 theCUBE presents UiPath Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. We're back with theCUBE's coverage of UiPath Forward 5, and we're live, Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Ajay Gupta is here. He's the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the Motor Vehicles of California, DMV. Welcome, Ajay, good to see you. Thank you. Good to be here. Wow, you have an interesting job. I would just say, you know, I've been to go into conferences for a long time. I remember early last decade, Frank Slutman put up a slide, people hangin' out, waitin' outside the California DMV. You were the butt of many jokes, but we have a happy customer here, so we're going to get into your case study. Yeah, yeah, very happy customer. Obviously, you've transformed the organization. I think it's pretty clear from our conversations that automation has played a role in that, but first of all, tell us about yourself, your role, and what's going on at the DMV. Sure, myself, Ajay Gupta, I am the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the DMV. Somewhat of, I would say, a made-up title, but Governor's Office asked me, okay, we need help, and what do you want to do? It's a cool title, though. Yeah, so I'm like, well, we are doing business and technology transformation, so that's what I've been doing for the last three years at the DMV. Before that, I was in private sector for 25 years, decided it was time to give back, because I was mostly doing public sector consulting, so here I am. Okay, so you knew the industry, and that's cool that you wanted to give back, because I mean, obviously, you're just talking off camera. You're smart, you're very cogent, and a lot of times, people in the private sector don't want to go work in the public sector, unless they're power crazy, you know? All right, anyway, so speaking with David Nicholson, the experience has gone from really crappy to really great, I mean, take it from here. Yeah, why am I gonna be, because I'm from California, I was just, you know, waxing eloquently about the change that's happened, just in terms of simple things like a registration renewal. It used to be go online and pray and weed through things, and now it's very simple, very, very fast. Tell us more about some of the things that you've done in the area of automation that have increased the percentage of things that could be done online without visiting a field office, just as an example. Yeah, what's the story? Yeah, so first of all, thank you for saying nice things about DMV, you as a customer, it means a lot, because we have been very deliberately working towards solving our customer pain points, whether it's in-person experiences, online, call centers, kiosks, so all across the channels. So we started our journey myself and Director Steve Gordon about three years ago, almost at the same time, with the goal of making Department of Motor Vehicles in California as the best retail experience in the nation across industry. So that's our goal, right? Not there yet, but you are working towards it. So for our in-person channels, which is what you may be familiar with, first of all, we want to make sure brick and click and call all the customer journeys can be done across the channels. You can decide to start journey at one place, finish at another place, all that is very deliberate. We are also trying to make sure you don't have to come to field office at all. We would welcome you to come, we love you, but we don't want you to be there. You have better things to do for the economy. We want you to do that instead of showing up in the field office, being in the wait line. So that's number one, creating more digital channels has been the key. We have created virtual field office. That's something that you would become familiar with if you're not as a DMV customer during COVID. The goal was we provide almost all the services. We connect our technicians to the customer who are in need of a live conversation or an email or a text or a SMS conversation or chat conversation in multiple languages or a video call, right? So we were able to accomplish that while COVID was going on, while the riots were going on, those of you know about that, our offices were shut down. We created this channel, which we are continuing because it's a great disaster recovery, business continuity channel, but also it can help keep people away from field office during peak hours. So that's been very deliberate. We have also added additional online services using bots. So we have created these web and process bots that actually let you do the intake, right? We could set up a new service in less than four weeks, a brand new service online. We have set up a brand new IVR service on call centers in less than a month for our seniors who didn't want to come to the field office and they were required certain pieces of information and we were able to provide that for our customers by creating this channel in less than four weeks. And the pandemic was an accelerant to this? Was it the catalyst really? And then you guys compressed it or had you already started on the journey? Well, we were ready. I mean, you came on right just before the pandemic? Yeah, so I came on in 2019, pandemic started in 2020 early. So we got lucky a little bit because we had a head start. I was already working with UI path and we had come up with design patterns that we're going to take this journey for all DMV channels with using UI path. So it was about timing that when it happened, it accelerated the need and it accelerated the actual work. I was thinking I'll have a one year plan. I executed all of the one year plan items in less than two months out of necessity. So it accelerated definitely the execution of my plan. So when you talk about the chat channel, is that bots, is that humans or a combination? Yeah, it's a combination of it. I would say more AI than bots. Bots do the service fulfillment work. So there is the user interaction where you have, you're saying something, the chat answers those questions, but then if you want something, hey, I want my registration renewed, right? It would take you to the right channel. And this is something we do today on our IVR channel if you call in the DMV number in California. You'll see that your registration renewal is all automatic. You also have a AI listening to it, but also when you're saying, yep, I want to do it, then bot triggers certain aspects of the service fulfillment because our legacy is still sitting about 60 years old and we are able to still provide this modern facade for our customers with no gap and as quickly as possible within a month's time. This is that. How many DMVs are in the state? Okay, so we have 230 different field locations out of which 180 are available for general public services. Okay, so, and then you're creating a digital overlay to all that. Yeah, it's digital and virtual overlay, right? Digital is fully self-service. Bots can do all your processing. Automation can do all the processing. AI can do all the processing. But then you have virtual channels where you have customer interacting with the technicians, our technicians, virtually. But once a technician is done solving the problem, they click a button and bot does rest of the work for the technician, so that's where we are able to get some back office efficiency and transaction reduction. When was the last time you walked into a bank? Oh, man. I mean, is that where we're going here? Well, you just don't have to go into the branch and into it anymore. And that is the goal. In