 The Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to theCUBE live at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are with UiPath at Forward 4. The next topic of conversation is going to be a good one and that's because it's automation for good. I've got two guests here joining Dave and me. James Dreskowski, strategic account exec at UiPath joins us and Brian Klatschkoff, head of automation at Densu. Guys, welcome to the program. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us. So we're going to dig into automation for good, which is going to be a really feel good conversation. We're going to get into what you're doing. But Brian, I wanted you to give the audience an overview of Densu as an organization. Who are you? What do you guys do? Sure, so Densu is a large network of advertising agencies for about 45,000 people large, 10 billion plus in revenue, going across about 125 markets. So we're a large enterprise advertising media, creative, CXM type business. We're really focused on helping to elevate our client's value when it comes to their value proposition around marketing, advertising, and media. So you think about that as a business that maybe it's hard to understand where automation might fit in. On the other hand, it's like a lot of moving parts, a lot of arms and legs. So how are you applying automation to the business? Sure, so when we first started doing proof of concepts level approaches, we approached things in a traditional, hey, let's go look at the shared services groups, why are we having invoice processing delays, things like that. And we started being a bit more prescriptive and proactive about how we were applying the limited POC budget we had to go after these problems. And we started doing some root cause analysis to understand the interaction between the back office functions and the mid office functions. And what we uncovered was that we could actually be really good custodians of budget and enable people at the same time by solving for problems at a root cause analysis level. So what I mean by that is maybe an invoice is coming down the pipe and it's not getting processed because it's missing critical information that could be easily added six processes upstream. So what really helped elevate the conversation that we're having around automation for good and be a catalyst for what we're gonna talk about a bit later is we just started connecting people from the mid office to the back office helping them understand, hey, if we actually follow process properly, put the right controls in place with our PA to generate critical data elements on those invoices, Shayler in the back office doesn't have to work through weekends because there's not a pipeline back load of invoices from the process. So we actually connected those mid office people with the back office people and it really drove that human connection to drive the change management within our automation journey. And that's kind of been the crux of what we've wanted to do over the past four years finding ways to elevate our people's potential by integrating automation and AI into their actual day to day work. So tech for good is a theme that you hear a lot and as a media company that kind of, we're not gotcha media, you know, we more want to tell the story of tech athletes and I think we've done a pretty good job over that over the past decade, but so techs under fire constantly, it was basically big tech, we hear Facebook hearings today and so forth, but so automation kind of early days, oh, you're going to take away my job. I think generally speaking with the fatigue of Zoom and the perpetual work day, people begin to understand that, hey, maybe automation is a good thing, but automation for good, what is that James? Yeah, well, it's not doing technology for the sake of technology. You know, at the end of the day, when we implement solutions with our customers like Densu, it's about what's the impact, what's the change, what's the benefit and what's unique about Densu is because they've grown through requisition and there are lots of different companies come together, you have to focus on the people first because there is no one process or one system that we can look and just automate that system or process, so automation for good is about focusing on the people and how do we take the solutions and the programs and the technologies we have and make an impact so that somebody's day is better, their job is better, the process they're doing is easier and they can focus on more of the things that make them different. Specifically, as we'll uncover in the conversation, we looked at a program that Densu is doing around working with different types of people as far as people with autism and what was the impact we could do there and that's uncovered a journey that we've been together for the last two years around seeing how we can make an impact with those types of folks who might not get the same types of opportunities as everybody else. Brian, talk about the catalyst for that program at Densu a couple years ago. Sure, so it goes back to that foundational layer of elevating people's potential. So the testimonial that we had from our own employees around applying automation and meaningful ways to progress their day to day came from an employee in the mid-office who said, I didn't go $160,000 in student debt to copy-paste stuff from Excel into this proprietary platform that we use for media and that really resonated with us as leaders in this space and with our executive leadership because there was a gap between what our people's skills were and what they were actually doing. They wanted to do mad men type stuff. They wanted to be the Don Drapers and the Peggy Olsons of our industry and they were losing that opportunity because we weren't tapping into the skills that they had to drive human-centric solutions for our clients. So taking that concept, we looked at the partnerships that we have with our outsourcing providers and Autonomy Works, which we're gonna do in a session later tomorrow with the CEO, Dave Friedman. We're gonna spend a lot of time talking about how the unique skill sets of that company and those people can actually elevate them to do more tech-enabled work but also enabling our own team to focus on building solutions with the skills that we have by allowing them to use the skills that they have to do the