 The Cube presents UiPath Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to The Cube's continuous coverage with day two of UiPath Forward 5. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host, Dave Nicholson, and you are watching The Cube. It's all about the robots, the automations, the transformations, and beyond. Adi Gubervana is here. She's Group Executive at Vodacom, and Navash Pillay is back. She's Senior Director of Telecommunications Industry for UiPath. Ladies, welcome to The Cube. Hi, thank you very much. So Vodacom, a leading telco in Africa, across the continent, tell us more about the company. The company is a traditional telecommunications company, but our vision 2025 is for us to transition from being a telco to a technology company. So you'll find that a lot of the use cases that we've actually started embarking on combine the combination of telco and fintech, and we've got a lot of RPA bots also supporting the fintech platform, which is quite a major step in our strategy. So it's interesting, Mark Andreessen's famous comment, every company's a software company. I like to think every company's a technology company, technology trippin'. So what does that actually mean for you? Is it like a split brain between fintech, because it's pretty clear that fintech is always highly technology oriented? Telecom, are they sort of together driving a technology business? How does that work? It's a converged use of the technology to add value to the customer. So what we want to do is to get to the point where we have converged services, whether telecommunication, because at the end of the day in the African market, you'll find that there's a lot of markets that are unbanked. So you'd find that a cell phone is a means of communication and a mobile platform for the users. So it's a natural progression for our company to actually play in both spaces. And I think one of the things I find quite interesting is the levels of trust that a lot of citizens have in our financial platform, in that even some of the governments are paying social grants using the platform. And so it almost becomes, without their phones, a lot of people cannot function, type of scenario. Nivash, is your role a global role? Yes, it is a global role. Okay, so it's interesting, because you're, I think, based down under, right? I am, yeah. I think I obviously spent some time in the African continent. How are you, what are you seeing in terms of the trends in telecommunications and you're noticing there's got to be differences across different regions. You know, a lot of times you hear, oh no, there's really kind of a global world out. And I know it is, but Telco seems to be one of the industries that has some uniqueness within the different regions. What are you seeing? Look, we are privileged to work with more than 200 telecoms around the world, but clearly, from a technology perspective, there are some regions that have embraced technology sooner than the others, particularly when it comes to automation. Now we do have use cases with all of them, that we, you know, the 200 we are working with, but the extent to which they become strategic partners varies. You know, what I find is, in the US, we are doing a lot in the customer experience space with the telecoms. In APJ, it's more back of house. And with telecoms like Vodacom, it's really strategic. You know, automation is being applied, practicing every facet of work. And you know, sometimes that could be because the demand is just so great for connectivity. You know, at times there's a skills gap, but it does vary. But what's reassuring is that there is a journey. And you know, at this event, what I have seen is telecoms wanting to learn from other telecoms. And I must say, ATI has been in huge demand. He did about 22 meetings yesterday with others wanting to know, which again is that strategic trend. ATI, my understanding is you've been at this for a while, this automation journey for quite some time. And PY Pass interesting, I mean, it's a company that's founded in 2005 and kind of did its own thing for a long time and then realized it had lightning in a bottle in the mid-last decade. But my understanding is you've seen it all, you've seen the legacy platforms. And so tell me about your personal journey with automation and the companies. Okay, so there's the automation pre-RPA, which was strange enough. I come from banking, got a finance degree, did automated reconcilations in one of the bigger banks and somehow I transitioned. And I mean, from a history perspective, the one of the previous platforms, which was the biggest one at the time, that's where I got to learn about RPA. And then there's another vendor that we then use in another company. So this is almost my third vendor that I'm experiencing in the RPA space, having joined RPA space in 2015. I, apparently, I'm kind of a veteran. So what are you seeing? Is what's the difference between, I mean, let's call UiPath that was sort of modern, focus on some simple to deploy. That's really how they get started when I first found it. How do you compare what UiPath has and there are others, there are other modern platforms to sort of the legacy platforms. What's the difference? I think it's the diversity and applicability of the technology across multiple industries is something that still amazes me up until today because the kind of customers I've been meeting today, I would not admit a guy who owns an ice cream company. And I'm like, where would automation come in here? But he's actually quite a big customer of UiPath, you know? So I think that's one thing I appreciate. I think the ease of use, it has actually allowed for a lot of people to be part of the digital transformation. I think in the history, in the past, technology has been seen as something that was a bit elite and that you needed to have X amount