 Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE and our live coverage of Forward Six, UiPath. We are here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Dave Vellante. We're joined by two guests this for this segment. We have Leila Delchich. She is the Global Head of Value Realization at Aeon. Welcome, Leila. theCUBE alum, I should say. Welcome back. Thank you. And Taiso Dwyer VP Global Financial Services, UiPath. Also a CUBE alum, so welcome, both of you. Great to be back. So I'm going to start with you, Leila. I remember on the keynote, there was a Aeon executive, I believe it was Mindy Simon, who said one of the things that is so critical is to know when to use AI and when not to use AI. That really stayed with me, then the wisdom to know the difference, really. We should add that too. So how is Aeon using UiPath, the platform to drive innovation and growth, would you say? So our journey and the new journey that we introduced is about hyper-automation. So we said, for us to gain the maximum outcome, an outcome is not just financial outcomes, but client and colleague experience weighs into the outcomes very heavily. We do need to consider a combination of capitalizing on our systems to start with, standardize the processes where you can, capitalize on our systems, leverage AI ML capabilities, and that's where UiPath becomes a big part of our foundation. So we are leveraging UiPath as a platform of multitude of capabilities. Intelligent document processing, communications mining, process mining, NLP. We couple that with our internal integration capabilities and there you go. You hand up with end-to-end capability, you drive outcome, that's where we are embarking on and we picked UiPath to be our partner in that journey. We have done a lot as Aeon in the past few years. We are now just quadrupling, hopefully our outcomes in automation, hyper-automation. Tais. It's really great to hear you tell that story because it is a journey for a lot of customers and Aeon has just done such a terrific job making this an enterprise-wide strategic imperative for the organization. And they're getting the kind of value that we really hope to see from all of our customers. As I mentioned, it's not just about the productivity or efficiency element of it, but they're seeing value when it comes to risk. They're seeing value when it comes to growing their business. And so in all these different dimensions, we're seeing UiPath's platform really help the organization take that next step into their digital future. The amazing thing, Layla, about having you back on is we live in an age where it used to be, if you were in manufacturing, bottling, you would be there for life. Absolutely. But we see Amazons in music and Apples in financial services and they're able to traverse industries because of, I'd say, because of data. It changes everything. Absolutely. But there are still some, there's still tribal knowledge but there are many similarities across industries now. So I'm curious as to what your learnings were from the manufacturing world that you've been able to bring into financial services in terms of getting adoption, building hyper-automation and getting scale. What an amazing question, Dave. And a topic that many of us discussed, those of us who joined Aeon very recently, it has been six months, an amazing journey, and an amazing company that is providing services to clients and it's all about making better decisions, informed decisions and better advices to help our clients make better decisions. In manufacturing, we deal with raw material and last mile and lots of shortages and lots of the volatility in the markets that impacts us. The big difference between the two is how we look at cost to serve and the sense of urgency, obviously. So in the professional services we are in, in broken and insurance, we pretty much have intellectual property. It is people that make the difference, it's our employees that are making the difference and it's our clients so that relationship is so personalized, so unique and we rely heavily on data. I have never seen an enterprise and an industry that is so data literate. We know the value of the data and we know how we can use that data to serve our clients better. It's just amazing. You don't necessarily find that in other industries. You have to go through a data literacy and training and upskilling and riskilling whereas when I joined Aeon that was one big difference that I noticed which is making our life very easy. What we bring as a different perspective is, like I said, that sense of urgency and cost to serve. In manufacturing, the minute, for a second that production line stops, you start losing on client expectation, experience, outcomes, financials. So that's a big difference that we bring sense of urgency and then the cost to serve. The way we look at cost to serve in manufacturing is very different compared to professional services. Data in the DNA, which is obviously very common in the industry. It's the case of the kingdom really when it comes to financial services and one of the other dimensions about the parallel that you just drew that I think is so important for this industry is that we're starting to see really an explosion of new ecosystems as you see in manufacturing, for example. There's organizations that are interacting with each other that might have been competitors in the past or maybe they have complementary services and now there's these new ecosystems where these companies are really being knit together by data and intelligent automation in order to make their businesses run seamlessly together, which I think is really