 The Cube presents UiPath Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Forward 5, UiPath's customer event. This is the fourth Forward that we've been at. We started in Miami, we had some great events. What's all about the customer stories? Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Flo Yee is here. She's the director of engineering and development at Densu, and Kate Hall is to her right. And Kate is the director of automation solutions at Densu. Ladies, welcome to The Cube. Thanks so much. It's great to be here. Tell us about Densu. You guys are a huge company, but give us the focus today. Yeah, absolutely. Densu is one of the largest advertising networks out there. One of the largest in the world with over 66,000 employees, and we're operating in 100 plus countries. We're really proud to serve 95% of the Fortune 100 companies. Have some names like Microsoft, Proctor, and Gamble. If you've seen the Super Bowls ads last year, Larry David's ad for the Crypto brand, that's a hilarious one for anyone who haven't seen it. So we're just really proud to be here, and we really respect the creatives of our company. That was the best commercial of Super Bowl by far. So I said at the top, I'm saying to Dave and I, we're talking, you I pass a cool company. You guys kind of look like cool people. You got cool jobs. Tell us about your respective roles. What do you guys do? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I'm the director of engineering and automation. So what I really do is to implement the automation operating model and connecting developers across five continents together, making sure that we're delivering and deploying automation projects up to our best standards, setting by the operating model. So it's a really, really great job. And we get to see all these brilliant minds across the world. Kate, what's your role? Yeah. And the automation solutions vertical that I had up, the focus is really on converting business requirements into technical designs for those developers to deliver. So making sure that we are managing our pipeline, sourcing the right ideas, prioritizing them according to the business, businesses, objectives, and making sure that we route them to the right place. So does it need to be an automation first? Do we need to optimize the process? Does this make sense for citizen developers? Or do we need to bring in the professional resources on Flow's team? So you're bilingual, you speak, you're like the translator, you speak Geek and Wallach, right, is that fair? Okay, so take me back to the, let's do a little mini case study here. How did you guys get started? I'm always interested, was this a top-down, is top-down required to be successful? Because it does feel like you can have bottoms up with RPA, but how did you guys get started? What was the journey like? We started back in 2017, very traditional top-down approach. So we delivered a couple POCs working directly with UiPath going back those five years, delivered those really highly scalable top-down solutions that drove hundreds of thousands of hours of ROI for the business. However, as people kind of began to embrace automation and they learned that this is something that they could help them, it's not something that they should be afraid of to take away their jobs. Densu's a young company with a lot of young creatives. They want to make their lives better. So we were absolutely inundated with all of these use cases of, hey, I need a bot to do this, I need a bot to do that. It's gonna save me 10 hours a week. It's gonna save my team 100 hours a month, et cetera, et cetera. All of these smaller use cases that were gonna be hugely impactful for the individuals, their teams, even in an entire department. But didn't have that scalable ROI for us to put professional development resources against it. So starting in 2020, we really introduced the Citizen Development Program to put the power into those people's hands so that they could create their own solutions. And that was really just a snowball effect to tackle it from the bottom up, as well as the top-down. So a lot of young people, Dave, not threatened by robots, they're bracing it. They've grown up with the technology. They know that they can order an Uber from their phone. Why am I sitting here at MITS typing data from Excel into a program that might be older than some of our youngest employees? Now the way you described it, to correct me if I'm wrong, the way you described it, it sounds like there's sort of a gating function, though. You're not just putting these tools in the hands of people sitting, especially creatives who are there to create. You're not saying, oh, you want things automated. Here are the tools, go ahead, automate it. For those of you who want to learn how to use the tools, we'll have you automate that. Did I hear that right? You're sort of making decisions about what things will be developed even by citizen developers. Let me, Flo, do you want to talk to them about governance? Absolutely, yeah. So I think we started out with assistant development program. Obviously they're a huge success, right? Last year we were also here at theCUBE, so very happy to be back again. But I think a lot, a lot have changed and we've grown a lot since last year. I have the joy of being a part of this team. And then the other thing is that we really expanded and implemented an automation operating model that I mentioned briefly just earlier. So what that enabled us to do is to unite developers from five continents together organically and we're now able to tap into their talent at a global scale. So we're really using this operating model to grow our automation practice in a scalable and also controlled manner. What I mean by that is that these developers originally were sitting in 18 plus markets, right? There's not much communication