 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward America's 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, everybody. This is Dave Vellante and we're here, day two of UiPath Forward Three, the third North American event that's theCUBE's second year covering UiPath, the rocket ship that is UiPath. PD Singh is here, he's the Vice President of AI at UiPath and Rudy Kuhn, who is the Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder of Process Gold. UiPath just announced this week the acquisition of Process Gold. So Rudy, congratulations and you as well, PD. Thank you. So that's cool. Process Gold is focused on process mining. You guys may or may not know about them, but Rudy, maybe you co-founded the company. Why did you co-found you and your founders, Process Gold and tell us a little bit about the problems that you're solving. Yeah, right, you know, many years ago I started my career with IBM and I used to be a business consultant. And typically if you try to implement any kind of technology like RPA, but back then we didn't have RPA. But if you try to figure out what the real process in the company are and you ask people, please tell me, how does the process really looks like? Usually people cannot tell you. They say, yes, we have a documentation, but it's outdated the moment you print it. So the idea was, actually, I came across process mining more than 10 years ago and I met the guy at the University of Eindhoven, Professor Dr. Wil van der Arst, and he had this bright idea to reconstruct business processes solely based on digital footprints from any kind of IT system. I mean, think about it. You use SAP, you use any kind of other IT systems. And you take the data that is left behind after the execution or the support of a process, you take it, you push the magic button and you see what the process really is, like an x-ray system for business processes. Well, Peter, we saw that in the demo at the analyst event. I thought it was like magic. I mean, I think it's actually, I think of a small company like ours even, the number of processes we have and the relative complexity, and by the way, half the time people aren't following them, but you were able to visualize them. So first of all, why did you acquire Process Gold? What was the thinking there? So, you know, just to pop one level up the stack, what exactly are we trying to do as a company? In UiPath is we're building this whole new set of platform capabilities, right? We used to have product lines in studio, orchestrator and robot. But now, when we look at the whole customer journey and all the elements that need to be there in that customer journey, we essentially have to build something, what I call the operating system for a self-improving enterprise. And what that means is there are three elements you need to combine together. You need to have a measurement system in place which can quantify the ROI of your automations. Of course, you need a really solid RTA platform like ours to do the automation itself. You have to be able to bring in pieces for doing complex stuff, cognitive stuff using AI. And then you need a scientific way of planning those automations using tools like process board because you have to do process mining. Once you complete this virtual circle, you can keep doing more and more of the automations. Essentially, you're feeding the beast of efficiency in your organizations. So essentially the way this worked, we don't have the means to do the demo here, but you essentially pointed your system at a process and it visually showed me the steps and laid them out in great detail. And I said, wow, that's like magic. But this stuff actually works. You got real customers using this. You do, yeah. Okay. So we work for companies like Porsche in Germany. Maybe you have heard about them, they build cars. And they are using process code for part of the production process. Today in today's world, every process, no matter if it's a physical process like production or purchasing or whatever, is used or is supported by IT. And it leaves a lot of data behind. And this is exactly the gold mine for us. So we extract this data. And again, we have a lot of algorithms in the software. It's sort of magic. Basically it's a lot of mathematics, which is magic for me, but it works. Yeah, you just take the data, you push the button and you see the process with all the details, as you mentioned, like throughput times, bottlenecks, compliance issues. And this is really the source. If you want to see the process, you can then decide, is this process now suitable for automation, or maybe should we first optimize the process and then go for automation. And this is key for RPA. Well, I think, I've been talking a lot of customers this week and last year, offline as well. A lot of times they'll tell us the mistakes they made is they'll automate a crappy process. Yep. This presumably allows me to sort of highlight, on some of the weaknesses and the weak links in the chain. So process optimization is a big deal, right? Both in the pre-automation phase and in the post-automation phase. Once you've automated a process, you need to know what are the bad things that are happening there? What are the blockers? What are the non-conforming steps that you're taking? So that's in the post-automation, but also in the pre-automation phase, where you haven't even decided what exactly are you going to automate. It's really hard to quantify what are the high ROI processes, right? I can go in and out and automate something which is not useful at all for the users, right? And so we want our users to avoid making those mistakes and that's why we are exposing these powerful, powerful set of tools, where you can use all these tools to easily document your processes, manage your processes, use process mining to look deeper into how are people and the different entities in your organizations working together. You know, historically if you look at stuff like, in all of human history, there have been certain processes, right? But as computers came on and stuff, we look at it in sci-fi movies. Everyone has always, as