 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to Miami, everybody. UiPath Forward Americas, hashtag UiPath, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Dave Vellante here for my co-host, Stu Miniman. Anthony Abatista is here, he's a principal in robotics and intelligent automation at Deloitte. Big consultant, CSI Anthony, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me, it's great to be here. So when the SIs and the consultancies lean in, you know it's a big business, you know it's strategic, and it's sort of life-changing, world-changing. What's your role at Deloitte, and then we'll get into what you see in the market space? So my role now is broadly in intelligent automation and really scaling our practice, looking at what's next. And if you think about automation in and of itself in an RPA, if you're not careful, it could be a race to the bottom, is our view, and just automating things without a business case, without sustainability, without thinking about what's next. You know, it's probably a race to the bottom from a results perspective, so what we like to do is think about what intelligent components can we have, not just in technology, but around the business case, around the actual implementation to say, you know, how do we just not take people out, how do we think about the future of work, what's the impact on industry, and how can we make something more of that and make this a sustainable part of the technology landscape, not just a let's go take some bodies out. Yeah, so the race to the bottom I'm inferring would be the hollowing out of the employee base without a plan to sort of retrain and redeploy people and actually add business value, just pure cost-cutting for automation, for automation's sake, versus what? What do you advise on your clients? Well, and the race to the bottom also would include just doing automation for the sake of doing automation and, you know, my joke here with the theme of the conference of accelerate everything. Yeah, I said I'm not sure that's exactly right, it's accelerate the right things, it's accelerate things that have the highest value, so I do think the race to the bottom is if you're not careful, you could just be doing automations, putting in bots, and I've seen a lot of programs start to fail or people start to question them if you don't have that longer view of automating the right things and accelerating the right things. The second part of that is, you know, there's context, there's interactions, and without some of the advanced cognitive components, without text, without speech, without machine learning and getting smarter as you do this, it'll be a race to the bottom if you're not doing those things. Yeah, I mean, Anthony, it's everything in business. If you start having meetings for meeting's sake, they get out of hand, you know, in the infrastructure space we have sprawl of every single technology out there. Maybe give us a little insight, what are you seeing as some of the real ways that, you know, companies get value out of this, help propel their business forward, help their employees be more fulfilled and not be doing drudgery work? So that's a lot, all in one question or a lot. I think, first of all, this is not a technology or a business problem, and this goes back to, you know, my 30, almost 35 years of working in technology. We still need business and technology alignment to make the real programs work. And I know some vendors have come out and said, this is easy, just go build a bot and business people can do this. And quickly it becomes a technology problem if you're successful or if you're not successful, it becomes a technology problem. So I do think one thing I'm seeing is the best programs have business led and technology enabled, but the leadership is aligned around how to do these programs. The second piece is having a business case. If we're going to automate some things that are low hanging fruit, understanding the difference between that and where their places were digging in, leaning in to some good old fashioned process work or asking the question, are my going to do best practice? Am I going to get some industry consultants in that know the difference between good and great or what I'm doing and can maybe guide me there quickly? I think people who are taking that approach and sort of knowing why they're doing the program, if it's low hanging fruit, that's fine. You might do some throwaways, but also having a long view of if I'm going to dig in, how do I get that value? How do I bring people in to help me get that value and not just repave the cow path? So take us through the business case. Maybe we could go through some examples, but what's the framework look like? Obviously, you know, save money, make money, okay, but you guys are going to get a lot more sophisticated than that. But with something like this, I presume you don't want to initially boil the ocean. You want to have a long term view, get some quick wins that are maybe, you know, gain shares going forward. Maybe take us through a framework using some of the examples that you've worked with on clients. What does it look like, the business case? So first, there's the back office business case, and I think those are best understood. So how do I automate financial processes or HR processes? A lot of those are pretty easy to do on an industry agnostic basis for the most part. And those typically do have the, can I close the books faster? Is there value in maybe taking some people out or redeploying them? And I think those are pretty well understood across the industry, various industries. So expense reporting, you know, approval is an obvious one, right? Because you're