 From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Manhattan, New York City, at Automation Anywhere's Imagine 2018. We've never been to the show. Pretty interesting, about 1,100 people talking about bots, but it's really more than bots. It's really how do we use digital employees, digital programs to help people be more efficient and take advantage of a lot of the opportunities, as well as the challenges that we're facing as we keep innovating. I'm really excited to have our next guest, Jeffrey M. Alt, the former chairman and CEO of GE. Great to see you, Jeff. Good to see you. Absolutely, last I saw I think was at Mines and Machines and we're huge fans, we have Comstock. I love Bill Ruse, so you know, what a fantastic team. Great team. But here you are talking about bots. And what's interesting is GE, you guys have been involved in big industrial equipment as well as a huge software business. So you really figured out that you've got to have software and people that really work with these machines. So you know, Jeff, I really am a big believer that productivity is the key and that we're seeing a bow wave of technology that's really going to impact the workplace in a meaningful way. The reason why I like RPA, what we call bots, is because it can happen so quickly, it can happen across the organization, it has great productivity associated with it. So I kind of view RPA as being really one of the, let's say early wave technologies in terms of how to drive more automation and productivity in the workplace. That's funny, because people ask me, they're like, what's the deal with some of these stock valuations? Is it real? And if you think back to the ERP days, right? ERP unlocked this huge amount of inefficiency. That was a long, long time ago and yet we still continue to find these huge buckets of inefficiency over and over again. I mean, I think to your point, the early days of IT, really, if you look at ERP, manufacturing systems, even CRM, they were really more around governance. They were kind of connecting big enterprises, but they really weren't driving the kind of decision support automation, AI, that companies really need to drive productivity. And I think the next wave of tools will operate inside that envelope. Ultimately, these will all merge, but I think these are going to get productivity much quicker than an ERP system or an MES system did, which are really, at the end of the day, driven by CFOs to drive compliance more than operating people to drive productivity. Right. But what's driving this is we've seen over and over that consumerization of IT, not only in terms of the expected behavior of applications, you want everything to act like Amazon, you want everything to act like Google, but also in terms of expectations of feedback, expectations of performance. Now people can directly connect with customer, with companies like they never could before, and the customers, and the companies can direct with their customer directly, where before you had channels, you had a lot of distribution steps in between, those things are kind of breaking down. I think that's for sure. I mean, I think that's for sure. I would say beyond that is the ability to empower employees more with some of these tools. So, an employee used to have to go to the CIO with a work ticket, here's what I need. You know, these bots grow virally inside organizations. They're easy to implement. They're easy to see and impact very quickly. So, I just think the tools are becoming more facile. It's no longer kind of a hierarchical, IT-driven technology base. It's more of a grounds up technology base, and I think it's going to drive more speed and productivity inside companies. Right. It's really this kind of, it's always a discussion, are the machines going to take our jobs, or are they, but really, There's, I'm not that smart, really. I mean, a lot of the people think that they're, It's funny, because they're not, right? I mean, everyone's got requisitions out like crazy. We need the machines that can do the jobs. I mean, nobody has easy jobs. The fact of the matter is, nobody has easy jobs. Right. You know, a company like GE would have 300 ERP systems, right? Because of acquisitions and things like that. An immense amount of complexity, manual journal entries, things like that. So, to a certain extent these, this automation is really helping people do their jobs better. More than thinking about, you know, where does it all go someday. So, I think we're much better off as an economy, getting these tools out there, getting people experienced with them, and seeing what happens next. It's funny, they just showed the bot store in the keynote before we sat down, and when you look closely, a lot of them look like relatively simple processes, but the problem is, they're relatively simple, but they take up a lot of time, and they're not that automated. One of my favorite chefs is doing a quote for a gas power plant. We take eight weeks. Because now we have bots that can draw data from different data sources, you can do it in two and a half days, right? So, that's not one you'd naturally think of for an automation technology like this, but the ability to automate from the different data sources is what creates the cycle time reduction. Right, and you're fortunate, you sat in a position where you can really look down the road at some interesting things coming forward, and we always hear kind of these two views, there's kind of the dark view of where this is all going with the automation and the robots, and then there's the more positive view that you just touched on. These are going to enable us to do more with less, and free people up to actually be productive and not do them a day. I think productivity enables growth. The world needs more productivity. These tools are going to be used to drive more productivity. I think many more jobs will be technically enabled than will be eliminated by technology. Clearly, there's going to be some that are impacted more dramatically than others, but I would actually say for most people, the ability to have technology to help them do their day to day job is going to have a much higher impact. Right, what do you think is the biggest misperception of this combining of people and machines to do better? What do you think people kind of miss the boat? Oh, look, I mean, I think it's that people want to gravitate towards a macro view, a theoretical view, versus actually watching how people work. If you actually spent time seeing how a service engineer works, how a manufacturing person works, how an administrative person works, then I think you would applaud the technology, really. I think we tend to make these pronouncements that are philosophical or coming from Silicon Valley about the rest of the world, versus if everybody just every day would actually observe how tasks actually get done, you'd say, bring on more technology, because this is just shitty, these are just horrible, these are tough, horrible jobs, right? A field engineer fixing a turbine out in the middle of Texas, right, a wind turbine, if we can arm them with some virtual reality tools and the ability to use analytics so that they can fix right the first time, that's liberating to that person. They don't look at that and say, oh my God, if I use this, they're gonna replace me. They really need me to do all this stuff. So I think not enough people know how people actually work. That's the problem. It's a tool, right? It's as if you took the guy's truck away and made him ride out there on a horse. I mean, it's with no tools. It's just another tool. I remember sitting in a sales office in the early 80s when the IT guy came out and installed Microsoft Outlook for the first time. And I remember sitting there saying, who would ever need this? You know, who needs spreadsheets? Right, right. I could do it all here. Yeah, little did you know. So I just think it's one of those crazy things, really. Yeah, little did you know, the spreadsheets are still driving 80% of the world's computational demand. Exactly. Crazy. All right, well I want to give you the last word again. You're here, it's a very exciting spot. We call them bots through robotic process automation for those that aren't dialed into what RPA stands for. Did you look forward? What are you really excited about? Oh look, I mean I always think back to kind of the forays really, which is kind of artificial intelligence, automation, additive manufacturing, and analytics. And I think if everybody just honed in on those four things, it's going to be immensely disruptive as it pertains to just how people work, how things get built, how people do their work. So when you think about RPA, I put that in the automation. It's kind of a merger of automation and AI. It's just really exciting what's going to be available. But this bad wave of technology, it's just a great time to be alive. Yeah, it is. People, I think forget, they focus on the negative and don't really look at the fact that you can drop into any city, anywhere in the world, pull up your phone and find the direction to the local museum. Well Jeff, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time. All right, he's Jeff Edmund. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Automation Anywhere. Imagine 2018. Thanks for watching.