 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath Forward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to Miami Beach, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is our one day coverage of UiPath, UiPath Forward Americas. UiPath does these events all over the world. They've reached about 14,000 customers to date, about 1,500 here, Stu. Great show, a lot of energy. We're watching the ascendancy of robotic process automation, the simplification of software robots. Courtney Dominguez is here. She's the vice president of World Fuel Services, and she's joined by Ashim Gupta, who's the UiPath's chief customer, success officer. Welcome folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. So Courtney, let's start with you. World Fuel Services, what's that all about? Yeah, so we're a logistics company and energy logistics company. We're actually based here in Miami, Florida. So it was a short commute over here to the fountain blue for the day. Lucky you. Yes, exactly. So yeah, so we do fuel globally all over the world. So we do for aviation, marine, and land. We also focus on renewable energy and we're really developing over in Europe as well. So interesting, a lot of interesting drivers and dynamics in your business, fast moving, a lot of change, sometimes hard to predict. Yes. What are the, in terms of your role, talk about your role and what some of the key business drivers are that force you to be on top of your game. Yeah, so I'm in charge of shared services and automation for the company. So it's really my role to help us operate more efficiently and do things smarter. Everybody's being challenged to do more with less. And as you grow the business, your transaction counts grow as well. So we're really in charge of transforming and providing solutions. UiPath is a component, a big component of what we're going to be rolling out and helping to really do transformation. So Shim, according to you saying, do more with less, that's got to be music to your ears. That's kind of your job is to make, according to her company, successful. So talk about your role and how you actually make her successful. Sure, so one is I was a former customer. So you look at Daniel Dennis' strategy and UiPath strategy, it's bringing people in who really have a passion for the industry and have that experience to go and try and operationalize a lot of our mission. As a former customer, I know a lot of times you get sold software and you don't get a lot of the tools or you got to go and buy another set of tools to make the first set of tools work. So customer success is about giving technical talent and really great experts and put them in the hands of our best customers to answer the questions that are out there as they embark on their RPA journey. That can go from anything from infrastructure, technical hurdles that they may face to how to really think about RPA, how to evangelize it within their areas. And by doing that, we get people up that adoption curve. They start seeing the benefits of RPA and it becomes a no-brainer, both for the company to invest in and employees to understand the value that RPA brings. So Courtney, was RPA kind of a no-brainer for you? Was it a what is this technology? How did you go about sort of bringing RPA into your vision? Yeah, I think all of the above. So it seems very intuitive. You want to do things smarter and do things more efficiently, but that makes people nervous too. So there's a lot of people that say, I like what I do and if you do it smarter and more efficient, do you still need me? And I also think that from the top, it's easy to say robots and that sounds really cool, but really putting it into the water supply is a different story. So one of the things that we did, we hosted an RPA Awareness Day, partnered with UiPath, they came in and worked with us on that. And then after that, we hosted a Botathon. So we went out and we had our whole enterprise download the community version of UiPath and just had them start experimenting and coming up with their own ideas. And honestly, it was a great crowd sourcing engine for us. And we just came up with an instant pipeline of ideas and people really caught on and bought into it at that point. So it was fantastic. Courtney, I want you to expand a little bit on that. In my career, I've always said, I always know next quarter, next year, I'm going to have more to do. When I manage a group and operations, it was you need to figure out what you can get rid of, what you can, I mean, automate a decade ago was quite different than what you did today. But I like what you said about how you engage everybody and got them to kind of get over that fear of the unknown. How long that process could take? Did you have senior management involvement in the planning? Yeah, I mean, honestly, this was a great ground roots kind of a way of getting it out. And we, it didn't take long at all. I mean, we've only been on this journey for a couple of months, quite honestly. And it's caught on like wildfire and we're really excited about it. So, you know, and I think it's great that we were able to partner some of our great younger talent along with some of our more people that have been doing it for a long time and we partnered together, we partnered them together and then they came up with their own ideas. It's easy for me to Monday morning quarterback, right? And stand on the other side and say, oh, you should do this or do that. But the people that are doing it every day are the ones that have the best ideas. They know what they don't want to do. They know what they want to spend their time working on. So they're the best ones to figure out how to make that other stuff that's not quite as fun. Go away. So yeah, it's been fantastic. So, Shem, if I could ask, how do you help your customers figure out what the right metric is? What is success for them? You've been on the customer side, we've been talking to your users. It's often like, oh, I think