pushing the button every time, to prove, to prove, to prove. Like I say, reporting gets to be a little, it gets to be more interesting so you're compressing the time to reporting. Again, doing sort of manual tax. Does that have a value to the street or to your investors or to just not elongating the whole process? Okay. You know, the company I worked in, we moved from a 10 day close to a one day close. It took us seven years of working hard to do that. Now people are thinking about continuous closes. You know, what are my books look like every day? Can I do valuations in certain industries? So I do think if there's business value to do that, again, these business cases are pretty well understood. I think where it gets interesting is we get to industry specific business cases. So from running an insurance company, for example, can I improve customer sat and it doesn't matter that I move the needle as far as renewals? Again, can I improve customer sat by maybe adjudicating a claim quickly, getting you to check and not having it be a big hassle. If there's no bodily injury or something we have to dig into, can I use robotics and other technology to help have a happier customer? Maybe save some cost, redesign the process, not have an inspector go out or an adjuster go look at things. So I think technologies play together well. The other is creating capacity in that same model. I have a client who really was about to go out and build some new buildings. Their business was growing very nicely, but they're about to undertake a major capital investment to build buildings and service their business the way they were doing it. And they'd make money doing that, but they made more money by not building the building and not hiring 1,000 or 1,500 people that would fill it and said, how can we use automation to stave off that investment? So CapEx, OpEx, now you start getting into some models that are not traditional. It's not just save some heads, but it's great capacity. I think I could probably count on one hand. I think so, yeah. The number of companies that have the capabilities of Deloitte in terms of its global presence, its industry expertise. Other than that sort of cartel, if you will, how do you differentiate? So one thing is we're very deeply technically competent and one of the reasons I came back out of the industry and joined the firm was our bench and technology competencies. So we can go with the best of them about sizing and scaling, not just filling a school bus, but making size and scale with industry expertise in our technical people. So I do think our technology bench is really strong because everybody has a love and business savvy. We like our business people to be tech savvy and our tech people to be business savvy. And that's sort of part of the culture. I think the second piece is our ability to think from an industry perspective, even if we're screwing some things in or going for a go live, I think our continuous industry points of views, our deep knowledge means we can bring an expert at any time and any place to weigh in the sum of the work we're doing. And sometimes that happens no matter of course. It might be a technical project, go build 40, 50 bots, but while we're there, we bring something more on a regular basis. I also think we don't just do work for the sake of doing work. We're very focused on the business case, sharing success. We've got some major automation projects, intelligent automation projects that were at risk and our fees and we've got aligned rewards. So I think that makes us different and maybe worth a little more premium in the market. So that's, I mean, oftentimes clients are afraid to sign up for those deals because the business case could be so attractive, they could be writing a big check, they want to keep the upside for themselves and have more operating leverage. But you've found that, well, certainly you're willing to take that risk because you understand the reward and that's kind of cool. I mean, the payoff must be pretty good, maybe better than normal in an engagement. Well it is and it's really interesting. We brought several of these to the door and said, how about we go into a risk sharing or reward sharing kind of situation and people have said, we're going to give you a lot of money if this works and they've had exactly, you know, let's just move back to a fixed price or a bound in scope project. So, and we don't mind that either. Great negotiating tactic, there you go. I want to go back to the industry discussion we were just having before. We saw in the big data world, one of the biggest challenges was when you looked at deployments, everything was custom. It wasn't very repeatable. I was at the Microsoft show two weeks ago and they said for AI, they're going to great, you know, industry specific groups to be able to really focus on AI, IOT and the like. In this space for the robotic automation, are there certain industries that you're seeing ahead of the curve in this? Are there things that, you know, is it going to be very industry specific? You said, you know, HR is very generalized, but give us a little more color if you can. So it's interesting you mentioned big data because I think the best automation is driven with data and analytics and feedback in the background. So I think the best industries are the ones that are most promising are places where there is a massive amount of data that we can apply automation and intelligent automation too. So a couple of standouts, healthcare, life sciences, massive amounts of data, a massive data channel, and they're very used to working with data and investing in data and automation. You can pretty quickly close the loop. The Seconds