Rudy says, the x-ray for the enterprise. We've always wanted to have this uber system that can understand everything that we are doing and tell us, you know, how can we improve stuff or what can we do better? Because as a species, that fuels a revolution. And so this is, it's fundamental to a lot of things that people do in every day and almost in every action that they take. So the secret sauce is math, right? Say it again, please. The secret sauce is math, right? Yes, it is. But you've got to have some kind of discovery engine as well, I mean, it's a system. So maybe can you give us a little bit more ideas to what's under the covers? Well, you know, it all starts with data and the data we need in the beginning is very, very simple. We need only three different attributes. The first attribute is what we call the case ID. So the case ID is a unique identifier for a case and it depends on the process. If we talk, for example, a very simple invoice approval process, then the case ID will be the invoice number. When we talk about claims management, it will be the claims number or purchase number, whatever. The second attribute we need is the timestamp. And every time we find a timestamp in a system like SAP or log file or database, this timestamp actually represents some sort of activity. So we need the case ID, timestamp, and activity. And solely based on this data, we can already show you how the process looks like. And then we enrich this data with other attributes like, let's say, supplier or invoice amount to give you some more ideas and some statistics. So this is the data we need. We transform this data. We access directly the database so there's no need to extract the data. We directly access the data and we transform it and then it will be represented in our application so you get really the full transparency of what's going on. So when you were a consultant, you mentioned you were a consultant at IBM, you would sit down with the pen and paper and talk to people about what they did. Maybe time and motion studies and studies. You know these process mapping workshops. Everybody, consultants, loves it. So you sit together with people in the room and at the end of the day, you have more processes and you have people there and everybody's telling you a different story and you know exactly that not everything is totally true. So- A lot of gray area in the maps that you had to build. Yeah, because people simply don't know what the processes are. It's not that they don't want to tell you. They simply don't know. Yeah, or as I said before, different people have different processes and they don't follow those. There's no standard to follow necessarily. So PD, what's the vision for how process gold fits into UiPath? So as Param was talking about in his keynote and Daniel talked about this too, a lot of our customers came to us to automate the processes that they already know about. For the processes that they don't know about, we have this whole set of tools, the explorer set of tools that we are releasing process gold is a part of that. But essentially now you don't need to know what processes to automate. You can use an automated set of tools to do that. Process gold, as Rudy was talking about, can go in, look at these log files, detailed audit logs that are generated by your systems of record, and then be able to visualize, optimize that process. But the technologies are really complementary because these guys used to work in the backend systems. That's why most of the process mining works. Works in the backend, looking at the audit logs. But UiPath as you know, we have really strong background in understanding the GUI in the front end understanding of apps, controls, and the control flows that the users have using our computer vision technology. When you combine these technologies, there's a magical effect that happens. Like if your backend does not contain the audit log of some actions that people are taking in the front end, let's say it's a small application which does not generate that audit log. Once you combine these two data points, this is one of the first in the industry of the one-of-a-kind system that can look across all the different spectrum of applications and be able to understand the processes at a deeper level. So technically, when you make an acquisition, you're obviously looking at the technology and how it's going to integrate. How challenging will it be for you to integrate? What have you done any sort of, when you did your due diligence, a lot of companies are really dogmatic about integration. Others, frankly, aren't, let's buy the company, buy another one. What's your philosophy? It was kind of a match made in heaven. I remember the first time I talked to Rudy on the phone and at the end of the day, our philosophies aligned like almost 100% because at the end of the day, Process Gold and UiPath is all about that customer obsession delivering the value to our customers and the values are same. We want our customers to get out of this mundane tasks, to automate the tasks as optimally as possible. And so both the companies, the outcomes align pretty well. Now, the mechanics of the integration, I think both the companies are, these are not dot com era companies where somebody came up with an idea and did this thing. Rudy and the team have been working in this area for 10 years. They have organizational knowledge, they have the expertise and so does UiPath also. And so we will take what I call a loosely coupled approach where we can choose common customers, we can choose common set of features that we are going to work on and that's how we will integrate. But again, the focus of all this is to deliver the value to our customers, not think about the mechanics of what the integration would look like. I think one of the most excited things that I'm hearing is this notion of the processes that are not known. Because so many processes today are unknown. Especially as we go into this new digital world. We used to know what processes we want to automate. You point some technology at it. Okay, great, we're going to automate. Now with this digital disruption that's going on, you actually may have no idea, you may be making processes up on the fly so you need a way to identify those processes quickly and then those ones that are driving ROI. I'm interested in your thoughts on AI and ROI and how to measure that, how those things fit together. So you know, AI, this is I think the biggest problem in the AI right now. There's a lot of hype in the space. We are tracking close to 3,000 different AI startups in the world. And nobody can actually put a number to the revenues or the valuation, the real valuation because of this ROI quantification problem, right? Let's say I have a company which says, oh, we are the best in class in understanding faces, sure. How is it going to be useful to an enterprise? If you cannot measure what value a facial recognition system is adding to your enterprise, it's not good enough for the business people because at the end of the day, my, I can have the world's brightest PhDs telling me, I have the state of the art model in the world which does blah, but if I cannot translate it into business value, it doesn't really work. And so that's why ROI quantification is so important and you have to make sure you align the econometrics of the AI measures and the business KPIs so that if for example, so your data science team should be able to know what metrics they have to improve in order to get a better ROI for the business. So you have to align those two things. And that is part of research that is not really prevalent in academic circles. Interesting. I mean, you've seen some narrow successes in, I'll call AI, things like infrastructure optimization. Okay, great, makes sense. What I'm hearing from you is identify the KPIs that are going to drive you. So the customer defines value. First, sort of take away. Identify what those KPIs are. And every business has thousands of KPIs, but there's really like three or four that matter. So identify those top ones. And then you're saying measure on a continuous basis how your system affects those metrics. So in economics, this is called the treatment effect. So for example, if you automated sales and marketing processes, the KPIs that matter to you is what is your conversion rate from when the leads hit your system to when the revenue is realized, or what is the total revenue that you're making, right? As you said, there's only two or three top-level KPIs that really matter. And now, if for example, you put an AI system in place that frees your leads differently, you should see and increase and uptake in revenue. And so that's what I mean by the ROI quantification. So if you've instrumented the system properly, put in the right quantification measurement system in place and have the auto-optimization mechanism, that's how things should work. You know, with process mining, we can even add additional KPIs to the picture. KPIs you usually don't have because if you ask a company, nobody can tell you how many different variations of a process you actually have. And with process mining, we can exactly measure how many variations there are. So if you are up to streamlining, to simplifying the process, to speed it up, we can actually tell you if your optimization effort is successful or not because we can show you how the number of variations is going down over time. Even if we, you know, we can also measure the success of RPA implementation. So it really, we use process code and process mining not only for identification of processes, but also for the monitoring of processes after unsuccessful RPA implementation. I can see so many use cases for this. I mean, it's like, my mind is just racing. I mean, sales guys in one region and sales gals in the other region doing things differently. You've got different country management doing things differently. And if I understand you correctly, you can identify the differences in those processes, document them, visualize them, and identify the ones that are actually optimized or help people optimize and then standardize across the organization to drive those metrics that matter. It's very powerful. It is really powerful. You know, as I said, we are living in the golden age of this system that can self-improve your companies. I mean, this was the holy grail of all of computer science. But with technologies like process code, with RPA, with AI, I think we are at that inflection point where we can realize that. So, we got to go, but I'll give you guys sort of the last word, each of you. So actually, first of all, Rudy question, how large, can you tell me how large the process goal team is? How many people? We have about 60 people. 60 people, great. We are based, our headquarters in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. So this is where we are very close to university. This is where our developers basically are located. And I'm based in Frankfurt in Germany. Well, for now, let's see what the future will be. So what's the home run for you with this marriage? The home run? You know, since we are in Las Vegas, I was wondering if you hit the jackpot or if we hit the jackpot, but I actually think the customers, our customers hit the jackpot because this combination of your technology, of our technology, this is really, you know, the go-to part. Good answer, so I was going to ask you the same question, PD, is this? No, I can't even tell you almost every one of the UiPath customers has expressed interest in process goal, right? Because right now we have a portfolio of products, but the interest that we are getting in process goal with the process mining offerings is unparalleled. So Rudy is right, our customers are the ones which are driving this innovation and the integration. And I'll be able to actually acquire this solution. I forget I have my notes, but relatively near term, right? Yes. We are going to make it available to our customers as soon as possible. Awesome, guys, congratulations. Really great to have you on theCUBE. Thank you. All right, and thank you everybody for watching, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from the Bellagio UiPath Forward 3, we'll be right back.