 From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. It's theCUBE, we are live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're covering UiPath Forward 4. This is our second day of coverage. We've had a lot of great conversations with customers of UiPath, partners, their senior leaders, and next up, we're going to be talking to, I'm going to say the Queen of Citizen Developer, Ness. I'm just going to create that title for you. Sydney Madison Pruscott, she's the Global Head of Intelligent Automation at Spotify. Sydney, welcome to the program. I am so excited to be here. We're excited to have you. So one of my, as we were talking before we went live, we both are big fans of Spotify. I don't know what we would do without it in our personal lives, but talk to me a little bit about Spotify, Automation, UiPath, and I don't want to get into your book, what you've done for citizen developers. Perfect. So Spotify is on a very interesting journey. We began the journey during the pandemic and we were speaking about this a little bit earlier. So our journey began with trying to understand how we would tackle still wanting to upskill our employees despite the fact that we were in the middle of this kind of global crisis. And so through that endeavor, we decided to actually split out our different automation capabilities into citizen developer and unattended automation. And we did all of this through a center of excellence. So a centralized COE, which would facilitate the growth of the automations, whether on the citizen developer side or the unattended side. And through this program, so we set up several different trainings where we could facilitate the growth of the citizen developer community through five day, what we call bot boot camps. And the bot boot camp is in essence five day training about four and a half, five hours a day where we take anyone at Spotify who would like to upskill in this type of automation and we teach them everything from the basics of robotic process automation all the way to what are all of the Spotify specific things that you have to do in order to maintain a robust citizen developer footprint within your team. And so through that entire journey, it's been quite amazing. We started with a very small footprint in our accounting team. And we have scaled now to over 100 citizen developers in a variety of functions within Spotify. And what was the role that you came to Spotify to do? Because you came there, went there right before the everything happened. Yes, so I was actually brought into Spotify to stand up and scale out our intelligent automation center of excellence. So the center of excellence is sort of the main spring of knowledge, training, innovation. And then the citizen developer piece, it sounds like you're pushing out distributing that knowledge, right? So I'm interested in that sort of architecture of automation. Is that you've got a combination of centralized expertise and decentralized innovation. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yes, so it's very interesting actually. So we facilitate the citizen developer program through the center of excellence. So you can think of the center of excellence as the foundation of that knowledge. And our goal is to democratize that knowledge throughout the enterprise. And the way we do that is through the training, we facilitate the governance of the program. So making sure that all of the infrastructure is properly set up, enabling the citizens if they need support, just talking about ideation, even so far as upskilling as well. So upskilling all the way to a power user, whereby those users could become true innovators and facilitate a wide variety of automations within their teams. And was it the events of the last 18 months that really catalyzed this and kind of led you to really become a big advocate for citizen-led development? It did, so we initially were starting with just the center of excellence and an unattended footprint. And we quickly pivoted and realized that we needed to, in order to scale significantly, given the situation working virtually, we are a distributed team around the world that it was critical for our success that we could really distribute this work out. And we felt that the best way to do that was through standing up a citizen-developer program. One of the things that I'm trying to understand is the relationship between automation and data. And I look at Spotify, in many respects, as a data company, at least a company who really understands data. And I see you building all these awesome data products on a subscriber as well. But you've added podcasts, you've got contributors to those podcasts, you've obviously got artists, and these people obviously have to be paid, you have this sort of interesting ecosystem. And these are all data products, if you will, that you guys build, and it's a very cool sort of business model. What's the relationship between data and automation? Ooh, it is a big relationship. I would actually say it is probably the pivotal relationship. Because in order to tell that compelling story of digital transformation, we have to understand the data behind all of the automations that we are generating. And this is whether it's a citizen-developer or COE built. And so for us, it's a critical component of our success that we can pinpoint those key metrics that we are looking at and in tracking what does success mean for our center of excellence? What does it mean for our citizen-led program? And this is everything from increased data quality to risk mitigation of different internal regulatory risks. It could be something as simple as hour saved on automation. So it's a wide variety of attributes that we're looking at to really pinpoint where the successes are coming from and where we can improve, maybe where we need to improve our automation footprint in a given business. Why did you write this book? Great question. So I believe in citizen development. I think it is a very unique approach to spreading out the way that you can transform your business. And so I saw a lot of struggles as I've gone through in the industry with understanding citizen development, the premise of it, and also understanding the technology behind it. I'm a big fan of StudioX. And so the book specifically focuses on StudioX and really introducing users to what is StudioX and how really teaching individuals how to upscale themselves just through the use of the book, very intuitive and hopefully taking away some of the fear that users may have about walking through a platform like StudioX. So what do I have to know to actually, can I read your book and then start coding? Yes, that is the goal, yes. So the goal for the book is very hands on. So it is a book for the novice business user, someone who is not familiar with RPA, someone who may not even be familiar with UiPath. They would be able to pick up this book, go through the set of exercises. It's very robust, over 400 pages. So it