I'm going to be able to save money, but maybe it's growing revenue. There's a lot of pieces there. I mean, a lot of it starts with listening because I don't think there's one right answer. You know, a lot of software companies come in and say, it is just about cost or it is just about X. We kind of, we think about it very differently. Some of our customers think about it in terms of cost to quality, getting accurate data, getting things done 100% accurate and getting data quality up. Some of them, it is a productivity game, right? It's important to get that cost out. We have customers in Japan who are using it to augment their workforce because they need more workers than the market can supply and RPA gets it. So I would say the first is listening to our customers. The second piece of it is then, you know, there are some standard things across our customer base that we're all learning together. You know, one of our customers started looking at the time, the run time of a bot or how long does it, how much infrastructure does it consume? So we're able to get best practices across to be able to figure out what are the right metrics that suits our customers' needs. Courtney, was, I'm trying to understand if it was a top down initiative or a bottoms up or both? It's both. Yeah, I think it's really both. So I think it's that top level setting the direction and saying this is what we want to do. You know, one of the things we have at World Fuel, a lot of people have them on trend. Dan said this this morning as well is we don't want to touch the keyboard, right? We want to, and we want to be no touch. We want things to come through seamlessly. So that's getting great data quality at the beginning with customer onboarding and then getting it all the way through and out the door because at the end of the day, we need to get the invoices out and the money back in, right? And I need to have accurate data to do that and do things efficiently. So I think it's from the top saying we want to be no touch and then it's up to my team to help provide solutions and work with the business and figure out how to make that happen. So it sounds like you had this ideation initiative. Yeah. Did you just pick one or two or did you say, okay guys, go, where did you start? What did you have to do to really prove out the value? We definitely picked one or two. I mean, it went with quick wins, but when you go with quick wins and you say like, this is what we did in a really short amount of time with minimal effort, think of the art of the possible. Think of what we can do. And now our focus is not on quick wins, our focus is on how do we transform our business? How do we take this tool and really apply it and transform the way we work? So I think it's important to have those quick wins initially and just kind of set the stage because that gets everybody thinking like, wow, this can be really big. And what kind of person was required to build the robot? Somebody who was fairly technical or was it a business person? Was it a team, two pizza team? I have the best team ever. And I really think we got a lot of them internally, really citizen kind of data scientists people, not anybody that was necessarily trained in it. Now we're getting more and more data scientists added to the team. So we're getting more developer type skills. We also have BAs, so we've got some people that are great at looking at process and how can we make things more efficient? So it's a combination, but I do really think that some of our best resources have just been people that are really eager to learn. I mean, UiPath does an amazing job of putting the certification in the academy and so many online tools, it's free. I mean, it's so easy to work with them and really pick it up. You don't need a lot of training and that's one of the reasons why we selected UiPath. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure this out. So, and they really make it all so readily available. A lot of the customers we talked to today in theCUBE have gone through a business case, some rigorous, some sort of back in napkin. What kind of business case and justification did you go through? So we started small with the bots, so we said let's prove it out with a small number of bots and if we can do that, then we can scale. And we were just chatting earlier that now we really want to look at it and say over the next three, six, 12 months, how can we really scale this and what do we think that looks like? Again, start small and then now, okay, now we know what's out there and we know what we can get, so let's go big. And we're ready to do that now. So did you go through a rigorous sort of quantification of the business value? Was it more like, hey, it's low risk, let's try it and see what we get? Yeah, yeah, low risk, let's just do it. Okay, and then what was the result? What was the business impact? Honestly, it's been fantastic. I mean, the results back that we've had have been savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars with minimal, again, minimal effort and minimal, you know, really unsure of what we were going to get out of it, so it's phenomenal. And the denominator, when I say denominator, I'm talking about benefit divided by cost. Sounds like the denominator was pretty low. Pretty low, yeah. One of the best ways to get ROI is lower than the denominator. I always talk to my kids about this when it comes to college costs. You know what I mean? Yeah, and really, I mean, you know, the community version, getting that out there and free and just having people start playing around with it, I mean, that right there keeps your costs pretty low because they're funneling and putting ideas in the pipeline. And then when it comes time to develop it and make it production ready, that's where effort is involved. But, you know, to get that just into the pipeline with a little bit of effort and a little bit of cost is... So it's clear, Shim, your strategy as a company is