 The Cube presents UiPath Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. Hi everybody, we're back in Las Vegas. The Cube's coverage, we're day one at UiPath Forward 5. Pascal Borne is here. He's an expert and best-selling author in the topic of AI and automation and the book, Intelligent Automation. Welcome to the world of hyper-automation, the first book on the topic. And of course, Ray Wong is back on The Cube. He's the founder, chairman and principal analyst, constellation research, also best-selling author of Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Guys, thanks so much for coming to The Cube. Always a pleasure, Ray. Pascal, first time on The Cube, I believe. Yes, thanks for the invitation. So, what is artificial about artificial intelligence? For sure not people. So okay, so you guys are both speaking at the conference, Ray. Today, I think you're interviewing the co-CEOs. What do you make of that? What are you going to probe with these guys? Like how they're going to divide their, divide and conquer? Why do you think the company, Danielle, in particular, decided to bring in Rob Ensling? Well, you know what? I mean, these companies are now at a different stage of growth, right? There was that early battle between RPA vendors. Now we're actually talking something different, right? We're talking about where does automation go? How do we get the decisioning? What's the next best action? That's going to be the next step. And to take where UI path is today to somewhere else, you really want someone with that enterprise credit, experience, the sales motions, the packages, the partnership capabilities, and who else better than Rob Ensling? I mean, that's something he's done. He can do that in his sleep, but now he's going to do that in a new space, taking a whole category to another level. Now, Daniel, on the other hand, right? I mean, he's the visionary founder. He put this thing from nothing to worry is today, right? I mean, at that point, you want your founder thinking about the next set of ideas, right? So you get this interesting dynamic that we've seen for a while with co-CEOs, those that are doing the operations, getting the stuff out the door, and then letting the founders get a chance to go back and rethink, take a look at the perspective, and hopefully get a chance to build the next idea or take the next idea back into the organization. Very well said. Pascal, why did you write your book on intelligent automation and hyper automation, and what's changed since you've written that book? So I wrote this book, Intelligent Automation, two years ago. At that time, it was really a new topic. It was really about the key content of the book is really about combining different technologies to automate the most complex end-to-end business processes in companies. And when I say capabilities, it's, we hear a lot about RPA, especially here, Robotic Process Automation, but RPA alone, if you're just trying to transform a company with only RPA, you just fall short, okay? A lot of those processes need more than execution. They need language. They need the capacity to view, to see. They need the capacity to understand and to create insights. So by combining Robotic Process Automation with AI, natural language processing, computer vision, you give this capability to create impact by automating end-to-end processes in companies. I like to test what I hear in the keynote with independent experts like yourself. So we're hearing that intelligent automation or automation is a fundamental component of digital transformation. Is it? Or is it more sort of a back office sort of hidden inside plumbing? Ray, what do you think? Well, you start by understanding what's going on in the process piece. And that's where you see discover become very important in that keynote, right? And that's where process mining is playing a role. Then you got to automate stuff, but when you get to operations, that's really where the change is going to happen. We actually think that, when you're doing the digital transformation pieces, analytics, automation and AI are coming together to create a concept we call decision velocity. You and I make a quick decision, boom. How long does it take to get out of management committee? Could be forever, right? A week, two months, never. But if you're thinking about competing with automation, these decisions are actually being done a hundred times per second by machine, even a thousand times per second, that asymmetry is really what people are facing at the moment. And the companies that are going to be able to do that and start automating decisions are going to be operating at another level back to what Pascal's book talking about, right? And there are four questions everyone has to ask her, like when do you fully intelligently automate? And that happens, right, in the background. When you augment the machine with a human so we can find, why did you make an exception? Why did you break a rule? Why didn't you follow this protocol? So we can get it down to a higher level confidence. When do you augment the human with a machine so we can give you the information so you can act quickly? And the last one is, when do you want to insert a human in the process? That's going to be the biggest question, order to cash, incident resolution, hire to retire, procure to pay. It doesn't matter when do you want to put a human in the process, when do you want a man in the middle, person in the middle, and more importantly, when do you want to insert friction? So Pascal, you wrote your book in the middle of the pandemic. Yes. And so, you know, pre-pandemic, digital transformation was kind of a buzzword. I had a lot of people gave it lip service and out of my watch, I don't have to worry about that. But then it became sort of, you're not a digital business, you're out of business. So what have you seen as the catalyst for adoption of automation? Was it the pandemic? Was it a sort of good runway before that? What's changed in a pre-isolation, post-isolation economy? You make me think about a joke. Who did your best digital transformation over the last years? The CEO, CHRO, the COVID. COVID. All right, all right, come on. Big racket ball, all right, all right. And that's exactly true, you know. Before pandemic, digital transformation was a competitive advantage. Companies that went into it had the opportunity to get a bit better than their competitors. During the pandemic, things have changed completely. Companies that were not digitalized and automated could not survive. And we've seen so many companies just burning out. And those companies that have been able to capitalize on intelligent automation, digital transformations during the pandemic have been able not only to survive, to thrive, to really create their place on the market. So that has been a catalyst, definitely a catalyst for, that explains the success of the book, basically. Yeah, okay. So you're familiar with the concept of stew, the food, right? Yes. So stew, by definition, is something that's delicious to eat. Stew isn't simply taking one of every ingredient from the pantry and throwing it in the pot and stirring it around. When we start talking about intelligent automation, artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence, it starts getting a bit overwhelming. My spidey sense goes off and I start thinking, this sounds like mush, it doesn't sound like stew. So I want to hear from each of you, what is the methodical process that people need to go through when they're going through digital transformation, so that you get delicious stew instead of a mush that's just confused everything in your business. So Ray, you want to answer that first? Yeah, we've been talking about digital transformation since 2010, right? And part of it was really getting the business model right. What are you trying to achieve? Is it a new type of offering? Are you changing the way you monetize something? Are you taking an existing process and applying it to a new set of technologies? And what do you want to accomplish, right? Once you start there, then it becomes a whole lot of operational stuff, and it's more than stew, right? I mean, it could be like, well, I can't use those words here, but the point being is it could be a complete, like operational exercise, it could be a complete revenue exercise, it could be a regulatory exercise, it could be something about where you want to take growth into the next level. And each one of those processes, some of it is automation, right? There's a big component of it today, but most of it is really rethinking about what you want things to do, right? How do you actually make things to be successful, right? Do I reorganize a process? Do I insert a place to do monetization? Where do I put engagement in place? How do I collect data along the way so I can build better feedback loops? What can I do to build the business graph so that I have that knowledge for the future so I can go forward doing that so I can be successful? But Pascal, should the directive be first IA, then AI, or are these things going to happen in parallel? Naturally, what's your position on that? Is it automated first? So AI is part of IA. It's part of the big umbrella, and very often I got the question, so how do you differentiate AI and IA? I like to say that AI is only the brain, so think of AI, because I consider AI as machine learning, okay? Think of AI like a brain in a jar that only can think, create insights, learn, but doesn't do anything, doesn't have any arms, doesn't have any eyes, doesn't have any mouth and ears, can't talk, can't understand. With IA, you give those capabilities to AI. Basically you create a capability, technological capability that is able to do more than just thinking, learning, and create insights, but also acting, speaking, understanding the environment, viewing it, interacting with it. So basically performing these end-to-end processes that are performed currently by people in companies. Yeah, we're going to get to a point where we get to what we call a dynamic scenario generation. You're talking to me, you get excited, I changed the story because something else shows up, or you're talking to me and you're really upset, we're going to have to actually address that issue right away. Well, we want the ability to have that sense and respond capability so that the next best action is served. So your data, your process, the journey, all the analytics on the top end, that's all going to be served up and changed along the way. As we go from 2D journeys to 3D scenarios in the metaverse, if we think about what happens from a decentralized world to decentralized, and we think about what's happening from web two to web three, we're going to make those types of shifts so that things are moving along. Everything's a choose your own adventure journey. So I hope I remember this correctly from your book. You talked about disruption scenarios within industries and within companies, and I go back to the early days of our industry, East Coast, Prime, Wang, DG, they're all gone. But you look at companies like Microsoft, they were able to get through that not all. Yeah, IBM, I call it survived. Intel is now going through their challenge. So maybe it's inevitable. But how do you see the future in terms of disruption within industry? Forget our industry for a second, all industry across whether it's healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, automobiles, et cetera. How do you see the disruption scenario? I'm pretty sure you talked about this in your book. It's been a while since I read it, but I wonder if you could talk about that disruption scenario and the role that automation is going to play either as the disruptor or as the protector of the incumbents. Let's take healthcare in auto as an example. Healthcare is a great example. If we think about what's going on, not enough nurses, massive shortage, right? What are we doing at the moment? We're setting five foot nine robots to do nonpatient care. We're trying to capture enough information off patient analytics, like this watch is going to capture vitals from going forward. We're doing a lot what we can do in the ambient level so that information and data is automatically captured and decisions are being rendered against that. Maybe you're going to change your diet along the way. Maybe you're going to walk an extra 10 minutes. All those things are going to be provided in that level of automation. Take the car business. It's not about selling cars. Tesla's a great example. We talk about this all the time. What Tesla is doing, they're basically going to be an insurance company with all the data they have. They have better data than insurance companies. They can do better underwriting. They've got better mapping information and insights. They can actually suggest next best action, do collision avoidance, right? Those are all the things that actually happen today and automation plays a big role not just in the collection of that information insight but also in the ability to make recommendations, to do predictions, and to help you prevent things from going wrong. So, you know, it's interesting. It's like you're talking about Tesla as they disrupting the insurance companies. It's almost like the over-the-top vendors have all the data relative to the telcos and mop them up for lunch. Pascal, I want to ask you, the topic of future of work kind of was a bromide before, but now I feel like post-pandemic, it actually has substance. How do you see the future of work? Can you even summarize what it's going to look like? It's, it's, or are we here? It's, yeah, it's definitely. It's a more and more important topic currently, and you all heard about the great resignation and how employee experience is more and more important for companies. According to Harvard Business Review, the companies that take care of their employee experience are four times more profitable than those that don't. So it's an issue for CEOs and shareholders. Now, how do we get there? How do we improve the quality of the employee experience? Understanding the people, getting information from them, educating them, I'm talking about educating them on those new technologies and how they can benefit from those. Empowering them, and I think we've talked a lot about this, about the democratization, local type of technologies that democratize the access to those technologies. Everyone can be empowered today to change their work, improve their work. And finally, incentivization. I think it's a very important point where companies that, yeah. Thank you for that. What's going to be the key message of your talk tomorrow? Give us the bumper sticker, if you will. Oh, I'm going to talk, it's a little bit different. I'm going to talk for the IT community in the context of the IT summit. And I'm going to talk about the future of intelligent automation. So basically how new technologies will impact beyond what we see today, the future of work. Ray, I always love having you on theCUBE, so articulate and crisp. What's exciting you these days in your world? I know you're traveling around a lot, but what's hot? Yeah, I think one of the coolest things that's going on right now is the fact that we're trying to figure out, do we go to work or do we not go to work? Back to your other point. I mean, I don't know where work is. I mean, for me, work has been everywhere, right? And we're starting to figure out what that means. I think the second thing, though, is this notion around mission and purpose. And everyone's trying to figure out what does that mean for themselves? And that's really, I don't know if it's a great resignation. We call it a great refactoring, right? Where you work, when you work, how we work, why you work, that's changing. But more importantly, the business models are changing. The monetization models are changing. There are macro-dynamics that are happening. US versus China, G7 versus BRICS, right? War on the dollar, all these things are happening around us at this moment. And I think it's going to really reshape us the way that we came out of the 70s into the 80s. Guys, always a pleasure having folks like yourself on. Thank you, Pascal. Great to see you again. All right, Dave Nicholson, Dave Vellante. Keep it right there. Forward Five from Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE.