 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Param Kolon. He is the Chief Product Officer at UI Path. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much for having me. You're coming back on theCUBE. Thank you. So I was just at UI Path with you in Vegas a couple of weeks ago and the UI Path tagline is a robot for every employee. The Microsoft tagline is empowering every employee to be a technologist, empowering citizen developers. Does it strike you that the two missions are similar in their way? That's absolutely right. I think we have so much in common, they're companies together and I think we're working very closely together in not just our technology but also what we're trying to achieve, which is to make people achieve more. You know, amplifying human achievement is a core mission of our company and very excited that Microsoft sort of shares the same ambition. Yeah, it really does connect with me. Satya, this morning talked about that 61% of job openings for developers are outside the tech sector and of course UI Path is really trying to help business productivity overall with everything you're doing. Absolutely and productivity is where we focus our technology primarily on. In fact, a lot of our focus is around how do we actually get people to do more with less time so they can have more time to do the things that they can do with the creative parts of their time as opposed to doing the mundane part. So yeah, productivity is really important to us as a company. It's what we think about every day. Could you bring us inside the relationship with Microsoft and UI Path? Yeah, so we're deeply partnered with Microsoft since day one. Most of our technology is built on Microsoft's stack on .NET. We run, our database is all run on SQL server or cloud service. Runs on Microsoft Azure. So we are very deeply partnered. We've helped Microsoft build a lot of AI services around document extraction to form Recognizer. We're one of the first customers that we work together with Microsoft and Chevron on. So we have a very deep partnership with Microsoft. Okay, so let me ask you a question actually as a customer of Microsoft, why everything built on Microsoft from the .NET through the infrastructure as a service? Why did UI Path choose Microsoft? I think it made a lot of sense. Microsoft's focus on productivity, Microsoft's focus on enabling developers to do stuff quickly. And it also helped that a lot of the founders, myself included, came through with Microsoft. It was a lot of experience with Microsoft. So I think part of that helped as well. Does it help or hurt when you are then pitching your services that it is, that it is a much more Microsoft focused company? So I think we've grown over the years to actually have a much broader ecosystem. So we have more than 500 partners now. We work with Google. Google is a customer, it's an investor. It's also a very deep partner. A lot of our AI services are building with Google. We're a deep partner with AWS as well. So I think we're working with all, the way our customers are today. But I think we still have a very close relationship with Microsoft, given our attitude and given where we started. Yeah, actually, I went to the UI Path Forward event last year and had not realized how deep that connection was with Microsoft, I see UI Path across all the clouds. So there's little mention of RPA this morning in the keynote, the Power Automate solution coming out for Microsoft. Of course, everyone seems to have an RPA out there, all the big software houses out there. Tell us what this means in the marketplace. Yes, listen, RPA is a very fast growing market. It is the fastest growing enterprise category today. And when you grow so fast, it's good for the business, but also attracts attention. I think getting somebody like Microsoft to sort of say that we're in it as well only helps sort of solidify the foundation, solidify the category and brings a lot more credibility to this category. So I think we're excited to have Microsoft here as well. And in terms of, as you were saying, you're two companies that are very much focused on workplace productivity, employee collaboration and being able to be more creative with the time that you have. How much is that cultural alignment? How much does that help your partnership? I think it helps a partnership a lot. So when we, for example, when we meet with the office team, they think deeply about helping people do more with less time. We think about the same things as well. So if you notice, some of the newer products that we've launched are very deeply integrated into office in fact, we do a lot of inspiration from products like Excel to be able to say business people that are able to do some very sophisticated, complex business models in Excel should be able to do similar stuff with their products as well. So we continue to work with Microsoft and in a cross collaboration across those teams. And I think in general, our message, we have a co-seller relationship with Microsoft. So when Microsoft brings us into opportunities and it closes, it actually retires Coda for Microsoft sellers as well. So I think all of that alignment really helps. We'd love to hear what joint customers, what brings customers to UI path at a show here? What are some of the key drivers for their discussions that you're having this week? Yeah, so I mean, we've got through the years we've got over 5,000 customers that work with us, large enterprises, very large banks to companies like Chevron. Chevron in particular is one of those customers. That's a very, very deep customer of Microsoft but also a very strong customer of ours. And in a specific use case at Chevron, while Chevron wanted to extract data from their oil field service rig reports, they were getting more than 1,000 oil rig reports coming in every day with about 300 pages per average for report and somebody had to manually go in and physically read those reports, put them into that SAP system so that you could predict if there was a preventive maintenance repair that was required. Working together with Microsoft, we were able to take a service that Microsoft was building an AI called Forums Recognizer and take it to pre-beta and alpha with the customer so that Chevron is now able to have all of those reports read by UiPath robots and automatically punch it into the SAP preventive maintenance application so that you can actually ship the engineer on site before you notice something happen to the oil rig. So I think that's a pretty cool scenario. Another similarity between UiPath and Microsoft is this customer obsession. And this is something that you talked a lot about at UiPath Forward, this spending time with customers, learning how they would use RPA and then also thinking