exciting and really speaks towards the future of where we're going in insurance. There's a lot of optimism and excitement in this conversation, so I don't want to throw water on it at the same time. There's also a lot of fear, anxiety, skepticism among the rank and file. Maybe not everyone is as data literate or as data excited as you all. How are you helping change perceptions internally and deal with the change management issue so that the rank and file understand just how impactful AI can be? Two things. One is I think we are all learning to embrace AI and live with AI and the capabilities and how we can make our life much easier and the second is how do we bring certain examples within our enterprise so that we create internal advocates and champions with the change? I think I'm very lucky when I joined AI on six months ago, one thing that stands out about the culture is a very quick adoption and change because it's all about serving clients. You have to be very adaptable, very flexible. That resonates internally to the way AI operates so our job in driving that change is much easier and our colleagues are willing to spend more time with clients and less time with some of the tasks and monotonic work so they are all very open and willing so we are very lucky at AI on to have colleagues like we do. That's definitely making our life easy and then showcasing examples on how it's actually impacting their life for the positive and helping them gain more skills, learn more skills, but also serve clients, give back time to serve clients. It's a high IQ environment that's sort of kill or be killed is out of the attitude. So I could see, I mean, what is your experience in terms of the industry in terms of leaning in to AI? I would think they want to be ahead of the curve. For sure the industry wants to be ahead of the curve and financial services does take some risks I will say and steps into new technology to see the power that it can really bring to the industry but I think it's really important to remember that this is additive and so when it comes to the employee nobody goes to work thinking I can't wait to process that form over and over and over again. At least I don't think so anyway. What we have in our employees that's really valuable is their minds, their ability to think critically, their judgment, how they think about the customer, the way that they engage with the customer and so this really gives them the ability to focus most of their attention on those aspects of their work which I think is really exciting and so yes I see that there is still trepidation a bit amongst a lot of people as you know how is this technology going to be embraced? What is it going to be used for? Will it be used for things that will impact my job? And the answer is probably yes but most likely in good ways that make your job much more satisfying and rewarding to be engaged in. So this idea of end hyper automation and end-to-end automation and we talk about ecosystems I'm curious as to how end-to-end automation extends into ecosystems, how you deal with sensitive information, privacy, data sharing, things of that, differences in workflows and the like. Absolutely, our focus right now is to achieve the end-to-end and hyper automation within Aeon so in Aeon first and making life easy for our colleagues especially our colleagues who are facing clients so that we decrease the cycle time and increase responsiveness. The second part will be extending into ecosystems ties to your point. I think in other industries we do see more of ecosystems in our industry, the industry we are in the broken and insurance, as I mentioned, we live every day we are in the business of helping our clients make better decisions. So we are in an industry that's a bit more personalized hence when we talk about extending to an ecosystem it's more personalized, having more personalized touch points and where it makes sense standardizing and working with industry associations. So we are actually embarking on few of those that are more industry associations but more focused on personalized. And to your point Dave, top of mind is data privacy compliance, right? Working with our clients on being very open, very transparent but for now our big focus again is within Aeon and how do we make sure that we add value in Aeon. That's going to be interesting because you're regulated industry so you have to be concerned about those things although the frameworks that you use might be different from the ecosystem so that's why you've got to have that framework at some point extend public policy will be involved and then once that's determined and agreed upon then growth occurs. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely so. And in addition to that even before public policy let's say is drafted around something like this a lot of companies are already concerned about how to take advantage of this in the most responsible and ethical way. How do you train models for example with the right data so you don't introduce bias into it? How do you make sure that the decisions are appropriate decisions? And one of the things that we're proud of here at UiPath is being able to introduce humans into that loop and so you have the ability for somebody to continue to validate that the answers that come out of models are the right ones for the business. But I think as we continue to grow this kind of technology growth usage in the industry we will continue to be very concerned and make sure that we're respecting all the global laws and regulations when it comes to privacy. Make sure that we're respecting our customers and what they expect out