machine learning training of models and things like that, which they really excel at from a detail-oriented perspective. And that's not only a feel-good story but it's great for our business because the resources on my immediate team are building product, they're building solutions and we can rely on an excellent partner in them to help us with the maintenance overhead that we're creating through those solutions and eventually through Automation Cloud driving better outcomes through positive, negative reinforcement within machine learning. And there's specific examples with individuals with autism, correct? Correct, that's right. That's some color to that, what is that all about? Yeah, let me tell you a little story. So when they first brought the conversation to me, I was terrified because the type of work that they were outsourcing was very repetitive, rule-based, and I'm like, this is perfect for Automate, this is exactly what we automate. I was terrified that the program we were going to work on together was going to eliminate the program. And so I was cautiously, you know, approached it. How ironic. I was like, oh yeah, that sounds like a great idea. And I hung up, I was like, oh, how are we going to figure out this one? But through the conversation, and we just started brainstorming and putting our heads together, what was interesting is because of the way that automations work, as far as being very structured and repetitive, it lends itself well to workers with autism, it's exactly the way they think. And what we actually found after kind of coming up with the collaborative ideas, hey, wait a second, we were already doing these kind of botathon hackathon type programs with the Densu employees, teaching them the skills how to build automations for themselves. What if we kind of modified it and adjusted it to cater to these types of individuals who learn differently, we have to approach it differently. And we went through the program, we adjusted everything. And what was incredible to see was they thrived with the ability to learn how to work this way. They built things that made them more productive, that created more capacity. They could do more with less now, work with more customers, do more work for their customers because they had this almost assistant that was kind of like them. And it was just so rewarding. We talk about, again, what's automation for good all about. It's about that personal reward. I mean, for me, we didn't sell any more licenses or it wasn't about the commercial transaction. It was about catering to the segment of the workforce that first of all, it was very educating, enlightening to me to see how many folks are out there that are unemployed. And I got to meet these first 15 individuals that couldn't have been more amazing and more smart and more diligent and hardworking. And the numbers are something in the lines of between 50 and 90% unemployed because they just don't get the same opportunities as people without autism. It's kind of the world set up for us. So to know that we could do this kind of program together to go have an impact in this community was the reward in and of itself. And we've since been working together on how we continue to expand that. How do we take that forward and bring that everywhere? Because that's the end of the day, I think, beyond revenue, this is the stuff that really matters, especially in an organization at Densu, that this is important. And I think building on the missed opportunity piece, around 50 to 90% being unemployed, that's a missed opportunity for business as well. So those skills are so niche and they're so necessary for us to thrive within an environment that's moving as rapidly as we are. Because we just can't keep pace with the change of feature sets that are being released coupled with maintaining existing solutions that we've built. So it's in cross enabling people to really compliment each other's unique skills and strengths based off of strong, true partnership. So it really became a beautiful three way partnership between Densu, autonomy works and UiPath that we continue to evolve as UiPath makes additional releases with emerging tech that we're especially hearing about right now. So we have a ton of different ideas that we can bring that into the fold and what resonates with us the most is hearing different perspectives on how to apply that coming from that working group. So just a different way of thinking about things and the diversity of thought really resonates with, hey, are we actually applying this thing the right way? Should we be thinking about this differently? Because you get a lot of yes people when we come and talk to people about how to apply this technology. And when you have somebody with a different perspective it's able to help us figure out what our long term strategy is actually going to look like but taking advantage of the resources and partnerships that we already have in place. In terms of that strategic vision how do you think this three way partnership that you mentioned is going to influence that percentage of those individuals who are unemployed? Any predictions on how much you can bring that down with automation? I think that depends on Dave's staffing plan. But the goal is to grow, right? So this is a startup out of Chicago that has a healthy amount of staff but finding ways to apply those skills in new ways with technology that's emerging. The horizon is your end point, right? And I think with the advent of low code, no code machine learning coming into this type of a platform it's only opportunistic. There's only things ahead of us to do that. We just have to make sure that we train people properly and give them that opportunity because they're going to run with it with the right leadership and those skills. Yeah, what's exciting also is what started as an idea and a conversation that's now turned into a pilot program and a little bit of expansion of the stuff we're working on together, we've taken some of the excitement and spread it beyond that now. So we've got partners like ENY and PwC and Reverture that are saying, and Special Eastern and Automatic who helped in the initial program saying, how can we help? What can we do? How can we broaden this? And how can we go out to the larger community and make a bigger impact? So I think it's exciting. We know we can see how fast RPA and these types of