myself and the state of Tennessee infrastructure architecture teams. We needed to get these things defined and signed off the architecture so we could expedite getting them built out. And then they, and they basically ran all four work streams, you know, the process, inventory, the prototype, the, the proof of perceived business value, the building out the center of excellence, working with myself. And, and this wasn't just us in a, a vacuum, we ended up having to, I mean, I could do the strategy, I could do the technology and I could said the roadmap and all the good stuff, but we had to actually meet with a lot of the state or tendency organizations on change management. How do we end up putting this process or an automation in the middle of the, the normal traditional process, right? So there was a lot of interaction there and getting their feedback and then tweaking our operational model based on feedback from the state of Tennessee. So it was all very collective collaborative. I think that would be the keyword is collaborative and then building out everything. So then, and then we ended up going to the next way where they knew so much and we were, we had such a tight timeframe that we continued with ey. >>So Christina, Bob mentioned center of excellence a couple of times in the state of Tennessee, but then beyond state of Tennessee, other organizations you've worked with in this space, what's the relationship between center of excellence and this thing we've been hearing about over the last couple of days, the citizen developer has that been, has, has, has that been leveraged in the state of Tennessee? Bob, have you seen that leveraged in other places? Christina? What's that relationship look like? >>Yeah, so we don't leverage that, that model yet we have centralized model and there's reasons for that. So we don't end up having maverick's, runoff runoffs have one off, have, you know, have a a UI path version or down this division or have another RPA tool in another division, right? So then all of a sudden we're, we have a maintenance nightmare. Manageability nightmare. So we basically, you know, I I I negotiate an ELA with UI path, so therefore if anyone wants to go do another automation on another division, or they would basically follow our model, our design, our coe, our quality gates. We we're the gatekeepers to bring into production. >>Got it. Now, yeah. Now Christina, what's your perspective? Because I can imagine Nashville and Memphis might have very different ideas about a lot of things. Yeah. Little Tennessee reference there, but what, what, what about what, what about other places are you, are you seeing the citizen developer leveraged in, in some kinds of places more than others or >>What? Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of, because of the foundation we're building. Yeah. So we laid, you know, when, when Bob talks about the first phase of eight weeks, that was amazingly fast, even in that's ridiculous. Spoke about it to say you're gonna lay these four foundations. I was excited, like, I was like, wow, this, this is a very serious client. They wanna go fast and they wanna get that momentum, but the AUM was laid out so we could propel ourselves. So we are at 40 automations right now. We're in the works of creating 80 more automations in this next year. We'll be at 120 really quickly. The AUM is critical. And I will say at a client, I've, I've worked with over 50 clients on automation programs. The way state of Tennessee treats the aom and they abide by it, it is the living document of how you go and go fast. Got it. And the one thing I would say is it's also allowed us to have such immense quality. So I always talk about you put in forward, you put in another 80, we're at 98% uptime on all our automations, meaning they don't go down. And that's because of the AOM we set up. And the natural progression is going to be how do you take it to citizen developer? How do you take it to, we call, you know, process automation plus, >>But methodically, methodically, not just throwing it out at the beginning and, and hoping the chaos >>Works. Exactly. Exactly. And >>The ratio of of bots to automations, is that one to one or you have automation? Oh no, the single bot is doing multiple. So how many bots are you talking about? >>We're doing, Bob, you're gonna answer this better than I will, but the efficiency is amazing. We've been pushing that. >>So our ratio now, cause we have a high density architecture we put in is four bots, excuse me, four processes. The one bot and four bots, The one virtual machine EC two server. Right? So it's four to one, four to one. Now what we're going to get by next summer, we'll do more analysis. We'll probably get the six to one, six to one that's made serious shrinkage of our footprint from a machine, you know, management perspective from 60 down to seven right now we're gonna add the next chunk. We add another 80 automations in FIS gear 24. We're only gonna add two more bot, two more servers. Right? So that's only 10 running like close to 200 bucks. >>And, and is doing this on prem in the cloud? >>No, our, the architecture's fully >>Oh, cloud based >>Ct. Yeah. So we use UiPath SAS model. Yeah. Right. So that handles the orchestrator, the attended bots, all the other tooling you need automation hub, process minor et etc. Etc. Cetera. And then on the state side in aws we have, we use unattended bots, cert bots that have to go down into the legacy systems, et cetera. And they're sitting on EC two instances. >>Was there, was there a security not hole that you had to get through internally? What was that like? >>No, actually we, we, we were lock and step with the security team on this. I mean, there are some standards and templates and you know, what we had to follow, you know, but they're doing an assessment every single release, they do assessments on little bots, what systems it's activating or are accessing, et cetera. The data, because you have fedra data of FTI data, you know, in the public sector to make sure we're not touching it. >>Do you guys golf? >>I do, yeah. Not Well, yes, >>If you mean I I like golf but not don't golf well, but so you know what, what a mulligan is. If you had a Mulligan right, for the state of Tennessee, what'd you learn? What would you do differently? You know, what are some of the gotchas you see maybe Christina in, in other customers and then maybe specifically state of Tennessee, >>Right? I would say, you know, it is the intangibles. So when we talk about our clients that go fast and go big, like state of Tennessee, it's because that, that we call it phase zero that gets done that Bob did. It's about making sure you've got the sponsorship. So we've got executive sponsorship all the way up. You've got amazing stakeholder engagement. So you're communicating the value of what we're trying to do. And you're, you're showing them the value. We have been really focused on the return on investment and we'll talk a little bit about that, but it's how do you make sure that when you do, you know, states are different with those agencies, you have such an opportunity to maximize return on investment if you do it right, because you're not talking about automation in one agency, you're talking it across multiple agencies. We call that the multiplier effect. And that's huge. And if you understand that and how to actually apply that, the value you get is amazing. So I, I don't, I can't say there's a mulligan here, Bob, you may think of some, I know on other clients, if you don't line up your stakeholders and you don't set the expectations early on, you meander and you may get five, six automations in over the year. You know, when I go to clients and say, we're doing 40, we're doing 80, they're like, >>Wow, that's the, but that's the bottom line. Gotcha. Is if you, if you want to have an operational impact and have multiple zeros, you gotta go through that process that you said up front. >>Exactly. A >>Anything you do differently, Bob? >>Well, I I what I do differently, I mean, I think, I mean we, we did get executive sponsorship, you know, and in one area, but we still have to go out to all the 23 agencies and get, and bring awareness and kind of like set the hook to bring 'em in, right? Bring 'em to the, to the, to the lake. Right. And, and I think if, if it was more of a blanket top down, getting every agency to agree to, you know, in investigate automation, it would've been a lot easier. So we're, we're, we're getting it done. We've gone through 13 agencies already and less than a year, all of our releases are sprinkling across multiple agencies. So it's not like a silo. I'll look at that. Everyone at every agency is being impacted. So I think that's great. But I, I think our, our Mueller now is just trying to make sure we have enough backlog to do the next sprints. >>Is it, you know, the ROI on these initiatives is, is, is so clear and so fast. Is it self-funding? Is there gain sharing or do you just give business, give money back to the state and have to scramble for more? Do you get to, you know, get a lick off that cone? >>Unfortunately we don't, but I, I, I try to see if we could get some property like, nah, we don't do that. It's all cost, cost based. But, but our ROI is very attractive, I think for, for doing a whole state, you know, transformation. I think our ROI is three and a half to four years. Right. And that's pretty mind blowing. Even if you look at private sector or, I, I think some of the, the key things which people are noticing, even though we're in public sector, we're we are very nimble. This project is extremely nimble. We've had people come in, exactly, we need this, so we're gonna get penalized. Okay, knock it out in four hours, four days. Right? So it's that nimbleness that you just don't hear of even in private sector or public sector. And we're just able to do that for all the collaboration we do across ey, across myself and across all the other organizations that I, that I kind of drag along or what have, >>What do you, what do you, do you see any limits to the opportunities here? I mean, is this a decade long opportunity? Is you have that much runway >>Or that's just not my dna, so we're gonna, we're gonna probably do it like in four years, but Well, when >>You say do it, I mean, will you be done at that point? Or do you see the weight, >>Look at, you know, we could boil the ocean and I think this is one of the reasons why we're successful is we could boil the ocean and and be, it will be 10 attended 20 year program. Yeah. Okay. Or we looked at it, we had some of EY guys look at it and say, I said, what's the 25 80 rule? Meaning, you know, give me, So if we had 500 processes, tell me how many processes will gimme 80% of the hours. And it was 125, it was a 25 80 rule. I said, that's what we're doing it, we're doing, we're gonna do the 80% of the hours quantifiably. Now when we're done with that pass, then we'll have those other ones that are bringing 20% of the hours, that's when we might be bringing citizens in. That's what we're bringing state workers in. But at that same time, we will be going back in the wave and doing advanced ai. Right. Or advance ia, in other words. So right now we do rpa, ocr, icr, but you know, there's NL ml nps, there's virtual agents and stuff. So that's like the wave we're gonna do through the ones we've already gone through. Got it. Right. So it'll probably be a two or three wave or iterations. >>Cool. Guys, thanks so much for coming into the cube. Great story. Really appreciate you taking us through it. Thank you so much for having us. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson. The Dave ante. We back at UI path forward five from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Keep it right there.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five, brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome to Las Vegas. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sans Convention Center covering UI Path Forward five. This is the fourth time the Cube has covered forward, not counting the years during Covid, but UiPath was one of the first companies last year to bring back physical events. We did it at the Bellagio last year, Lisa Martin and myself. Today, my co-host is David Nicholson, coming off of last week's awesome CrowdStrike show back here in Vegas. David talking about UI path. UI path is a company that had a very strange path, as I wrote one time to IPO this company that was founded in 2005 and was basically a development shop. And then they realized they got lightning in a bottle with this RPA thing. Yeah. And Daniel Deez, the founder of the company, just really drove it hard and they really didn't do any big kind of VC raise for several years. >>And then all of a sudden, boom, the rocket ship took off, kind of really got out over their skis a little bit, but then got to IPO and, and has had a very successful sort of penetration into the market. The IPO obviously has not gone as well. We can talk about that, but, but they've hit a billion dollars in arr. There aren't a lot of companies that, you know, have hit a billion dollars in ARR that quickly. These guys had massive valuations that were cut back, obviously with the, with the downturn, but also some execution misuses. But the one thing about UiPath, Dave, is they've been very successful at penetrating customers. And that's the thing you always get at forward customer stories. And the other thing I'll, I'll, I'll add is that it started out with the narrative was, oh, automation software, robots, they're gonna take away jobs. The opposite has happened, the zero unemployment. Now basically we're heading into a recession, we're actually probably in a recession. And so how do you combat a recession? You put automation to work and gain if, if, if, if inflation is five to 7% and you can get 20% from automation. Well, it's a good roi. But you sat in the keynotes, it was really your first exposure to the company. What were your thoughts? >>Yeah, I think the whole subject is interesting. I think if you've been involved in tech for a while, the first thing you think of is, well, hold on a second. Isn't this just high tech scripting? Aren't you essentially just automating stuff? How, how cool can that possibly be? >>Well, it kinda was in the >>Beginning. Yeah, yeah. But, but, but when you dig into it, to your, to your point about the concern about displacing human beings, the first things that can automate it are the mundane and the repetitive tasks, which then frees individuals up frontline individuals who are doing those tasks to do more strategic things for the business. So when you, when we, you know, one of the things that was talked about in the keynote was this idea of an army of citizen developers within an organization. Not, you know, not just folks who are innovating and automating at the core of enterprise applications, but also folks out on the front line automating the tasks that are interfering with their productivity. So it seems like it's a win-win for, for everybody throughout the enterprise. >>Yeah. So let's take a, let's take folks through the, the keynote to, basically we learned there are 3,500 people here, roughly, you know, we're in the Venetian and we do a lot of shows at, at the Venetian, formerly the San Convention Center. The one thing about UiPath, they, they are a cool company. Yeah, they are orange colors, kinda like pure storage, but they got the robots moving around. The setup is very nice, it's very welcoming and very cool, but 300 3500 attendees, including partners and UiPath employees, 250 sessions. They've got a CIO, automation council and a pickleball court inside this hall, which pickleball is, you know, all the rage. So Bobby, Patrick and Mary Telo kicked it off. Bobby's the cmo, Mary's the head of branding, and Bobby raised four themes. It it, this is a tool that it's, this is RPA is going from a tool to a way of operating and innovating. >>The second thing is, the big news here is the UI path business platform, something like that. They're calling, but they're talking about about platform and they're really super gluing that to digital transformation. The third is really outcomes shifting from tactical. I have a robot, a software robot on my desk doing, you know, mimicking what I do with the script to something that's transformative. We're seeing this operationalized very deeply. We'll go into some examples. And then the fourth theme is automation is being featured as a strategic line item in annual reports. Bobby Patrick, as he left the stage, I think he was commenting on my piece where I said that RPA automation is more discretionary than some other things. He said, this is not discretionary, it's strategic. You know, unfortunately when you're heading into a recession, you can, you can put off some of the more strategic items. However, the flip side of that, Dave, is as they were saying before, if you're gonna, if if you're, if you're looking at five to 7% inflation may be a way to attack that is with automation. Yeah. >>There's no question, there's no question that automation is a way to attack that. There's no question that automation is critical moving forward. There's no question that we have moved. We're in the, you know, we're, we're still in the age of cloud, but automation is gonna be absolutely critical. The question is, what will UI path's role be in that market? And, and, and when you hear, when you hear UI path talk about platform versus tool sets and things like that, that's a critical differentiator because if they are just a tool, then why wouldn't someone exploit a tool that is within an application environment instead of exploiting a platform? So what I'm gonna be looking for in terms of the, the folks we talked to over the next few days is this question of, you know, make the case that this is actually a platform that extends across all kinds of application environments. If they can't seize that high ground moving forward, it's it's gonna be, it's gonna be tough for them. >>Well, they're betting the company on >>That, that's Rob Ensslin coming in. That's why he's part of the, the equation. But >>That platform play is they are betting the company. And, and the reason is, so the, the, the history here is in the early days of this sort of RPA craze, Automation Anywhere and UI path went out, they both raised a ton of money. UI Path rocketed out to the lead. They had a much e easier to install, you know, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, some of the other legacy business process folks, you know, kind of had on-prem, Big Stacks, UiPath came in a really simple self-serve platform and took off and really got a foothold in the market. And then started building or or making some of these acquisitions like Process Gold, like cloud elements, which is API automation. More recently Reiner, We, which is natural language processing. We heard them up on the stage today and they've been putting that together to do not just rpa but process mining, task mining, you know, document automation, et cetera. >>And so Rob Ins insulin was brought in from Google, formerly Google and SAP, to really provide that sort of financial and go to market expertise as well as Shim Gupta who's, who's the cfo. So they, they, and they were kinda late with that. They sort of did all this post ipo. I wish they had done it, you know, somewhat beforehand, but they're sort of bringing in that adult supervision supervision that's necessary. Rob Sland, I thought was very cogent. He was assertive on stage, he was really clear, he was energetic. He talked about the phases, e r p, Internet cloud and the now automation is a new S-curve. He quoted a Forester analyst talking about that. He also had a great quote. He said, you know, the old adage better, faster, cheaper, pick two. He said, You don't have to do that anymore with automation. He cited reports from analysts, 50% efficiency improvement, 40% productivity improvement, 40% improvement in customer satisfaction. >>And then what I always, again, love about UiPath is they're no shortage of customers. They do as good a job as anybody, and I think I would say the best of, of, of getting customers to talk about their experiences. You'll see that on the cube all this week, talked about Changi airport from Singapore. They're adding 50 able to service 50 million new customers, new travelers with no new headcount company called Vital or retail. And how you say that a hundred thousand employees having access to it. Uber, 150% ROI in one year. New York state getting 1.2 million relief checks out in two weeks and identifying potentially 12 billion in fraud. They also talk about 25% of the, of the UI path finance team is digital. And they've, they've only incremented headcount, you know, very slightly one and a half times their revenue's grown. What a 10 x? And really he talked about how to, for how to turn automation into a force multiplier for growth. And to your point, I think that's their challenge. What were your thoughts on Rob ens insulin's keynote? >>First of all, in addition to his background, Rob brings a brand with him. Rob Ensslin is a brand, and that brand is enterprise overarching platform. Someone you go to for that platform play, not for a tool set. And again, I'll, I'll say it again. It's critically important that they, that they demonstrate this to the marketplace, that they are a platform worth embracing as opposed to simply a tool set. Because the large enterprise software providers are going to provide their own tool sets within their platforms. And if you can't convince someone that it's worth doing two things instead of one thing, you're, you're, you're never gonna make it. So I've had experiences with Rob when he was at Google. He's, he's, he's the right person for the job and I, and I I I buy into his strategy and narrative about where we are and the critical nature of automation question remains, will you I path to be able to benefit from that trend. >>So a couple things on that. So your point about sap, you know, is right on EY was up on stage. They, EY is a huge SAP customer and they chose UI path to automate their SAP installation, right? And they're going all in with UI path as a partner. Of course. I I often like to say that the global system integrators, they like to eat at the trough, right? When you see GSIs like EY and others coming into the ecosystem, that means there's business being done. We saw Orange up on stage, which was really interesting. >>Javier from Spain. Yeah. Yep. >>Talking about he had this really cool dashboard and then Ted Coomer was talking about the business automation platform and all the different chapters and the evolution. They've gotta get to a platform play because the thing I failed to mention is Microsoft a couple years ago made a tuck in acquisition and got it to this market really providing individual automations and making it, you know, it's Microsoft, they're gonna make it really easy to add it really >>Cheaply. SAP would tell you that they have the same thing and, >>And then, and then just grow from that. So UiPath has to pivot to a platform play. They started this back in 2019, but as you know, it takes a long time to integrate stuff. Okay. So they're, they're, they're working through that. But this is, you know, Rob ends and put up on the, the slide go big, I, I tweeted, took a page outta Michael Dell. Go big or go home. Final thoughts before we break? >>I think go big or go home is pretty much sums it up. I mean this is, this is an existential mission that UiPath is on right now, starting to stay forward. They need to seize that high ground of platform versus tool set. Otherwise they will never get beyond where they are now. I I I, I do wanna mention too, to folks in the audience, there's a huge difference between a billion dollar valuation and a billion dollars in revenue every year. So, so, you know, these, these guys have reached a milestone, there's no question about that. But to get to that next level platform, platform, platform, and I know we'll be, we'll be probing our guests on that question over the next couple years. >>Yeah. And the key is obviously gonna be keep servicing the customers, you know, all the financial machinations and you know, they reduced yesterday their guidance from the high end being 25% ARR growth down to roughly 20% when you, when you factor out currency conversions. UiPath has a lot of business overseas. They're taking that overseas revenue and converting it back to dollars though dollars are appreciated. So they're less of them. I know this is kind of the inside baseball, but, but we're gonna get into that over the next two days. Dave Ante and Dave, you're watching the Cubes coverage of UI path forward, five from Las Vegas. We'll be right back, right after this short break.