collaboration between them. And then we went in and bridged them together. What happened is that originally they were only delivering projects and use cases within their region. And sometimes these use cases could be very, very much small scale and not really maximizing their talent. What we're now able to do, it's tap into a global automation pipeline. So we're connecting these highly skilled people to the pipeline elsewhere, the use cases elsewhere that might not be within their regions. Because one of our focus, a lot of change I mentioned, right? One thing that will never change with our team, it's use automation to elevate people's potential. Now it's really a win-win situation because we are connecting the use cases from different pipelines so the business is happy because we're delivering these high scalable solutions. We're also utilizing these developers and they're happy because their skills are being maximized. And then at the same time, we're going out automation program so then that way the citizen development program so that the lower complexities, projects that are being delivered at a local level and we're able to innovate at a local level. I have so many questions flow based on what you just said. It's flowing my mind here. It's a whole cycle. So let me start with, how do you, you know, one of the concerns I had initially with RPA because you're talking about some very narrow use cases and your goal is to expand that, to realize the potential of each individual. But early days I saw a lot of what I call paving the cow path, taking a process that was not a great process and then automating it. And that was limiting the potential. So how do you guys prioritize which processes to focus on and maybe which processes should be rethought? Right, exactly. A lot of the time when we do automation, right, we talk about innovations and all that stuff, but innovation doesn't happen with the same people sitting in the same room doing the same thing. So what we're doing now able to connect all these people, different developers from different groups. We really bring the diversity together. That's diversity, diversity in the mindset, diversity in the skill set. So what are we really able to do and we see how we tackle this problem, it's two. And that's a problem for a lot of business out there is the short termism. So there's something what we do is that we take two approaches. One, before we, you know, for example, when we used to receive a use case, right, maybe it's for the China market involving a specific tool and we just go right into development and start coding and all that good stuff, which is great. But what we do with this automation framework, which we think it's a really great service for any company out there that want to grow and mature their automation practice, it's to take a step back. Think about, okay, so the China market would be beneficial from this automation. Can we also look at the Philippine market? Can we also look at the Thailand market? Because we also know that they have similar processes and similar tools that they use. So we're really able to make our automation in a more meaningful way by scaling the project just beyond one market. Now it's impacting the entire region and benefiting people in the entire region. That is what we say, you know, putting automation for good. And in that, it's what we talked about, advancing, teaming without limits. And that's a- We want to make sure that we're really like taking a step back, connecting all of the dots, building the one thing the right way, the first time. And what's really integral into being able to have that transparency, that visibility is that now we're all working on the same platform. So, you know, Brian spoke to you last year about our migration into Automation Cloud. Having everything, that single pipeline in the cloud, anybody at DenZu can opt in and join the automation community and get access to Automation Hub, see what's out there, submit their own ideas, use the launch pad to go and take training and get started on their own automation during, as a citizen developer and, you know, see the different paths that are available to them from that one central space. So, by taking a breath, stepping back, pausing just a bit, the business impact at the tail end is much, much higher. Now, you start in 2017, really before UiPath made its big enterprise play. It acquired Process Gold, you know, Cloud Elements, you know, most recently, we had some others. How much of what you guys are doing is platform versus kind of the initial sort of robot installation? Yeah. I mean, platforms power people and that's what we're here to do as the global automation team, whether it's powering the citizen developers, the professional developers, anybody who's interacting with our automations at DenZu, we want to make sure that we're connecting the docs for them on a platform basis so that developers can develop and they don't need to develop those simple use cases that could be done by a citizen developer. They're super smart technical people. They want to do the cool shit with the new stuff. They want to branch into, you know, using AI center and doing document understanding. That's, you know, the nature of human curiosity. Citizen developers, they're thrilled that we're making an investment to upskill them, to give them a new capability so that they can automate their own work and they're the process experts. They don't need to spend a month talking to us when they could spend that time taking the training, learning how to create something themselves. How much sort of a use case runway, when you guys step back and look at your business, do you see a limit to the use cases? I mean, where are you if you had on a spectrum of, you know, majority, how much more opportunity is there for DenZu to automate? There's so much. I think