 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to South Beach, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, Stu Minimanis here. This is UiPath Forward Americas. UiPath does these shows all around the world and they've done, I don't know how many, but they've reached 14,000 customers this year. But Bobby Patrick knows, he's the CMO of UiPath. Bobby, great to see you again. That's great to be on again. So how many of these events have you done in the last 12 months? We've probably done a dozen, all major cities. We've still got Beijing and Dubai coming up, over 14,000 people in our events alone. We go to a lot of other industry events, obviously, but yeah, at our own events and every single event we break our records. And we're always undersizing our events. It drives everyone nuts. You're always riding the wave, Bobby. You hit cloud right as the wave was building. How did you find this company? Yeah, so I was the HPE Cloud. They were restructuring, or they spun assets off and took a little time, got a call and said, robotic process automation. And of course I thought of physical robots. I looked online and said, wow, that's interesting. I did some search terms on. I saw RPA kind of skyrocketing in search. And my background's actually integration, data integration before cloud. And then I met Daniel and he fell in love with Daniel. And this was a year ago, it was employee 270, right? We'll have 2000 by the end of the year. So it's been everything I expected, which was a rocket ship, has completely, constantly I've underestimated. It's amazing. Well, so you're the one who turned me onto this whole space. You sent me the Forester Wave, where it was last year's and you guys were third this year, you've leapfrogged into first. And then we said, wow, that's kind of cool. Let's download this and play with it. And we tried to download the other ones, but we couldn't, it was kind of too complicated. And they wanted us to talk to resellers and it was like, no, no, no. You guys were like really open. And we found it was super simple to use. It was one of our guys, it wasn't a coder, a smart dude, but it was a low code, no code type of situation. You were explaining to me at Legal Seafood's last week that you actually have written some automations. So it's pretty simple to get started, but there's a spectrum, right? It's pretty powerful too. Yeah, it's an epiphany that hits everybody. This is the part where I see it, even in myself, when I realized every morning I was getting up and going to Google Trends and I was looking at us versus Automation Anywhere versus Blue Prism and we're pulling away. It's great, I'll get happy in the morning and I'll screenshot it and then I'll go to Slack and send it to the company team and I'll go, well, why am I doing this? So in 20 minutes now I have a robot every day, every morning it does it for me. And I get a text and I get an email. We have in marketing a dozen of these. I've got one that does our Google AdWords around the world, I've got one that takes all of our 30,000 inbound new contacts a month in different languages, translates, finds out what country they're in and routes into the right country. It's, you know, these are simpler examples, but once you realize that anything you do is routine and mundane that a robot can do for you, it's just, it brings, it makes you happy, first of all, right, and you realize the vision we have for the every robot for every person, it's a very realistic vision and it's two, three years out. Yeah, probably one of the things that's really interesting to me today is talking about what this means for jobs and careers. Right, as you know, Dave and I were at Splunk earlier this week, talking about, you know, Splunkers, data's at the center of what they do and everybody comes to them to how do I leverage my data? I did operations for a bunch of my career and I'd spend lots of time with my team saying, what do you hate doing? What are you manually doing? You know, what can you get rid of? And there's a collaboration between I hear that your customers, it's not just, oh, some consultancy comes in and they cut something away and they took it away from you, it's like, oh no, wait, you're actually involved with this, it seems like an ongoing process and you're making people's jobs better. Can you talk a little bit about that dynamics of how this transforms the vision for I hear from UI Path is you're going to change the world. Yes, so you have to sit in, let me talk about the future of work or digital work. You have to sit in a conference room and watch a bunch of workers sit around and I'll give you an example at DISA, so big federal government agency. Federal government has lifetime workers, right? And in the room were 30 workers who every day download assets and then they compile them and then they analyze them. They have their best, fastest kind of human go against the UI Path robot that they automated. In 15 minutes, the human downloaded two assets or they call archives and the robot at 17, the entire room of 30 cheered, right, cheered. No longer do we have to do that crap ever again, right? And this is, we see this in every industry, every, it's so much fun because you see just people just radiating with excitement, right? Because, you know, I was out with a customer today that says they can't even fulfill today what the humans they have, the 25% of the work they've got. So your robots are creating capacity, they're filling the void. You've probably heard about Japan, right, and the Asian population and RPA addressing, and UI Path addressing suicide rates. This is about making society better. This is about robots doing the work that we hate, right? One of our great customers, Holly Ull from State Auto, said on stage, she said, you know, robots do the work nobody misses. And I think that's, that's terrific. Now, what about job impacts, right? So we worry every day about what this means, right? And so we spend a lot of time on our academy making it easy to train people, build digital era skills. We announced our academic alliance, right? We've hired an amazing chief learning officer. You saw Tom Clancy, you know him and his team. You know, we're going to, we're going to train a million students in three years. You know, we're worried about the middle class, we're worried about people who are, maybe are farther along in their careers and helping them reskill. So, you know, we take that as a part of our job, as a company, to figure out how to, how to, you know, upskill people and make them a part of this. And I'm really excited because a year ago when I joined, everybody said big problem you have is people are worried about taking a lot of jobs. I don't hear that from the 1,500 customers that are here today. Well, and isn't part of that reskilling, learning how to apply automation, maybe even learning how to apply RPA, maybe even doing some automation? Yeah, so obviously there's, so World Economic Forum came out two weeks ago with a study that said, automation will add a net 60 million jobs. I think those, for the people that loses, it'll two X gains jobs. Now those are different jobs in some cases. Some of those jobs are digital era skills, some of those jobs are AI, data science. So I think there's a, there's, but there are some cubicle jobs that will be affected, right? There are some swivel chair jobs will be affected, but no different than when they automated toll boots, right? Or, you know, automated different parts of mundane work that we've all seen throughout our lives, right? So I think the speed at which this is happening is what worries people. Unlike in the past, it took a little longer for automation or industrialization to impact jobs. But, you know, we're focused on this, right? We're going to put money towards this, and we're just not seeing that today. Maybe it's because the economy's doing so great, people have a, well, you know, workforce shortage, but we're just not hearing it. Well, I mean, maybe a number of factors. I mean, there's no question machines have always replaced humans. This is the first time in history of replacing humans in cognitive functions. Or augmenting. Yeah, absolutely. It does suggest that there's opportunities for whether it's education, you guys are investing there, training, and re-skilling, whether it's around creativity. And that's really where the discussion, in our view, anyway, should be. Not about, okay, let's protect the future from the past, from the future. You know, you don't want to just repay the cow path to use another bromide, right? You got to move forward. And education is a key part of that. And you guys are putting your money where your mouth is. Yeah, we are. And I think, you know, our Academy we launched a little over a year and a half ago, has a quarter of a million people in it. They're earning diplomas. They unlinked in. I watch every day people post their new diplomas of the skills they've earned, right? They go through the courses. It's free. It's on, you know, democratization runs at the heart of this company. It's why, you know, we're growing so much faster than an automation anywhere, right? It's why we are a different kind of company. They're a very commercial minded kind of company. They're marketplace. You have to be a customer. If you're URL, when you type in your email, isn't a customer, you can't go to their store and do anything. We're free, open, share your automations. And it's just a very different mindset and community runs at our heart. If you're a small business, you know, under a million dollars, you got to use our software for free and you can run your robots. And we have one of our orchestrators running on Azure. And so, you know, I think all of this is helping get companies and people more comfortable with our technology. I mean, there are kids and students now. We had University of Maryland up here. You didn't see it, but a professor. He's building whole classes now at University of Maryland in the business school, all using our technology, saying every student should have a robot through their entire career, through their entire time at University of Maryland. That's every university. This is going to go so fast, Dave. Let's do it. It's going to go so fast. And I think back again a year ago, I mean, next year when we do this again, right, at our big flagship event at three or 4,000 people, you'll felt that progression. But the year I've been here, it's night and day already. All right, so Bobby, you know, we're big fans of community. We help the open source stuff. You've got a long background in that. Help us put together some of these stats here. When I looked in your keynote, you said there's 114,000 certified RPA developers out there across the globe. 139 countries. Right. 250,000 people have downloaded. You've only got a UI path of about 2,000 customers. So, you know, we talk business model and how your business grows, the industry grows. You know, help us understand that phenomenon. So, these are going to go exponential. So, we have large companies now that are committed to deploy UI path to every employee. Every employee becomes really a user then. So, you're going to see that user number go like this. Well, it applies, customer number goes like this, right? We're adding six new customers a day right now. You know, the real opportunity for us is every one of our customers, very few are down their journey like an SMBC is. SMBC RPAs in their annual reports, right? They say $500 million already, right? It's a societal thing, right? They actually in Japan share together to help each other, each company here in the US where they're a little competitive, right? Banks don't share with other banks typically, right? But this is kind of what we're driving. And it's, you know, when you make an automation UI path, while we're not open source as a platform, the automation is open source. You put it on go, I can take that. You can take that. It's the same kind of problem. Put it in the studio right away, modify it a bit, and you're good to go. Now you've sped your implementation, which is already fast by 70, 80, 90%. This is, we're just getting started. So you're going to see companies adopting across HR, across the flight chain, contact centers. You know, today we're, for the most of our customers, we're in one division. So the opportunity to grow within a company where we were probably barely 5% penetrated in our biggest clients. Yeah, and you've seen my prediction. I think a lot of the market forecasts are undercounting this space. I mean, there's a labor shortage, a skilled labor shortage. There's more jobs than there are people to fill them, because they don't have the right skills today. There's a productivity problem. Productivity line is flat. RPA is going to become a fundamental component of digital transformations. It's about a billion dollar business today. I got to peg the 10X by 2023. Craig at Forestry upped his guidance today. I may have told you all to a $3.3 billion market in 2021. Now I was a little disappointed. It was 2.9 before. I think he's still way under shooting it, but nevertheless, to grow it 10% in one year in his mind is still pretty big. Yeah, a lot of those market forecasts are kind of linear. You're going to see an S curve like growth in this market. I think there's no question about it. Just speaking to the customers today, we've seen this before in other major industry trends. We certainly saw it at service now. We saw it at Splunk. We saw it at Tableau. UiPath, it feels like a very similar vibe here. Nutanix, where we did the show here. I just feel an explosion coming. I already see it. It's palpable. One other reason for the explosion, which is a little different than, say, most of the open source tech companies, is they were an IT cell, right? Because you don't have to use code to automate your tasks, right? The best developers for us are actually the subject matter experts in finance, in supply chain, in HR. So suddenly we've empowered them, because IT everywhere is constrained, right? And they're dealing with keeping the systems current. So suddenly these tools, the software, is available to any employee to go learn and automate what they do. The friction we've removed between business having to go to IT, IT being understaffed, IT having to get the requirements, all that's gone. So you create robots overnight over the weekend and make your life better. I mean, it's, again, most of the world still does not understand what's going on. I mean, you can feel it now, but it's an epiphany for anyone when they see it. Well, the open mindset that Daniel talked about today, he said, you know, our competitors are doing what we do, and that's okay. Right. And that's the rising tide lifts all boats kind of thing. That puts pressure on you guys to stay ahead of the pack. Yeah. A big part of what Tom Clancy's doing is the training piece. That's huge. Free training. So you got to move faster than the market. You're confident you can do that. What gives you confidence? I think one is where our product's simpler to use. So I think, you know, you go to automation anywhere and you need the code, right? You don't have to code with our design tool. We're told we're about 40% faster to implement. And that's, you know, look at the numbers. We shared our numbers again today. 