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to the Cube's Coverage of Forward five UI Path Customer event. This is the fourth forward that we've been at. We started in Miami, had some great events. It's all about the customer stories. Dave Valante with Dave Nicholson, Flow Yees here. She's the director of engineering and development at dsu and Kate Hall is to her right. And Kate is the director of Automation Solutions at dsu. Ladies, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much. Thanks >>You to >>Be here. Tell us about dsu. You guys are huge company, but but give us the focus. >>Yeah, absolutely. Dentsu, it's one of the largest advertising networks out there. One of the largest in the world with over 66,000 employees and we're operating in a hundred plus countries. We're really proud to serve 95% of the Fortune 100 companies. Household names like Microsoft Factor and Gamble. If you seen the Super Bowls ads last year, Larry, Larry Davids ads for the crypto brand. That's a hilarious one for anyone who haven't seen it. So we're just really proud to be here and we really respect the creatives of our company. >>That was the best commercial, the Super Bowl by far. For sure. I, I said at the top of saying that Dave and I were talking UI pass, a cool company. You guys kinda look like cool people. You got cool jobs. Tell, tell us about your respective roles. What do you guys do? Yeah, >>Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I'm the director of engineering and automation, so what I really do is to implement the automation operating model and connecting developers across five continents together, making sure that we're delivering and deploying automation projects up to our best standards setting by the operating model. So it's a really, really great job. And when we get to see all these brilliant minds across the world >>And, And Kate, what's your role? Yeah, >>And the Automation Solutions vertical that I head up, the focus is really on converting business requirements into technical designs for flows, developers to deliver. So making sure that we are managing our pipeline, sourcing the right ideas, prioritizing them according to the business businesses objectives and making sure that we route them to the right place. So is it, does it need to be an automation first? Do we need to optimize the process? Does this make sense for citizen developers or do we need to bring in the professional resources on flow's >>Team? So you're bilingual, you speak, you're like the translator, you speak geek and wall, right? Is that fair? Okay. So take me back to the, let's, let's do a little mini case study here. How did you guys get started? I'm always interested, was this a top down? Is, is is top down required to be successful? Cuz it does feel like you can have bottom up bottoms up with rpa, but, but how did you guys get started? What was the journey like? >>Yeah, we started back in 2017, very traditional top down approach. So we delivered a couple POCs working directly with UiPath. You know, going back those five years, delivered those really highly scalable top down solutions that drove hundreds of thousands of hours of ROI for the business. However, as people kind of began to embrace automation and they learned that this is something that they could, that could help them, it's not something that they should be afraid of to take away their jobs. You know, DSU is a young company with a lot of young, young creatives. They wanna make their lives better. So we were absolutely inundated with all of these use cases of, hey I, I need a bot to do this. I need a bot to do that i's gonna save me, you know, 10 hours a week. It's gonna save my team a hundred hours a month, et cetera, et cetera. All of these smaller use cases that were gonna be hugely impactful for the individuals, their teams, even in entire department, but didn't have that scalable ROI for us to put professional development resources against it. So starting in 2020 we really introduced the citizen development program to put the power into those people's hands so that they could create their own solutions. And that was really just a snowball effect to tackle it from the bottom up as well as the top down. >>So a lot of young people, Dave, they not not threatened by robots that racing it. So >>They've grown up with the technology, they know that they can order an Uber from their phone, right? Why am I, you know, sitting here at MITs typing data from Excel into a program that might be older than some of our youngest employees. >>Yeah. Now, now the way you described it, correct me if I'm wrong, the way you described it, it sounds like there's sort of a gating function though. You're not just putting these tools in the hands of people sitting, especially creatives who are there to create. You're not saying, Oh you want things automated, here are the tools. Go ahead. Automated. We'll we, for those of you who want to learn how to use the tools, we'll have you automate that there. Did I hear that right? You're, you're sort of making decisions about what things will be developed even by citizen developers. >>Let me, Do you wanna talk to them about governance? Yeah, absolutely. >>Yeah, so I think we started out with assistant development program, obviously the huge success, right? Last year we're also here at the Cubes. We're very happy to be back again. But I think a lot, a lot had changed and we've grown a lot since last year. One, I have the joy being a part of this team. And then the other thing is that we really expanded and implemented an automation operating model that I mentioned briefly just earlier. So what that enabled us to do is to unite developers from five continents together organically and we're now able to tap into their talent at a global scale. So we are really using this operating model to grow our automation practice in a scalable and also controlled manner. Okay. What I mean by that is that these developer originally were sitting in 18 plus markets, right? There's not much communication collaboration between them. >>And then we went in and bridged them together. What happened is that originally they were only delivering projects and use cases within their region and sometimes these use cases could be very, very much, you know, small scale and not really maximizing their talent. What we are now able to do is tap into a global automation pipeline. So we connecting these highly skilled people to the pipeline elsewhere, the use cases elsewhere that might not be within their regions because one of our focus, a lot of change I mentioned, right? One thing that will never change with our team, it's used automation to elevate people's potential. Now it's really a win-win situation cuz we are connecting the use cases from different pipelines. So the business is happy cuz we are delivering these high scalable solutions. We also utilizing these developers and they're happy because their skills are being maximized and then at the same time growing our automation program. So then that way the citizen development program so that the lower complexities projects are being delivered at a local level and we are able to innovate at a local level. >>I, I have so many questions flow based on what you just said. It's blowing my mind >>Here. It's a whole cycle. >>So let me start with how do you, you know, one of the, one of the concerns I had initially with RPA, cuz just you're talking about some very narrow use cases and your goal is to expand that to realize the potential of each individual, right? But early days I saw a lot of what I call paving the cow path, taking a process that was not a great process and then automating it, right? And that was limiting the potential. So how do you guys prioritize which processes to focus on and maybe which processes should be rethought, >>Right? Exactly. A lot of time when we do automation, right, we talk about innovations and all that stuff, but innovation doesn't happen with the same people sitting in the same room doing the same thing. So what we are doing now, able to connect all these people, different developers from different groups, we really bring the diversity together. That's diversity D diverse diversity in the mindset, diversity in the skill. So what are we really able to do and we see how we tackle this problem is to, and that's a problem for a lot of business out there is the short-termism. So there's something, what we do is that we take two approaches. One, before we, you know, for example, when we used to receive a use case, right? Maybe it's for the China market involving a specific tool and we just go right into development and start coding and all that good stuff, which is great. >>But what we do with this automation framework, which we think it's a really great service for any company out there that want to grow and mature their automation practice, it's to take a step back, think about, okay, so the China market would be beneficial from this automation. Can we also look at the Philippine market? Can we also look at the Thailand market? Because we also know that they have similar processes and similar auto tools that they use. So we are really able to make our automation in a more meaningful way by scaling a project just beyond one market. Now it's impacting the entire region and benefiting people in the entire region. That is what we say, you know, putting automation for good and then that's what we talked about at dsu, Teaming without limits. And that's a, so >>By taking, we wanna make sure that we're really like taking a step back, connecting all of the dots, building the one thing the right way, the first time. Exactly. And what's really integral into being able to have that transparency, that visibility is that now we're all working on the same platform. So you know, Brian spoke to you last year about our migration into automation cloud, having everything that single pipeline in the cloud. Anybody at DSU can often join the automation community and get access to automation hub, see what's out there, submit their own ideas, use the launchpad to go and take training. Yeah. And get started on their own automation journey as a citizen developer and you know, see the different paths that are available to them from that one central space. >>So by taking us a breath, stepping back, pausing just a bit, the business impact at the tail end is much, much higher. Now you start in 2017 really before you UI path made it's big enterprise play, it acquired process gold, you know, cloud elements now most recently referenced some others. How much of what you guys are, are, are doing is platform versus kind of the initial sort of robot installation? Yeah, >>I mean platforms power people and that's what we're here to do as the global automation team. Whether it's powering the citizen developers, the professional developers, anybody who's interacting with our automations at dsu, we wanna make sure that we're connecting the docs for them on a platform basis so that developers can develop and they don't need to develop those simple use cases that could be done by a citizen developer. You know, they're super smart technical people, they wanna do the cool shit with the new stuff. They wanna branch into, you know, using AI center and doing document understanding. That's, you know, the nature of human curiosity. Citizen developers, they're thrilled that we're making an investment to upscale them, to give them a new capability so that they can automate their own work. And they don't, they, they're the process experts. They don't need to spend a month talking to us when they could spend that time taking the training, learning how to create something themselves. >>How, how much sort of use case runway when you guys step back and look at your business, do you see a limit to the use cases? I mean where are you, if you had on a spectrum of, you know, maturity, how much more opportunity is there for DSU to automate? >>There's so much I think the, you feel >>Like it's limitless? >>No, I absolutely feel like it's limitless because there one thing, it's, there's the use cases and I think it's all about connecting the talent and making sure that something we do really, you know, making sure that we deliver these use cases, invest the time in our people so we make sure our professional developers part of our team spending 10 to 20% of the time to do learning and development because only limitless if our people are getting the latest and the greatest technology and we want to invest the time and we see this as an investment in the people making sure that we deliver the promise of putting people first. And the second thing, it's also investment in our company's growth. And that's a long term goal. And overcoming just focusing on things our short term. So that is something we really focus to do. And not only the use cases we are doing what we are doing as an operating model for automation. That is also something that we really value because then this is a kind of a playbook and a success model for many companies out there to grow their automation practice. So that's another angle that we are also focusing >>On. Well that, that's a relief because you guys are both seem really cool and, and I'm sitting here thinking they don't realize they're working themselves out of a job once they get everything automated, what are they gonna do? Right? But, but so, so it sounds like it's a never ending process, but because you guys are, are such a large global organization, it seems like you might have a luxury of being able to benchmark automations from one region and then benchmark them against other regions that aren't using that automation to be able to see very, very quickly not only realize ROI really quickly from the region where it's been implemented, but to be able to compare it to almost a control. Is that, is that part of your process? Yeah, >>Absolutely. Because we are such a global brand and with the automation, automation operating model, what we are able to do, not only focusing on the talent and the people, but also focusing on the infrastructure. So for example, right, maybe there's a first use case developing in Argentina and they have never done these automation before. And when they go to their security team and asking for an Okta bypass service account and the security team Argentina, like we never heard of automation, we don't know what UiPath is, why would I give you a service account for good reason, right? They're doing their job right. But what we able to do with automation model, it's to establish trust between the developers and the security team. So now we have a set up standing infrastructure that we are ready to go whenever an automation's ready to deploy and we're able to get the set up standing infrastructure because we have the governance to make sure the quality would delivered and making sure anything that we deployed, automation that we deploy are developed and governed by the best practice. So that's how we able to kind of get this automation expand globally in a very control and scalable manner because the people that we have build a relationship with. What are >>The governors to how fast you can adopt? Is it just expertise or bandwidth of that expertise or what's the bottleneck? >>Yeah, >>If >>You wanna talk more about, >>So in terms of the pipeline, we really wanna make sure that we are taking that step back and instead of just going, let's develop, develop, develop, here are the requirements like get started and go, we've prove the value of automation at Densu. We wanna make sure we are taking that step back and observing the pipeline. And it's, it's up to us to work with the business to really establish their priorities and the priorities. It's a, it's a big global organization. There might be different priorities in APAC than there are in EM for a good reason. APAC may not be adopted on the same, you know, e r P system for example. So they might have those smaller scale ROI use cases, but that's where we wanna work with them to identify, you know, maybe this is a legitimate need, the ROI is not there, let's upscale some citizen developers so that they can start, you know, working for themselves and get those results faster for those simpler use cases. >>Does, does the funding come from the line of business or IT or a combination? I mean there are obviously budget constraints are very concerned about the macro and the recession. You guys have some global brands, you know, as, as things ebb and flow in the economy, you're competing with other budgets. But where are the budgets coming from inside of dsu? Is it the business, is it the tech >>Group? Yeah, we really consider our automation group is the cause of doing business because we are here connecting people with bridging people together and really elevating. And the reason why we structure it that way, it's people, we do automation at dsu not to reduce head count, not to, you know, not, not just those matrix number that we measure, but really it's to giving time back to the people, giving time back to our business. So then that way they can focus on their wellbeing and that way they can focus on the work-life balance, right? So that's what we say. We are forced for good and by using automation for good as one really great example. So I think because of this agenda and because DSU do prioritize people, you know, so that's why we're getting the funding, we're getting the budget and we are seeing as a cause of doing business. So then we can get these time back using innovation to make people more fulfilling and applying automation in meaningful ways. >>Kate and Flo, congratulations. Your energy is palpable and really great success, wonderful story. Really appreciate you sharing. Thank you so >>Much for having us today. >>You're very welcome. All keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante. We're live from UI path forward at five from Las Vegas. We're in the Venetian Consent Convention Center. Will be right back, right for the short break.