ahead of them and in terms of how they could use RPA. How do you work with customers and Microsoft together in partnership and in terms of how do you find out exactly what their needs are and the joint solutions that you could provide? Yeah, and then that's a really good question. Microsoft has been very obsessed with driving customer obsession in all parts of the organization. We culturally have a really deep obsession about working closely with customers. And I think, so if Microsoft has MTC meet the customer sessions around the world and we work closely with Microsoft to make sure that our technology can be showcased by Microsoft people in those MTC sessions so that when customers come in they're able to not only see Microsoft's technology but also our technology and if they're interested then our sales teams work collaboratively together to make sure we can have joint sessions and planning and working with customers. So I had a chat earlier this year with your CMO Bobby Patrick talking about how AI and RPA go together. You own the product so will AI be able to allow RPA to get into more complex configurations? Give us where we are and what's new in that space. Yeah, I know absolutely. So like the first wave of RPA was all about taking sort of structured processes, deleting data from Excel sheets, deleting data from APIs, and be able to process it in different systems. Now humans don't always work with that. 10% of what we do on a daily basis is structured data, right, spreadsheets and stuff. 90% of what we do is reading spreadsheets, extracting information from papers, responding to chat conversations. All of that unstructured information can now be processed by AI algorithms to be able to extract the intent of the chat conversation. To be able to extract the data that's in that unstructured document that we just received. To be able to use computer vision to detect what is on the computer screen so that you're able to detect that control, whether it renders the browser or it renders in a Windows 30 application of that. So AI brings the possibility to automate a lot more complex processes within the organization, mimicking sort of more human-like behavior. So robots are not just doing the numbers and structured data, but be able to process unstructured information as well. Will the AI help at all trying to understand what can I automate? Yeah, absolutely, and that's the other piece of being able to use process understanding capability. So what we've done is we've built capability that's able to follow human activity logs and how people are using systems, but also how the databases are getting updated by different applications and be able to mine that information to understand how work is getting done in the enterprise and be able to understand what are the scenarios and possibilities for automating more business processes. And that's also one of the key benefits of how AI and process mining can be applied to the context of the RPA. There are so many product announcements today on the main stage. It's an 87-page book that we were sent from the Microsoft comms team. What are some of the most exciting things you've seen here today? I think I'm really excited about some of the innovation that Microsoft is doing in the analytics stack to be able to report on the data warehouse, but also big data together in one stack. I think that's really powerful. That is something that our customers have been very interested in because robots process structure log, but also unstructured logs. I'm also excited about some of the AI investments that Microsoft is making. I think some of the AI capabilities and are really coming to practical use. I mean, a lot of companies talk about AI for a long time. We've applied AI practically in our technology, but I think a lot more technology is now available for us to be used in our products. Okay, Parm, there's recent acquisition, but Process Gold was the company. Tell us a little bit about that and what are the plans for that? Absolutely. So Process Gold is a company that's based around Germany and Eindhoven in Netherlands. And this is the company that was focused on process understanding or process mining. So essentially what they had was that connectors to different line of business applications and be able to sit and study logs of how work was getting done over long periods of time. So what happens is if you went to a line of business owner and you ask them, what is your process for procurative pay look like in order to cash look like? Chances are they'll draw you a straight line and say, here's what the process is. However, when you look at how work is getting done, it's typically not a straight line. And depending on how many variations you're looking at, you can get up to like 15 or 20 different variations, the same process being done. So what Process Gold does is it identifies what are the different ways in which processes are getting done. Identify where the bottlenecks exist in the process. How long is the step one? How long is the time between step two and step three? Is that taking 25% of what the total time is? And is there a way to optimize that process by eliminating that bottleneck? And once you've optimized the process, it also gives you the ability to go automate that optimized process, right? You don't want to automate a process that is suboptimal. You want to go understand the process, see how work is getting done, optimize the bottlenecks and eliminate the bottlenecks, optimize the process and then go automate that and Process Gold, it really helps us sort of cater to that need, which is go automate the best possible way to optimize the process. In terms of Microsoft's use of things like AI and ML, ML, we have not really talked a lot about ML here. I mean, it was mentioned on the main stage, but not a lot. How, I mean, what do you think the future holds in terms of Microsoft in the next five to 10 years? Yeah, I mean, I think I see Microsoft investing a lot in data and really being able to get all kinds of data because ML is useful only after it's able to reason over tons of data. And Microsoft is, you know, rightfully investing in the data repository in stores so that it has the ability to store that data, to process that data. And once it's got the data and the data assets over it, then it's able to go create the algorithms that can reason over data and create that stuff. And I think that's really exciting because Microsoft has a lot of the horsepower to be able to not only store that data, process that data efficiently, so it can be used in machine learning and AI. Well, Param, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you, pleasure to have me here. Thank you very much, yeah. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite.