 From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Hello from Las Vegas, live at the Bellagio, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are at UiPath Forward 4, like I said, in Las Vegas. So great to be in person, sitting at an anchor desk with a co-anchor, and I guess, we're going to be talking about deploying new technologies in a large global enterprise. Vicki Harris is here, manager, application, performing platform engineering services at Chevron. Vicki, welcome to the program. Hey, thank you, happy to be here. So, isn't it great to be, we're outdoors, nice to, everyone's nice and safe, but great to be back at an in-person event where so many hallway conversations can spark more innovation. That's one of the things I think a lot of us have been missing in the last 18 months. You've been with Chevron almost 15 years, but this is, we're talking about a 142-year-old organization, talk to me about the evolution of IT that you've seen. Very happy to do that. A lot of, I would say the greatest jump forward, we saw in cloud, and we started our cloud transformation before digital transformation came along, but it was really the thing that enabled us to be ready, I would say, for the extra value, the extra push, and so we're so happy to be well positioned. So, we started our cloud journey in 2017, and between 2018 and 19, because of the investments in automation, it just took off, and today, we're still receiving the benefits of that, but prior to that, it took a little bit longer. Also, we had an agile transformation, which was very helpful because we can't really afford to move at waterfall speed anymore, and so cloud and agile really helped boost that and get us started. So, whenever we get a practitioner on, we have a million questions, so can we start with your role? Are you in IT, that's where you're in that organization? I am in IT, so I'm a product line manager, we support really the core for software engineers and citizen developers. So, on the software engineering side, CICD pipeline, DevOps tooling, code frameworks, all of that to make our software engineers more productive, and on the citizen development side, same philosophy, we want to make them more productive, not worry about how do I do it, just how to apply their business logic, so we support the citizen development programs and the underlying platforms. So, Vicki, when you talked about cloud in 2017, are you talking about infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, SAS, all of the above, because I'm sure you were doing SAS before then, but how do you think about cloud? So, that's a great question. Yes, we were always doing SAS, and we continue to do SAS, so, and Chevron was one of the earlier adopters of UiPath for cloud, because we do want to be cloud first, always, always, always, and we're trying to really reduce and restrict our on-prem footprint. But the automation we started in kind of 2017, 2018 is, I would call it infrastructure as code. So, deploying everything with code the same way all the time, which was partly a technical shift, but also a really big cultural shift, that instead of having people doing the same task, 400 different ways, which is hard to sustain, it's hard to troubleshoot. So, we took the pain in building that, and there's a lot of pain in the transformation itself, but the upside when you're finished is amazing. Yeah, so that's what, UiPath's answer to my next question, which was, what is the catalyst? It was seeing the cloud's potential for programmable infrastructure, and that sounds like it was a game changer for you. It was a huge game changer, and that really, on the software engineering side, the whole way we do infrastructure, the way we program everything, but we also found we're not touching part of the organization with that transformation, and that's where the citizen development programs and RPA comes in as, you know, hey, we're really proud of ourselves, we did so well, but how do we get to the edge where we haven't been able to have the same impact with that automation? For an organization, and I mentioned 142 years young, we'll say, I guess you could say old for an organization, young for a person, where in terms of the cultural change, that's hard to manifest across such a historic, history institution. Talk to me about the appetite for automation, you said you started doing automation, bringing it into the organization in the last five years or so, what's been the appetite across different lines of business to embrace it, to see it as an advantage, rather than taking jobs away? So there's never appetite for automation on its own, because you're changing someone's process, but what there is appetite for is the result. And also we went through a large organizational transformation, so in addition to value, bottom line cost savings, we have people who are just improving their workflow for themselves, and so there's also a sense of empowerment for them. So I would say the empowerment and then the results are much bigger drivers, and then you say, oh, if you want that, yes, by the way, this is how we get that, but it's not automation for automation's sake, but people understand, they understand now the value of it, and the more they learn, they understand that doing one process 25 ways is not a way to run your business. Right, how to actually drive those outcomes that they're looking for. So how did it start? Did it start in IT? Was it an IT-led initiative, or was it a department? IT-led, yes. Okay, so focused on the IT department, so you were automating certain tasks within IT, or not necessarily? So IT-led, but as the foundation for all the business units, so again, we focus on the core, but we also focus on enablement. So anybody who's a builder, maker, developer, out there in the business units, we just want to make their job easier, better, faster, just for the business logic. So then we bring them in and say, here's how you do it, but they bring the best ideas, right? They know their business processes, I don't know their business processes. If I sat down and said, here's where automation value is, we wouldn't be doing so well. They know where it is. We just give them the tools to find that value, and it's extraordinary how they find it, but there's a lot of manual processes out there. But it's a common story when you talk to UiPath customers that it'll start maybe one person in a department and then people looking over her shoulder going, oh, I want some of that, and then it explodes. It sounds like you were taking a much more whole house approach. We are taking a whole house approach, but we did start early with POCs. And so, and then those proved their value pretty easily and pretty quickly. And so then it was a determination of, hey, we would like to do something bigger here than just leave this technology out there. We're just leaving all this value on the table. We're leaving all this skill sets, all this passion, all this enthusiasm in our citizen community. We don't think we can transform as a corporation if we leave that energy motivation skill on the table. Can you add some color to the ROI? Have you said the POC, a quick hit, obviously. Can you give us some details on that? What can you tell us? What can I tell you? Okay, well, so, from when we started the program three years, I think we're showing about $6 million of return. We see the value just in time savings, like everybody else does, and we have, so that's with about 300 automations, over 600,000 hours, I think, saved. But first year, it's just so easy. You can see it, it's not hard to calculate it. The hour saving, very simple calculation. So anybody who's concerned about ROI, it's so simple, it's so easy. You