(upbeat music) >> theCUBE presents UiPath FORWARD5 brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody you're watching theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD5. We're here at the Venetian Convention Center Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson this morning. Dave, we heard these boomers, these thunder boomers. We thought it was the sound system. (Dave laughing) >> Thought it was something fake. >> But it was actually some crazy weather out here in Vegas. It's rare to see that kind of nuttiness out here. John Morrison is the director of Product and Technology at T-Mobile and Naga Chakravarthy is the Chief Digital Officer at iOpex. Guys, welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> Next, so John, (commentator booming) so okay, we're serving automation. I don't know if you guys can hear that S0 let's just give him a second here. >> (Commentator) Three different tracks >> I think it's pretty loud. Probably coming through. Usually we don't get that. >> It's live. >> But, it is live. So John, we, we've interviewed a lot of customers that have automation in their title. Your title's, Director of product and technology. Obviously you're here 'cause you have an affinity to automation. But talk about your role and how automation fits into it. >> Sure. Well, I'm the director of product and technology and I oversee what we call the communication, collaboration and productivity applications and services for T-Mobile. Reason I'm here is we took over the automation program and automation is falling within to our productivity portfolio. So I'm here to learn about, from these experts and all these leaders within the UiPath and from our vendors as well. >> Okay. Now tell us about iOpex. So kind of an interesting name. Where'd that come from? I think cloud. When I think opex, but, get rid of my cap. Where's the name come from and what do you guys do? >> Actually we thought hard about what to name about 13 years back. You know, I think all of us, the whole team comes from a service background and then I think we believe that you need to have people and as a lot of operational activities were increasing, you know the dependency on people was also increasing. And we thought that there has to be an angle for us to be very unique in the market. So we thought, you know, I would say iOpex is currently at 3.0 and if you look at what 1.0 was, it's all about driving innovation in operation excellence, right? And the medium was technology. And today, if you ask me from operation excellence that is the base, we are actually looking at how do you drive innovation in operating experiences. That's where automation and all these things becomes very native to us. >> So the market just went right, right to you guys you were ahead of the game. And then, wow, now, >> I have to brag that we fortunately named it Opex, which can be interchangeably used for operation excellence or operating experience. >> Got it. >> So, so John, where did, where did it start? What was the catalyst for your automation journey? How did, was it the, was it the, the merger? Take us through that. >> Sure. So I look at our automation journey, like a crawl, walk, run journey for sure. It started with the partnership of UiPath and iOpex. We had an innovation lab. They came, they set up a proof of concept. Proof of concept was successful. I was then asked to build out an automation program for the T-mobile enterprise. Not having any experience within automation as we had discussed before usually you have automation within the title. We leaned heavily on our partners iOpex being main critical partner in that evolution. And so iOpex came in and helped us build that center of excellence and really helped us put that support team together so that we could be successful as we moved forward. Now, when we had both of those in place, we were able to go to the businesses and find opportunities and showcase what automation was all about. The problem is we were so green is that, you know, we'd go and we'd look at an opportunity, but that opportunity we'd deliver and then our pipeline would be empty and we'd have to go look for other opportunities. So we really had to present and get that executive sponsorship of automation for the enterprise. And I'm going to do a few shoutouts here. Giao Duong, John Lowe and our CIO Brian King, were critical in giving us what we needed to be successful. They gave us the expertise, the funds to do what we needed to, to build out this program. We utilized iOpex, UiPath to really get that expertise in place. And today, our pipeline, we have about 300,000 manual hours of labor savings that we'll deploy by the end of the year. That's a huge success. And that's where we're at right now. The run part of it is going to be, I'll wait. >> Wait. No, it's okay. So you went, you went from hunting to fishing in a barrel? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So the, our next is focused on citizen development, building out that citizen development program, where we will be partnering with UiPath and iOpex to get that in place. And once we have that in place I feel like we're going to be ready to run and we'll see that program just kick off. But like I said before, 300,000 hours of savings in the first year of that program. That's incredible. And we're a large company and we'll, I mean we're just starting so it's going to be fun. >> So many questions. So Naga, is the COE where people typically start or is it sometimes a grassroot effort and then the COE comes later? How do you typically recommend approaching it? >> I think the fact that we started very small there was a clear mandate that we have to take a very strategic approach while we are solving a tactical problem to show that automation is the future and you need to solve using automation, right? And we not only looked at it just from a task automation standpoint, we were starting to look at it from a process, entire end to end process automation. And when we started looking at it, though we were tactically automating it, COE naturally fell in place. So, which means you need to evangelize this across multiple departments. So when you have to have, when you have to have evangelize across multiple departments, what is very important is you need to have the pod leaders identified let's say if you have to go to different departments it is somebody from John's team who's very capable of navigating through different departments' problem statements and how when you, when you navigate it you can rightly evangelize what is the benefit. And when it comes to benefit, right? You need to look at it from both the angles of operation excellence and what is it going to do from a growth standpoint of solving a future problem. So somebody internally within T-Mobile we were able to use very nice, you know John's team, you know, the COE naturally fell in place. All of them were at some point in time doing automation. And slowly it was a path that they took to evangelize and we were able to piggyback and scale it bigger. >> So in the world we're in, whether you're talking about cloud services that are created by hyper scale cloud providers or automation platforms from UiPath, between those shiny toys and what we want to accomplish with them in the world of business and everything else there are organizations like iOpex and you and John are working together to figure out which projects need to be done in a strategic, from a strategic viewpoint but you're also addressing them tactically. I'm curious, >> Yeah. >> How does that business model from an iOpex perspective work do you have people embedded at T-Mobile that are working with John and his folks to identify the next things to automate? Is it a, is it, where is the push and where is the pull coming from in terms of, okay now what do we do next? Because look, let's be frank, in the, from a business perspective, iOpex wants to do as much as it can a value for T-mobile because that's what, that's the business they're in. But, so tell me about that push pull between the two of you. Does that make sense? Yeah, So I'll say real fast that, yeah iOpex is actually part of the T-mobile team. They are embedded. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> We work with them daily. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> Right. They had the expertise they're passing along the expertise to our full-time employees. And so it's like we're all one team. So that should answer that one for sure there. >> Absolutely. Let me add one more point to it. See if, you know, I think with respect to T-Mobile I would say it's a little bit of a special case for us. Why I say that is, when we started the whole conversation of we need to drive automation with you there was a natural way to get embedded, you know as part of their team. Normally what happens is a team, a COE team works and say I will do the discovery and you guys can come and do the solution design. That was not the case, right? I think it was such a strategic investment that T-Mobile made on us, right? We were part of the discovery team. So, which means that we were able to take all the best practices that we learned from outside and openness to accept and start looking at it what's in it for us for the larger good that made us to get to what we call it as building a solution factory for T-Mobile. >> Vellante: I got a lot of questions. >> John: Yeah. >> John, you mentioned your CIO and a couple of other constituents. >> Yes. >> What part of the organization were they from? They helped you with funding, >> Yep. >> And maybe sort of gave you a catalyst. How did this all get funded? If I, if you could, Cause a lot of people ask me well how do I fund this thing? Does it fund itself? Do I do, is it an IT driven initiative line of business? >> So those executives were from the IT team. >> Vellante: Okay. For sure. But a lot of our programs start from grassroots ground up and you know a lot of vendors say, hey, you need it from the top down. This was a perfect example of getting it from the top down. We were working it, it was fine, but it wouldn't have taken off if we didn't have, you know, Brian King and John Lowe providing us that executive sponsorship, going to their peers and telling them about the program and giving us the opportunity to showcase what automation can do. >> How do you choose, I got so many questions I'm going to go rapid fire. How do you choose your automation priorities? Is it process driven? Is it data led? What's the right approach? >> I think it's a combination, right? One fundamentally guiding principle that we always look at is let it not be a task automation, right? Task automation solves a particular problem, but maybe you know, if you start looking at it from a bigger, you need to start looking at it from process angle. And when it comes to process, right? There are a lot of things that gets executed in the systems of record, in the form of workflow. And there's a lot of things that gets executed outside the systems of record, which is in people's mind. That's when data comes in, right? So let's say you use process mining tool of UiPath, you will get to know that there is a bottleneck in a particular process because it's cluttered somewhere. But you also have to look at why is this clutter happening, and you need to start collecting data. So a combination of a data science as well as a process science blends together. And that's when you'll start deciding, hey this is repetitive in nature, this is going to scale, this is an optimization problem. And then you build a scorecard and that scorecard naturally drives the, you know decision making process. Hey, it's going to drive operation excellence problem for me or is it going to be a true business benefit of driving growth? >> So I was going to ask you how you visualize it. You visualize it through, I guess, understanding of the organization, anecdotal comments, research digging, peeling the onion, and then you do some kind of scorecard like approach and say, okay these are the high, high opportunity areas. Okay. So combination. Got it. How about change management? Because Dave, you and I were talking about this before, big organizations that I know they have IT, they got an application portfolio. That application portfolio the applications have dependencies on each other. And then they have a process portfolio that is also related. So any change in process ripples through the applications. Any change in application affects other applications and affects processes. So how do you handle change management? >> So we actually have a change management team and we make sure that before we go forward with anything it's communicated what changes would be in place. And this change management team also does communications broadly for any of our applications, not just automation. So they partner close with iOpex, with our development teams on opportunities that are going out. You want to add anything? >> Yeah. So when it comes to change management, right? Well, John is front-ending all the changes relating to apps and stuff like that by having a steering committee, what really is the proactive thing that