of skills and level of education. Whereas the RPA industry has almost bridged that gap in actually bringing along as many people in the journey in terms of digital transformation. And the fourth industrial revolution is now starting to become more inclusive. Horizontal across industries. So Vodacom headquartered in South Africa, but presence throughout the continent. I imagine that various geographies have various twists and quirks to them and different needs. But as a general premise, the African continent has led the rest of the world in terms of embracing these little mobile devices for the most mission critical from a personal perspective things, right? So if you're already trusting all of your finances and even interaction with your government from a financial perspective, when you say technology platform, technologies moving forward, what's more critical from that? Or how do you branch off from that? What are some of the other things that you can share with us that you're looking towards in the future that may trickle over here eventually? So I think one of the things we started playing around with quite well is actually the convergence of machine learning, AI and RPA. You would find that a lot of research will tell you that this is the future of the automation. And for us, we're actually living the future in that we have civil use cases that are actually extracting a lot of business value. Where we've realized that RPA in and of itself, and this is obviously oversimplifying the technology, is almost the unlimited hands on keyboards that you could ever have, right? And then machine learning and AI almost becomes unlimited brains. So when you then combine the two, you almost have this strong technology that can revolutionize how we operate and service our customers. Well, how does that translate? Can you translate that into a user experience at this point? So. I mean, we're talking about people who, they have a mobile device. They don't have a desktop computer at home. Yeah. This is their portal into the world. So you'll find that if you're speaking pure Telco, and I'm obviously oversimplifying this, I'm no way an engineer, right? But I think at a very simplified level, there's a lot of legacy technology that is used in the Telco space. And you'll find that because of that, there's a lot of lack of integration. And you would find that the reasons why a lot of customers call us is because there's poor integration in a lot of instances. And it's ad hoc. So it's not as if the system has failed completely. So what we've now done is to try and see how do we use machine learning to pick up on those anomalies on the network, right? And because each time something breaks, right, it's almost a fixed way to fix it. And therefore, the machine learning, picking up the anomaly, almost then hands over to the RPA bot to fix the problem within the network element. But that means that from a customer experience perspective, instead of you actually realizing there's a problem, we fixed it before you even know that there's a problem. And therefore, and as you can imagine, it means that you then call the call center less because now you don't have the reason to complain because we've proactively identified the problem and we proactively use RPA then to fix it. So we almost have almost like a self healing element in within the RPA AI space. I think of, and we don't talk about the data. We haven't talked about the data much this week. I think in many respects, this industry is data industry. Our automation is all about what you can do with the data. Unlimited hands, unlimited brains, because to me, you have unlimited data and a lot of times you just can't handle it. So what's the data angle on all this? So firstly, I know a lot of people will say data is the new oil. No. I would never say that. I always ask people, if I give you a bucket of brain crude oil, what are you going to do with it? And similar to data. So I want to almost equate data to the crude oil element. But if you don't know how to refine it, process it, get it to be reliable, it's very useless in of its natural sense. So I think one of the things we've realized is that leveraging of the analogy of the machine learning in the brain. If you are in the sales space, you're forever trying to push new sales, right? And then chances are when a customer leaves you, you're almost in a re-access state. So when I imagine a world where you could proactively identify a customer with the propensity to leave your company. Because a lot of customers don't just, there are situations where they'll be walking down the street competitive to cause them, they leave. Not because they were unhappy, but a lot of customers actually had several engagements with us that were not pleasant. Whatever the definition is. So we then saw there was almost five types of attributes that resulted in customers leaving us. So what then that said was, imagine if you're an account manager, right? And you got told, UiPath P2I Limited has experienced one, two, three, four, right? Actually, please go engage with them because something is happening. It means that as an account manager, you are then equipped to have a meaningful engagement with the customer because you're saying, hi, UiPath, I see you've had X amount of job calls and you've had X amount of complaints in our call center. What is happening is it could be your network, maybe the tower where you are, and then the conversation becomes so meaningful. And I think even during COVID, what we found is that if customers started using less of our data, not because they were unhappy, but it became an affordability thing, because this is thousands and thousands of data elements and pieces about customer transactions. There's no way one human would be able to go through all of the data and make meaningful decisions out of it. So