 Hi everybody, welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Dave Vellante, and you're watching the Cube. Lisa Martin and Rebecca Knight are also in the house, but right now we have Daniel Dinez, the founder of UiPath Cube alum. Great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. Yeah, it's always exciting to be here with you, Dave. Yeah, right after the keynote this morning. I liked your style. It was very interesting the way you stood up. You started telling stories. Went back to the beginning. You stressed humility. Why is that important to you, to convey to large audience, three, four thousand people here, that being humble is fundamental to UiPath? Why is that important to convey? Well, I'm not saying we are humble, but what I am saying is that I realize that you need to think in terms of humility in your decision-making process, in approaching people, in listening to people. And it's more like a framework to me. Humility gives you a direction. And why it's important? Because I think like most people, I was not born with humility at all. In my 30s, actually I was pretty arrogant and unhappy. And I've seen actually how our competitors lost in front of us, a very small company, because they were kind of arrogant with customers. And customers in the end said, okay, let's work with the other guys that are not. They are more flexible, open, and they listen to us. So this is how I realize this is a big tenet of our culture. And actually it's an interesting story. I and the other co-founders, we were talking quite a lot. How can we define our culture? And we went through different propositions. Like we like to be open, we like to have joy working together, and we are kind, we have kinder. But in the end, I had this epiphany. I have to define it by one single word. I need to simplify. And then it came humility to me. But it's more in opposition to be arrogant. It's the capacity of listening to other capacity of changing your mind, be flexible, move fast, understand what's in front of you, make decision fast, change decision fast. So it gave us really a very good framework. And it allows you to attract people like minded. And being bold is part of that framework. Yes. So it's not humility and timidity. It's humility, but make decisions fast, be bold, take risks. Yeah, I think actually they go very well hand in hand. And there's many people associate humility with being submissive. But on the contrary, humility, it's a treat that gives you clarity and gives you a lot more information that you can use in a bold way. So I think that's actually the best combo. So I hear another story in your keynote, which I never knew and it blew me away. And I tweeted this out. It's a story of your start. You were in Singapore and you rightly said on stage, when you do business in Japan, you got to be face to face. Now, I know from experience, it usually takes five or six, sometimes more, face to face meetings in Japan before they even begin to trust you and give you an opportunity. But you decided to reroute to Japan. And actually the bottom line of the story is you ended up closing a deal with the financial institution SMBC, which is Sumitomo Bank, I guess. In Japan, and that experience led you to win in the financial services market in New York. I've never heard a story like that for a non-Japanese company that's unprecedented. Yeah, that's true and unprecedented in a way. It's not like we planned it, it was just good timing. Yeah, but still. We were like kids, so we were joking. We are like Gingis Khan hordes, like the Golden Horde. We spread around the world and it was a big interest from customers around the RPA. So many people were interested in talking to us and we went after the people that we had chemistry with. So we were lucky to get SMBC and it's not only the institution per se, but it's the people inside. And also, Hasegawa-san, that I met just a few months before expanding into Japan was instrumental for our presence there. And he's a very non-typical Japanese in the way he approaches things. He's very open, he's candid. He also, he was CIO of major banks. He spent, you know, like four, five years in New York. He's very international. And we clicked very well and then he made the connections. So first of all, the SMBC trusted him. He trusted me and Yawoto-san after we met a few times started to trust us as a company. And really in the beginning, we never asked them for money. So I think in the first six months or so, they just use the, you know, kind of all our services, all our software, it was basically free. So it was an intense focus, but it paid off very handsomely in just one year after that. An interesting lesson you give without the expectation necessarily of anything in return because it feels right and then you learn and take those learnings and then you scale the company. But it sounds like you were just having fun coding with your friends early on. Was it ever your intention to build a big company? No, no, honestly, my intention was to kind of find my freedom. And I was very lucky. Nobody came to me 10 years ago and say, then you'll take like one to million dollars for this company. I would have said yes. Well, I'm glad you didn't. Yeah, I'm glad I didn't. The cube is glad you didn't, too. I'm glad nobody came, yeah. Okay, I want to get into the product a little bit, going from studio to orchestrator to