100 million we announced in July 1st and they are 140 now, right? We are telling our numbers. We're open and transparent. Our competitors, what Blue Prism does are public, right? We know they're growing slower. The other difference is the market, the requirements are not created equal. Blue Prism only works in an unattended robot fashion, only in the back office. So if you have front office automation with call centers and customer service, they don't have the concept of an unattended robot. You know, this idea of, so they lack the ability to serve all the requirements of a customer. You know, I think it's just architecturally, I think what we're seeing in terms of simplicity and openness, and then market coverage, very different than either automation anywhere at Blue Prism. All right, Bobby, let me poke at something. So if I look at, you came out this morning and said accelerate everything. One of the concerns I have is say, okay, if I take existing processes, a lot of times if you look at them, they're not ideal. They were manual in nature, it's great to do that, but how much do you need to wait and revisit and get consultants in to kind of fix things rather than just say, oh, okay, the faster's better for some things, but not necessarily for all things unless you can make some adjustments first. Yeah, I mean, you don't want to really automate a bad process, right? So we're not encouraging anyone to do that. And so as you see a combination of, you know, one thing about RPA which is great is you don't have to go in and say, I'm going to go do procure to pay, right? Like you, traditional IT company. And so you can go into that process and say, oh, look at all these tasks, these sub-processes, where there's huge friction, you know, and you can go automate that and get huge value. And that's really- Almost like microservices. Yeah, exactly, so you're able to go in, and that's really what people are doing on the more ambitious projects. They're saying, I'm also going to go re-opt, you know, optimize my process, think differently, but the reality is people are going in, they're finding these few parts of a bigger process, automating it, getting immediate outcomes, immediate RO outcomes, and paying back that entire project in six months, including the FISA and an Accenture or PWC or others. That doesn't exist anywhere in technology. That kind of, you know, speed to an outcome and then payback period, it just doesn't exist. Well, the fact that the SIs are here, yeah, we heard 15-day payback today, you know, super fast ROI. The fact that the big SIs are here, especially given it's relatively early days, says a lot about the potential market size. I always joke those guys like to eat at the trough, I mean, this is big business. And it's important for you guys, because they're strategic, they're at the board level, you need the top-down support. At the same time, it sounds like there's a lot of bottom-up activity, and that's where the innovation's going to come from. What's next for you guys? You're taking the show on the road again? You're right, so the next forward is in London, so we've had one in Europe and one in the US. We do what we call together, which are more intimate, or all around the world, which are country-specific or industry. I mean, we're going to go and call it the Automation First Tour, and we're going to go start our next tours up all through next year, hit all the cities again, probably three times the size of each city. You know, I look at, like in Washington D.C., with federal government. We started the federal government in January. You know, federal government for us next year will be a $60 million software business. For our partners, give them six, eight, 10X on services on top of that. That's meaningful, that's why you see them here. That same calculation exists in every vertical and in every country. And so it's good for our partners. It's great, we want them to focus on building their skills, though. Getting good skills and quality. So we do a lot with them. We hosted a partner forward yesterday with 500 partners focusing on them, and look, we were investing in you, but you've got to deliver quality, right? So, no, I think we amplify everything we did this year because it worked for us well. We amplify it big time, and forward in the year from now, whether it's Vegas, Orlando, or we'll announce it soon, will be substantially larger. Well, any company that's digitally transforming is going to put RPA as part of that digital transformation. It's not without its challenges, but it's a tailwind, and you better hop on that wave or you're going to end up driftwood, as Pat Gelsinger likes to say. Bobby, thanks so much. Thank you, Dave. Thanks for having us here. This has been a fantastic experience, and congratulations, and good luck going forward. Thank you. All right, guys, that's a wrap from here. This is theCUBE, check out theCUBE.net. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. theCUBE.net's where all the videos are. Wikibon.com for all the research. We are busy, Stu. We're on the road a lot, so again, look at the upcoming events. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time.