of us in our businesses. So are you, I'm thinking about what you were just saying about financial services being such a highly regulated industry with so many concerns about security, governance, privacy, similar to healthcare. How are you leveraging the learnings from working with financial services companies and applying them to other industries and sectors or are you quite there yet? Well I would say it's bi-directional and so you use healthcare as an example, they have very strict privacy laws as well and so when we think about what it takes to protect the individual that is on the receiving end of the output of this technology, they're very similar goals which is to respect privacy, to maintain confidentiality when it comes to information, security is of utmost importance and so when we think about the design and the way that we train the artificial intelligence, those become principles by which we use as a foundation for that training and development. Leila, your CEO on the main stage this morning shared in her video that she thinks of UiPath as a strategic partner. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what that means actually and why an insurance company needs an automation company as its strategic partner. Great question. Strategic partner for me is a partner that whatever keeps me awake at night should keep my strategic partner awake at night. Whatever my outcomes are, should be the outcomes of my strategic partner so that's kind of what we are looking for. A little like a marriage maybe. Yeah, it is in a way and the reason for that is we heavily rely on, in this case, a technology company. We do have many other strategic partners but in the case of UiPath, it's a technology company. It helps me with learning curve, speeding up the learning curve, helps me with speed to market so that I can actually produce some of the results for my clients and for our colleagues internally at speed. Reliance on the talents and upskilling and the risk-killing of my internal talent and they close the gap until we risk and upskill. So all of that put together, that's kind of how we look at strategic partners. We have a few strategic partners in our portfolio and UiPath is the one that we picked for automation. Very critical. If you look at our industry and the processes, we are a process people and process company so we actually rely on automation equally as other industries, whether it's manufacturing or any other industry out there. So one of the first strategic partners we picked as we embarked on the new journey at Aeon. Layla, having been at several forwards, how would you describe the evolution that you've seen just in terms of when you talk to your colleagues from RPA to end-to-end automation, hyper-automation? First of all, how would you describe it but could you even have predicted that? Is that, was that your vision now coming true? How do you think about that? In the world of technology, many of us have been discussing a platform as a capability and if you look at UiPath starting as RPA, that's many of us started with just automating an individual task. That was very important to get excited and generate some quick wins and showcase, you talked about change, actually that's how change happens when our colleagues start to understand what it actually means and how it makes their life easy. So that's the advocacy. Now very quickly, what we had to start to develop is the platform capabilities. So instead of going and gaining individual capabilities from many different technology companies, how do you gain a platform capability where you have all of the capabilities and you can choose based on your use case, that's what gives you a greater value. When you automate one piece of the puzzle or the process, you only gain one fraction of the outcome and you forget about that outcome very quickly. When you look at end-to-end process, upstream and downstream, and when you bring the colleagues together in that upstream and downstream, everybody realizes, ah, I automated this piece, but I'm actually creating a problem downstream, right? Or hey, I'm taking some of the waste from the upstream. So when you bring the end-to-end together and when you look at automation end-to-end with the platform capability that gives you speed, that's when you generate outcomes. So we are embarking on the journey. I hope next year we'll share some outcomes. What a testimonial, I mean. It is, it's wonderful. It is such an honor to have customers like Aeon as part of the journey for UiPath. And Lila's right, you know, we started off with our roots deep in RPA and we have grown so much into a platform, now offering all kinds of AI capabilities on top of it. And I think it's also because that partnership that you were talking about before, it's what informs what we need to do. And so we're not here just to exist to produce technology, we're here for our customers. And so they're the ones that help us shape what they need for their businesses. They help us understand where the business needs to be optimized more, what are the challenges that are facing, what's complex about the way that they run their business, and that helps us build technology that solves those problems for them. And so over the last couple of years, we're really proud to have customers like Aeon take us on that journey to our future as well. Tais and Lila, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE to talk about the state of AI and automation in the insurance industry. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will take a short break and be back with more of theCUBE's live coverage of Forward Six. Stay tuned.