 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here covering UiPath Forward, looking unpacking software robots, robotic process automation. Jeff Aldridge is here. He's the advisory principal for EY. Great to see you, Jeff. Thanks for coming on. Stu Miniman, myself, Dave Vellante. We're excited to have you. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me, appreciate it. So I was at a chief data officer conference early this year, and the speaker asked how many of you are involved in robotic process automation projects? I would say two thirds, maybe even three quarters of the hands went up. These are guys in suits, kind of stayed individuals. But I've seen data that suggests that while everybody's interested in kicking the tires, that there's not a lot of companies that are at scale, single digits at scale. What are you seeing, does that match, and why do you think that is? Yeah, I think that's pretty consistent with what we see in the market. I think a lot of folks have bought a few licenses, they've done a few exploratory pilots, but very few companies have gone to production with more than 30 bots. We do think that's going to change dramatically in the next 12 to 24 months based on what we're seeing in the market. So it's an exciting period of time. What's the headwind to scale, and how are you reducing friction? Yeah, I think it varies, but I think change is just hard for organizations, right? And so I think they've started a little bit slow trying to figure out what's their purpose, why are they doing this? Is it about head count reduction? Is it about trying to scale? Is it about accuracy? So trying to define that common purpose and common metrics to measure success I think has been slow for some organizations. But I think once they have that purpose and they kind of see what the potential is, then I think it starts to pick up speed. So we've certainly seen more and more companies go into scale. Yeah, and it's always something new. It's like, how do I measure success? What was the outcome you're expecting? We've talked to a number of customers today already, and the answer's been different for every one of them. They are all very similar as to what they're doing, but what it means to their business. I thought I was going to reduce cost, but oh wait, I'm going to drive more revenue. Right. I thought I was going to do this, oh wait, it's great ROI. It turned around really different. How do you deal with that in the field? Yeah, I think you're right. I think at some point to do a few pilots and kind of kick the tires, you don't have to know what the purpose is. So it's pretty easy to do that. But I think once you start thinking we're really going to do this, you've got to coalesce around what our purpose is. And so we like to talk to people about different examples of what other companies have done. And in particular, how do you measure success? For some companies, they're looking at the same goal, for example, cost reduction. They look at that differently. So we've had a very large client who said, we're going to measure cost reduction based on next year's budget. So if we're able to not have to hire additional resources, we get to count that. If we're able to find hard dollar savings, we get to count that. So for example, in peak periods of the year when we hire a lot of contingent labor, if we automate something that keeps us from having to hire that amount of contingent labor, then we get to count that. Others will count against the prior year. So I think even when you have a similar goal, you can have different metrics of how you measure it. That next year's budget is actually quite interesting because if you could do more with the same, now you're getting operating leverage, that's almost as good as dropping to the bottom line through a CFO. Yeah, and some would say it's better because you don't have a disruption of your current workforce. It's not about reducing heads that we have today, but it's how can we grow and how can we scale without having to add back office costs and other costs in the organization. So I think that's going to become pretty common for fast growing companies. What's your interest, Jeff, in automation, robotic process automation? How did you get here? Kind of what's your background? Yeah, so I'm a CPA, finance person by background, went to law school, but I've always been about process improvement and helping organizations improve. And so I think this is just the next step in that, right? Technology has taken a leap and now organizations can take a leap in terms of additional process improvement. And I think the best companies are looking at it as how do I use my top resources to do more? And so I think that's another objective of some of the better companies is, how do I free up my people to do what they were hired to do? Jeff, one thing I'm trying to understand, when I think about process, one of the challenges I think back to outsourcing is, when I outsource something, it made me not be able to change as much as I want to. I lost some skill set and therefore I had a disconnect between the business and keeping operations going. How is this different? How do I make sure that when I put a robot in place that I'm not frozen into kind of the way things were before? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, first of all, I think outsourcing is great in the right situation, but you're right, for a lot of organizations, it was sort of out of sight, out of mind. And once I offshored cost, it just seemed to grow and never reduce, right? And we never improved the process. I thought it would be my mess for less, but it turned out not to be the case. Yeah, I think this is fundamentally different because the bots are sort of part of your onshore team. They're a virtual workforce. And I think as companies see what they can do, it's actually the opposite. They find more things that the bot can do so that humans can focus on the higher value added decision support. Do you think RPA will reverse some of the outsourcing trends and the pendulum will swing back? I think we're already seeing it. I do think it will do that. I think it allows you to insource some of those things and reduce cost in the process. And then just talking from a parochial US view, those software robots are global, presumably, but it reduces the need to ship jobs overseas to use the pejorative. It does, which obviously is popular in the current, you know, kind of current political environment. But you know, there's also entire industries like healthcare where because of HIPAA laws, they can't offshore activities. So they by and large have not been able to take advantage of outsourcing and so this is now an opportunity to reduce cost through bots. Yeah, I mean, there's two sides to that coin, right? I mean, the political rhetoric says, oh, outsourcing is bad, bad, bad, but you remember Jack Welch, he's like, listen, this is actually really good, you know, and of course GE's going through some troubles now, but under his reign, you know, their profitability was pretty substantial. So your point about healthcare is quite interesting because first of all, that's an industry that's ripe for transformation. It really hasn't transformed. I mean, I think you'd agree, every industry is going to get digitally transformed in some way, shape, and form healthcare, financial services, defense haven't yet, maybe