we end up doing is right when a bot goes live, there is a life support that we provide for the entire bot that's gone live. And the fundamentally core principle for that entire support to work good is you start looking at what's the benefit that the bot is giving more than that when a bot fails. Right? Why is the bot failing? Is it because the systems of records on which the bot is running? Is it that is failing? Or the inputs that is coming to the systems of record the data format, is it changing or the bot logic is failed? And once we set up a constant monitoring about that we were able to throw insights into the change management team saying that the bot failed because of various reasons. And that kind of compliments the whole change management process. And we get earlier notifications saying, hey there's going to be changes. So which means we go proactively look at, hey, okay fair enough, this systems of records, this data is going to change. Can we test this out in staging before you hit the production? So that way the change becomes a smoother process. >> And how quickly can you diagnose that? Is it hours, minutes, days, weeks, months? >> So, >> Vellante: Depends. >> It's a very subjective question. Right. If we know the pattern early then the SWAT team quickly gets into it and figure out how we could stop something, you know, stop the bot from failing. The moment the bot fails, you know, you need to basically look at how the business is going to going to get affected. But we try to do as much as we could. >> So Naga, I'm going to put you on the spot here. >> Please. >> As a partner of UiPath, this question of platform versus product. In order to scale and survive and thrive into the future UiPath needs to be able to demonstrate that it's more than a tool set, but instead a platform. What's your view on that in general? What differentiates a platform from a product? Does it matter to your organization whether UiPath moves in the direction of platform or not? >> I think, it is, it's undoubtedly platform, right? And a platform in my mind will constantly evolve. And once you think about it as a platform you will end up having a lot of plug and place. If you look at the way UiPath is evolving it is evolving as a platform. It used to be attended bot and unattended bot and plugged with Orchestrator. And if you look at it, the problem of solving the up chain and the down chain naturally came in process mining, task capture, made it up chain, a platform that solves the up chain. And then it slowly evolved into, hey I'm actually doing business process automation. Why could I not do test automation with the same skillset? So a platform will try to look at what is that, you know I've got in myself and how can I reuse across the enterprise? I think that is deeply embedded in the UiPath culture. And that's the kind of platform that, you know anybody like a system integrator like us, we do not have to multi-skill people. You just have to skill in one and you can interchange. That I would say is a good approach. >> So John, what's the future look like? What's the organization's appetite for automation? You know, is there an all you could eat kind of enterprise license approach? >> John: Yeah, so we are enterprise license. >> You are? Okay. >> So, and iOpex helped us move to the cloud so we can move quickly. That was definitely a benefit. The future of it, I would say citizen development is going to be key. Like I want citizen development within every business organization. I want them to be able to discover, deploy, you know, and and just use us, the center of excellence as support as needed. The appetite's there. Every group has automation within their goals or KPIs right? So it's there. We just need to be able to get in front of 'em. It's a large company. So I'm, '23 is going to be huge for us. >> Another fantastic story. I love that UiPath brings the customers to theCUBE. So thank you guys for telling your story. Congratulations on all your success. Good luck in the future. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> All right. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson UiPath FORWARD5. The bots are running around Dave. We're going to have to get one of the bots to come up here and show people a lot of fun at FORWARD. We're here in Vegas, right back, right after this short break.

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path, >>Everybody. We're back in Las Vegas. The cube's coverage we're day one at UI Path forward. Five. Pascal Borne is here. He's an expert and bestselling author in the topic of AI and automation and the book Intelligent Automation. Welcome to the world of Hyper Automation, the first book on the topic. And of course, Ray Wong is back on the cube. He's the founder, chairman and principal analyst, Constellation Reese, also bestselling author of Everybody Wants To Rule the World. Guys, thanks so much for coming on The Cubes. Always a pleasure. Ray Pascal, First time on the Cube, I believe. >>Yes, thank you. Thanks for the invitation. Thank you. >>So what is artificial about artificial intelligence, >>For sure, not people. >>So, okay, so you guys are both speaking at the conference, Ray today. I think you're interviewing the co CEOs. What do you make of that? What's, what are you gonna, what are you gonna probe with these guys? Like, how they're gonna divide their divide and conquer, and why do you think the, the company Danielle in particular, decided to bring in Rob Sland? >>Well, you know what I mean, Like, you know, these companies are now at a different stage of growth, right? There's that early battle between RPA vendors. Now we're actually talking something different, right? We're talking about where does automation go? How do we get the decisioning? What's the next best action? That's gonna be the next step. And to take where UI path is today to somewhere else, You really want someone with that enterprise cred and experience the sales motions, the packages, the partnership capabilities, and who else better than Roblin? He, that's, he's done, he can do that in his sleep, but now he's gotta do that in a new space, taking whole category to another level. Now, Daniel on the other hand, right, I mean, he's the visionary founder. He put this thing from nothing to where he is today, right? I mean, at that point you want your founder thinking about the next set of ideas, right? So you get this interesting dynamic that we've seen for a while with co CEOs, those that are doing the operations, getting the stuff out the door, and then letting the founders get a chance to go back and rethink, take a look at the perspective, and hopefully get a chance to build the next idea or take the next idea back into the organization. >>Right? Very well said. Pascal, why did you write your book on intelligent automation and, and hyper automation, and what's changed since you've written that book? >>So, I, I wrote this book, An Intelligent Automation, two years ago. At that time, it was really a new topic. It was really about the key, the, the key, the key content of the, of the book is really about combining different technologies to automate the most complex end to end business processes in companies. And when I say capabilities, it's, we, we hear a lot about up here, especially here, robotic process automation. But up here alone, if you just trying to transform a company with only up here, you just fall short. Okay? A lot of those processes need more than execution. They need language, they need the capacity to view, to see, they need the capacity to understand and to, and to create insights. So by combining process automation with ai, natural language processing, computer vision, you give this capability to create impact by automating end to end processes in companies. >>I, I like the test, what I hear in the keynote with independent experts like yourself. So we're hearing that that intelligent automation or automation is a fundamental component of digital transformation. Is it? Or is it more sort of a back office sort of hidden in inside plumbing Ray? What do you think? >>Well, you start by understanding what's going on in the process phase. And that's where you see discover become very important in that keynote, right? And that's where process mining's playing a role. Then you gotta automate stuff. But when you get to operations, that's really where the change is going to happen, right? We actually think that, you know, when you're doing the digital transformation pieces, right? Analytics, automation and AI are coming together to create a concept we call decision velocity. You and I make a quick decision, boom, how long does it take to get out? Management committee could free forever, right? A week, two months, never. But if you're thinking about competing with the automation, right? These decisions are actually being done a hundred times per second by machine, even a thousand times per second. That asymmetry is really what people are facing at the moment. >>And the companies that are gonna be able to do that and start automating decisions are gonna be operating at another level. Back to what Pascal's book talking about, right? And there are four questions everyone has to ask you, like, when do you fully intelligently automate? And that happens right in the background when you augment the machine with a human. So we can find why did you make an exception? Why did you break a roll? Why didn't you follow this protocol so we can get it down to a higher level confidence? When do you augment the human with the machine so we can give you the information so you can act quickly. And the last one is, when do you wanna insert a human in the process? That's gonna be the biggest question. Order to cash, incident or resolution, Hire to retire, procure to pay. It doesn't matter. When do you want to put a human in the process? When do you want a man in the middle, person in the middle? And more importantly, when do you want insert friction? >>So Pascal, you wrote your book in the middle of the, the pandemic. Yes. And, and so, you know, pre pandemic digital transformation was kind of a buzzword. A lot of people gave it lip service, eh, not on my watch, I don't have to worry about that. But then it became sort of, you're not a digital business, you're out of business. So, so what have you seen as the catalyst for adoption of automation? Was it the, the pandemic? Was it sort of good runway before that? What's changed? You know, pre isolation, post isolation economy. >>You, you make me think about a joke. Who, who did your best digital transformation over the last years? The ceo, C H R O, the Covid. >>It's a big record ball, right? Yeah. >>Right. And that's exactly true. You know, before pandemic digital transformation was a competitive advantage. >>Companies that went into it had an opportunity to get a bit better than their, their competitors during the pandemic. Things have changed completely. Companies that were not digitalized and automated could not survive. And we've seen so many companies just burning out and, and, and those companies that have been able to capitalize on intelligent automation, digital transformations during the pandemic have been able not only to survive, but to, to thrive, to really create their place on the market. So that's, that has been a catalyst, definitely a catalyst for that. That explains the success of the book, basically. Yeah. >>Okay. Okay. >>So you're familiar with the concept of Stew the food, right? So Stew by definition is something that's delicious to eat. Stew isn't simply taking one of every ingredient from the pantry and throwing it in the pot and stirring it around. When we start talking about intelligent automation, artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence, it starts getting a bit overwhelming. My spy sense goes off and I start thinking, this sounds like mush. It doesn't sound like Stew. So I wanna hear from each of you, what is the methodical process that, that people need to go through when they're going through digital trans transmission, digital transformation, so that you get delicious stew instead of a mush that's just confused everything in your business. So you, Ray, you want, you want to, you wanna answer that first? >>Yeah. You know, I mean, we've been talking about digital transformation since 2010, right? And part of it was really getting the business model, right? What are you trying to achieve? Is that a new type of offering? Are you changing the way you monetize something? Are you taking existing process and applying it to a new set of technologies? And what do you wanna accomplish, right? Once you start there, then it becomes a whole lot of operational stuff. And it's more than st right? I mean, it, it could be like, well, I can't use those words there. But the point being is it could be a complete like, operational exercise. It could be a complete revenue exercise, it could be a regulatory exercise, it could be something about where you want to take growth into the next level. And each one of those processes, some of it is automation, right? There's a big component of it today. But most of it is really rethinking about what