we then found that some customers were complaining about affordability. So we then built another model that says, if an account manager is talking to a customer and they're struggling from an affordability perspective, what's the next best offer you can make to your customer while you're engaging? And then if now UiPath takes up that offer, then you'd find that the bot does the post-engagement provisioning on the system because now if you then said, I can only afford 10 lines, but only pay 10 gigs, but not 10 lines and 20 gigs. That is at least better than us losing our customer. And we offering them almost a downward migration, capital situation, then the bot does that on the system. So you would find that we almost playing in the space of a human-centered intelligent automation where machine learning becomes the brain. The person is amplified in how they operate with the customer, and then the RPA bot becomes the hands that executes on that. And as the account manager, you focusing on engagement and convincing, which is really what people are good at and selling, as opposed to going through all of the, because water comes with a lot of products. So as opposed to having a person going through the products and trying to find the best product for you. So we're using machine learning to assist the humans. I mean, every interaction is consistent in that case. I know I sometimes have to call three or four times to find a professional that knows enough that can help me, such a frustrating thing as a consumer. So you're attacking churn with automation. We haven't even talked about how you guys are working together, your journey and all that stuff. But how are you guys working together? What are you doing in addition to what you just described with UI battle? So I think my portfolio is quite wide. So I am, my team is in every single vertical in the organization from customer care to the consumer enterprise business units, to finance, technology, network, compliance. And we do all of this in about six countries, right? So one of the things we've actually realized is that if we're looking at customer service, we wanted to understand why do customers call us. And I think I came from a point of ignorance because I'm not from Telco. So I actually realized that if we're talking billing and finance, revenue assurance, customers call us because we build them erroneously. But technically speaking, it's our system that said there's something that resulted in the customer calling us. So why do we not know about our own systems? Why are we waiting for the customers to call us? And literally those are the questions I was asking because I felt like, why are we not, why are we waiting for the customer to call us? So we then found a way to try and see within the billing systems, where do the breakages happen, right? So that we fix them before the customer has to call us again. So then again, from a billing perspective, it means that, because the billing element can come in two ways. We are giving you a service and not charging you for it. We then have revenue leakage. Or we, you are consuming something and we overcharging you. Then you call us and say, Vodacom is stealing my data. I promise you, nobody wakes up in the morning and wants to take one gig. Of your data. So it almost becomes a data integrity initiative that results in good customer service, but then results in eradication, of course. As opposed to us waiting for customers to tell us what the problem is and trying to help them fast. Because that's generally all it's been, but I've picked up the energy around customer service. How do we help you fast? I'm saying, why must you call us when it's our systems that are failing at? So we're almost trying to see how do we use the technology internally to give customers a better experience and then also have the financial benefits that we are now starting to see happening. What's the scope of your, like how many automations? How many bars? Can you give us a sense of this? So right now I think we over on, with all of the four, five countries that we in, we over 400 bots. So we started in 2000, four years ago. This is my fourth year in Vodacom. And we're not using just one product with UiPath. It became a platform because as we came across more kinds of problems, I think what I've appreciated about UiPath is how we've actually created a partnership instead of them trying to sell me products for the sake of consuming products. It became a, this is my problem, right? And then somehow they would whip out the product that solves my problem type of thing. So it became an ecosystem of solutions that we are using. You must love hanging out with Artie. I absolutely do. And look, you know, I've spent a career in telecommunications myself and, you know, the best days were when you could deliver an outstanding customer experience. And as you can see from what Artie has achieved, when you were more proactive and predictive, you can serve your customers so much more effectively. And that just lifts the morale of the team because we all, you know, have this purpose in doing our jobs. But this is automation and AI built into every part of that customer journey. So end to end, you know, the customer's much happier. You know there's a problem before the customer knows, you can solve the problem in most cases before they even know. And that's just what we are all in business to do to make things better. Great story. Thank you so much for sharing. I appreciate you coming back on theCUBE. Thank you very much. Thank you, Artie. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Don't forget to go to siliconangle.com, all the news, go to thecube.net. You'll see all these videos are available on demand as well as the other events that we do. Dave Vonte for Dave Nicholson. Keep it right there. We're right back at Forward 5, UiPath.