technologies are causing change. We got to make sure that people don't get left behind especially someone is this important part of a segment of a workforce. If we can equip them with these skills to be relevant to their current employers or future employers, I think it's critical. Another moment for me during this process was it took for granted what working actually means. It creates independence for us. So you get a job, you get paid and generate income. You have the independence now to go live on your own, provide for yourself. A lot of these individuals I learned are still living with their parents because they can't get employment. They don't have that independence that we take for granted. So I think, again, that's the essence of what Automation for Good is all about is being able to go make an impact like that to that community. And it's, we talk about cultures and brands and it's also great to work with an organization like Densu because they get it, right? Their product is ideas. It's human capital is their main ingredient of what they generate value for their customers. And so be able to take that and help people is just, I think, what it's all about. Well, you're lucky both to be in a business that the incentives are aligned. You're not in businesses that are designed to appropriate data and push ads in front of our face. And a lot of big companies, it's almost like, oh, okay, we got to do this. I don't mean to overstate this, but we have to do this because we're big and we're rich. And if we don't, we're going to get attacked. And it's not about like a check box and to put somebody in charge of it. Oftentimes a woman or a person of color and I shouldn't be negative on that. That's fine. That's good to do. But it just seems like there's a nice alignment with Automation. AI could be similar because, I mean, AI could be used for really bad automation. Okay, maybe takes the perception as it takes jobs away, but it's a really nice alignment that you can point at a lot of different initiatives. So I think that's really a fortune to see. That's what defines a partnership, right? It's that alignment of long-term interests that you make the investments now and the sacrifices now to drive that. It's not just commercial. It's not just transactional. We were talking about the opportunities for these types of people and for us as a customer and for UI path. It exists within that AI conversation that you were just talking about because from a technical perspective, you want to mitigate as much algorithmic bias within your training models. That's what these people are doing. It's helping to train models much more rapidly and effectively and objectively than we could have done otherwise. And that's having that as part of our extended partnership within our network is going to accelerate the type of work that we want to do within the releases that we're seeing coming out of this conference because we don't have to worry about, oh, well, we got to focus on tax forms and training the models to notice a signature because autonomy works has us covered there. They're enabling us to do more. We're enabling them to do a little more. And that's the beauty of this intersection between the partners. Brian, I presume you talk with prospective customers of UI paths and presume also that you probably looked at some of their competitors. If you think about what differentiates this fast-moving company, we talked this morning about the cadence of releases. Very fast. Yeah, it's a lot. Why UI path for Dense? UI path has been a tremendous partner for us since about 2017. And we've been able to move on that journey with UI path. We've been able to help understand the products roadmaps and move at a similar pace as each other. So we're really lucky in that we have the flexibility as an advertising and media company that we're not beholden to internal audits, external audits, and really defined regulatory bodies. So we made a decision six, seven months ago to collapse six UI path on-prem instances and migrate to cloud with the sponsorship of our global CTO and our AMER CTO just because it was the right thing to do. And because it enabled this type of partnership with external providers. So being able to move at that similar pace from a release cycle but also from a feature adoption perspective, it just makes the most sense for us. And we have that liberty to go do those things as we need to. Yeah, so the move to the cloud, you're able to take advantage much faster because what did we hear this morning? You release every six months. Which is a typical for an on-prem. And then, but you got to prepare for that. I don't know how many N minus ones you support, but it's not infinite. You got to move people along so people have to prep. Whereas now in the cloud, there's the feature, boom. Yeah, so being investing automation for good topic, it's about automation for good across people in general, within and internally to us and externally to us, for our clients, for our employees and for our partners. The automation cloud enables that to happen much more seamlessly because we don't have the technical debt in place that requires people to VPN into our network and go through the bureaucracy of security, legal and privacy, which we've already done by the way, but those conversations bureaucratically still need to happen with automation cloud. We're able to spin up autonomy works employees in real time and give them the right set of access to go pursue the use cases that they want to and that we need them to. So that technical debt release that we've experienced through the automation cloud is what's enabling us to do this type of good work. That makes sense. Less friction, obviously greater scale, easier to experiment, fail fast. We went from 12 separate programs to one program in a matter of a couple of months. It was wild. And I imagine you're only really scratching the surface here with what you're doing with automation that really the horizon is the limit, as you said. Guys, thank you for joining us, talking about automation for good, what you're doing at Denso RPA with Autistic Adults. There's probably so many other great use cases that will come from this. Guys, we appreciate your time. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thanks you guys. Awesome. For Dave Vellante, I'm Misa Martin coming to you from Vegas. UI path forward for.