to lower the barriers to entry for your clients, train them, free training, get them hooked, and then let the rest of it soar. Yeah, I mean, one is we share that, our CEO talked about today, we share that joy that automation brings to a lot of people's work. That's what drives them. So for us, it's not about nickel and diming people every step of the way. It is arming them with what they need to fulfill the mission for what we sold them automation or RPA for, and that's a huge part of it. So it goes beyond just the academy, just the training. You know, it's the intimacy that we want to keep with our customers. So we're growing very fast in our number of employees. So even though we have, I think we're, you know, getting close to 2,000 customers, our goal is to get to 2,000 employees here very quickly. And our CEO really stresses customer first in that equation. So we learn and we do little pivot points along the way. Example could be internal marketing, helping people drive awareness, you know, the bodathon that Courtney had for her teams. We want to be able to sponsor those things, get, you know, be partners in getting that name of RPA out there. So it's everything that they need to try to get up that curve. Courtney, your enthusiasm is palpable as much of the feedback that we've had from customers. But if you had to do it over again, would you change anything? Would you go faster? Would you have done anything differently? Have you had a mulligan? One of the concerns is that I feel like we've got a lot of momentum and I want to keep it going. So I want to, you know, like Ashim, we need to scale our team as well so that we can, we're able to handle that pipeline of work coming in and that we don't stall out. Because I really see a lot of enthusiasm for what we're developing and we want to be able to keep up with that. So I love moving fast. I wish we could move faster. I pushed my team to say, hey, let's, how much faster can we go? Because, you know, there's commitments as well at the board level saying, you know, what are you guys doing and how are you transforming? But I wouldn't do anything over so far. So far it's been fantastic. You know, it strikes me that when you put in a robot and automate a process, you're saving for an individual, an arm or a leg. You know, a lot of arms and legs. How have you thought about, you know, virtualizing those arms and legs into a team that can really drive this to your last point through the organization to keep that momentum going? Yeah, and that's what we're looking at now, right? We want to look at that digital roadmap and say, not arms and legs, but we actually want to look at real resources. And it doesn't necessarily mean a resource reduction. It just means being able to scale and do things more efficiently. And hopefully redeploy those resources to do stuff that requires a brain, right? Yeah, Shema, I'm curious. Do you have some tools to help customers as to how they scale and grow and keep the momentum going? It reminds me of like a rocket going off. You've got those booster levels and you want to reach escape velocity, but then, you know, probably keep accelerating. Yeah, so you'll start seeing our platform expand in this. At this conference, and Daniel must have talked about it, we launched UiPathGo. Getting openness and collaboration within organizations and across organizations, that's really what our Go platform will enable people to do. Sharing automations, learning best practices, being able to connect with different companies, different partners at a fast pace, that's so important because there's not a cookie cutter approach to this. We need collective knowledge to ramp up the speed. And then slowly by slowly, the features that we're starting to do, shareable libraries within the platform. We're going to, you're going to see other process discovery type automations come out or tools that we're starting to roll out to our customers. And then we have events. Yesterday, Courtney was a part of our customer advisory council. It is incredible when you put customers like Courtney in a room who are so passionate and are incredible, sharing what's working, what's not, and everybody leaves saying, okay, these are the two things that I'm either going to look out for or that I'm going to do differently to make sure the journey happens ahead. Those are just a few. Courtney, Daniel was on earlier today and we were asking him to give us some advice to young people who is kind of inspirational of what you talked about this morning and this keynote about people laughed them out of their office and so forth. And one of the things he said is I didn't think big enough. I had, I started to think bigger. You got to think bigger. So as you put on your think big hat, where do you think this can go? So I really see UiPath and RPA collaborating, right? I mean, we're investing in a lot of smart tools and I want to see how all of those tools can work together. I don't want it to be just UiPath or just another tool or workflow tool. I want to see how they can all, because to me, that's where the value really comes in. I mean, if you're leveraging best of breed options and best of breed tools and then we can say, how do these all work together? That's transformational. So really at the end of next year, what I want my team and what I want my leaders to say is, wow, they have really transformed the way that we work and the way that we do business. To me, that's a win. If Ashim can make me successful in that, I'll be a happy camper. Awesome, guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. We're seeing some of these trends that we've talked about, the productivity gap. We have more jobs than we have employees to fill those jobs. The productivity line's not moving. RPA and the ascendancy of RPAs promises to change that. We'll be covering that ongoing. You're watching theCUBE live from UiPath forward. America's Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. Thank you.