the, Do you feel like it's limitless? No, I absolutely feel like it's limitless because there's one thing, there's the use cases and I think it's all about connecting the talent and making sure that something we do really, you know, making sure that we deliver these use cases, invest the time in our people. So we make sure our professional developers part of our team, spending 10 to 20% of the time to do learning and development because only limitless if our people are getting the latest and the greatest technology and we want to invest the time and we see this as an investment in the people, making sure that we deliver the promise of putting people first. And the second thing is also an investment in our company's growth and that's a long-term goal and overcoming just focusing on things our short term. So that is something we really focus to do and not only the use cases we're doing, what we're doing as an operating model for automation, that is also something that we really value because then this is kind of a playbook and a success model for many companies out there to grow their automation practice. So that's another angle that we are also focusing on. Well that's a relief because you guys are both seem really cool and I'm sitting here thinking, they don't realize they're working themselves out of a job. Once they get everything automated, what are they going to do? But so it sounds like it's a never ending process but because you guys are such a large global organization, it seems like you might have a luxury of being able to benchmark automations from one region and then benchmark them against other regions that aren't using that automation to be able to see very, very quickly, not only realize ROI really quickly from the region where it's been implemented, but to be able to compare it to almost a control. Is that part of your process? Yeah, absolutely because we're such a global brand and with the automation operating model, what we're able to do, not only focusing on the talent and the people but also focusing on the infrastructure. So for example, maybe there's a first use case developing in Argentina and they have never done these automations before and when they go to their security team and asking for an opt-by-pass service account and the security team in Argentina has never heard of automation, we don't know what UIPath is, why would I give you a service account? For good reason, right? They're doing their job, right? But what we're able to do with the automation model is to establish trust between the developers and the security team. So now we have a set of standing infrastructure that we're ready to go whenever an automation is ready to deploy and we're able to get this set of standing infrastructure because we have the governance to make sure the quality we're delivered and making sure anything that we deploy, the automation that we deploy are developed and governed by the best practice. So that's how we're able to kind of get this automation expand globally in a very controlled and scalable manner because the people that we have build a relationship with. What are the governors to how fast you can adopt? Is it just expertise or bandwidth of that expertise or what's the bottleneck? Yeah. If you want to talk more about it. So in terms of the pipeline, we really want to make sure that we are taking that step back and instead of just going, let's develop, develop, develop, hear the requirements like get started and go, we've proved the value of automation at Densu. We want to make sure we are taking that step back and observing the pipeline and it's up to us to work with the business to really establish their priorities and the priorities, it's a big global organization. There might be different priorities in APAC than there are in AMIA for a good reason. APAC may not be adopted on the same ERP system, for example. So they might have those smaller scale ROI use cases but that's where we want to work with them to identify maybe this is a legitimate need, the ROI is not there. Let's upscale some citizen developers so that they can start working for themselves and get those results faster for those simpler use cases. Does the funding come from the line of business or IT or a combination? I mean, there are obviously budget constraints. Everybody's concerned about the macro and the recession. You guys have some global brands. As things ebb and flow in the economy, you're competing with other budgets but where are the budgets coming from inside of Densu? Is it the business? Is it the tech group? Yeah, we really consider our automation group as a cause of doing business because we are here connecting people, we're bridging people together and really elevating and the reason why we structure it that way is people, we do automation at Densu not to reduce headcount, not to not just those matrix number that we measure but really it's to giving time back to the people, giving time back to our business so then that way they can focus on their well-being and that way they can focus on a work-life balance. So that's what we say we are forced for good and by using automation for good as one really great example. So I think because of this agenda and because Densu do prioritize people, so that's why we're getting the funding, we're getting the budget and we are seeing as a cause of doing business so then we can get this time back using innovation to make people more fulfilling and applying automation in meaningful ways. Kate and Flo, congratulations. Your energy is palpable and really great success, wonderful story. Really appreciate you sharing it again with us. Thank you so much for having us today. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante were live from UI Path Forward 5 from Las Vegas. We're in the Venetian Convention Center, we'll be right back for this short break.