 From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Manhattan at Automation Anywhere, Imagine 2018. 1,100 people buzzing all around us here. The ecosystem is hot. Everybody's looking at all the various solutions, all the various bots, all the various activities going on. And we're excited to have relatively newcomer to the company. He's Kashif Baboo, the VP, Product Marketing for Automation Anywhere. Kashif, welcome. Thanks for having me. So you said you've been here, we've had all the founders on, I think. So you've been here about a year. So first impressions, I imagine this is your first show. What do you think? It's actually my third show. Oh, it is your show? Thanks for moving in. Oh, were you a customer before? Yeah, by company standards, I would say I'm a veteran. So we're doing these shows, all of these marketing activities that are very rapid things. Yeah, very good. So one of the topics we haven't talked about so much today is this kind of digital workforce concept. And you guys have a really specific idea of what makes, you know, kind of taking these things to actually be considered a digital workforce. So what are those three things that you guys combine to have something that's unique in the marketplace? So we pioneered the concept of digital workforce and in our parlance, in our definition, a digital workforce, especially at enterprise scale, comprises of three key components. RPA, which is robotic process automation, right? Cognitive automation, which is the ability of using AI and machine learning capabilities with RPA. And last but not the least, smart analytics. So the combination of these three make up what we call a digital workforce. If any of one of these elements is missing, we feel that that's not really a true digital workforce. So a digital workforce platform that we call enterprise combines all of these capabilities together to really deliver a true enterprise class digital workforce platform. Now how long have you guys been baking in the AI component of it, in the cognition piece? Because there's a lot of talk about cognitive computing and it's a big theme that IBM has had for a long, long time and we're seeing AI work itself into all kinds of interesting applications. Now kind of where was your guys AI journey? How long have you been at it and where are you seeing kind of the breakthrough to get to this digital workforce concept? So automation anywhere has been around for about 15 years now. So we have a very mature product. I look after the enterprise platform and we just released version 11, which is so it makes it the most mature platform in the industry at the moment. Now to answer your question about AI and bringing AI into it, that's fairly recent but we are based in the heart of Silicon Valley. Google is one of our customers. So is Tesla, so is LinkedIn. These are three big AI companies with their own AI technology, yet they use automation anywhere platform as well. So there is AI and then there is AI with RPA. So think of it as purpose-built AI capabilities that are infused through our digital workforce platform to enhance our RPA capabilities. And you bring in analytics, then we talk about predictive analytics. So overall, again, it's building a digital workforce that is enhanced by AI, that is enhanced by cognitive capabilities so that RPA is not just RPA, it's RPA to the next level. Right, and really RPA that's going to evolve. RPA that's eventually going to write itself, or write new versions of itself based on new things and process improvement, new discoveries in terms of better ways to get things done using those other two legs of the store. So you will see a lot of publications out there that talk about RPA evolving into AI or AI taking over RPA. The fact is there is again AI and then there is AI combined with RPA. So if you take Google's example, Google uses us in the back end, yet it is one of the largest AI companies in the world. So AI, think of it as a big hammer. It has to be used very carefully. And we have purpose-built AI into our product to make sure that we extract all the unstructured data. And then we, as Mahir mentioned, or CEO mentioned earlier in the keynote, it is feeding this RPA monster that needs more and more data. And all of that data comes through our AI and cognitive capability. And we know, right, that for the machines to learn, they need more and more and more data so they get better and better. It's just the way computers do learn. It's very different than the way humans learn. It's a slightly different model. It's about building a digital map. We use Waze and Google Maps and all of these different GPS-driven capabilities to find our way around Manhattan, for example, or Bay Area for that matter. Think of our digital workforce platform with AI capabilities and with analytics capabilities as a digital map of an enterprise. We touch so many different infrastructure components from CRM system to ERP systems to HRIS systems that amount of data that we capture that passes through our system gives us perhaps the best look anyone can have into how data flows through an enterprise and what's the best way to use it. Right. So I'm curious in terms of kind of those vertical applications that you described, where have you seen the biggest impact now that you've started to bring the AI in? Are there certain verticals that are just right for significant positive change and some that are less so? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot of data locked in documents still. So banking, finance, and insurance. Those are the three verticals, three industries where our first step with our IQ bot, which is our cognitive product, we have seen a lot of traction there. The reason for that is again, when we decipher these documents, when we decipher and capture all the data, we then use it very intelligently in automating the processes. So the first step to answer your question would be organizations, industries that use unstructured data that is locked into their documents. So all this dark data methodology. So we unlock that data and then we use RPA and we feed this RPA monster to really automate the various processes. Every time you guys talk about all the data locked in these documents, I can't help but think of the old OCR days when I got my first $1,000 flatbed scanner read a couple of times, never worked back then. Larrant of the different things. Funny that you mentioned that because the OCR technology that got built into a lot of scanners later on, a lot of that technology we use under the covers but at a much more enhanced level. Right, right. So we partner with some of the best OCR technologies out there, but then we put AI on top of that to really take it to the next level. So when the data comes out of a simple OCR process, it's no longer just some data that you can, like we used to see. Now it's data that is structured that can be automated in a few clicks. Right, it has context, right? And most importantly, it has context, which makes all the difference in the world. Okay, so what are some of your priorities for next year before I let you go? What are some of the things you're working on if we sit down a year from now? What are we going to be talking about that's new? It's a new thing. Without telling me any secrets. No, no, the A's have been signed here. And imagine, we come with an approach of an open book, open kimono, if you will, and we share all that we are working on and all that we're working on today, but also going forward. So AI is a big element of that. Automation combined with any sort of automation, especially RPA, combined with AI and machine learning capabilities, that's already, we have a product, as opposed to just an idea, it's a working product with dozens of organizations using it. But then we are infusing that AI into RPA and making it intelligent RPA, making it an intelligent digital workforce platform. That's the ultimate goal and that's, we are already well on it. All right, well Kashif, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time and congrats on a great show. Thank you, thanks for having me, Jeff. All right, it's Kashif, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE, Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018 in New York City. Thanks for watching.