 Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Forward Six. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Lisa Martin. The theme of this conference is AI at work, and that's what we're talking about. Is what we're talking about. We've been having, one of the things I loved yesterday, and we're bringing some of the main stage from yesterday to you right now, is really looking at how customers, the voices of customers, we're really talking about how automation can just massively unleash potential, and we're going to be talking with the guy that led off the conference right now. You're stealing my thunder. We're welcoming to the stage Dennis Lu. He is the CEO of Vital, welcome Dennis. And Mohamed Kedir, he is the section manager at Vital. Senior section manager, and we just, we call you kid, that's your nickname, okay, okay. Dennis, I'm going to start with you. Why don't you start telling our viewers a little bit about Vital and what you do, and what your company does. Thank you, I'm from the Singapore government. We are a department doing shared services, processing HR, payroll, finance, invoices, procurement shared services. In the Ministry of Finance in Singapore, we are about 500 strong. We serve more than 100,000 public employees, and more than 100 Singapore government agencies. So our scope is large, and I only have 500 people doing all these things. So that's where we come from. We are actually both civil servants, public employees, and we are here, and very privileged at a forward six UI path conference, learning about local automation and finding new ways to take ourselves forward and ahead in terms of productivity, in terms of doing better for our public officers and for our country. So that's why we're here. Ked, give us a little bit of your thoughts on, you know, one of the things we talked a lot about yesterday is that automation is, it's more than productivity gains. It's really about empowering people. You talked about, Dennis, 100,000 people that you're empowering. Ked, talk a little bit about that, and then Dennis, weigh in on your thoughts about how it's just more than productivity gains that people empowerment is really critical. Absolutely, Lisa. So I am a graduate of human resource management and business. So when I joined Vital, more than 10 years back, I started off as a human resource officer. Makes sense, right? But now I'm doing automation in the obstacle role, and I am enjoying it. So what happened? Maybe I actually go through my journey with you and how I was empowered at work to make this transition. So when I was in a human resource operations, automation solution, even the simple ones are being appreciated by my coworkers and bosses alike. Back then I was just using simple Excel formulas and VBA macros to do some sort of automation. And even this simple automation is being very received by my coworker, right? Because it actually helped them in their work. And these are actually encouraged and actually supported by our bosses. Perhaps maybe I'll tell you a story on how supportive the bosses are, right? So back then I was trying to learn about VBA macro. So I was trying to find work causes on VBA macros. However, it was all full, right? So when my director actually learned about this, she approached me saying that, hey, actually I got a course that she's attending coming up soon. So she told me why not I replace her, take her slot, right? So that's how supportive they are. So anyways, the culture of innovation from the bottom up is well-nested and vital. So however, I mean, who else will actually know about the tedious, painstaking work rather than the ground folks ourselves, right? Yeah, so however, when you actually use VBA macro for automation, you quickly realize the limitation of it, which is it's pretty much limited to your coding skills. Hence when Vitaly started training us for seasoned developer course, right? Using low-code automation tools, such as UIPath, so the X, it was really a game changer, right? I was thinking to myself, wow, this is so easy to now automate my stuff, my work, right? So each of us that actually went through the course needed to develop a script by ourselves. So did I, and I actually continued on developing more scripts that helped with my work process. Basically, I'm employing more boards to do my work, but getting paid the same, right? That's what Rob said yesterday. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So like what Rob said yesterday in the keynote, working smarter and not harder, right? Yeah, so that's my journey. So maybe I jump in to thank it for his loyalty to Vitaly. I mean, I'm an organization that experiences fairly high turnover for our government space. I mean, we hit 17% for a couple of years, so it's coming back down now. And Kit has been with us more than 10 years, right? Yeah. But in a positive compliment for Kit, with during the time he's been with us, he joined us as an executive. Today, he's risen the ranks all the way to a senior section manager along the way here. He has had multiple promotions and more importantly, a rise in job scope because today I brought Kit along to get another colleague, Ms. Fahana, because they're both citizen developers and Kit is now a citizen developer, supervising citizen developers. And there's magic in that, right? Because all of them know this local automation, which is one thing, but their starting point was business operations. They are the ones that felt the pain on the ground. Truly painful. I always feel very blessed when I supervise their work and read their reports because I myself would never want to do that, right? But as the boss, he talked about bottom-up. I need to do what we call a top-down approach. So it's a top-down bottom-up together. So the top-down approach, if you allow me a bit of time to elaborate it, it's actually quite simple when you think about it. We need to figure out how to empower and equip our people. Now in Singapore, we face labor constraints and labor shortages. My bosses, to their credit, are happy to invest in technology, but even if I wanted to hire another 500 or 1,000 people, I just cannot find them. So what do I do? So I have to look for solutions, technological solutions that allow us to augment, augment, put our people at the centre, and augment their capabilities even better so that they can grow in their jobs, do more, and over time, grow in their roles, right? Grow in their roles, get promoted, and be far, far more productive. I think that is the essence of our journey so far. And we're very appreciative for local automation, including companies like UiPath that provide us with the platforms for my staff to open up the journey. And if I may add in, because inspiration by talking to some executives yesterday, sharing my vital story and listening to their stories, I think one thing that Vital does slightly ahead or different from the rest is we are using the technology to reframe our role and reframe our work. So the whole idea is we were traditional back room operations, manual, tedious, and over time I always wondered my staff would come work a few years, get burnt out and leave, right? That's a real concern. Yeah, it's a real concern, right? How do you create and reframe your work such that ideally as more money work comes to us, we get energised, we get empowered, we want to do more. So the key enabler is this local automation. When you think about it, why is that so? Because now when I throw Kit and the team a challenge, I don't tell them please use brute force, work 24-7 and get the output out tomorrow because my service client, my service partner, Ministry ABC says this is very urgent, I need it now, right? In the past they would have to work through the night to get it done. Now what does Kit do? Maybe I will just turn to him and he can share more about the levels of automation that his team comes and really they are classified into three levels. That's the thinking, there's individual level automation, there's team level automation, there's enterprise level automation and everything is really being looked at by the citizen developers themselves with support from management. So if you don't mind, I could ask Kit to elaborate a little bit on the three levels of automation. Sure, sure. So basic, once he mentioned about the three levels, so maybe I will share with you on my scripts I developed on these three levels, right? The first one is individual level, right? So it's about my work. So it's pretty much simple. So monthly I actually need to do, refresh the dashboard and then provide my bosses. It's pretty mundane, right? So I actually developed a script to help me with that. So the script where I actually navigate to my case management system, I will generate the reports and then basically open the dashboard to refresh the data with the latest report. And then it will actually notify my bosses. So pretty simple but actually helps. Second level is teams level. So for the human resource and payroll teams, for one of the process, they actually need to generate multiple HR reports from the ERP. So what I actually scripted for them is for the board to actually navigate through the ERP system and then actually generate the different reports they actually need. And then the board would then basically perform some data manipulation, data wrangling to get the outcome that they want. And then shared in the shared platform before notifying the team that is done. Again, it's very simple but it works. It works. So lastly, it's more interesting, it's got to do with enterprise level. You're talking about organizing wide, vital wide level. So for this board I did was to bridge the system gap of our vendor ticket management system. Tickets here referring to the issue locks. For example, if vital staff actually encountered a system issue, they will actually lock a ticket to the vendor. So then the vendor will actually update in their ticket management system of their ticket. However, this ticket management system is only accessible by them. So problem will come when they actually are updated in their ticket management system that is pending for vital staff action. However, vital staff is not aware of that. It will lead to... There's a gap. There's a gap. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it will lead to longer resolution times and of course inhibitions of operations. So my solution is for the vendor to basically take the ticket listing from their own system and then give it to us and then the script will actually take over from there. It will do the mapping, the manipulation and then actually email to each and every single vital staff of their tickets, tickets that is pending for their actions. Yeah, and of course they also give a consolidated listing to the bosses for their reference. And then to any of... I created a shared platform whereby the vital staff can actually report inaccurate ticket status, right? And then this will actually go back to the vendor. So it completes the feedback loop. Hence, this whole solution actually breached the gap of our vendor's ticketing system. I'm just so proud to bring it to tell you these stories because there's no way I can tell them number one and number two. Imagine the value he has created for us. Absolutely, yes. It goes beyond, thanks for that. And it goes beyond the so-called productivity, man hours and savings. He's actually using local automation tools. He and his team, he and his team at the enterprise level to build entire refined systems of engagement, if you think about it, right? System engagement that level upon or that ride upon traditional ERP systems that all of us use. I don't have to mention their names. We know who they are, but everyone has to use these systems, but we all know that those systems can be clunky, can be difficult. And every time you put up a change request, it almost never happens because it's too expensive or the pro IT developers have no time. So coming back to what was talked in a conference yesterday, I think there was some, what ifs question on stage? What if your whole organization were IT developers? I almost wanted to say that was my promise to my bosses. I said, my whole organization, the 500 of them, will be low code, no code citizen developers. While I have an IT team, they're only about 12, they will focus on what is the very technical stuff that only the IT experts can do or equip to do. For example, cybersecurity, technical infrastructure and all these really incredibly difficult stuff that you don't need to go to college to get a four year degree or a six year master's, whatever to do. But the rest of us, 500, you heard from Kit himself, come from non-technical backgrounds, with the training, with the opportunities to co-create and learning from the likes of other customers and the experts at UI paths, they can make magic happen. So your excitement and optimism about the potential of citizen developers is so evident and there's so many dimensions to this story because of what it's enabled Kit to do with his team, what it's enabled the enterprise to get done and leading people to, I'm imagining, having more job satisfaction and more time to work on things that are actually meaningful and creative tasks rather than having to do boring mundane things which then will impact retention for you. But I don't want to throw water on it, throw cold water on it, but I want to ask what are the potential risks here and are you, because I'd imagine there are things that you have to consider when you have non-technical people doing technical things, there is some governance, maybe inconsistent standards, so how do you overcome those challenges and how do you think about them? So I would say these were questions that were thrown at us right from the get go. We started with local automation, playing around with it as early as 2017, 2018 and at the start it was all about a tender automation, small scale, because of this risk issue. Fast forward to today, fast forward for today and using the framework that KIT has elaborated. At the enterprise level, we put in place controls and governance where we look at the automation, the boards, the impactful ones, we draw a line to say that those that have above a certain impact and risk like this that go around various systems, after his team has built it, he leads a center of excellence team in an operations business division. They bring the entire script to a center of excellence in the center, which reports to me actually. We call it an innovation hub and we scrub through the requirements, the documentation. So you are the humans in the loop. Yes, we are the humans in the loop, the documentation and most recently we even got audited by our colleagues at the Auditor General's Office and the Accountants General's Office, our internal auditors to come in to take a look at our frameworks to make sure that all the documentation is correct. Number one. Number two is, you can imagine in the government, especially with security and confidentiality is so important. When we roll out these technologies, right? The IT security side of the house, we want to make sure that every step, everything that a board does has an audit trail. So all that we do within our systems are completely compliant with that. Human in the loop is so important because at a citizen developer level, every board is tied to a human being. So we know exactly who did what, especially for the attended boards. So my PA, my personal executive, it's not only does she serve two bosses, myself and my WT, she builds boards all the time. But all the boards are tied to her. So when you look at system logs, it looks as if she's doing all the work, but it's an extension of her, the human in the loop. For the unattended automation where we push up at the enterprise level, then there's this whole pretty rigorous structure of ensuring that they're all scrubbed, tested and checked all the time. So we have the frameworks to monitor them, I get a wonderful chart to show me all the different boards running, how many of them failed and why. This is a short answer to your question. It takes a while, but we have figured it out and we are pushing it hard. And the thing is this, right? I've heard again this morning feedback that how does Vital manage this pushback from the traditional IT? There is this not so nice word that sometimes people call citizen developers and I'll say it out there, they call us shadow IT, right? But the good thing is, I don't think we should be looking at who's in the light and who's in the dark, right? We're all working together to achieve a common outcome. The fact of the matter is, IT resources are extremely scarce around the world, not just in Singapore. I have 12, even if I get a budget to hire 24, and even if I can hire 24 or 30, they can't do everything that the 500 could possibly do. So it's about working together, ensuring and agreeing on all the security protocols which is non-negotiable. But after that, deciding what segment of the work who does what and the IT, I found that the IT people are very appreciative that the business users themselves take on this because, you know, for us, you'll write system requirements, send it to the IT guy, the IT doesn't understand what he wants. So now he builds it. My last question for you and maybe, you can comment on this as well, is your advice, your recommendations, you've probably gotten to speak with a lot of UI path customers in the last day and a half here, but what does it take for an organization like Vital to really embrace automation and AI? I imagine there's a cultural component there. Yes, yes. I think the starting point first as a leader is I have to make sure that I find the correct tools to think about how to bring organization forward. So you look at it from the top down and bottom up. I think top down, I would say I've gotten all the inspiration talking around the world. I mean, there are different platforms out there that we all can use. What I would say special about Vital and what I'm very happy with and I'm very privileged to have stuff like Kit and I don't have just one stuff like Kit. There are many others like him growing up. It's the belief in your people, in that your people can do it. The belief that your people can embrace this automation, reframe the way they think, reframe the job, put in the extra effort, and let me put it this way, they've been talking for four day a week, I'll say that's a luxury four day week, but we want to put in our good five and five and a half day weeks and earn a decent salary. And the only way to earn a decent salary or to see wage growth in this age is to see productivity growth. Productivity growth. So with great success stories like coming from Kit and I invite him to share what he thinks about the audacious target I've set for them, I told them recently a few months ago at my town hall that I want and hope to see a 10x productivity gain. 10x. Wow. And I think one of them fell off the chair. Because when I said that in my mind, if we have achieved, if we can achieve five facts, that would be great. But let's go for 10, that sounds better, right? And fast forward to today, and let me talk a bit about AI, all the product releases in recent times and how say UI path is also using generative AI to build it around the human, convinces me that what I'm thinking is correct. You think about it, right? Because with generative AI, citizen developers can script faster, can use StudioX more quickly because now it's able to generate ideas and the prompts and even do the first draft. In the past, it would have been taken, the same logic applies. In the past, he might have taken 10 hours to come up with a complex automation. Once we get our hands on these new tools, he may take half an hour. Exactly. So he'll be coming to ask me for a raise. But we're thinking maybe I just put in charge of all citizen developers. That's why we are so bullish about this and that's why we think it's such a great revolution. Don't just focus on the traditional IT and highly skilled staff, but focus on your whole population at large. Give them a chance, train them. I'm training my entire vital by the end of next year. 100% will be trained in RPA technologies. It's a whole organization. And give them a chance to upskill and to learn and to use their skills. And I think if I ask Kit what he thinks, looking forward, what he's excited about, maybe we can hear from Kit. So maybe I come in in the bottom-up approach, bottom-up approach in a story, right? Yeah, in a story. So the story is how my Opset team is what they are right now, right? So currently, my Opset team is generating automation solutions after solutions every single day. But do you know that several years back, they are actually coming from operations, doing the daily, day-to-day human resource processes. They also, some of them are actually doing payroll processes. Yeah, so, and then all of them do not have any IT or programming-related background, right? So in a sense, they are actually the earliest citizen developers of vital. So what make them change? So on top of the top-down approach which my CHE mentioned, there are certain common traits among the specialists which you can actually consider them as a bottom-up approach. I can summarize here. So the first one is actually I got interest in technology. So they are actually aware very early up that what automation can actually do to help with their work, right? Secondly is they have this desire to actually help themselves and their coworkers on using technology for their work, right? To make work better. Lastly, which I think is the most important one, like what they say, every great journey begins with a single step, right? So several years back, all of them actually took the bold first step to automate something. They are your work process with all the safety net assured by the bosses, the training, and the tools provided. And then it kind of snowballed from there. They got projects after projects and their skills just developed further and further. So a few years back, the function decided to combine all of them together and make an abstract team. Yeah. That's inspiring. Thank you so much. What a great story. So if I may just summarize in two phrases, the beliefs I have would be all my wonderful and capable citizen developers. The pattern to their background is there's no pattern. You need to give everybody a chance, whichever background they come from. And two is think about it with all this, talk about inequality in a world, talk about digital divide in a world. By doing all this, we will not let the digital divide become a social divide. In fact, the digital tools today can bring society's teams and workers together to do more. That's great advice. And then that to me is what drives me to come to work every day and what, what, why we bring a kid to share our story to the world. Thank you very much. Well, Dennis and Mohamed, kid, sorry. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. A really fun and interesting conversation. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Lisa Martin. We'll be more with the cubes back with my back, back with more of theCUBE's live coverage of forward six. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.