platform. Explain the importance to our audience of having a platform and how that's fundamentally changed your market opportunity. Look, when I realize how big is the problem that we address, I also realize RPA and UI automation, it's one way to skin the cat. But you also need to have API because you will call, and most of our automations are a mix of API calls and UI automation calls. And then you need to understand documents because many processes come with some sort of document. They start with the document, or they are document centering. To put this together, you kind of make a platform. It's not the one product. There are three distinct technologies that you have to make together. So that was the decision that led us to build a platform. And then we added the discovery piece and think about process mining. It's not so obvious why it should be part of the platform. But right now when we work to integrate everything together, process mining is going to be a central technology to see life, all the processes in an enterprise. Those that are automated, but also the manual processes, the system processes. I never thought process mining was a market per se. I always thought it was a capability that would enable business value to be created. But in and of itself, it's important, especially when so many processes are being documented manually. I know I've worked with a lot of financial services companies and they would have big binders of process. A person who was responsible for documenting them, that's crazy and that's changed. But is it actually a market or is it just part of the platform? Well, for some companies it is a market, clearly. But for us, it's definitely part of the platform. I think we very rarely sell process mining in itself as a separate product. I think the combination of mining processes, understanding where there are bottlenecks and automating them and this making this cycle over and over again, it's very powerful. And then so you shared a demo today, which essentially was quite remarkable. It took many of the things that you were just talking about, put them together in a natural language type of interface. And you mentioned semantic automation, something that you talked about several years ago, I think, but now it's coming to life. Explain what that is and I have a number of questions around it. As a, first of all, automations don't really understand what they do. They just do. They just do. So it was kind of an aha moment for us when we say, what if automation can actually understand what they do? They will be much more powerful. In the sense, when they stop working for some reasons, if they understand what they do, actually they can adapt. So they become way more like humans, emulating much better humans if they understand what they do. So this is, we started to work on bringing understanding to automations. And the first process that we put our eye on was this repetitive copy-paste that people have. If you think in BPO industry, it's a lot of, you know, take a document, copy 10, 20 fields, put them into an ex-self spreadsheet, do some changes to the data and then put it into another. So I thought we go to the core of the issue with the clip or that. But it was a great kind of work. Before that, we couldn't look at the screen like an application and ask what's on the screen to really understand. To really understand the concept. It's first name, it's last name, it's address. Now we understand. Someone doesn't have to go on code, copy first name into this field, which represent first name. Right now they just say take this data and we look at the data, we understand what is the data about and copy into this screen and we understand the screen, we understand the meaning of it. So this is why we are capable at first view without even coding anything to match them. And this is actually the foundation technology for our autopilot that we have introduced yesterday in the keynote of Graham. I thought it was hilarious in the analyst meeting yesterday. Somebody asked you about the name and we laughed about it because he said others use co-pilot, autopilot, and your answer was it's marketing. It's automation pilot. Yeah, that's yeah. Or in a car, it felt good to all of us. Yeah, of course it works. But back to the semantic automation. So you've got all this combination of unstructured data and structured data and their disparate data elements. You're making sense of them, making them coherent. Yes. And I guess essentially turning them into structured data, is that correct? And then being able to do it. Yeah, I think that's a great way of putting it. And they have some patterns around it and basically exactly how we felt when you read the screen and you understand, screens are more structured than most documents in a way. So we read the screen, we understand the structure of data and then we go to an unstructured format and we apply this structure and ask basically, give me the information in this form. This is why it works. Even if you think like we've charged GPT, it works very well if I go to a document and say, give me this type of information. Give me the account number. Give me if there is a liability or not. But it's important to know what to ask. Right. So we understand what to ask by reading the screens. And you're applying AI to achieve that. I mean, you guys were doing AI for a while. Everybody says that, but it's true. You bought re-infer natural language processing company before a GPD. We do, yeah, we do AI for a long time. And communication mining was based on transformers which is the same technology. Okay, so you're applying AI to solve these problems. Are you an AI company? And just don't want to say it because it's kind of AI washing. I think we kind of been for a long time. We have huge investments in document understanding. We've been a specialized AI company if I want to be more precise about it. And now with the addition of generative AI we've become a more general AI type of company. So thinking about the potential of UI path in the future, it seems to me that you have an opportunity and I love your thoughts on this. Actually, let me back up. There's a very few handful of examples. I'm going to throw a crazy one at you. Steve Jobs, Tesla, Elon Musk, and even Larry Ellison. They put together hardware and software in a way. He was the iPhone, right? The software car. And even Larry Ellison with his integrated systems. I don't know how closely you follow that, but it's true, they have hardware and software very tightly integrated. Is there an opportunity, vision now, to have an AI machine where you take your software robots and actually bring it to the physical world? And what struck me is the semantic automation. You've got people, places, and things. You've got a digital representation of my business. It's almost like Uber for the enterprise. Is that technically feasible? Is it a crazy idea? What do you think about that? I think we explore it for some while. But it's always a little bit on the back of my mind. For instance, we have a customer in Germany that builds robotic arms. And they use our technology not to control the arms, more in finance. But then I talk to them, what about if we use automation to control the arm? So it's possible, I think. I'm not sure it's going to be our focus. But I've seen other customers want to talk to a customer in Dubai, so they operate the largest port there. So they wanted AI to control the joystick that takes containers and put them into the docking areas. It's also possible, and they use kind of a screen and with the joystick. So probably we can train right now using computer vision. But they are far-fetched somehow. We have a lot to work on the business process. I understand you have to be focused. And you got a lot of work to do there. I just thinking ahead 10, 20 years, I think the AI is going to, I already can, mow my lawn and vacuum my floor. It already happens. It doesn't do such a great job, but it will. It will, it will do much better. And it's going to dramatically change our lives. Yeah. So I feel like you've got technology that actually could. Yeah, I think, you know, I said something in my keynote that people overestimate what you can do in one year, but underestimate. I think this is way overestimate we can do with AI right now. And I think the expectations people will be, will not be fulfilled. But in 10 years, I think we will see the iPhone moment of AI. How are you liking the new role, relatively new role, I mean the more focused role on product with Rob, kind of dealing with the go to market. How's that working? How are you guys getting along? Do you ever fight? No, actually not at all. Maybe it's a little bit concerning for me. Yeah, exactly. But we've never been into a fight and it seems to agree on everything very fast. I think it's really, it's working quite well. When you find the right partner, I think things move very fast. And I think both of us have the space to move, at, you know, where we are at best. So I feel really positive in our collaboration. I feel kind of happy doing the stuff that I love. Yeah, you seem happy. Oh, thank you. Yeah, so, and it's good. And Rob's doing a good job. He seems like he's, he's doing a much better job that I could have done ever. He's got the skill set that perhaps compliments, you know, yours very nicely. So the other thing that strikes me about forward, I've been to a number, I think we've been at every forward, except the first one. Sorry we missed that. But, well, it was a very interesting one in New York. Small, in a small, yeah. It was an avenue for like 400 people but we had like 700 subscribers. So I don't know exactly how we did it with fire regulation. Yeah, the fire marshal must have been stressed out. Yeah, they have been. But everyone I've been to, you try to put customer stories first and everybody says that uniquely. And I think you might have done this before but you launched the conference with three customer stories, short ones. Not big, long, drawn out case studies but just it was very artistic and dramatic. You know, if you didn't see it, lights went on and you had a customer and then went to another one and yeah, exactly. But I like that style because it says you want to put customers first and tell that story. Most of the content here is customer. I know many companies say they put customer first but it's not so easy to leave it. Because customers are a lot of time picky, they are demanding that. You need to build a muscle to have the empathy for customer. And for me it was very hard to build this muscle into our development area of the company. I literally had to go and tell them why do you feel you are smarter than the customer? Are you using the software at home? Are you putting your career