because they're high risk, but what are you seeing? Yeah, I think this is coming and it's not going to stop. I think you're going to see all industries take any advantage of automation. And frankly, I think RPA is just the beginning. I think that we all see this moving into artificial intelligence, but for most organizations, they want to learn with RPA. They want to capture some low hanging fruit so they can move then to the next level. So it's about training employees, it's about setting up a governance structure and kind of, you know, preparing for that future. When I see companies like yours at an event like this, I say, okay, there's big dollars in this event. And big dollars means that big dollars, not just for you guys, not just for guys like UiPath, but for customers. Certainly ERP was that way. I mean, you hear all the jokes about SAP implementations, but if you could have bet on the companies that bet on ERP early, SAP specifically, you could have made some decent money in the stock market because those guys drove efficiencies. Are we seeing the same thing here? Is this kind of big dollar transformations? And my real question is, does it apply for all companies like Amazon, AWS? A lot of small companies can take advantage of that. Can smaller companies take advantage of RPA or is it a big giant enterprise trend? Yeah, I think they can. I think if you talk about a smaller company, you've got to activate multiple functional areas. So it's not going to be a single automation and a single function like finance that's going to bring you the ROI that's big. So in a smaller company, I think you've got to activate other back office areas like HR and supply chain and procurement. Whereas a larger company, we've worked with some very large companies where even a single process area can generate significant savings. What does a successful, the profile of a successful customer look like? It's a couple of that we've talked to. It's like, well, I know I need the executive support and I usually have somebody that's operations, maybe Six Sigma that focuses on that kind of environment and they're like, oh, this is a new tool that will help me accomplish what I've been trying to do for years. I think there's a few things. I think number one, having that common purpose, we know why we're doing this and we have specific goals. But I think to your point, it's having that executive sponsor. When this gets hard, they push through it and everybody knows they're behind it, be it a CEO or someone of that stature. And so what I've seen is when that's in place, you'll see multiple functions jumping on board. And one of the things we've used is media, for example. So doing videos where the people that have been involved kind of get highlighted for what they've done and that tends to spur efforts and now you want to be a part of it, right? And you want to show that you're looking for improvement in your area. And so we're definitely seeing some people have some pretty tremendous success. You said when things get hard, what are some of the headwinds that you're seeing? Is that just the natural aversion to change inside of an organization? Well, I think there's, in addition to the natural aversion to change, I think there's this idea about I don't want my team to lose their jobs, right? I'm worried about what that means. I don't want to get to a situation where I've reduced so many heads that I'm afraid I can't be effective in the future as we grow, right? And so there's naturally people wondering why are we doing this, what's the purpose, what's it mean to me? And so I do think it's important to do that strategy phase up front, identify the opportunities, identify the ROI so that we can all see why we're doing this. And it really is pretty impactful. So we started this segment talking about how most companies aren't at scale with RPA. Are there any examples you can share with us that where your clients are either headed there or actually have scaled? Yeah, there are actually several now, right? And so I always start with ourselves. I mean, believe it or not, EY over three years ago started automation in our own back office. And today we're one of the largest users of RPA robotics, as well as chatbots, machine learning, NLP. We think we've saved two million hours a year out of our own back office, which has been fantastic for us. And so we took those learnings at scale and have now started applying those to clients. But there are some big name clients. I think you mentioned a few industries like oil and gas and consumer products. We have some big clients that have gone to scale in those areas. So I think there's several examples that people can learn from. And that's primarily squeezing the back office lemon? Or they're... You know, it's been more of that to begin with. I think now what's really next for this is next generation use cases that include the front office and how do we make our sales force more effective? How do we improve our supply chain? I think there's bigger opportunities for next generation RPA and first generation AI. Hey, I wonder, Jeff, if you look at the market forecast and the classic market forecast, they're a straight line and you're looking at how many people will be replaced by robots. But it feels like there's this sort of blind spot where you don't really know where the innovation is going to come from. But like you said, it could be sales, could be marketing, could be your customer in the field. But it feels like there's a lot of revenue potential in other parts of the organization that are hard to forecast, your thoughts? Yeah, we have really come up with a pretty exhaustive list of use cases from some of our clients. And every day we're kind of thinking of new applications. And so I think you're going to see a lot more front office applications that are going to drive revenue as opposed to just reducing costs. And then of course, as you move into the AI realm, I think there's a lot more there in terms of revenue generation. But I think we just scratched the surface and there's a lot of opportunity out there. What's your relationship with these guys at UiPath? You know, we've had a tremendous relationship for quite a while with UiPath. Some of our largest clients, two of our Fortune 5 companies have gone to scale with UiPath. As Bill just mentioned in the overall session, we've created some solutions with them around SAP migrations. We've also done some things around document recognition where we've combined Abby with UiPath and some other tools from Microsoft. So we think that these guys, they are on the right track. They've gotten some investment dollars. They're partnering with the right people. And we like their strategy of knowing where they play and integrating with others who are better at other things as opposed to trying to build it themselves. So it's a great relationship and we look forward to continuing it. Well, it's certainly attracting a lot of money. These guys have raised over 400 million, I think is the number, 225 was the latest round. So the VCs are paying attention. Google's in there throwing money at it. So Jeff, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. Yeah, thanks for having me. Good luck with everything. All right, take care. Thank you. Keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from Miami, UiPath forward. 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