 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Ahmed Zaidi is here, he's the chief automation officer at Accelerate, a specialist service provider in this area of RPA. And Armando Lambert is the vice president of enterprise optimization governance and risk. Guys, oh, sorry, at Bayview Asset Management in Miami. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you for having us on. So, Bayview, you got a good view of the bay in Miami? Is that kind of where the name comes from, or? It's a beautiful place to work, I'll tell you that. Miami is happening, UiPath Forward II was in Miami at the Fontainebleau, back here in Vegas, but, so let's get into it. Ahmed, chief automation officer, that's kind of a cool title, I don't see that a lot. What's that entail, and tell us about Accelerate. So, Accelerate, at Accelerate, we're one of the largest niche providers. It's the only thing that we do. We're a process automation and AI company, and our sole focus has been process automation since our inception. In our past lives, we're generalists. We did well, and wanted to do it again. So, when we started Accelerate, we wanted to make sure that we focused on a very specific vertical niche, and process automation was just starting up the uptick, about mid-2016-ish. So, there's going to be some interesting conversations around process automation. It's like, had an analyst on yesterday, they predicted that RPA is dead, process automation lives, it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek thing. So, maybe we can talk about that a little bit. But, Amando, tell us about your role and a little bit about Bayview. Yeah, so Bayview is an asset management company, primarily whole loans, mortgage-backed securities, mortgage servicing rights. We offer service advisory, as well as investment vehicles. My role, basically, is to strategize, innovate, look at new technologies, new ways of streamlining the business. And, you know, about in 2016, you know, we were faced with a challenge, and the challenge was, we have a lot of rot, swivel chair-type work, back office operational work. And, I went in there just trying to look at people, processes and systems, and trying to figure out a way to make things more efficient. And, you know, RPA is one of those vehicles. Okay, so you're smart, you started with people in process, you didn't start with the technology, right? So, what did you learn? I mean, take us back to 2016, when you started to do the investigation, you started to unpack the processes and the people. What did you see, and then what led you to RPA? Yeah, I mean, I think, inherently, there's a lot of business processes that are just brought down through years of just being kind of entrepreneurial and doing a lot of business. So, a lot of these processes early on, we felt like we could just go in and automate, and we realized it just needed a level of process optimization first. So, in doing that, it just kind of directs the vehicle right into what type of automation you need to do. It's not always RPA, RPA is a big component for us. It works. For us early on, we wanted to put a strong governance structure. I strongly believe that, you know, and it's worked out so far for us. So, you brought in, Accelerate, you brought in an outside firm to help you with that process automation, is that right? Absolutely. So, tell us more about how that all went down. So, that was an interesting time, right? These products were coming up. Nobody really knew how well they work. So, we went in and we actually did proof of value. We said, hey, this is all well and good. Let's do a proof of concept and a proof of value. At that time, proof of concept really were a thing. I don't think we should do them anymore. We should only do proof of values, but we went in, looked at the various systems they had, tried it out so he could demonstrate it to his management that this thing works, and as soon as that was over, I think I'd give it to Armando here. We went all in, right? I said, all right. Let's look at the highest value things. Let's deliver this. Let's figure out a governance model. Let's not hold it back like we have done in past IT projects, spinning up. So, let's get the infrastructure up and running very quickly. Let's get a few automations out there so the business sees the value right away, right? Crawl, walk, run. We can do this. What are we going to automate? What do we need from IT? And how are we going to govern this? These are the three pillars that I suggest everybody look at. And we did that parallel, parallel streams and all three of them. And within a few months, he was able to return significant value back to the business, which has led to adoption. I think that has been a very big reason why he's been able to scale because he was able to show early value back to the business very quickly, focusing on value rather than the technology or the underlying solution, right? It's, a lot of times we see folks going into RPA saying, what can RPA do for me? I think that is the wrong question. The question really is, what do you do? Let's classify what you do in manual mechanical work, intelligent work and wasteful work, right? And then look at your toolbox. I have RPA, I have AI, I have other technologies that within an enterprise folks are working on and then apply those to it. RPA becomes the glue for most of these things. You have APIs, SDKs, you have AI technologies, be it cloud or on-frame. RPA becomes the glue and it becomes easy to deploy once you've figured out what all the different pieces are. But it's important to look at the process first and say, what do you do? So when the business comes back and say, what can you do for me with RPA? I say, no, I don't know. What can you do for me with AI? I don't know. Tell me what you do and then I'll tell you what the solution is. So, Marno, given that you started with the value, did that ease some of the potential friction that you sometimes see with change management or change in general? Or did you still see that resistance? And I'm interested in where you started. What were some of those high value areas that you attacked, but the cultural piece first, if you will. Yeah, I mean, a lot of marketing, it's really what it comes down to, trying to prove to the C-suite and managing director areas, like this is a value proposition. Early on, we did a lot of presenting round tables, lunch and learns with the business, because there is some resistance early on. I think everybody has a misconception that it's going to take their jobs, where I believe it's going to create a lot more jobs in the future. For me, it was always a scalability play. How can our business do more for less? And that's really what we really wanted to get to. Throughout that journey, we realized there's a lot of benefit, especially for companies that have a heavy back office operations. And we just started, like Ahmed mentioned there, we started slow. I didn't want to boil the ocean. I needed to prove to leadership that this works. And I think about three years ago, we all kind of felt, is this going to stick? We've seen technology, we've been in technology for over 20 years. And some things fly, some things don't. So we wanted to prove that it worked. And the industry just kind of surrounded itself around that. And look where you are now. I think everybody's putting a lot of money in their budgets for intelligent automation, not just RPA. So the initiative was kind of middle up to the C-suite and then top down? Is that how it- Absolutely. I'm a firm believer the tone needs to come from the top. It has to come from the top. And luckily for me, I have great leaders in our company. They understood the vision. They understand what it could potentially mean for their business. They just needed someone to help execute. So what kinds of things did you start with? Was it a lot of sort of manual form filling out or? Some of that, data extraction from PDFs utilizing OCR. RPA is great to gather and collect data so that they can put it in their models and make more informed decisions. Claims, processes, dealing with different agencies. Early on in adopting UI path, there were some limitations. We worked around that. Now it's pretty much limitless. They could touch any system, any technology, any process. So yeah, it's growing tremendously. And in terms of just ensuring governance and compliance as you scale- Yeah. You have robots doing that. How do you deal with that? We're working more and more. I mean, I think regulators now realize, okay, you're removing the human element. So that's a big value as well. Or sampling, now you're not limited to what you can sample. You can sample 100%. So those are big values. And when you speak to regulators, they really understand that. I would say five years ago, I'm not so sure. But now they welcome it. And I think a lot of the government agencies now are adopting RPA. So it's a good story. Well, automation kill sampling, is that what you're looking at? No, I think it is absolutely right. The point actually, interesting point you made, right? The regulators or the auditors or, for that matter, the security and the compliance guys inside the enterprise have this term of the bot, right? Has this connotation of terminator. And I keep telling him, no, this is that thing you buy at Target that does this. I press the right button, this goes right. I press the left button, it goes left. It just doesn't think on its own. And I think that conversation is very important, right? Once you have that conversation with the security and the compliance guys to say, this is a bot, it only does what you ask it to do. You could put a social security number in front of this guy all day long, in front of this user ID all day long. It just doesn't know what to do with it, won't ever read it. And once they realize that, the conversation changes. Especially when in compliance and audit, right? The compliance officers would love this once you tell them, there's a lot of decision making that happened in people's heads or Excel spreadsheets that never made it to systems and was never logged. So you get something in, you massage it, you did that and you put that in the system. That decision making is now auditable. So you can go back and say, here was the input, here was the massaging of it, here's what went into the system of record after it came in. So I think those conversations early on really helped the scale and adoption. Age old problem and tribal knowledge. Exactly. Joe has his spreadsheet and Fred knows that Joe has a spreadsheet. So when Joe leaves, he has to get the spreadsheet and that's kind of this perpetual thing. How much of what you guys did, Armando, was process re-engineering versus just applying automation at some low-hanging fruit? I think looking back now, it's about a 50-50 split. There are some areas that have robust processes and that makes our life easier. We can just kind of go in, map it out, look at the automation future state and deploy, develop and deploy. Some areas, they inherit processes and they don't always, they're so busy doing their day jobs. They don't always realize there's room for efficiency in their process. So early on, when we priced out how much this would cost, how much development it would be, we didn't always factor in that it would be a 50-50 split and doing a lot more process improvement in the beginning. We've now counted for that. So absolutely, it's about a 50-50 split. Craig Leclerc this morning said something that I was an analyst and he said, very analyst sort of statement, you got to stop worrying about the ROI, focus on the more strategic stuff. Every analyst sort of says that, but I work with a lot of CFOs too. Where's the ROI? So you're in the financial services business. Bottom line dollars matter. Absolutely. So you obviously measure ROI and how do you look at it? You said earlier, you're not cutting jobs, right? But so what do you take, how do you measure kind of the value, the ROI? I mean, giving the end user a little more to think about, give them the opportunity to do more, be more thoughtful in what their day-to-day job is rather than doing the swivel chair type work. So the measurement, the beauty around RPA is it's very quantifiable. Unlike some traditional IT systems, you really can't, the data doesn't always kick back. All our bots, all our processes kick back. They give us data that we can quantify. Metrics on volume versus man hours. This is all information you capture early on. You need to do this at the discovery stage. And we train, we have a robust training program for our business analysts and program managers and developers. And they're always, that's the question they ask every time. It's not just about what is your process, your current state to future state. It's like, let me look at your historical trending. What do their volumes look like? Our business is very cyclical. It goes up and down. And when I mentioned I want them to be scalable and have more capacity, that's really the play for me. For me, it's never been an FTE. I get it, it may come from the C-suite. But like I said, the tone from the top has been solid. Their vision is more about, hey, when it's cyclical and it goes up and down, we need to be able to do more. We need to be able to scale. Have you been able to measure productivity improvement? Absolutely. Absolutely, we have. If you had a mulligan, what would you do differently? Good question. I mean, I think we factored early on, I mentioned this early on, how much process improvement was needed. I think we undervalued that. And every business faces the same challenges, right? Everyone feels like they're doing the right thing. These processes are inherited. Regulations change, investors change. There's new business rules every day. And you kind of need to sit back as a business user every now and then and refresh that. And we didn't account for that early on. We're helping the business do that. Our business is fantastic. They bought into the program and it's like having additional workforce working on your side. Daniel Dinesa in his keynote last night basically said and pick up on something you guys said is he really appreciates the customers who took a chance early on. He goes, because frankly, our product wasn't fully baked out. And I was like, wow, what an honest statement from a CEO. You don't usually hear that. But my sense is that they got it right, UiPath, and I love your comments, in the sense that they went after simplicity and said, okay, make it easy to adopt and then we'll figure it out and then bring in the functionality. Is that kind of what happened? Picking up on Daniel, and by the way, it's amazing. Humility really comes through, right? So I saw him 2016 standing on stage. And when my partner came to us with the idea saying, hey, we're going to do, we should do this RPA thing. Now I'm giving away my age, but 1998, my first job, I was sitting in front of a computer in Prudential and they put the software in front of me. It was called SQA Robot. It was a test automation tool. It was called SQA Robot. Why that relates to Daniel is he came on the stage in the IRPA conference in 2016. Remember, I love this presentation, just a blues black thing and a few words on it, because let's not kid ourselves. We have this very traditional QA automation technology that we think can do something really super and I have built a product on top of that, but there's not a lot of magic in here yet, right? So that's, but I think the great thing about UiPath has been the vision, right? The vision has been, and if you saw yesterday, they started with the core and unlike some of the other vendors, they said, we're just going to do RPA really well. We're not going to go into the OCR market. We're not going to try to build AI things. Let's make sure that our core RPA, so you're an enterprise, you want to do OCR, you're not going to buy it from an RPA company. You want to buy it from somebody who's been doing it for 30 years or who just has that sole focus. So I think UiPath had that sole focus, but as I've seen in the past three, four years, they've just done a great job with the full vision, right, starting from, they started with the middle of the core of the product and they said, okay, let's go towards the business and see what the business needs with planning of their automations on and so forth and going further to the right to say, let us enable the technology guys who actually implement this to give them the tools and the integrations they need to actually make this product a full product. I think it's a very good question when people say, what can you do with RPA for me? So I said that answer was very different three years ago than it is today, right? Some of the things are coming out of the box with these. So I predict that in the next few years, document understanding and natural language and all that will just be built in. Today's still very sort of clunky in terms of how you do it, but I think those things are coming together. So looking at processes that way is really important. A lot of runway for this market. Armando, I'll give you the last word. Where do you see RPA, intelligent automation going in your organization? Is it still early days, you got a lot more adoption so you're pretty much settled? No, definitely not settled. I think it's, RPA is just one of the tools in the spectrum of intelligent automation. So more integration, more APIs, a lot of machine learning, eventually some AI. So yeah, we are not slowing down. There's a lot of opportunity. My mandate, as I mentioned before, is just scale, scale, scale. So the process is working, we have a good program in place and we'll continue marching forward. Great, guys, thanks so much. You're welcome. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. Thank you for watching, we'll be right back with theCUBE live from UI Path Forward 3 in Las Vegas, right back.