 From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Hello from Las Vegas, the CUBE is live at the Bellagio. We are here covering UiPath Forward 4. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, and we're very pleased to be joined next by the Chief Product Officer of UiPath, Param Kalon, Param, welcome to the program. Thank you, thanks for having me. It's great to be back here in person, isn't it? It is lovely to be back here in person. Dave and I got to see a little bit of your keynote this morning and when we had to leave to come to set, we turned around and it was standing room only. It was amazing to see how many customers, partners, prospects UiPath has brought here. Clearly, you've got over 8,000 customers now, tremendous growth, the IPO just six months ago. Last time you were on theCUBE at Forward 3 was two years ago, 2019, where you unveiled this vision for a fully automated platform. Talk to us about what's transpired since. Yeah, it's been fascinating, there are more than 9,000 customers now. You know, when we were here two years ago, we shared a vision with our customers. The vision was all about having an end-to-end platform. The end-to-end platform can help companies automate simple processes, complex processes. It can help them automate anything from point-in-time tasks to long-running end-to-end processes. And we imagine that our automations will impact every worker within the enterprise. And you'll augment the capacity to build automations through citizen development initiatives. We didn't have all the components then, so we worked hard since then to make sure that we can make this end-to-end platform available. They can do everything from discovering automation opportunities to helping companies easily build automation, whether that automation is for simple processes that are doing a predictable pattern of work, or whether it's using more complex machine learning and AI algorithms and extracting information from documents to do that kind of stuff. And then also helping citizen developers build automation. So build pillar is what differentiates our time to value in the market, helping companies realize quick value for that. Then the next pillar we look at is manage, and manage is all about making sure that they're IT stakeholders that are managing the deployment of the entire platform from our server components like orchestrator to components like robots that run the workflows, can easily be managed at low cost of ownership, and can effectively manage the requirements of IT stakeholders like governance and security and audit and all those kinds of things. And then we have the next pillar is run, which makes sure that our robots can run on machines. And we're very excited actually in this release to announce that our robots can run across platform. So, historically, we were a Microsoft Windows.net based code base, it only ran on Microsoft Windows machines and now we can actually run those robots on Linux-based machines as well so you can deploy those robots on Linux containers. So that's the run pillar. And then we have engage, which is all about making sure that the software that we're releasing can be used by every user within the enterprise. So it's an engaging experience. Automations are available to business users where they need them. Right, if they're working in a line of business application like Slack or Microsoft Teams, robots are available there. If they're working in a productivity application, so I'd look, they're available there. And then we also have a curated set of engaging interface for people to use UiPath robots and something we call UiPath Assistant. So super excited about this sort of end-to-end platform. I think it's delivering a lot of value to our customers. I tweeted out during your keynote all the features under discover, build, manage, run, engage, and could barely fit it in the screen. And it was an eye test in terms of just a number of features that you guys have developed. My point is was that innovation is the lifeblood, life source of tech companies. Demand Gen 2, but I mean, it's the product, right? And the indicator is the pace of those innovations. And so it seems like you're picking up the pace as you scale as a company. Is that true in terms of just the velocity of the features that you're rolling out? You guys have been busy since the pandemic. Yeah, at the expense of, you know, are not trying to annoy anybody within the company, we are a very product-centric, you know, company. This company was founded by an engineers and ran it truly as a, you know, engineering-centric company for many, many years. So as we've scaled, I think we haven't lost that attribute of our culture to make sure that we are continuing to innovate, continuing to make sure that we're delivering capabilities based on what our customers are demanding of us. And that's been part of our strategy as well. We've always said that we're going to build what our customers ask for and we're going to learn from our customers. And as we're expanding our install base of customers, we're learning more things from them and we're continuing to respond to those customers as fast as we can. It helps the fact that we're, helps that we are a bigger company now, so we have more resources at our disposal so we can do more. But I'd say, you know, if you looked historically at some of our releases over the last two, three years, we've done a lot of innovation in every one of these releases and we do it twice a year, these big releases. And this is release 2021.10 we're talking about? That's right, this is release 2021.10 and it's the one of two major releases in the year. So we do a release in the first half of the year and we do a release in the second half of the year and that's how we've been doing over this. This is how on-premise customers consume sort of our software. The cloud customers get these capabilities more frequently, that's every two weeks, but the on-premise customers give them, get these capabilities every twice a year. How much time do the on-prem customers have to get to the new release? I mean, you can't just make it, you know, n minus 30. Yeah, so what do you give them? A couple cycles, three, four cycles, two, three? We give them, so six cycles of three years to upgrade to the next version of the software. Most customers upgrade much sooner than that because if you looked at our software three years ago and you compared it to what we have today, you basically said there's no reason why I should be paying you for that capability when I can get so much. So generally we see customers upgrading more frequently. We've also, because we run the same code base for our cloud customers that we run for on-premise customers and cloud customers as we update their service every two weeks, we've built enough resiliency to make sure that the upgrades are seamless for customers so it doesn't cause them a lot of pain to go from one version to the next. So we expect most customers upgrade within 12 to 18 months of deploying a software. Let's talk about acceleration. The last 18 months we've seen a massive acceleration in automation as a mandate for every industry to first survive what was happening in the world and then to really thrive. How has the pandemic influenced the roadmap? Maybe what's in 2021.10? What has, and how have you helped customers accelerate their need to automate to stay in business and to be successful disruptors? Yeah, so what, it's a great question. What we've noticed is that in our customer base there's certain aspects of business processes that have just required a lot more demand to be able to accelerate certain parts of business whether it's a retailer trying to meet demand for a certain set of product category or whether it's a healthcare organization trying to make sure they can provide care to more people more frequently. The truth is that we didn't have to make fundamental shifts in our technology to be able to meet that demand because we had built the core underpinning of our technology was built on the premise that you are allowing a machine to mimic human behavior and to do that and if you can throw more compute at those machine doesn't have more robots we can do more work at that. So the pandemic has definitely accelerated the demand for automation. It hasn't changed our roadmap to go in a different direction as we go there. We've just made sure that we can continue to meet the demands of our customers. The one thing that it has impacted us is it's brought automation to the top of the priority list for IT stakeholders. In the past we sold a lot and our value and messaging resonated a lot along the line of business owners but as the pandemic as they started using more and more automation the IT stakeholders are now a lot more interested in what we're doing and we've done a lot of work in ensuring that the requirements that our IT stakeholders have from running mission critical workloads from compliance, from governance, from security are all met as part of the platform basically out of the box as opposed to having to bolt on. One of your competitors just got bought out by private equity and the PE firm's going to mash them together with an integration company. You guys bought Cloud Elements, which I look at as a nice clean integration player. I wonder if you could talk about the importance of Cloud Elements, how that fits into your product portfolio and in the market in general. Yeah, it's a fascinating time to be in the automation business. There's lots going on. When we saw Cloud Elements earlier this year what we realized was as companies are trying to automate processes there are certain systems where you can get to information, we can get to actions you want to take through API and it's maybe better to access them through API because the user interface doesn't provide the same set of capability in the same way and there's other systems where you want to have UI based automation because APIs don't exist or too hard to use. Historically there were different products that people had to use. You either had to use an integration platform type product to be able to get to all the APIs and it was a very developer driven workflow to put that process in place or you could use something like UI Path where you can connect systems through UI automation. What, when we looked at that problem we said the problem is to connect, break the silos that exist across processes and apps in the enterprise and we wanted to provide one single design environment in which developers can use API or UI automation or even machine learning based predictions and construct an end to end workflow where you can blend together a set of ML skills, UI automation, API automation to compose that into an automation. So that was our thesis behind that. The market definitely seems to be paying attention and it seems that other people are trying to follow the same path as well. Some industry analysts have written about sort of the consolidation in categories happening there too. You guys started a trend for sure. Let's talk about security. You guys announced a partnership with CrowdStrike, Endpoint Security, clearly the leader there. They're a really amazing company. What's that partnership all about? How to come about and maybe give us some color there. Yeah, so we're very excited about this partnership and as I was mentioning earlier, one of the things that pandemic has done is it's elevated the importance of automation to the boardroom, to the CIOs, to