you want things to do, right? How do you actually make things to be successful, right? Do I reorganize a process? Do I insert a place to do monetization? Where do I put engagement in place? How do I collect data along the way so I can build better feedback loop? What can I do to build the business graph so that I have that knowledge for the future so I can go forward doing that so I can be successful. >>The Pascal should, should, should the directive be first ia, then ai? Or are these, are these things going to happen in parallel naturally? What's your position on that? Is it first, >>So it, so, >>So AI is part of IA because that's, it's, it's part of the big umbrella. And very often I got the question. So how do you differentiate AI in, I a, I like to say that AI is only the brain. So think of ai cuz I'm consider, I consider AI as machine learning, Okay? Think of AI in a, like a brain near jar that only can think, create, insight, learn, but doesn't do anything, doesn't have any arms, doesn't have any eyes, doesn't not have any mouth and ears can't talk, can't understand with ia, you, you give those capabilities to ai. You, you basically, you create a cap, the capability, technological capability that is able to do more than just thinking, learning and, and create insight, but also acting, speaking, understanding the environment, viewing it, interacting with it. So basically performing these, those end to end processes that are performed currently by people in companies. >>Yeah, we're gonna get to a point where we get to what we call a dynamic scenario generation. You're talking to me, you get excited, well, I changed the story because something else shows up, or you're talking to me and you're really upset. We're gonna have to actually ch, you know, address that issue right away. Well, we want the ability to have that sense and respond capability so that the next best action is served. So your data, your process, the journey, all the analytics on the top end, that's all gonna be served up and changed along the way. As we go from 2D journeys to 3D scenarios in the metaverse, if we think about what happens from a decentralized world to decentralized, and we think about what's happening from web two to web three, we're gonna make those types of shifts so that things are moving along. Everything's a choose your end venture journey. >>So I hope I remember this correctly from your book. You talked about disruption scenarios within industries and within companies. And I go back to the early days of, of our industry and East coast Prime, Wang, dg, they're all gone. And then, but, but you look at companies like Microsoft, you know, they were, they were able to, you know, get through that novel. Yeah. Ibm, you know, I call it survived. Intel is now going through their, you know, their challenge. So, so maybe it's inevitable, but how do you see the future in terms of disruption with an industry, Forget our industry for a second, all industry across, whether it's healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, automobiles, et cetera. How do you see the disruption scenario? I'm pretty sure you talked about this in your book, it's been a while since I read it, but I wonder if you could talk about that disruption scenario and, and the role that automation is going to play, either as the disruptor or as the protector of the incumbents. >>Let's take healthcare and auto as an example. Healthcare is a great example. If we think about what's going on, not enough nurses, massive shortage, right? What are we doing at the moment? We're setting five foot nine robots to do non-patient care. We're trying to capture enough information off, you know, patient analytics like this watch is gonna capture vitals from a going forward. We're doing a lot what we can do in the ambient level so that information and data is automatically captured and decisions are being rendered against that. Maybe you're gonna change your diet along the way, maybe you're gonna walk an extra 10 minutes. All those things are gonna be provided in that level of automation. Take the car business. It's not about selling cars. Tesla's a great example. We talk about this all the time. What Tesla's doing, they're basically gonna be an insurance company with all the data they have. They have better data than the insurance companies. They can do better underwriting, they've got better mapping information and insights they can actually suggest next best action do collision avoidance, right? Those are all the things that are actually happening today. And automation plays a big role, not just in the collection of that, that information insight, but also in the ability to make recommendations, to do predictions and to help you prevent things from going wrong. >>So, you know, it's interesting. It's like you talk about Tesla as the, the disrupting the insurance companies. It's almost like the over the top vendors have all the data relative to the telcos and mopped them up for lunch. Pascal, I wanna ask you, you know, the topic of future of work kind of was a bromide before, but, but now I feel like, you know, post pandemic, it, it actually has substance. How do you see the future of work? Can you even summarize what it's gonna look like? It's, it's, Or are we here? >>It's, yeah, it's, and definitely it's, it's more and more important topic currently. And you, you all heard about the great resignation and how employee experience is more and more important for companies according to have a business review. The companies that take care of their employee experience are four times more profitable that those that don't. So it's a, it's a, it's an issue for CEOs and, and shareholders. Now, how do we get there? How, how do we, how do we improve the, the quality of the employee experience, understanding the people, getting information from them, educating them. I'm talking about educating them on those new technologies and how they can benefit from those empowering them. And, and I think we've talked a lot about this, about the democratization local type of, of technologies that democratize the access to those technologies. Everyone can be empowered today to change their work, improve their work, and finally, incentivization. I think it's a very important point where companies that, yeah, I >>Give that. What's gonna be the key message of your talk tomorrow. Give us the bumper sticker, >>If you will. Oh, I'm gonna talk, It's a little bit different. I'm gonna talk for the IT community in this, in the context of the IT summit. And I'm gonna talk about the future of intelligent automation. So basically how new technologies will impact beyond what we see today, The future of work. >>Well, I always love having you on the cube, so articulate and, and and crisp. What's, what's exciting you these days, you know, in your world, I know you're traveling around a lot, but what's, what's hot? >>Yeah, I think one of the coolest thing that's going on right now is the fact that we're trying to figure out do we go to work or do we not go to work? Back to your other point, I mean, I don't know, work, work is, I mean, for me, work has been everywhere, right? And we're starting to figure out what that means. I think the second thing though is this notion around mission and purpose. And everyone's trying to figure out what does that mean for themselves? And that's really, I don't know if it's a great, great resignation. We call it great refactoring, right? Where you work, when you work, how we work, why you work, that's changing. But more importantly, the business models are changing. The monetization models are changing macro dynamics that are happening. Us versus China, G seven versus bricks, right? War on the dollar. All these things are happening around us at this moment and, and I think it's gonna really reshape us the way that we came out of the seventies into the eighties. >>Guys, always a pleasure having folks like yourself on, Thank you, Pascal. Been great to see you again. All right, Dave Nicholson, Dave Ante, keep it right there. Forward five from Las Vegas. You're watching the cue.

>> TheCUBE presents UI Path Forward Five brought to you by UI Path. >> Welcome back to UI Path Forward Five. You're watching The Cubes, Walter Wall coverage. This is day one, Dave Vellante, with my co-host Dave Nicholson. We're taking RPA to intelligence automation. We're going from point tools to platforms. Neeraj Mathur is here. He's the director of Intelligent Automation at VMware. Yes, VMware. We're not going to talk about vSphere or Aria, or maybe we are, (Neeraj chuckles) but he's joined by Thomas Stocker who's a principal product manager at UI Path. And we're going to talk about testing automation, automating the testing process. It's a new sort of big vector in the whole RPA automation space. Gentleman, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Neeraj: Thank you very much. >> Thomas: Thank you. >> So Neeraj, as we were saying, Dave and I, you know, really like VMware was half our lives for a long time but we're going to flip it a little bit. >> Neeraj: Absolutely. >> And talk about sort of some of the inside baseball. Talk about your role and how you're applying automation at VMware. >> Absolutely. So, so as part of us really running the intelligent automation program at VMware, we have a quite matured COE for last, you know four to five years, we've been doing this automation across the enterprise. So what we have really done is, you know over 45 different business functions where we really automated quite a lot different processes and tasks on that. So as part of my role, I'm really responsible for making sure that we are, you know, bringing in the best practices, making sure that we are ready to scale across the enterprise but at the same time, how, you know, quickly we are able to deliver the value of this automation to our businesses as well. >> Thomas, as a product manager, you know the product, and the market inside and out, you know the competition, you know the pricing, you know how customers are using it, you know all the features. What's your area of - main area of focus? >> The main area of the UiPathT suite... >> For your role, I mean? >> For my role is the RPA testing. So meaning testing RPA workflows themselves. And the reason is RPA has matured over the last few years. We see that, and it has adopted a lot of best practices from the software development area. So what we see is RPA now becomes business critical. It's part of the main core business processes in corporation and testing it just makes sense. You have to continuously monitor and continuously test your automation to make sure it does not break in production. >> Okay. And you have a specific product for this? Is it a feature or it's a module? >> So RPA testing or the UiPath T Suite, as the name suggests it's a suite of products. It's actually part of the existing platform. So we use Orchestrator, which is the distribution engine. We use Studio, which is our idea to create automation. And on top of that, we build a new component, which is called the UiPath Test Manager. And this is a kind of analytics and management platform where you have an oversight on what happened, what went wrong, and what is the reason for automation to **bring. >> Okay. And so Neeraj, you're testing your robot code? >> Neeraj: Correct. >> Right. And you're looking for what? Governance, security, quality, efficiency, what are the things you're looking for? >> It's actually all of all of those but our main goal to really start this was two-front, right? So we were really looking at how do we, you know, deliver at a speed with the quality which we can really maintain and sustain for a longer period, right? So to improve our quality of delivery at a speed of delivery, which we can do it. So the way we look at testing automation is not just as an independent entity. We look at this as a pipeline of a continuous improvement for us, right? So how it is called industry as a CICD pipeline. So testing automation is one of the key component of that. But the way we were able to deliver on the speed is to really have that end to end automation done for us to also from developers to production and using that pipeline and our testing is one piece of that. And the way we were able to also improve on the quality of our delivery is to really have automated way of doing the code reviews, automated way of doing the testing using this platform as well. and then, you know, how you go through end to end for that purpose. >> Thomas, when I hear testing robots, (Thomas chuckles) I don't care if it's code or actual robots, it's terrifying. >> It's terrify, yeah. >> It's terrifying. Okay, great. You, you have some test suite that says look, Yeah, we've looked at >> The, why is that terrifying? >> What's, It's terrifying because if you have to let it interact with actual live systems in some way. Yeah. The only way to know if it's going to break something is either you let it loose or you have some sort of sandbox where, I mean, what do you do? Are you taking clones of environments and running actual tests against them? I mean, think it's >> Like testing disaster recovery in