 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward America's 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host Rebecca Knight co-hosting alongside Dave Vellante. We are joined by Gavin Jackson. He is the Senior Vice President and Managing Director, EMEA at UiPath. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. You are brand spanking new to the company. Brand spanking new. You were at AWS for four years, joined UiPath in September. I want to start this conversation by having you talk a little bit about what appealed to you about UiPath and what made you want to make the leap after four years at AWS. Yeah, so I had the privilege at AWS of really having a really close proximity to enterprise customers and getting the opportunity to listen to what they really wanted when they were talking about their digital transformation journeys. And as it turns out, the sort of cloud first and the automation first eras, if you will, are operating models at two sides of the same coin. If you think about what the cloud proposition has been over the last number of years, it's really been about sort of reducing or eliminating the undifferentiated heavy lifting so that builders can build. And then that turned into an operating model principle and then became sort of cloud first. And it's the same thing for the automation world. You know, we are reducing and eliminating the undifferentiated heavy lifting of business processes and tasks and everything else, whether they're complex tasks or simple tasks, removing that so that builders can build and business people can innovate and giving them the freedom to do what they need to do as business owners. Now I'm going to keep pushing on this. The similarities and differences because where it seems to break down is where RPA is focusing on the citizen developer, the end user. I'm afraid of AWS, I won't go near it. I see that console, I go, oh, call my techies. You know, AWS is, you got to be pretty technical to actually leverage it. At the same time, I'm thinking, well, maybe, not maybe my builders are building things that I can touch, but help us square that circle. Yeah, so I think the world is trending towards as much automation as possible. So if it can be automated or if you can reduce the burden to get to innovation, I think technology is moving that way. Even in coding, I think the trends we're seeing whether it's AWS or anyone else is low to no code. And so we occupy a world within the RPA space or the intelligent automation space where we're providing tools for people that don't need a requirement or a skill set to code and they can still manufacture, if you will, their own automations. And particularly with a release that we're just announcing today, which is StudioX, it really kind of reduces the friction from a business user who has zero understanding of how to code to build their own automations whether it's kind of recording a process or just dragging and dropping different components into a process, even I could do that. And that's saying something I can tell you. Your alter ego is Tony Stark. Well, so yes, exactly, yeah. So just in terms of this idea of democratizing the automation, the building, you said, you've been just someone who's pretty decent at Excel. You're close now. So what will this mean? I mean, what does that bode for the future of how work gets done? Because I mean, that is at the core of what you're doing. It's scientifically understanding how and where work gets done, where are the bottlenecks, where are the challenges, and how can RPA fix this? So I think ultimately, like a lot of technologies, it's really about the exponential curve of productivity. And whether you're looking at a national level, a global level, a company level, a human level, every level of productivity has declined really over the last number of years. And technology hasn't done a great job to improve that. And you can say that some technologies have done a good job. Again, I'd use ADBS as a good job in terms of the proliferation or how prolific you can get more code out and more progress there, but overall productivity has declined. So our sort of view of the world is if you can democratize automation, if you can use or add a digital workforce to your teams, then you'll have an exponential curve of productivity, which a human level is important, a company level is important, a national level is important, and probably a global level is important. We're at this tipping point for technology really unlocking a lot of value. One of the things that your former boss, Jeff Bezos, said was bet on dreamy businesses that have unlimited upside. These dreamy businesses, customers love them, they grow to very large sizes, they have strong returns on capital, and they can endure for decades. I wonder if you could put UiPath in that context of a dreamy business. What does he know, right? I mean, no, but it's absolutely right. I mean, so, and this is one of the reasons I was attracted by the way to UiPath, because I think that the robots themselves, if you can just kind of look at the subcategory of the robot, I think it's on a similar curve to how Gordon Moore was talking about the Intel microprocessor in 1965, and the exponential curve of progress, I think we're on that similar curve. So when I sort of project five years from now, I just think that the amount the robots will be able to do, the cognitive kind of capabilities it will be able to do are just phenomenal. So, and customers give us feedback all the time about two things, they love and they value what we do. The value is important because it's very empirical. For the first time, they can actually deploy a technology and see almost an immediate return on their technology. Whether it's a point technology, solving one process or a group of processes, they can see an immediate empirical return. The other thing that I like to measure, I quite like, is that they value it. Sorry, they love it, they love and value it. So they love it, meaning it actually induces an emotion. So when you watch the robots in action and they watch something that has been holding your team back or that has been stifling productivity or whatever it is, people get giddy about it. It's quite fascinating to see. I want to come back to something you said about, your comment about Gordon Moore and tie that to digital transformation. When I think of digital transformation, I think of data. What's the difference between a business and a digital business, it's how they use data. They put data at the core. And for years, we marched to the cadence of Moore's law and that's changed. That's not what the innovation engine is today. It's machine intelligence, it's data and it's cloud for scale. Where do you guys fit? I mean, obviously AI is a piece of that, but maybe you could add some color to where RPA fits in that equation. So I think that's an important point because there's a lot of miscommunication, I think, about really what it means when you talk about digital transformation and what it means to be digitally transformed. And really digitally transformed, you're really talking about a category of customers which are large, more institutional enterprises and governments because they have something to transform. What they're transforming into is more of a digital native sort of attributes, more insurgent mindsets. And these companies are, to your point, they're very data hungry. They harvest as much data as they can from value from data. They're very customer centric. They focus on the customer experience. They use other people's resources, the cloud being one great example of that and the missing point from what you said is they automate everything. They're born automated. So part of the digital transformation journey is that if it can be automated, it will be automated and anything that's new will be born automated. So let me ask you a follow up on that. Is there a cultural difference in EMEA versus what you're seeing in North America in terms of their receptivity to automation? I mean, there are certain parts of Europe which are more protective of jobs. Do you see a cultural difference or are they kind of, I mean, we do see even some resistance here but when you talk to customers, they're like, no, it's wonderful, I love it. What are you seeing in Europe? So I don't see much of a cultural difference there and I actually don't see yet. I haven't seen any feedback yet. It's very new still, but I haven't seen anybody talk about really that this technology is a technology to take jobs out. I think most people see this technology as a way of getting better performance out to humans. Pivoting them towards more. So I would say like in some markets in my prior life, in many prior lives, I would say that there's some countries like France, for example, that would have been a little bit more stayed within their approach to new technologies and adoption, not so with regards to automation. They see this as a real, again, productivity increase. I think that's true for people who have tasted it. But I do think there's still some reticence in the ranks until they actually experience it. That's why we'll talk to some customers about it. They'll have botathons and just to educate people on what's possible to let them try to build their own robots and then the light bulbs go off. Well, and Gavin's point too is that it's taking away the aggravations, the frustrations, the mundane, the drudgery, and then you said people get giddy about those things, but I don't have to do that anymore. But then the question is also, so what creative things are you doing now? So how are you spending your time? What are you doing differently that makes your job more interesting, more compelling? And I think that that's the real question too. So what is the, okay, yes, we're saving some money and people aren't having to do these mundane tasks, but then what does the value add that the employees are now bringing to the table? Yeah, so actually they've made the right point as well in terms of the mechanism for doing that, is that part of the battle here is to spark the imagination. And just like anything really, just like back in the Amazon world, it's all about sparking the imagination. If you can imagine it, you can build it. It's the same thing really within our world now is figuring out with customers what tasks do they do that they hate doing either at a user level or a downstream level. What are the things that they really want to do that they need our help to harvest? And so we do the same sort of things that we would have done with AWS where we did lots of hackathons and brought lots of technology partners in with us and we were sort of building all of this. We do exactly the same thing with the RPA space. It's exactly the same. This is really important because creativity is going to become an increasingly important component because if productivity goes up, I mean you can do the same amount of work with less people. So it is going to impact jobs and people are going to have to be comfortable to get out of their comfort zone and become creative and find ways to apply these technologies to really advance, drive value through their organizations. And actually I look at this as well as a long-term technology, right? As a long-term technology is something that's important for my children. I have three and they're still very young so 12, 10 and six. But eventually they will go into the workplace with these skills embedded. They will just know how you get work done as you have your robot do a whole load of tasks for you here and your job is to build and to be creative and to harvest data and to manipulate data and serve customers and focus on the customer experience. That's really what it's all about. The real brain work. The real brain work. Absolutely. Gavin, a pleasure having you on the show. Great luck at UiPath. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. Please stay tuned for more from theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath coming up in just a little bit.