the CISOs and now they're looking at UiPath's automation platform as a key enabler of getting work done within the enterprise. So when they look at something that's going to take like 20, 30% of the transactions in a work environment and move it through that platform, they want to make sure that it has all of the security that they have thought about for all other applications and users are using as well. So CrowdStrike has done phenomenal work in security solutions to manage how employees are using based on their profiles different applications and different APIs as well. What we've done is we've taken that the capability that they have built for their employee workforce and make sure that we can apply it to the robotic workforce that our customer is using as well. So the same policy-based control that says, you know, this employee in this department isn't allowed to access the system or it needs to be logged that they had access to this data, the same can be applied to robot as well. So you're no longer able to say, you know, I don't know what my robots are doing. I need to go through logs to find out. You can maintain a policy. You can get alerts when robots do something that they're not allowed to do. And not only that, you're able to pinpoint specifically the which workflow process that robot was executing when it touched a system that it wasn't allowed to. So it gives you that peace of mind if you're a business owner or an IT stakeholder at a company to make sure that my robotic workflows is in doing what it's supposed to do. So the point of integration for CrowdStrike is a robot? Is that correct? It is a robot. So it monitors what the robots are doing and it reports it back into their Falcon interface that basically says, I've got a policy that when applied to my robot workflows and when as they're executing things I can monitor, control, get it alerted of different things that they're doing. And the robot today already does its own identity access, right? You've developed that. Yeah, the robot has its own identity. So robot generally, historically, had to go log into many line of business systems to do the work, right? And the robot is running inattended as it's working side by side with a human. Then it assumes the identity of the person that's working so it can go access those systems. But if it's working unattended, then it's using a service account to make sure that it can go access the application that it needs to access to be able to pull information or update actions into those systems. So you mentioned more than 9,000 customers now. I know you've got more than 1,200 with 100,000 or more ARR. Customer listening, I know, is very important to UiPath. We just had the CIO and digital officer of Coca-Cola on talking about that was a big differentiator when we said, who else did you look at? But what was it that really made UiPath stand out? And that's that customer listening, the voice of the customer, the impact that it has on the technology and the company overall. Talk to me about some of your favorite stories of customers that have really helped influence, especially in the last year and a half, the direction of the company. IPO six months ago, as I mentioned, how is that customer voice really critical to the innovation that your team is driving? Yeah, I know it's very important and that's something that we've done from the beginning of creating this market and entering this category of RPA. It was initially a customer that educated us about what RPA is, brought us and told us what kind of solution they wanted and the help us create the first solution and we've worked very closely. In fact, I joined the company about three and a half years ago and my first month I spent a lot of time with a customer in Japan to learn from what they thought about automation, very large bank in Japan, and we've continued that process. So we have every quarter, we meet our customers around the world and customer advisory boards. We run a product advisory board every six months, very specific information at a feature level on what we're working on and we ask our customers to ward on the feature list and we decide based on how much importance they put to different product areas to see what we're going to innovate on. We feel this is the best way to build enterprise products. It's helped us tremendously and we're very extremely grateful to our customers to be able to help us shape the platform in this way. You know, when the whole discussion around AI for a start at AI and RPA and there were some naysayers and it seems like you're applying AI everywhere. It's hard to even understand it sometimes. So can you help us understand your strategy with respect to AI? Where aren't you applying it? But maybe you could help us sort of shape that discussion. That's a really good question. So I'd say AI is a core intrinsic aspect of what we do in our platform. And I'll tell you how it matters. It matters because what we're trying to do at the end of the day is mimic how people work, right? And make sure that we can process the systems that just like humans process it as well. So when you look at something on your computer screen, you're using your computer vision to be able to identify what is on the computer screen, whether you're looking at a browser or you're looking at a specific control that you can enter the customer name or hit a button. So our technology essentially give our robots the same skills to be able to understand what is on the user interface in front of the screen. And if I'm going to give you an instruction to say, start a certain application and click the new button and then enter this information on this form, the robot is able to process that exactly the way you would do it by using those eyes. And that's what, intrinsically, we build the computer vision capabilities. Now we've applied that ability to understand computer screens to documents as well. And that's where we build machine learning models for extracting information from documents. So if you hired somebody in Account Spayable Department and you showed them a piece of paper and you said, hey, this is an invoice, please put it into this system. They are able to look at that invoice and when they get the next document, they know this next document is also an invoice and they're able to put that and extract information from it and put it into a line of business system. So we're teaching our robots the same skills to be able to classify documents of certain document types and using machine learning models extract relevant information from those documents. Even if one invoice looks different from the second invoice, you're still able to, as human eye, reliably extract the information from it, the robots have the exact same skills to be able to do it. So okay, so classification, it makes sense because you're using math and now you have enough processing power and enough data and so you can apply those algorithms. Does the AI help, maybe this is a stupid question, but does it give context as well? Can it interpret context like a human could? Are we at that point yet? Well, it depends on what you mean by context. In general, the applications of AI, broadly speaking, are narrow and they're not able to go broad and understand the entire context. That's where humans are better. That's where humans are able to sort of truly apply the context, especially if it's a rare occurrence of that context and that's why we fundamentally believe that AI is powerful only if you can apply it together with humans and so we build capabilities to support like a human in the loop scenario where if a document was read by the robot and it extracted information but extracted with a low confidence or it wasn't able to find all the right fields of a supposed to, we can suspend the process, send the document and the extracted information to a human and the human can correct what they've extracted and with that, you're creating retraining data for the model to behave appropriately next time it sees similar information in the next document. So we do believe that AI is not going to solve all the problems. AI is going to be able to solve the neuropath but as you look at sort of broader and contextual specific things that are out of normal behavior, you would still need humans to be able to guide what robots are able to do. But I mean chatbots can interpret context. I don't know if that's because it's brute force. Yeah. He's just throwing a lot of repetitive sort of data. I don't know if you guys seen the very first AI stand up comedy. No. You haven't seen this? No. It's the first stand up comedy routine written by machines and it's a lot of it's really stupid but some of them, some of the jokes aren't bad. You know and they have an audience and there's the fake laughter coming in but so it seems like it's amazing. You have to, I'll send it to you, you have to check it out. But so we're starting to get to the point where you could interpret context or create context and like you say, human in the loop allows you to sort of verify that. Correct and validate robot actions, AI actions, yeah. Okay, so you'll just kind of ride that AI curve wherever it takes you, right? Well I think AI is really important and it'll become increasingly important as we look at the future. We're also looking at in the future AI based development or AI based helping of building development scripts so something that you'll hear, Dan will talk a lot about semantic automation so we're investing a lot and ensuring that we can have semantic automation type capabilities into a product that helps the process of building automation simple enough so that more citizen developers can build it and drives developer productivity at the end. I have a specific use case I want to show you offline and tell me if you can help. Yeah, I got to ask you one more question as here we are talking about humans and AI surrounded by humans finally for the first time in a long time. What's just been some of the feedback that you've heard between yesterday and today in the last 30 seconds that we have here? The feedback about the product specifically or the technology, the direction of the company, what you're announcing? Yeah, our customers are very excited about some of the things that we've announced today. I'd say the excitement is specifically around some of the things we're doing around the discovery pillar. We've got a lot of excitement around what we've acquired through Cloud Elements and the integration service that's available that's part of our platform. We've got customers very excited about running automations and Linux machines so that they can scale them, manage the total infrastructure around it. We've also released Automation Suite that gives our on-premise customers the same sort of manageability and deployment capabilities that are available to our SaaS customers so that the admin experience is improved. So in general, the feedback around the innovation and things that we're doing has been very, very positive from our customers. Sounds like a lot of validation, Perum. Thank you for joining Dave and me on the program today talking about what's new. Congratulations on that and for holding a very successful in-person event. That's a big deal. Well, thank you so much for having me. We're happy to be here. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. We've been coming to you all day from Las Vegas. We're going to see you tomorrow. Same channel from UiPath Forward 4. See you then.