 From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. theCUBE is here live at UiPath Forward 4. Very excited to be here in person. Next topic, the smart factory. Couple of guests here to unpack that for us. Jason Bergstrom joins us, the smart factory lead at Deloitte and Thomas Hansen, the CRO of UiPath. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Great to have you, great to be in person. Let's talk about smart factory. Factory 4.0, what is it from Deloitte's perspective and then UiPaths? So if you think about smart factory, it's really that transition from the old kind of analog manufacturing environment to the digital operating type environment that we see today. So technology has really changed in the last three or four years. And as a result of that elevation of technology, we're able to do a lot more on the manufacturing floor than we ever could. So what used to be more analog or hybrid with a little bit of technology is now starting to shift really to end-to-end integrated manufacturing operations that are based on digital platforms and we're loving it. It's a great place to be. Great. Thomas, what's your perspective? Well, first of all, it's great to be here. Thank you for the invite. It's so nice to be away from Zoom calls or other type of calls, right? Yes. And be in person. We have an amazing partnership with Deloitte. We have worked together for years. We've done more than 400 joint engagements with large companies across the world. And in that process, we've really gone deeper from a vertical and industry perspective. And smart factory is really the starting point of going super specific in figuring out what is automation or how does automation rather play into a smart factory like a beautiful trombone, that music from a beautiful trombone? So years ago, we wrote a piece talking about the cloud as an opportunity and how to take advantage of it. And one of the premise of the piece was you got to build ecosystems. And maybe it's within an industry or within a practice and build data and different disciplines because the power of many versus the capabilities of one. This smart factory initiative that you guys have going, it feels like an ecosystem play. Can you describe that ecosystem? Who's involved? I know SAP in for AWS, but tell us more about the ecosystem. Yeah, sure. So your hunch there is a great one, right? We learned early on that trying to do this as Deloitte or Deloitte plus one, just wasn't going to get it done, right? You really needed to harness the power of the many. And so at the core of what we're doing at the smart factory at Wichita that you alluded to is about bringing an ecosystem to life. So we have 21 partners that are going to be participating out of the gate with the smart factory at Wichita. And the intent is to show a seamless solution, an actual end-to-end production facility that showcases 21 amazing technologies and partners. And we're just really thrilled about what we're able to show our clients. So Wichita. So Koch Industries owns Infor. So obviously that's the Wichita connection. Is that right? That is. So they got to be involved in this. I mean, they're amazing company, but what can you tell us about their involvement? So Koch, obviously the Infor connection, Dregos, which is another Infor company as a founder within the ecosystem, which is fantastic. They play at the core. They're also an incredibly important client, right? So the Koch business on the whole is critical to how we think about manufacturing across a whole range of industries from discreet production to scaled process. They're fantastic partners and we've had a great time working with them. And you guys are just about to launch through soft launch. Can you tell us more where you are in the progression? Sure. So soft launch started two days ago. Oh wow. So the building, we have the keys. We are doing some visits with a handful of friends and family, the ecosystem partners that you mentioned. They'll be coming out to see it and to provide some feedback. And then we go live in earnest in January. And Thomas, where's UiPath fit? Well, we fit in as a key partner in this initiative. Look, we as a company, we are partner preferred partner first. We do all our business together with partners. We have run about almost 5,000 partners now globally. And then there's a few. Then there's a few in that 5,000 that are unique that really stand out. And Deloitte, of course, is one of those very, very special partners that we work with globally but also locally here in the U.S. across all the states, across all the industries. So we're thrilled to be part of this. Automation plays a key, key part of smart factory. When you think about it, the evolution of work, there's so much boring mundane work out there. Humankind is better served spending that time and effort on the non-mundane, on the innovative, on the creative. And that's what we're trying to ensure that the humans in the loop, so to speak, are focused on the innovative work, the creative work. And we have software robots, RPA automation, handle all that boring and mundane work. Right, letting the folks focus on the value add to themselves, the value add to the organization. That's right. More strategic investments. Thomas, question for you is, in terms of, you talked about this being horizontal across industries, but I'm curious about what some of the feedback is from some of your customers, 8,000 customers now. You've got a very large, what, 726 million ARR, huge. A lot of customers, over 100 million ARR. What's been the feedback from some of those guys and gals? Well, so, first of all, personally, I've been in enterprise software for more than 20 years. And what I've experienced over the years most large-scale enterprise software projects tends to be multi-year in nature, be rather complex, and the failure rate can be rather high. Then in comes RPA and automation, which is a complete different kettle of fish, in the sense that from conceptualization of identifying a process to getting it built, getting it tested, getting it into production, you're talking days and weeks only. So the path to seeing value is so fast. What I've learned yesterday and today from the 15, 16 customer meetings I've had so far is the same unique trend or learning across all industries and also from various parts of the world, and that is very fast realization of value, perhaps starting initially with five, 10, 20 processes, and then scaling super fast because they find that return on investment incredibly quickly with our solution. So that's what unifies it across geographies and across industries. When you think about the smart factory, and one of the things we've learned during COVID is there's so much unknown. So sometimes these processes aren't linear, like a trombone going back and forth in and out, but is there unknown in the smart factory processes or is it pretty well known and you can do the process mining on that known base? What's the dynamic there? So there's a few different dimensions to it. So yes, it is well known because it's a controlled environment, but one of the things that we're doing is we're actually actually introducing a lot of unknown factors to try to let the bots and the process mining kick into effect, right? So we're artificially, let's just say, injecting opportunity for us to do that. The other thing that we're doing is, and what's really unique about the smart factory at Wichita is it's one of four across the globe for Deloitte. And so we're bringing data in from the other three sites, which is data that'll be less controlled. We're going to do process mining on that to try to take advantage of some of the capabilities associated with the solutions. Okay, so when you think about process mining, do you start there or do you start, I sometimes call it paving the cow path? Taking what you've known, that linear process that hits that as the quick win and then worry about the process mining? Or do you step back and say, wait a minute, we have to rethink the entire factory experience. Where do you start? Well, I think it depends in the case of the smart factory. We've got a few different places. We're using it to do ingestion of orders. So that's obviously a very controlled environment. We're then using it to do a lot of work around inventory management and optimization as well as month-end close plays, which will be a lot more, we're learning as we go, right, so I think on the spectrum, it could be on either end. My personal belief, if you look at it more long-term or actually out in the real world, is that this is all about learning new things. It's about generating insights from data that frankly, you don't want human beings to have to go do that, and so having the ability to take advantage of an intelligent automation solution as powerful as UiPath is really a great advantage. One of the things that's misunderstood, I think, about UiPath is they look at what happened post, let's say 2015, 2016, and say, oh, just like every other Silicon Valley company, double, double, triple, triple, and that's not how you guys started. You sort of let things bake for the better part of a decade, and then got product market fit, and then exploded, and so that, to me, was a key to your success in scaling. This, I feel like you guys are building a new offering here. This is not just doing a one-off. The product market fit, it's not like a point product. It's a big thing. Can you talk about the go-to-market, your product market fit, you're testing it out now, your goals, you're trying to scale this up? What are some of the things that you can share about your aspirations? So the partnership from a UiPath perspective to Deloitte is a critical partnership, one of the select few on a global level. We have enjoyed tremendous amount of engagements together. I mentioned earlier on 400, and I believe we now have together around about 1,000 developers trained within your organization on UiPath, right? That's right, yeah. So we have a strong base that, of course, we want to build for, and hopefully put a sera behind the 1,000 to 10,000 over time. We want to make sure that it's globally inclusive, that we can serve all the marketers across the world where we have joint presence. And there's a select number of verticals and industries where we really have had success together, that we, of course, want to go and specifically zoom in on. One would, of course, now be manufacturing together, and, of course, a classic vertical. We've been very strong in together is BFSI, Banking, Financial Services, Industry. So those are good areas to go into. Jason, you're building a business out of this, right? I mean, you've got a business plan around it, and you're going to scale this thing. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that's 100% the case. So we have Smart Factory at Wichita. That is part of our positioning in the marketplace. What we found is that telling people about tech and about solutions is one thing. Showing it to them in a production environment is altogether different, right? Giving clients the opportunity to explore the art of the possible in a real setting like that is incredibly impactful. And so you talked about go-to-market. We see this relationship with the ecosystem and what we're trying to do in Wichita. That's sort of the epicenter of building an entire business which ultimately will have huge global potential. We talk about speed for a minute, and the growth trajectory that UI Path Thomas has been on for the last five years or so. I think I was reading, I think it was analysis that Dave wrote that in 2016, revenue was a million, 2015, 2020, 600 million. So massive growth very quickly. My question, Jason, is for you, in terms of the speed, how quickly are you looking to see the Smart Factory 4.0 really impacting organizations around the globe? Because these guys are on a fast bullet train. Yeah, so I wish we had those growth rates. I will say though, selling and delivering these solutions holistically to manufacturers takes more time. So we think of our cycle as being measured certainly in many months, certainly not years. We are starting to see an acceleration of that entire sale cycle and delivery cycle just because of things like the pandemic driving organizations to just need to move faster. Frankly, if you're not moving towards digital manufacturing operations right now, you're probably behind. And so we're seeing that urgency from the market start to pick up. But we don't have that kind of growth rate, unfortunately. Well, what's interesting about Deloitte to me is you guys are, I think of you as a virtual company. I mean, I know you got a lot of bodies out there, but it's not like you got a lot of physical locations, right? And so now you're investing in a physical plant, essentially. Which is extremely exciting. We keep telling ourselves when we talk to folks, they own lots of buildings. So just because we're excited about our building doesn't mean they are. But you're exactly right, right? We're obviously a global services and products company. So this is one of a handful of buildings that are going to start to represent us as an organization and we're really excited about it. What should we watch as kind of milestones for progress, success, what are the markers that we should be paying attention to as independents? I think specifically on this rapid experiment together. I think one of the key learnings we can take away that we can apply to other companies in the manufacturing industry specifically. Look, from a UI perspective, we work with many large-scale manufacturers around the world, but we've seen amazing fast progress. With Bridgestone, for example, we implemented a smaller set of bots that helped them reduce their paperwork by 85% out to their branches. With a Turkish e-commerce retailer called Archelik, I think I get the pronunciation correctly, they put 85 processes in place with our bots and are now to date transacting or running, I think it's three million e-commerce transactions with our processes. So the impact we can have in manufacturing together with the learnings from the smart factory, I think it's just so exciting, really. Yeah, the impact, the potential there is unlimited. Guys, thank you for joining Dave and me, talking to us about Smart Factory 4.0, what it means for both businesses, how the partnership is evolving. It sounds like music from a beautiful trombone. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me today. Thank you. Thank you for having us. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. The queue is live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio at UiPath Forward 4, we'll be right back.