should be able to find it in your first year. If you're not finding it in your first year, I mean, obviously it grows, but if you're not finding some return in the first year, I would say, take a look at what you need to adjust, because it's not that hard. And your CFO, sorry, one more question if I may. And your CFO saw that, so okay, time savings, essentially, was the business result, but it wasn't necessarily, was it hard dollars or did your CFO say, ah, that's kind of soft dollars? We have both hard and soft, and yeah, we would never put a dollar sign next to something that doesn't hit the income statement, so very careful about that. But yeah, it's both, because sometimes somebody actually changed their group first and they're feeling the process pain after. And so the healing of automating something so that just the two people can do it, we've seen that use case as well. It's harder to capture any savings because it's not really savings there, but it's more of a job satisfaction. So there's a lot of soft benefits that go with it, but we don't usually, you know, commit the, turn that into dollars. It's not very valuable. But those employees that are far more productive are eventually helping the customers be more productive as well. I think they're directly linked. Well, you said you found ROI quickly, and that's something that UIPath says about itself, that customers are generally achieving an ROI of a break even within months alone. So when you talk to other professionals in oil and gas, how do you talk to them about automation being really a critical driver of that business's success and transformation? I think in large enterprises, whether they're in our sector or not, some of them just struggle with the sheer scale. It's almost like, where do I start? So they do see the value, but it's more about how do I start this thing? How do I scale this thing? How do I structure a program? I have not found anyone that says I don't believe the value proposition. Again, it's pretty easy to see. And the RPA, POC started after cloud, right? So that was, am I right about that? It was 18, 19 time frame? I would say actually starting around the same time. The POCs were done in 2017, so yeah. Okay, and so, was there anything specific in your industry that you targeted? I mean, you obviously wanted to hit the high value items first. Was there anything particular there? That's a really good question. I think our journey looks like other companies, kind of they start with the back office. Those are the easiest processes for people to understand in just terms of where do I have a heavy manual load? So some of our first work was with finance in currency conversion. So pretty manual intensive for a global company. Pretty big deal, lots of immediate value. But if you think of, let's talk about wells. So we have systems for mapping wells, drilling wells. You'd be surprised. Some of those systems look kind of like your ERPs. They have kind of the same challenges. So as we extend outside of traditional kind of HR, finance, audit practices into the rest of our business, the use cases are similar. I've got disparate documents. I have systems that don't talk to each other well. I have somebody who, and we have a lot of partners. So if you're in a project with five partners and everybody's producing a different type of document or something, how do you make some sense out of that? So use cases like that we're finding in our upstream and downstream businesses also. And you did an RFP at the time? Wrote a bunch of vendors and ran them through the cycles? We did some comparisons, yeah, early on. Why UiPath? Strong user experience. So because this is primarily citizen enabled. And so that feedback, hey, could I learn this quickly? Was it easy to use? Those were really the most important things in selection. I mean, we always look at cost, that's important too. But also a company's position, so their ability to scale and grow. There's a lot of people in this market because of the interest in automation. So part of it is also understanding the strength of the company behind as well. One of the things that was mentioned in the keynote this morning, I think it was a stat from Gartner that in 2016, there was about 2% of automatable processes were automated. Fast forward now, it's about 25%. There's still a tremendous amount of potential for organizations in any industry to deploy automation. You've said you've got about 300 plus automations so far. What are some of the things that are coming next that you can share? What is our upside or where do we stop or our growth taper off? Where are you going? I don't think we know. We get so much from our user community in terms of what can we do now. They're so empowered. So I wouldn't want to set limits on ourselves in terms of what we can do. But certainly we're looking at text analytics, really how do we manage that document? How do we extract that data, use models to get that into our data lake? But there's still always the work of finding still that last mile of process. There's many parts of our business still untouched. And so we don't want to let up on that. That's still important to go after all of that and keep the programs going. Chevron, huge company, and you've got probably one of everything that's ever been invented in technology. We're seeing a trend where a lot of these software companies are embedding RPA into their platforms. You're seeing with the ERP vendors, acquisitions being made for service management, big cloud guys have some, on and on and on. And so how do you think about those sort of vertically integrated stacks versus what you're doing with UiPath? So for me, I think of them the same as a code extension. So because that was more popular a few years ago on those big platforms, and you're right, we have one of everything. But it's important to, when you think of investment and ROI, where do we actually spend money? It's in maintaining the capability, keeping the programs, doing the training. That's an investment. And so when someone comes to me and says, can you support some other tool? I usually say, maybe not, is there a business case for that? Because we want to be able to deploy to the whole enterprise. That isn't to say that somebody who's got a workflow that stays within that platform, that that might be an appropriate use for them. But I'm very sure it's not an appropriate use to extend it out of that platform somewhere else. And so we draw the line, really, what do we, enterprise automation? We want to be very careful about the tools we use for that. And the reason for that is not just security, reliability, and the ability to scale those programs. Because when someone calls me and says, my stuff doesn't scale, it's like, ours does. And so, but the org capability investment is also, it's not small. So if you're going to believe in this, you have to keep feeding it. You have to keep training new people, bringing them on. And so you can't really do that across 12 platforms. Right. You're creating your own flywheel, and that's how you can accelerate ROI, right? Correct. Although, you know, the citizen developers are driving the wheel for sure. You, as in Chevron, I mean. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not Vicki, Inc. Vicki, thank you so much. We are out of time. Thanks for stopping by talking to us about automation in a large global enterprise at Chevron. I won't look at Chevron the same. Again, now I know how forward-thinking they are and how much they are embracing technology. We appreciate your time. It's been my pleasure. Thank you both. Thank you. All right. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, at UiPath Forward 4. We'll be right back.