the old days. Imagine. >> So we are actually not running any testing in the production live environment, right? The way we build this actually to do a testing in the separate test environment on that as well by using very specific test data from business, which you know, we call that as a golden copy of that test data because we want to use that data for months and years to come. Okay. Right? Yeah. So not touching any production environmental Facebook. >> Yeah. All right. Cause you, you can imagine >> Absolutely >> It's like, oh yeah we've created a robotic changes baby diapers let's go ahead and test it on these babies. [Collective Laughter] Yeah >> I don't think so. No, no, But, but what's the, does it does it matter if there's a delta between the test data and the, the, the production data? How, how big is that delta? How do you manage that? >> It does matter. And that's where actually that whole, you know, angle of how much you can, can in real, in real life can test right? So there are cases where you would have, even in our cases where, you know, the production data might be slightly different than the test data itself. So the whole effort goes into making sure that the test data, which we are preparing here, is as close to the products and data itself, right? It may not be a hundred percent close but that's the sort of you know, boundary or risk you may have to take. >> Okay. So you're snapshotting, that moving it over, a little V motion? >> Neeraj: Yeah. >> Okay. So do you do this for citizen developers as well? Or is you guys pretty much center of excellence writing all the bots? >> No, right now we are doing only for the unattended, the COE driven bots only at this point of time, >> What are you, what are your thoughts on the future? Because I can see I can see some really sloppy citizen coders. >> Yeah. Yeah. So as part of our governance, which we are trying to build for our citizen developers as well, there there is a really similar consideration for that as well. But for us, we have really not gone that far to build that sort of automation right >> Now, narrowly, just if we talk about testing what's the business impact been on the testing? And I'm interested in overall, but the overall platform but specifically for the testing, when did that when did you start implementing that and, and what what has been the business benefit? >> So the benefit is really on the on the speed of the delivery, which means that we are able to actually deliver more projects and more automation as well. So since we adopted that, we have seen our you know, improvement, our speed is around 15%, right? So, so, you know, 15% better speed than previously. What we have also seen is, is that our success rate of our transactions in production environment has gone to 96% success rate, which is, again there is a direct implication on business, on, on that point of view that, you know, there's no more manual exception or manual interaction is required for those failure scenarios. >> So 15% better speed at what? At, at implementing the bots? At actually writing code? Or... >> End to end, Yes. So from building the code to test that code able to approve that and then deploy that into the production environment after testing it this is really has improved by 15%. >> Okay. And, and what, what what business processes outside of sort of testing have you sort of attacked with the platform? Can you talk to that? >> The business processes outside of testing? >> Dave: Yeah. You mean the one which we are not testing ourself? >> Yeah, no. So just the UI path platform, is it exclusively for, for testing? >> This testing is exclusively for the UI path bots which we have built, right? So we have some 400 plus automations of UI bots. So it's meant exclusively >> But are you using UI path in any other ways? >> No, not at this time. >> Okay, okay. Interesting. So you started with testing? >> No, we started by building the bots. So we already had roughly 400 bots in production. When we came with the testing automation, that's when we started looking at it. >> Dave: Okay. And then now building that whole testing-- >> Dave: What are those other bots doing? Let me ask it that way. >> Oh, there's quite a lot. I mean, we have many bots. >> Dave: Paint a picture if you want. Yeah. In, in finance, in auto management, HR, legal, IT, there's a lot of automations which are there. As I'm saying, there's more than 400 automations out there. Yeah. So so it's across the, you know, enterprise on that. >> Thomas. So, and you know, both of you have a have a view on this, but Thomas's views probably wider across other, other instances. What are the most common things that are revealed in tests that indicate something needs to be fixed? Yeah, so think of, think of a test, a test failure, an error. What are the, what are the most common things that happen? >> So when we started with building our product we conducted a, a survey among our customers. And without a surprise the main reason why automation breaks is change. >> David: Sure. >> And the problem here is RPA is a controlled process a controlled workflow but it runs in an uncontrollable environment. So typically RPA is developed by a C.O.E. Those are business and automation experts, but they operate in an environment that's driven by new patches new application changes ruled out by IT. And that's the main challenge here. You cannot control that. And so far, if you, if you do not proactively test what happens is you catch an issue in production when it already breaks, right? That's reactive, that's leads to maintenance to un-claim maintenance actually. And that was the goal right from the start from the taste suite to support our customers here and go over to proactive maintenance meaning testing before and finding those issues before the heat production. >> Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I'm, I'm still not clear on, so you just gave a perfect example, changes in the environment. >> Yeah. >> So those changes are happening in the production environment. >> Thomas: Yeah. The robot that was happily doing its automation stuff before? >> Thomas: Yeah. Everyone was happy with it. Change happens. Robot breaks. >> Thomas: Yeah. >> Okay. You're saying you test before changes are implemented? To see if those changes will break the robot? >> Thomas: Yeah. >> Okay. How do you, how do you expose those changes that are in the, in a, that are going to be in a production environment to the robot? You must have a, Is is that part of the test environment? Does that mean that you have to have what fully running instances of like an ERP system? >> Thomas: Yeah. You know, a clone of an environment. How do you, how do you test that without having the live robot against the production environment? >> I think there's no big difference to standard software testing. Okay. The interesting thing is, the change actually happens earlier. You are affected on production side with it but the change happens on it side or on DevOps side. So you typically will test in a test environment that's similar to your production environment or probably in it in a pre-product environment. And the test itself is simply running your workflow that you want to test, but mark away any dependencies you don't want to invoke. You don't want to send a, a letter to a customer in a test environment, right? And then you verify that the result is what you actually expect, right? And as soon as this is not the case, you will be notified you will have a result, the fail result, and you can act before it breaks. So you can fix it, redeploy to production and you should be good now. >> But the, the main emphasis at VMware is testing your bots, correct? >> Neeraj: Testing your bots. Yes. Can I apply this to testing other software code? >> Yeah, yeah. You, you can, you can technically actually and Thomas can speak better than me on that to any software for that matter, but we have really not explored that aspect of it. >> David: You guys have pretty good coders, good engineers at VMware, but no, seriously Thomas what's that market looking like? Is that taking off? Are you, are you are you applying this capability or customers applying it for just more broadly testing software? >> Absolutely. So our goal was we want to test RPA and the application it relies on so that includes RPA testing as well as application testing. The main difference is typical functional application testing is a black box testing. So you don't know the inner implementation of of that application. And it works out pretty well. The big, the big opportunity that we have is not isolated Not isolated testing, isolated RPA but we talk about convergence of automation. So what we offer our customers is one automation platform. You create one, you create automation, not redundantly in different departments, but you create once probably for testing and then you reuse it for RPA. So that suddenly helps your, your test engineers to to move from a pure cost center to a value center. >> How, how unique is this capability in the industry relative to your competition and and what capabilities do you have that, that or, or or differentiators from the folks that we all know you're competing with? >> So the big advantage is the power of the entire platform that we have with UiPath. So we didn't start from scratch. We have that great automation layer. We have that great distribution layer. We have all that AI capabilities that so far were used for RPA. We can reuse them, repurpose them for testing. And that really differentiates us from the competition. >> Thomas, I I, I detect a hint of an accent. Is it, is it, is it German or >> It's actually Austrian. >> Austrian. Well, >> You know. Don't compare us with Germans. >> I understand. High German. Is that the proper, is that what's spoken in Austria? >> Yes, it is. >> So, so >> Point being? >> Point being exactly as I drift off point being generally German is considered to be a very very precise language with very specific words. It's very easy to be confused about between the difference the difference between two things automation testing and automating testing. >> Thomas: Yes. >> Because in this case, what you are testing are automations. >> Thomas: Yes. >> That's what you're talking about. >> Thomas: Yes. >> You're not talking about the automation of testing. Correct? >> Well, we talk about >> And that's got to be confusing when you go to translate that into >> Dave: But isn't it both? >> 50 other languages? >> Dave: It's both. >> Is it both? >> Thomas: It actually is both. >> Okay. >> And there's something we are exploring right now which is even, even the next step, the next layer which is autonomous testing. So, so far you had an expert an automation expert creating the automation once and it would be rerun over and over again. What we are now exploring is together with university to autonomously test, meaning a bot explores your application on the test and finds issues completely autonomously. >> Dave: So autonomous testing of automation? >> It's getting more and more complicated. >> It's more clear, it's getting clearer by the minute. >> Sorry for that. >> All right Neeraj, last question is: Where do you want to take this? What's your vision for, for VMware in the context of automation? >> Sure. So, so I think the first and the foremost thing for us is to really make it more mainstream for for our automation developer Excel, right? What I mean by that is, is to really, so so there is a shift now how we engage with our business users and SMEs. And I said previously they used to actually test it manually. Now the conversation changes that, hey can you tell us what test cases you want what you want us to test in an automated measure? Can you give us the test data for that so that we can keep on testing in a continuous manner for the months and years to come down? Right? The other part of the test it changes is that, hey it used to take eight weeks for us to build but now it's going to take nine weeks because we're going to spend an extra week just to automate that as well. But it's going to help you in the long run and that's the conversation. So to really make it as much more mainstream and then say that out of all these kinds of automation and bots which we are building, So we are not looking to have a test automation for every single bot which we are building. So we need to have a way to choose where their value is. Is it the quarter end processing one? Is it the most business critical one, or is it the one where we are expecting of frequent changes, right? That's where the value of the testing is. So really bring that as a part of our whole process and then, you know >> We're still fine too. That great. Guys, thanks so much. This has been really interesting conversation. I've been waiting to talk to a real life customer about testing and automation testing. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for everything. >> All right. Thank you for watching, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and I will be back right after this short break. This is day one of theCUBE coverage of UI Path Forward Five. Be right back after this short break.

The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi, everybody went back live at the Venetian, formerly the Sands Convention Center. Dave Ante with David Nicholson. UI. Paths forward five. This is the fourth forward conference that the Cube has done. So we've seen the ascendancy of UI path, the growth customers. UiPath is one of the first companies to actually come back Post Covid. Last year, 2021 at the Bellagio. They took a chance and it actually worked out great at a couple thousand people there. Lots of customers. We're here with Lauren Joyce, who's the global automation lead at Whirlpool. She's joined by Regener Facade rp, who is the global automation lead at Accenture. Good to see you again. Lauren. Welcome to the Cube first timer. Very much, >>Yes, thank >>You. So you're relatively new to automation, but you, as we were talking, you're a process with talk about the center of excellence that you're building out. What's the importance of that to Whirlpool? >>Absolutely. So we are first looking at automation from our finance organization and they were coming to us with, Hey, here are 12 things we wanna automate. And really what we are finding is that not all of these things were suitable for automation. So we've started on the COE journey of, well, how do we make sure that we're getting the most ROI for our business? Starting with discovery, making sure that what we're automating it makes sense, it's the right process versus just an upgrade or, or retooling set. So for us, especially being a global company, making sure that we had that governance in place, that mindset and what should be automated and when really made sense and helped us on our journey pursuing. >>And, and, and I presume that's where Accenture comes in. I mean, rp, you got deep industry expertise, you've got automation expertise. What role do you play in that prioritization exercise? >>So the, the way we approach any automation implementation is similar to what we did here in our pool. First step is, you know, I call it as knowing where you are in the automation journey. Like what always is, if you don't know where you are on a map, a map won't help you. So baselining the current automation maturity and the current journey where they are. And once you do that, you identify you are not star and prioritization and the goals that are required and then you build a plan. And exactly how we approach in establishing a center of excellence that drives the automation with rigor, knowing where you are and where you want to get to, >>What's the team look like in a, in a, who's on the bus, You know, who's who's, who's in in the circle if you will. How do you com you know, build, you've written about this, it's like a sports team. You put it together, you need be a quarterback, you need a lineman, you need, you know, wide receivers who's on the center of excellence team. >>So the way you always build the center of excellence is making sure that your business partners and the senior leadership team is committed to the entire automation journey. That's the key ingredient for success. Then you build, one of the critical aspect is the talent, the quarterback, you said the talent. In today's world, automation talent is just not about knowing, you know, RPA techniques or you know, process optimization, but it is an end to end technology stack starting from cloud to data to analytics and entire platform capabilities of automation that combined and coupled with change management and how do you drive an enterprise chain management is very, very critical in terms of implementing automation. >>Absolutely. Lauren, I'm curious, did, did Accenture bring UI path to Whirlpool or did you bring, or did you bring Accenture in and UI path in together? How, how did that interaction? >>Yes. So we brought Accenture in and they really helped us along with that journey and they brought UI path to us. Our European business was actually using Blue Prism and that's when we said no, we wanna standardize specifically on UI path and make sure from a global standpoint we're using the same tooling. And that really helped that as we were building our team, we leaned on their expertise and then even we're retooling people within our corporation of, hey, we took our SAP lead, our GCP lead to be our technical architect and and people that could help speak the language and translate from process and explain that doesn't have to be a large project and explain what automation is to help drive return investment for sure. >>Now you're early in, but have you seen results, you know so far? Can you talk about that, quantify it in any way or? >>Absolutely. So we started our journey December of 2020. We've automated about 60 or so bots, but really everything that we've done is based on hours saved. So we're at about 60,000 hours automated and with some of our biggest, like our big box stores and our KitchenAid small appliances, we've even had hard dollar savings that we had a bot that went live about in 60 days. We had a $3 million return and take took out 3000 hours of human interaction. That was great for us. >>So the world's kind of a mess right now. You got supply chain issues, you got inflation, you got a recession, you got the United States. Anyway, you got the Fed trying to figure out, oh there's sling shoting, you know, some people are, you know, really hurting stock market is starting to show that there's a lot of confusion out there. The world is changed quite a bit obviously the last few years. How do you guys see it? What role has, I wonder if both of you could answer, what role has automation played in helping like, for instance, Whirlpool with maybe supply chain problems or maybe bigger forecasting and, and what are you seeing across organizations? But Lauren if you could start. >>Absolutely. So for us being able to show improvement in a six to eight week development cycle and instead of saying here's a heavy dollar investment or a new tooling that you gotta get people resources up to speed on, we can take where we are today, automate save hours where we're getting our employee engagement scores of I'm overworked, I have too much on my plate, how can you help me? And automation is there to support and that's really helped our business one take unnecessary work off their plate and show very quick value add to the business without having to have huge dollar investments in our, I'm you trying to save money. >>Are people, what are you seeing in terms of, so some of the problems that people I see as sign out here said, oh, in inflation at five to 7% go after productivity and make it in 20% gains. I mean, what are you seeing in the field? >>More than ever, More than ever, automation is more relevant now given the current economy environment that we are operating. Because automation always free up or optimizers the capacity that every enterprise has. Optimizing capacity is very important so that you can take your talented employees and the talented resources to do more strategic transformation program, which helps to sustain and stay and scale in your business. So I see that automation playing a significant role to impact business imperative. >>What are some of the common misconceptions? I mean we talk a lot about people's fear of automation. You know, I don't think that's necessarily a misconception. I think a lot of times people are fearful about automating though. Maybe they, they shouldn't be. We had Dentsu on today, DS like, you know, this giant global branding firm and they get a lot of young kids, they're like, No, bring it on. I don't want to do all this mundane stuff. But you know, a lot of folks are are are concerned, but, so that maybe is one misconception. Are there others, Lauren, that you found that you can share? >>I think we were lucky that we didn't necessarily have that fear of being replaced by automation. I think our change management plan really helped drive that. We included some fun things of any time a bot went live you got almost like a birth certificate of here's the process we save for you, here's how it's grown over six, six months, 12 months, 18 months. But I'm not sure if we had any other major gaps like that or or pitfalls >>Or, or p anything that, >>So my philosophy is automation is human plus machine combination. You can't run just, you know, people can't think that, you know, if my task get automated, I lose the, I lose my my jobs. That's not how it works because you, you do need human expertise, competency skills to kind of argument what you do with automation. And most important thing when you do this change is that most of the enterprises do not believe, do not understand that you have to get even process, right? You don't want to, you know, have an inefficient process and put automation on the top of it. Then you just made your inefficiency run more faster. So you need to kind of make sure that you address inefficiency, optimize your process, then infuse automation, then have human plus machine capability to strengthen your automation. >>Is it really that easy? Sounds easy, right? It, >>So from an, from an Accenture perspective, if you're, if you're looking at the market as a whole or looking at industry verticals, what's the difference between an organization that is leveraging automation and an organization that is not leveraging organ leveraging automation? Is there, is there sort of a range of percentage of efficiency that you can put on that? What does it mean for their bottom line? >>Essent, you must have data on this. Yeah, I mean what, >>Yeah, >>Today, today's world in the technology world, every organization understands the importance of automation that's given. That's a table stake. Now, where an organization is in the journey differs some of the enterprises maybe at the beginning of the maturity spectrum. In my book I talk about automation maturity framework wherein there are the initial stages of automation. Some of them are intelligent automation at the end of the spectrum where they're using data cloud and AI to drive the automation journey. But in every enterprise, the key success of automation depends upon whether you do automation and enterprisewide not in a silo in the organization, but if you do enterprise wide apply across, you get a lot more benefits, lot more efficiency to drive. >>Does does automation being more strategic or key? Does it, does it in a way make investments in automation more, more scrutinized or more circumspect? I, I would, I would use the term discretionary. We heard Bobby Patrick today say this is not discretionary, it's strategic to me. If it's strategic it might be a mandate but it's might be something I can kick down the road. What are you seeing there in the field just in terms of overall demand and sentiment? >>Automation today, as I said, is a table stake. When it becomes an integrated DNA of enterprise, it is always, you know, whether you want to call one pillar of strategy, key DNA of your strategic roadmap you are in investments have to be directly proportional to what you want to accomplish as your business KPIs to thrive and deliver your business with. Otherwise, if you do it as like a one off thing, you know you won't get the benefit. Yeah. >>Or from your standpoint, where do you want to take the automation initiative inside a whirlpool? How are you thinking about scaling it? What have you learned that you can apply to driving scale? >>So we put some strict governance in place who weren't just automating everything under the sun cuz >>Wild west >>Yeah, I can't support that. Right? So we made sure that everything had at least less than a one year invest return on investment and 500 hours worth of automation for us to even consider it as part of our coe. So because of that, we do have some automations that would make sense, but that's why we're looking at a citizen development program or low code, no code. What other types of options are there to make sure that it does become a part of our culture and dna that you can automate those even small parts of your workflow to, to make your day better. >>When, when you're looking at those workflows, do you, are you, are you literally looking over someone's shoulder with a stopwatch and measuring, Measuring how time >>And motion studies? No >>Question. Yeah. I mean is it time and motion studies? I mean, is that sort of the entry level data that that you use or is it more, or is it more automated than that? >>I would say it's a little more automated than that, but we do sit down and we ask our business process, show me what this process looks like to you. And then from that we can take some task mining and look at, okay, how long did it take you to do this? How often are you doing it? And then based on how long the automation would take, see how many hours are saved and how many people are doing that same task on a monthly, daily, weekly basis. >>Great. All right guys, thanks so much for coming in the cube and sharing your story. A whirlpool and always love to have Accenture on. You guys got such a massive observation space, global depth of industry. So thank you very much both. Thank you. Thank you. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante will be back right to the short break, you watching the cubes coverage of UI path forward. Five live from Las Vegas.