really packed a lot of knowledge in there. But the goal would be by the time you walk through every single exercise and complete the book, you would not only understand RPA, you would also understand UiPath as a service provider platform. You would also understand the nuances of StudioX. So in theory, someone like myself could get your book, download the community edition, start building automations, right? Yes, exactly, exactly. And then maybe you have to Google a few things, but... Yes, yes. And it comes with a very robust code setup. So you're able to actually look at the code and review examples of the code in a source code repository. So again, it's very novice users. It's meant for to help facilitate just the learning of someone who is maybe curious about RPA, curious about UiPath, or just curious about StudioX. I'm going to do it. I already have the use case. You do, you have the use case. I'm interested in doing it too. I mean, I can tell that it's a passion project of yours that you fundamentally believe in. You know, we saw this morning data from IDC and we've seen lots of different data sources that talk about automation taking jobs, people being fearful, organizations not being ready. At the same time, we've had such a tumultuous last 18 months that organizations that weren't digital are probably gone. And organizations that aren't, how did there was this massive uptick in automation because suddenly you couldn't get bodies into buildings. So tell me about how this book is a facility. First of all, tell us the name of it. And then as a facilitator of those employees who might be worried about their jobs being taken by bots. That is a great question. So the name of the book is Robotic Process Automation, a citizen developer's guide to hyper automation using UiPath Studio X. And I would say I've heard a lot of the conversations surrounding the loss of jobs, the potential fear. We know as humans we are generally, unfortunately a little resistant to change. And I'll say the digital revolution that we are going through within the workforce, whether it is hybrid work, whether it is completely virtual work, it is a bit daunting. And I understand that fear. I think in alignment with the conversation that we had heard about earlier forward, their RPA has the ability to generate a massive amount of not only improvements within different industries, but jobs as well. And for someone who is looking at this kind of ever-changing landscape and they're wondering where do I fit in? Am I going to get pushed out of a general industry? I would say that that fear turned that into power, turned that into ambition. The level of upskilling that you can do on your own, whether it's using UiPath Academy, whether it's reaching out to your center of excellence, it's incredible. There is a wide variety of different ways that you can upskill yourself. And in essence, you become a powerful player in your environment, because not only do you have the business acumen, you now have the technical acumen. And that is everything. I mean, when we talk about transformation, we talk about where are industries going, there's a saying that every company now must be a technology company. And so this is the key. Even as workers, even as employees, we all must be technologists. And so the real question is, think of yourself and think of this concept I like to call human augmentation. How can you augment yourself through UiPath, through the use of RPA, to become that upskilled worker, that next level worker who will be integral to the success of any company moving forward? We talk a lot about upskilling. Now, of course, part of that upskilling, I presume, is learning how to use robotic process automation and the tooling. But it seems that there's more to it than that. And you just strike me as a person that's creative, you have a power persona. So what are these sort of intangible skills that I need to succeed in this new world? And can I learn them? That's a great question. I think one of the biggest skills, being able to think outside of the box, that is huge. And again, this goes back to Lisa's question about what does it take and what should you, you should really think outside of the box about your own career, about your team, about your company, how you can improve upon what is already there, or how can you build something completely new that has never been thought of before? So I think that's the biggest skill, the ability to innovate, think innovatively and think outside of the box. I believe it's something that is maybe a little intuitive to some individuals, but you can also learn. And you can learn to get out of your own way, so to speak, so that you can actually start to come up with these really creative ways to address whether it's complex business problems, whether it's at an industry level or even just within your internal enterprise. Creativity is actually one of the attributes. Yes. I guess, if it's not, it may not be in your DNA, but it's like humor, right? If you hang out with funny people, if you hang out with creative people, you can learn and apply. That's right, that's right. But in the beginning of the pandemic, you know, one of the things that I think we all went, you seem to have a ton of motivation and ambition, as Dave was saying, and I'm someone that normally has that too, but in the first year of the pandemic, that was hard. It's hard to get motivated, it was hard to know where do I fit in. How do you advise, and now, of course, when you published the book six months ago, we're about a year into the pandemic, things are looking better, because here we are in Las Vegas at an in-person event with humans. But how do you see, how do you recommend to folks that don't have technology backgrounds, like you don't, I don't, to motivate themselves to go, you can take the control, take, and everybody, don't we all want control as people? Take control of your career path, there are a lot of opportunities out there. How do you advise people navigating this challenging sort of mental state with, there's so many opportunities sitting right here? Yes, so I think it goes back to the getting out of your own way. It also goes back to really taking a look at assessing your own skill set, assessing your own personal drivers, what motivates you, whether that is in your personal life, whether that is in your professional life, and then taking a look also at those motivators, how can I look at those, and what use can I get out of those to help me to transform my own personal skill set and really grow out my capabilities, right, as a professional? It's all about really thinking through your, I'll say your professional background or role as ever changing, ever growing, and as long as you approach it with a mindset of constantly growing, constantly upskilling, I mean, honestly, the sky is truly the limit. It is a great question. Weird question. If mastering Word is a one, and let's say learning how to use Excel macros, is let's call it a three, and the spectrum goes out to building a complex AI model, data science kind of ML model, if that's a 10. Where does learning how to code RPA as a citizen developer fit on that spectrum? That's a good question. You know, that's a great question. I would say somewhere between, I would say somewhere between maybe three and four. Okay. Oh. I think we're around there because you, there's so, again, we have so many tools that we can use to help upskill the citizens at this point that we can really walk them through the nuances at a pace that is conducive to really retaining the knowledge. So I don't think it's definitely not the level of let's say building out a complex like machine learning model or something of that nature. It may be a little bit more in alignment with if someone is upskilled in macros or you may be upskilled in some other type of scripting language. Similar to that, I might even say sometimes a little bit, maybe a little bit less difficult than that, depending on what you're trying to automate, right? The process you're trying to automate the complexity of that. But inside of a day, I can do something fairly simple, right? Yes. So we actually, the training that we have at Spotify, we train our users from novice, absolutely no understanding, no knowledge of RPA to building able, being able to build a bot in five days. And those are five half day sessions that the citizen developers attend and by the morning of the fifth day, they actually have built a bot. And it's very powerful. Being able to upskill someone and show them, I can take you from absolutely no understanding of RPA to actually having something a bot that you can showcase and you can run within as little as five half days. I mean, it's very compelling to any business user. Wow, the business impact issues. You guys are too young to remember, but there's this thing called Lotus123. We used to have to go to Lotus class, slash file retrieve for you folks who remember this. It was all keyboard based, but it was game changing in terms of your personal productivity. And it sounds like there's a similar, but much, much larger impact with RPA. Speaking of impact, talk to me about the impact of the program, especially in the last, this year, here we are in October. You've mentioned, started small, now there's about 100 folks. Talk to me about the appetite of that as we've seen this massive acceleration and the need to automate for everyday things that we expect as consumers, whether we're ordering food or buying something online. So it really is a different mindset in terms of thinking through the way that we work differently. And so we've really approached it with, if you're an accountant, think of what is the future role and responsibility of an accountant in this new digital environment. And through that, we have been able to really push this idea or this concept of upskilling as a key element of personal professional success and also team success. And that has been a game changer. So there's a lot of value that comes out of the cohesiveness between the personal desire to upskill and continue to be a consummate professional in whatever role you're in, but also to help your team, right? To be a standout team player in terms of the skills that you're bringing to the table as both an accountant and someone that has now the power of automation within your skill set. I'm going to ask you one more question and that is something that Dave brought up yesterday as he was sitting on a panel with and he was the only male, which is not common in our industry. How have you seen the role of females in technology changing? I imagine you do work in STEM, I imagine you're a motivational speaker, you should be, if you're not. But how have you seen the role of females in technology changing since there's so much opportunity there? Yes, that is a great question. I believe that RPA specifically is an incredible driver of women and influencing more women to enter into STEM fields, primarily because it is such an innovative technology. There are so many roles you said that are just opening up, probably I've heard different numbers in terms of acceleration of growth over the next five to 10 years. So we're looking at a plethora of opportunities and these are brand new roles that women who are curious about STEM, curious about being a technologist can dive right into from wherever they are. So whether they are a tax professional today, whether they are working within accounting, whether they're working with an internal audit, they have the opportunity now to test the waters. And quite often it is such a fascinating field and as I said there's so much potential around it and for growth and just for changing different industries that it's a great driver for women to actually enter into STEM technology and really drive change, facilitate change and have more women at the table, so to speak. And you didn't start in tech in STEM, right? I did not, no. You have a law degree or no? You have an MS in STEM? Yes, so yes, legal studies. And then I actually am a philosopher, so I started by my degree as a philosopher. I love it, it was logic. Yes, logic, exactly, exactly. I love how you've applied that to STEM, tech. Yes, I was not initially in STEM and it was actually through an internship at a technology firm while I was in college that I first dove into technology and it just immediately captivated me just in terms of working, the pace, just being able to solve these complex business problems at scale around the world. It was absolutely fascinating to me, obviously still is but I think testing the waters in that way, as I was just talking before, it helped me to understand I had never envisioned a career in technology, but having an opportunity to test the waters really enabled me to see that wow, this is something where I have a skill set and it brings out a passion within me that I didn't know that I had, so it was a win-win. That's awesome, last question, where can folks go to get your book? Oh yes, so anywhere books are sold. Definitely on Amazon, if you're here at Forward, we also have a book signing so you can come find me, I'll be on the patio signing books and yeah, it's everywhere and I would love to hear feedback and we're thinking about a second one so please let us know how you, like the activities that are in there. Congratulations. Thank you. Congratulations and Dave's going to pick one up so he can start. Oh no, I'm going to do that. I have the use case, I'm dying to dig in, I really am. You're breaking analysis on it. So it's been great to have you on the program, your energy's fantastic, you really open up opportunities for people, I hope that more people will watch this and understand that while the sky is really the limit, and thank you for your time. Absolutely, thank you, it's a pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, we're live in Vegas at the Bellagio UI Path Forward 4. Be right back with our next guest.