 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Day one of UiPath, UiPath Forward Three. Hashtag UiPath Forward. Elena Christopher is here. She's a Senior Vice President at HFS Research. And Elena, I'm going to recruit you to be my co-host here. And this is this power panel. So, Jean Younger's here, CUBE alum VP of Six Sigma, Six Sigma leader at Security Benefit. Great to see you again. And Amy Chandler, who's the Assistant Vice President and Director of Internal Controls also from Security Benefit. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. All right, Elena, let's start off with you. You follow this market, you have for some time, you know, HFS is sort of anointed as formulating, you know, this marketplace, right? You guys were early on. The voice of the automation industry. What are you seeing? I mean, process automation's been around forever. RPA is hot, recent tremble. What are you seeing in the last year or two? What are the big trends and rip currents that you see in the marketplace? I mean, I think one of the big trends that's out there, I mean, RPA has come onto the scene. I like how you phrase it, Dave, because you refer to it as rightly so. Automation is not new. And so we sort of say the big question out there is, RPA just flavor of the month. RPA is definitely not. And I come from a firm, we put out a blog earlier this year called RPA is Dead Long Live Automation. And that's because when we look at RPA and when we think about what its impact is in the marketplace, to us, the whole point of automation in any form, regardless of whether it's RPA, whether it be good old school BPM, whatever it may be, its mission is to drive transformation. And so the HFS perspective and what all of our research shows and sort of justifies that the goal is, what everyone is striving towards is to get to that transformation. And so the reason we put out that piece, the RPA is Dead Long Live Integrated Automation Platforms, is to make the point that if you're not, because what does RPA allow? It affords an opportunity for change to drive transformation. So if you are not actually looking at your processes within your company and taking this opportunity to say what can I change? What processes are just bad and we've been doing them? I'm not even sure why for so long. What can we transform? What can we optimize? What can we invent? If you're not taking that opportunity as an enterprise to truly embrace the change and move towards transformation, that's a missed opportunity. So I always say RPA, you can kind of couch it as one of many technologies, but what RPA has really done for the marketplace today, it's given business users and business leaders the realization that they can have a role in their own transformation. And that's one of the reasons why it's actually become very important. But a single tool in its own right will never be the holistic answer. So Jane, Elena's bringing up a point about transformation. We, Stu Minim and I interviewed you last year and we've played those clips a number of times where you sort of were explaining to us that it didn't make sense before RPA to try to drive six-sigma into business processes, just couldn't get the return. Now you can do it very cheaply. And for six-sigma or better is what you use for airplane engines, right? So now you're bringing that to business process. So you're a year in, how's it going? What kind of results are you seeing? Is it meeting your expectations? It's been wonderful. It has been the best. It's been probably the most fun I've had in the last 15 years of work. I have enjoyed partly because I get to work with this great person here and she's my COE and helps stand up the whole RPA solution. But we have gone from finance into investment operations, into operations. We've got one sitting right now that we're going to be looking at statements that it's going to be 14,000 hours out of both time out as well as staff hours saved. And it's going to touch our customer directly that they're not going to get a bad statement anymore. And so it has just been an incredible journey for us over the past year. It really has. It's okay, Amy. Your role is, you're the hardcore practitioner here, right? That's right. You run the COE. Tell us more about your role. And I'm really interested in how you're bringing it out, RPA to the organization. Is that led by your team or is it kind of this top-down approach? Yeah, this last year we spent a lot of time trying to educate the lower levels and go from a bottom-up perspective. Pretty much we implemented our infrastructure. We had a nice solid change management process. We built in logical access. We built in good processes around that so that we'd be able to scale easily over this last year. So, which kind of sets us up for next year and everything that we want to accomplish then. So, Laina, we were talking earlier on theCUBE about, you know, RPA in many ways is, I call the cleaning up the crime scene, where stuff is kind of really sort of a mass and huge opportunities to improve. So, my question to you is, it seems like RPA is, in some regards, successful because you can drop it into existing processes. You're not changing things. But in a way, this concerns that, oh well, I'm just kind of paving the cow path. So, how much process reinvention should have to occur in order to take advantage of RPA? So, and I love that