Financial Services, we're using automation to run more models, to handle more calls, to handle more interactions. And then certainly in consumer focus things, can we have a good experience in a retail channel or a customer support channel by using automation? And again, sometimes people are happy or interacting with a bot or an intelligent agent than they are. Has those bots passed the Turing test yet? Excuse me? Did they pass the Turing test? Yeah, some of them are getting close, right? But I still think there's some work to do there. So some of the mistakes people made, I'm inferring from your comments. People don't have a plan, they don't have the business case, they don't have the business technology alignment. What are the big mistakes that, what are we missing here that people should try to avoid? Well, I think alignment and then the sponsorship, like having that business case and not getting lost on the way, or we get X million dollars into a program and somebody starts sniping at it. So I also think booking the benefits and having your CFO or some operator on board who's actually booking the benefits, whether they're takeouts, redeployments, or even customer sal or other things. If you're going to push the needle, somebody needs to measure it. And then advice, let's flip it around sort of positive side, advice for people who want to get started. Obviously it sounds like you got to have the sponsorship. What, pick something that's going to give a fast return, you want quick hits, is that right? Hey, you want some early success and I'd say don't boil the ocean, use your words before. Find some, but also understand a longer term picture and don't get again onto this, let's go live and let's pick the first 500. You know, pick 10, get going, have some success. I think two years ago, we spent a lot of time on looking at technology, doing POCs. I think people are getting beyond that now and you can quickly say, all right, if we're going to do a POC, let's make it real. Let's not make it a science project, but let's get a real area where there's real sponsorship and let's go build the first 10 bots. So I'd infer from that that the, so the POC, the investment might be a little bit larger, but the payback is going to be more substantive. People are willing to take that chance of economy's good, so why not? And also why spend two or three months doing science projects or more in some companies? And when you do these early projects, are you narrowly focused on sort of a part of the organization or are you involving more constituencies and hurting more cats or is it sort of just dependent in both? I think what's typical is if there's a business person or a tech person thinking about this probably, typically might do a strategy piece of work that says, is there a business case at a high level, typical consulting, then are there ways that we could find sponsorship in an area and start somewhere. Now, assuming the big business case can be worked out and you have some learning, start somewhere. But I think the ones that try to start broadly and do too much in too many areas, unless you're very careful, might make no one happy and prove nothing to anyone. And that could be a failure, but we do have some customers where we've gone out and gone to multiple areas, HR, finance, some of the back office places all at once and said we're going to do a POC in each one. If they've got the discipline and they want to work on those things at once, it just makes it into a program rather than a project and that's what we're going to do. Yeah, okay. Anthony, any feedback you have on the go marketplace? How important is that to customers? We always wonder how much co-creation will happen from the users, that kind of dynamic. So I work in a place where all we have is our people and our intellectual capital. So I can say personally, I'm suspicious of marketplaces and places you post your wearers and I don't think it's that easy. With that said, I do think there's opportunities to help each other to sort of think of it as an open source opportunity or a way to show eminence and thought in the market. So I think we'll participate cautiously in those kinds of environments. We like to see some structure around that. I think other vendors have similar marketplaces, not just in the RPA space, but in the technology space. But I have to think what's in it when we're creating a false expectation if we put solutions there. So I think it's good to be in the market. It's good to open source some things and play. But I think we always want to be careful about that. And I really like what I'm seeing from UiPath's marketplace, the way they're thinking about it, which is having certain lovers. Is it an internal marketplace? Can we have customers and people use it in a controlled environment rather than just being a bizarre or a freefall? What is the relationship with UiPath? So, we've been working with UiPath probably since they started, both as a customer and with our customers. And we have various, our relationship is deep. We sponsor events like this. We are reseller, and we are working on formalizing some of that potentially as an alliance partner in the future. But our relationship is deep. Hands on, going to clients, working together to serve our joint clients. Great, Anthony, love the independent perspective. You guys are always about, technology's important, but the people side, the process side, the business outcome is really what you're all about. So, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for being here. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back right after this short break. We're live UiPath Forward from Miami. You're watching theCUBE.