 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Vellante. We're joined by Richard Fong. He is the IT manager finance delivery at Chevron. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. So Chevron of course is a household name, a big oil company. But tell us a little bit about what you do there. So I'm the IT manager and I'm responsible for software and application engineering. My team develops custom applications for Chevron. And over the last couple of years, we've actually started an RPA development practice. Okay, so what were the issues, the challenges that you were experiencing where you said, hey, maybe we can get a bot to help us do this? Yeah, yeah, there are a plethora of opportunities in Chevron to automate many, many mundane tasks. What UiPath and RPA brings to the table is a very easy way to automate tasks where these tasks maybe building a traditional like .NET application would be too expensive and take too long. Using the UiPath platform, we're able to very quickly build solutions and deploy them much quicker than we would have done if we had to build a traditional like a .NET application. The bots aren't coding, are they? Are the bots coding? The bots, we found that you don't need to do a lot of coding for these solutions. So that was a big help in terms of being able to deploy and automate solutions very quickly. Like what's an example? What do you mean by a solution? So, believe it or not, we have many people who still go through and open up email attachments. They're Excel files or PDF files or text files. And that's their day job. That's what they do all day long for weeks. Usually maybe about two weeks of doing data processing. They spend the other two weeks doing error corrections. So we were able to use UiPath to develop a solution, a bot that will cull through your one's inbox, open up attachments, copy and paste that data automatically into like a flat file. And then they would just upload that into the ERP system. So that was a big win for us. And that's just one example. So this is, was this an IT, I'm always interested in how RPA gets into an organization. Was it IT-led, was it business-led, is it top-down? It sounds like it was an IT-led initiative. In this example, it was an IT. Interestingly, it came to Chevron. Chevron's a huge organization with many different IT departments actually. And for Chevron, it actually started with another IT manager in our Supply and Trading Department, I think, that took a look at RPA. And he just brought it out and socialized it with other IT managers. And the finance group said, hey, this has huge potential here. So then we took it and did some proof of concepts with it and just took off with it. So going back to those employees that you were describing, whose job it was to open up email attachments and then do that data looking for aberrations. What do they do now? I mean, this has been built to us as we are freeing up your time. You can now focus on the more creative aspects of your job. How are they spending their time? Absolutely. Actually, that played out exactly like you mentioned. There was a little bit of nervousness with these employees. Like, oh my God, what's going to happen to my job? I've been doing this for years. I'm comfortable with it. I'm an expert at opening attachments. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So there was definitely some nervousness, no doubt. And, but what eventually happened is that we were able to redeploy these folks onto other projects and have actually a cost avoidance situation because instead of hiring new folks, having to hire new folks or bring in contractors, we're able to redeploy them onto higher value projects. Yeah, I mean, I think we hear that a lot from customers. From the vendors you hear, oh no, everybody loves it. Which is true, once you experience it, you love it. But you've got to be cognizant, I would think. And I wonder if you could sort of share your experiences as to how you dealt with that uncomfortableness. You got to be cognizant that it's going to affect people's jobs. So what did you guys do to get people more comfortable, to educate them that you're not just trying to replace them with software robots? Yeah, yeah, no, you do need to be sensitive to how people will react to potentially losing their job. Actually, the story is not you're losing your job. This is an opportunity to upskill and to grow your career, right? Just doing data entry is kind of like, yeah, it's a little bit career limiting. So we kind of approach it in that context. And the other thing is Chevron's a great company to work for, we're not purposely trying to eliminate positions. We're still growing, oil is still in big demand. So it's about upskilling and reallocating people to higher value work. I mean, everybody's hiring. I mean, there's basically 0% unemployment. So if you're like 98, 97% of the people, you'll have a job. So now, it'd be interesting to see if that changes. But even in bad times, 90% of the people are employed. So my question is, how far do you see this going? Rebecca and I were talking at the top of our segment. In many ways, you're basically, you're automating mundane tasks that already exists. So they're known processes. Okay, it's important you're saving money. You're freeing up undifferentiated heavy lifting. You use Gavin's term. But how far do you see this going? Do you see an opportunity to really create an automation fabric across a company? Have you guys started to think about that? Absolutely, I see it going pretty far actually. We've kind of just scratched the surface. One of the reasons why I'm here at this conference is to look at what are the new products coming out, new products and features. We're at a juncture where we need to understand now how to scale all these solutions across the enterprise. And how do we ensure also not only that things are automated, but that we are following all our governance, risk, and compliance procedures. So that when the Comptroller, our internal controls group says, you're automating these financial transactions, what are you doing to make sure you're protecting the integrity of the systems as well? So I'm excited to see that the UiPath has invested quite a bit in things like information protection, security, management of bots and things like that. So that's going to help us. The other thing that we, the other area that we have not fully deployed is around artificial intelligence and machine learning. So those solutions will actually help us, will give us the capability to really further automate and leverage things. And it's more easier than what we do today. Most of the solutions that we've deployed are more algorithmic based, rules based, whereas some of the things that we saw about extracting semi-structured data, template-less data processing, that's going to be the next big area that we need to look into. So scale makes sense, because if you can take something that one person's saving some money on and you can scale it across the organization, I don't know how many employees Chevron has, but it's a lot. 10s of thousands. Oh, 10s of thousands. Yeah, yeah. It's a benefit to them. 160 countries, you know, there's folks, some, the automation that we ran for the finance department has been mostly for the central finance groups, corporate finance, but there's financial groups all over the world with Chevron that are looking, that are also doing similar data processing. We haven't even gone out there yet, as much as we want to, but I think what we want to do is go out there this time with artificial intelligence and machine learning features of the platform. So I want to double-click on that. So the security piece makes sense. If you're going to scale it across 160 countries, et cetera, you got to make sure it's secure and complies. UI path talks about a path to AI. Why is RPA a path to AI? Can you help us understand that better? Well, I think it's my connection to that. I was actually, I was hearing the talk this morning about that. Good marketing, it catches your ear. Yeah, and so I had about 20 minutes to think about it since then, but I think the easy connection is that it seems, well, the way they've deployed AI and ML, it's using the current UI studio, and it's a drag and drop operation for what they've, the way they're deploying AI and ML. So if you're currently using UI path studio to develop your algorithmic based automations, it's not a great leap to just bring in the AI and ML modules of UI path. I want to ask about this two ideas of introducing AI and ML, also deploying bots really across the enterprise. We're really talking about change management here. And we've scratched the surface a little bit saying that some employees have been happier and saying, okay, I can move over here and I can focus on these higher value areas of my career, grow my career. But there's also a great skepticism within the public about bots. I mean, we've seen the malevolent bots that really had a real effect on our election. And we're seeing that in other areas of technology, how do you bring people along? And say that this is a force for good and they'll trust us, link arms with us, bots are the future. And they're, I mean, what would you say? I think that's a valid point that you do need to address the things where bots could go wrong, things could go rogue. How do we make sure we still have control that incorrect decisions are not being automatically made? So that is a valid, that is a very valid point. And I, so I kind of go back to the whole thing about we have to have good governance risk and compliance processes supported by the platform. UI path, I'm glad to hear they made it a priority to continue investing the platform and include governance risk and compliance into it. The other aspect from a developer, individual developer perspective is that we need to encourage developers to put in very good checks and balances in their code to develop for worst case scenarios about something happens, something goes bump in the middle of the night, that your bot is able to recover or alert, you know, and so, and for everything to be very transparent and audible. So those things I think, if you do a combination of those things, I think you'll put people at ease about these solutions. How important is the SAS announcement today in terms of a deployment model? Is that something that, you know, struck a chord with you, that resonated with you? Yeah, yeah, so actually before the conference I actually registered myself for the SAS, an instance of the SAS platform. Just like what they said, that it takes a minute, it actually took me a minute. I wanted to say, yeah, hey, it was just a minute. And I had, you know, it was very seamless to develop the RPA using their SAS solution, great new features. So I think that has also the potential for organizations like ours that have an on-prem to maybe move to a hybrid solution so we could leverage all the new features in the 2019 version. And hybrid because you want to maintain some kind of level of GRC compliance that's specific to Chevron, right? And not just sort of cookie cutter, cloud. And, you know, and also just to, we've invested a lot in the on-prem and we're going to, you know, look for the, you know, get our ROI out of everything that we've done on-prem. But I think maybe eventually everything's moving to the cloud. So we'll probably start a journey at some point to their cloud version. But I think there's also some other companies that I talked about. They do need to know how secure is the cloud version of the UiPath. Did you evaluate other companies besides UiPath before you took on? Yeah. Why UiPath, I'd love to hear your comments on that. So definitely we, you know, evaluated other vendors. I think the advantage with UiPath is it's easy to use. You know, it was a fairly robust tool. So the concept of the studio and the orchestrator to manage your portfolio of solutions, we felt that it was a stronger product overall. When you go, you know, we've heard a lot about citizen developers and low code or no code. As RPA permeates through the organization, do you see that continuing to be an IT service led? I mean, kind of an interesting role for you guys. I mean, I was saying to Rebecca before, it kind of reminds me a service now. I don't know if you're a service now customer. Yes, we are. But started on IT and then, you know, I don't know if you have gone into the lines of business, but it was kind of IT bringing it to lines of business. Is there a similarity there? And do you see RPA as playing a role? Very much, very much. And I've been in IT for a really long time. So I went through the days of citizen developers doing access databases or Excel macros. And then they've thrown it over to the fence to IT to support. And these things are like, they're not compliant. You know, they're, you know, so we've had, I was like, we were really worried about what are we going to do with all these RPAs that these folks are going to do, you know, develop on their own? I think the reality is that we are trying to push innovation out to everyone. So the reality is that there will be citizen developers and we actually just need to embrace that and let them develop. But the challenge is as for an IT department is how can we set up the processes, the infrastructure, everything else to receive all these new solutions and manage it and be stewards of all these new solutions. So I think that's going to be the challenge for our IT department. And I think that's going to be something that we need UI path to help us figure out is how do we scale to have thousands of these solutions without having to hire a whole army of IT support folks to, you know, leverage the tools. Maybe we need RPA for IT just as much as we're doing RPA for the business. Getting the whole house in order. Absolutely. That's going to be, I think that's the key to survival. Richard, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great conversation. Great, thank you for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more of the CUBE's live coverage of UI path.