you use that phrase paving the cow path as a New Englander. It's, you know the roads in Boston are, in fact, paved cow paths. So, it's, we know that that can lead to some dodgy roads. And that's part of, and I say it, because that's part of what the answer is. Because the reinvention, and honestly, the optimization has to be part of what the answer is. I said it just a little bit earlier in my comments. You're missing an opportunity with RPA and broader automation. If you don't take that step to actually look at your processes and figure out if there's, I mean, just essentially dead wood that you need to get rid of, things that need to be improved. One of the sort of the guidelines, because not all processes are created equal, because you don't want to spend the time and effort, and you guys should chime in on this. You don't want to spend the time and effort to optimize a process. If it's not critical to your business, if you're not going to get lift from it, or from some ROI, it's a bit of a continuum. So, one of the things that I always encourage enterprises to think about is this idea of, well, what's the, obviously what business problem are you trying to solve? But as you're going through the process optimization, what kind of user experience do you want out of this? And your users, by the way, they don't, you tend to think of your user as it could be your end customer, it could be your employee, it could even be your partner. But trying to figure out what the experience is that you actually want to have, and then you can actually then look at the process and figure out, do we need to do something different? Do we need to do something completely new to actually optimize that? And then again, line it with what you're trying to solve and what kind of lift you want to get from it. But I'd love to, I mean, popping over to you guys, you live and breathe this, right? And so I know I think you have a slightly different opinion than me, but. We do live and breathe it, and every process we look at, we take the consideration, but you've also got to, you have a continuum, right? If it's a simple process, and we can put it up very quickly, we do. I mean, it's, but we've also got ones where one process will come into us and a perfect example is our rate changes. It came in and there was one process at the very end and they ended up, we did a wing to wing of the whole thing, followed the data all the way back through the process, and I think it hit, what, seven or eight different areas of the business. And once we got done with that whole wing to wing to see what we could optimize, it turned into, what? 60? Yeah, 60 plus, yeah. 60 plus what? Spot processes from one entry. So right now we've got 189 to 200 processes in the backlog, and so if you take that and exponentially increase it, we know that there's probably actually a thousand to 2,000 more processes at the minimum that we can hit by the company and we need to look at those. Yeah, and I will say the wing to wing approach is very important because you're following the data as it's moving along, so if you don't do that, if you only focus on a small little piece of it, you don't know what's happening to the data before it gets to you and you don't know what's going to happen to it when it leaves you, so you really do have to take that wing to wing approach. So your internal controls is in your title. So we're talking about scale, it's a big theme here, my path, and these days things scale really fast and booboos can happen really fast, so how are you ensuring that the edicts of the organization are met, whether it's security, compliance, governance, is that part of your role? Yeah, we've actually kept internal audit and internal controls and in fact, our external auditors, EY, we've kept them all at the table when we've gone through processes, when we've built out our change management process, our logical access, when we built our whole process from beginning to end, they kind of sat at the table with us and kind of went over everything to make sure that we were hitting all the controls that we needed to do. And actually, I'd like to piggyback on that comment because just that inclusion of the various roles, that's what we found is an emerging best practice and all of our research and all of the qualitative conversations that we have with enterprises and service providers is because if you do things, I mean, it applies on multiple levels because if you do things in a silo, you'll have siloed impact. If you bring the appropriate constituents to the table, you're going to understand their perspective but it's going to have broader reach. So it helps alleviate the silos but it also supports the point that you just made, Amy, about looking at the processes end to end because you've got the necessary constituents involved. So you know the context and then I believe, I mean, I think you guys shared this with me that particularly when audits involved, they actually are perhaps helping cultivate an understanding of how even their processes can improve as well. That is true. And from an overall standpoint with controls, I think a lot of people don't realize that a huge benefit is your controls because if you're automating your controls, you know, from an internal standpoint, you're not going to have to test as much from just an associate, a process owner, paying attention to their process, to the internal auditors, they're not going to have to test as much either. And then your external auditors, which that's revenue. I mean, that's savings. You lower your auditing goal? Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll see, right? Yeah. That's always the hope. That's how you want it. Yeah. So, I got to ask you, so you're a year in, a little over a year in, right? So if you had a golf, you know, mulligan and golf, if you had a mulligan, you'd do over, what would you do over? The first process we put in place, at least for me, it breaks a lot. And we did it because at the time, we were going through decoupling and trying to just get something up to make sure that what we stood up was going to work and everything. And so we kind of slammed it in. And we pay for that every quarter. And so actually it's on our list to redo. We automated a bad process. Yeah. We automated a bad product early on. So we pay for it in maintenance. Every quarter, we pay for it, because it breaks inevitably. Yes. Okay, so what has to happen? You have to reinvent the process to the latest? Yes, we're, you know, we relied on a process that somebody else had put in place. And in looking at it, it was kind of a up and down and through the hoop and around this way to get what they needed. And, you know, there's much easier ways to get the data now. And that's what we're doing. In fact, we've built our own, we call it a bot mark. That's where all our data goes. They won't let us touch the other data marts and so forth. So they created us a bot mark. And anything that we need data for, they dump in there for us. And then that's where our bot can hit. And our bot can hit it at any time of the day or night when we need the data. And so it's worked out really, it's worked out really well for us. And so that kind of, the bot mark kind of came out of that project of, you know, there's got to be a better way. How can we do this better instead of relying on these systems that change and upgrade. And then we run the bot and it's working one day and the next day somebody has gone in and tweaked something. And when also I really need out of that system is data. That's all I need. I don't need, you know, a report. I don't need anything like that because the reports change and they get messed up. I just want the raw data. And so that's what we're starting to do. How do you ensure that the data is synchronized with your other marks and warehouses and is that a problem? No, not yet. No, not yet. I'm wondering, because I was thinking the exact same question, Dave, because on one hand it's a nice, I think, step from a governance standpoint. You have what you need, perhaps IT or whoever your data curators are. They're not going to have a heart attack that you're touching stuff that they don't want you to. But then there is that potential for synchronization issues. Because that whole concept of golden source implies one copy, if you will. Well, and it is. It's all coming through. We have a central data repository that the data's going to come through and it's all sitting there and then it'll move over. And, you know, to me, what I most worry about, like I mentioned on the statement ones, okay, I get my data in. Is it the same data that got used to create those statements? And as we're doing the testing and as we're looking at going live, that's one of our huge test cases. We need to understand what time that data comes in. When will it be into our bot mark? So when can I run those bots? You know, cause they're all going to be unattended on those. And so, you know, the timing is critical. And so that's why I said not yet. But- Which you want to know what, we can build the bot to do that compare of the data for us. Ha ha. So we can ensure. I saw a stat the other day, I don't know where it was on Twitter, or maybe it was your data, that more money, buy on it or whatever, 2023 is going to be spent on chatbots than mobile development. I can imagine, yes. You guys, what are you doing with chatbots and how are you using them? Do you want to answer that when you want to? Okay, so part of the reason I'm so enthralled by the chatbot or personal assistant or anything is because the unattended robots that we have, we have problems making sure that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing in prep. We have some in finance. And you know, finance, you have a very fine line of what you can automate and what you need the user to still understand what they're doing, right? And so we felt like we had a really good, you know, combination of that. But in some instances they forget to do things so things aren't there. We get the phone call, the bot broke, right? So part of the thing I'd like to do is I'd like to move that back to an unattended bot and I'm going to put a chatbot in front of it and then all they have to do is type in run my bot and it'll come up, if they have more than one bot, it'll say which one do you want to run? They'll click it and it'll go. Instead of having to go out on their machine, figure out where to go, figure out which button to do and in the chat I can also send them a little message. Did you run your other reports? Did you do this? You know, so I can use it for the end user to make that experience for them better. And plus we've got a lot of IT, we've got a lot of HR stuff that can fold into that and then RPA will be in behind it, kind of the engine on a lot of it. So you've child-proofed the bot. Exactly, there you go, there you go. And it also provides a means to be able to answer those commonly asked questions for like HR, for example. You know, how much vacation time do I have? When can I change my benefits? Examples of those that they answer like frequently every day. So it gives, you know, that provides another avenue for utilization of the chat bot. And if I may, Dave, it sort of, it supports a concept that I know we were talking about yesterday. We call it HFS, it's our AAA trifecta, but it's taking the baseline of automation, it intersects with components of AI and then potentially with analytics. This is starting to touch on some of the opportunities to look at other technologies. You say chat bots, at HFS we don't use the term chat bot just because we like to focus and emphasize the cognitive capability, if you will. But in any case, you guys essentially are saying, well, RPA is doing great for what we're using RPA for, but we need a little bit of extension of functionality. So we're layering in the chat bot or cognitive assistance. So it's a nice example of some of that extension of really seeing how it's, I always call it, it's also the power of and, if you will, how you're going to layer these things in to get what you need out of it, what best solves your business problems. Just a very practical approach, I think. So Lena, Guy has a session tomorrow on prediction, so we're going to end with some predictions. So our RPA is dead, will it be resuscitated? What's the future of RPA look like? Will it live up to the hype? I mean, so many initiatives in our industry haven't. I always criticize enterprise data warehousing and ETL and Hadoop and big data as not living up to the hype. Will RPA? It's got to have a hell of a lot of hype to live up to, I'll tell you that. I mean, back to some of our causality about why we even said it's dead. As a discrete software category, RPA is clearly not dead at all, but unless it's helping to drive forward with transformation and even some of the strategies that these fine ladies from security benefit are utilizing, which is layering in additional technology, that's part of the path there. But honestly, the biggest challenge that you have to go through to get there is and cannot be underestimated is the change that your organization has to go through. Because think about it, if we look at the grand big vision of where RPA and broader intelligent automation takes us, the concept of creating a hybrid workforce, right? So what's a hybrid workforce? Is literally our humans complemented by digital workers. So it still sounds like science fiction. To think that any enterprise could try and achieve some version of that, and that it would be A, fast, or B, not take a lot of change management is absolutely ludicrous. So it's just a very practical approach to be eyes wide open, recognize that you're solving problems, but you have to want to drive change. So to me, and sort of the HFS perspective continues to be that if RPA is not going to die a terrible death, it needs to really support that vision of transformation. And I mean, honestly, we're here at a UI path event. They had many announcements today that they're doing a couple of things, supporting core functionality of RPA, literally adding in process discovery and mining capabilities, adding in analytics. So to help enterprises actually track what your benefit is. These are very practical cases that help RPA live another day, but they're also extending functionality, adding in like their whole announcement around AI fabric, adding in some of the cognitive capability to extend the functionality. And so prediction wise, RPA as we know it three years from now is not going to look like RPA at all. I'm not going to call it AI, but it's going to become a hybrid. And it's honestly going to look a lot like that AAA trifecta I mentioned. Well, and UI path and I presume other suppliers as well are expanding their markets, reaching you hear about citizens developers and 100% of the workforce. Obviously you guys are excited and you see a long runway for RPA. I'll give you the last word. It's been a wonderful journey thus far. After this morning's event where they showed us everything, I saw a sneak peek yesterday during the cab and I had a list of things I wanted to talk to her about already when I came out of there. And then she saw more of them today and I've got a pocket full of notes of stuff that we're going to take back and do. I really truly believe this is a future and we can do so much. You know, Six Sigma has kind of gotten a rebirth. You go in and look at your processes and we can get those to perfect. I mean, that's what's so cool. It is so cool that you can actually tell somebody I can do something perfect for you. And how many people get to do that? It's back to the user experience, right? Which is, we can make this wildly functional to meet the need. Right, right, right. I don't think it's RPA is the end-all solution. I think it's just a great tool to add to your toolkit and utilize moving forward. Great. All right, we'll have to leave it there. Thanks, ladies, for coming on. It was a great segment. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We'll be right back from UI Path Forward 3 from Las Vegas, right after this short break.