in line and you don't want to fix a bug that destroy this guy there, destroy their processes? How come? You are used to think that you can prioritize better. So this is how I got to them and they realized that. Look, maybe it's, I'm also working with this big Japanese client help. I think they had a little more some kind of respect towards so they, it came a little bit more natural. Oh, if you could. To not disappoint the Japanese customer. Somehow it was kind of interesting to see people, some of their culture kind of transpires somehow. And people got a little bit more, I think polite when they talk to Japanese people, right? It's true, yeah, because they're so polite in return. But it's like, you know the saying, if you can make it there, you make it anywhere. The song, you know, Frank Sinatra, New York City. It's actually, if you can make it in Tokyo, you can make it anywhere. We prove it's right, yes. I want to ask you about your aspirations for UiPath. It's so challenging to build a company, multi-billion dollar company. It's intense. Things never go perfectly, right? And so you have to respond and address very difficult. You can't control the market. Things happen in the world, geopolitics. What in your mind, how do you envision UiPath in the future? She said, we sometimes under, we don't accurately forecast the future, but we maybe overhype the early part. What in your mind do you want UiPath to be? Do you want it to be one of the next great software companies, and what do you have to do to achieve that and stay independent? I think we are kind of really on the path to stay independent, because we achieve the size, that we have some kind of velocity. And we are, even in this market, it's a big price for someone to acquire UiPath, so I'm not seeing it happening, honestly. And I don't want this. No, good. It kills innovation. Yeah, I really want to stay independent, so I enjoy a lot what I am doing. But, and I feel that with our touch of customers, with our understanding of business processes, we are in a really good position to build the next generation foundational models that can become this first, maybe digital companions for our customers, and then eventually we'll start to orchestrate business processes and do them completely autonomously. As an AI company, we kind of agree that you're a very specialized AI company. We saw, just in June we were out here, when we covered the Snowflake conference and the Databricks conference, I don't know how closely you follow those companies, but Snowflake bought a company called Neva. I don't know what they paid, but Databricks bought a company called Mosaic ML. The print number was, I think... Well, then one billion, I think. It was over three, I think, but it was at their lower valuation, so it was really like one and a half, 1.7. And I remember I was talking to Frank Slutman about this, and I said, these markets pretty hot. I mean, you guys are paying a lot of money for this. He said, it's the talent. Yeah. The talent is so valuable. It's worth picking these companies up. And it's obviously got to be a strategic fit. My question for you is, how are you able to attract that talent? Do you worry about the lack of talent in AI, or do you happen to have that because it's sort of your heritage? Well, I think we have a really solid talent in AI. I also think about what's our acquisition of green for a communication mining. We really have great talent from a hub, which is UCL in London. Before the hype, by the way. Before the hype. Yeah, for sure. And look at the way we solve one of the hardest problems ever. Think about it, to create AI that can use a computer like a human user. So basically just ask that AI do something and you describe that something and that AI will use a computer like an assistant, like a human user. And it's one of the hardest problems out there. People are very interested in helping, in working on this problem. Was that NDA? What, iPass? Okay, can we talk about that? I was sure. I stumbled into the meeting. I wasn't sure if it was... I think it's not... Is there something you guys talk about? We are kind of part of... We play in iPass, but not that we compete head to head with the established player, like Boomi or Musso. You're not trying to beat them. No, no, but we play already in iPass in the niche that is about using API to automate the process. And it's becoming actually a bigger niche. And iPass, I think at this point, it's a huge category that encompass many things. But this one, API automation that's part of iPass, I think we have quite a good story there. If it's an independent category, if we try to play in analysts, iPass, this is not important for me. What's important is that our customers knows when they go to automate a process, UIPAP has world-class RPA, world-class API, world-class AI. This is the message that I want to convey. To me, it's like process mining. It's not a market for you. It is, exactly. It's not a market. It's a capability that allows you to add more value for your customers. And of course, if the value is there, that'll increase. It's a good way of putting it, yes. Okay, I got to go. I got to go. Fantastic, don't get up because you don't want this out. Thank you so much. Great to see you. Yeah, good stuff. Okay, keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from UIPath. Forward six from the MGM in Las Vegas. Right back.