fact, we already have a starting point. I mean, just like you have ATM machines, we have kiosks already that do some of this automation work for us today. The goal is to not have to, unless you really want to, we actually set up these personas. One of them was High Touch Henry. He likes to go to the field office and talk to people. We are there for them. But for the millennials, for the people who are like, I don't have time, I want to quickly finish this work off hours, 24 by seven, which is where bots come in. They do not have an HR complaint. They don't have overtime. They're able to solve these problems for me 24 by seven. What's the scope of your, like, how many automations, how many bots, can you give us a sense? Sure. So right now we're sitting at 36 different use cases. We have collected six point of eight point. Well, we have saved 8.8 million dollars just using the bots. Overall savings, if you were to look at virtual field office, which bots are part of, we have collected 388 million dollars so far in that particular channel. Bots, I've also saved paper. I've saved a million sheets of paper through the bot, which I'm trying to remember how many trees it equates to, but it's a whole lot of trees that I've saved. And how many bots are we talking about? So it's 36 different use cases. So 36 bots? Well, no, there's more bots. I want to say, so we are running at 85% efficiency, 50 bots. Oh wow. Wow, okay. So you asked the question about who loves last time someone was in a bank. The last time I was in a bank, it was to deposit more than $10,000 in cash because of a cash transaction. Someone bought a car for me. It was more of a nuisance. I felt like I was being treated like a criminal. I was very clear what I was doing. I had just paid off alone with that bank and I was giving them the cash for that transaction, as opposed to the DMV transaction transferring title. That was easy. The DMV part was easier than the bank. And you're trying to make it even easier. It shouldn't be that way. But I have a question for you on that bot implementation. Can you give us, you've sort of given us examples of how they interact. Yeah. But as your kind of prototypical California driver's license holder, how has that improved a specific transaction that I would be involved with? So, wow. You as a Californian and you as a taxpayer. You as a Californian getting services and you as a taxpayer getting the most out of the money that the DMV spending on providing services. Both are benefits to you. So, bots have benefited in both of those areas. If you were used to the DMV three years ago, there was a whole lot of paper involved. You got to fill this form out. You got to fill this other form out. And you got to go to DMV. Oh, by the way, your form, you didn't bring this thing with you. Your form has issues. We have calculated that about 30% of paper workloads are wasted because they just have bad data. There is no control. There's nobody telling you, hey, do this right. Even dates could be wrong. Names could be wrong. Fields may be incomplete and such. So, we were able to automate a whole lot of that by creating self-service channels which are accelerated by bots. So, we have these web acceleration platforms that collect the data. Bots do the validation. They also verify the information, give you real-time feedback or near real-time feedback that, hey, this is what you need to change. This is what you need to verify. So, all the business rules are in the bot. And then, once you're done, it'll commit the information to our legacy systems which wouldn't have been possible unless a technician was punching it in manually. So, there is a third cohort of Californians which is our employees. We have 10,000 of those. They, I don't want them to get carpal tunnel. I want them to make sure they're spending more time thinking and helping our customers, looking at the customers rather than typing things. And that's what we are able to accomplish with the bots where you press that one button which would have required maybe 50 more keystrokes and that's gone. And now, you're saving time. You're also saving the effort and the attention loss serving the customers. Jay, what does it take to get a new process on board? So, I'm thinking about Real ID. I just went through that in Massachusetts. I took, it was going to be months to get to the DMV so I ended up going through a AAA. Had to get all these documents. I uploaded all the documents. Of course, when I showed up, none were there. Thankfully, I had backup copies but it was really a pleasant experience. Are you, describe what you're doing with Real ID and what robots play? Yeah, sure. So, with Real ID, what we are doing today and what we'll be doing in the future. So, I can talk about both. What we are doing today is that we are allowing most of the work to be done up front by the customer because Real ID is a complex transaction. You've got to have four different pieces of documentation. You need to provide your information. It needs to match our records and then you show up to the field office and by the way, oh man, I did not upload this information. We are getting about 15 to 17% returns customers and that's a whole lot of time. Every single mile, our customer travels to the DMV office which averages to about 13 miles in my calculation for average customer. It's a dollar spent in carbon footprint, in the time lost, in the technician time trying to triad some other things. So, you're talking $26 per visit to the economy. And amazing frustration that has to come back. And our customer satisfaction scores which we really like to track goes down right away. So, in general for Real ID, what we have been, what we have done is created a bunch of self-service channels which are accelerated by workflow engines, by AI and by bots to collect the documentation, verify the documentation against external systems because we actually connect with Department of Homeland Security, verify what's your passport about. We look at your picture and we verify that, yep, it is truly a passport and yours and not your wife's, right? Or not a picture of a dog and it's actually truly you, right? I mean, people do all kind of fun stuff by mistake or intentionally. So, we want to make sure we save time for our customer, we save time for our employees and we have zero returns required when employee, customer shows up which by the way is requirement right now. But the Department of Homeland Security is in a rule making process and we are hopeful, very hopeful at this point in time that we'll be able to take the entire experience and get it done from home. And that'll give us a whole lot more efficiency as you can imagine and bots are at the tail end of it committing all the data and transactions into our systems faster and with more accuracy. That's a great story, I mean really congratulations and I guess I'll leave it, last question is where do you want to take this? What's your roadmap look like? What's your runway look like? Is there endless opportunities to automate at the state or do you see a sort of light at the end of the tunnel? Sure, so there is a thing I shared in the previous session that I was in which is be modern while we modernize. So that's been the goal with the bot. They are integral part of my transition architecture as I modernize the entire DMV bring them from 1960, bring us from 1960 to 2022 or even 2025 and do it now, right? So bots are able to get me to a place where customers expectations are managed. They are getting their online, they're getting their mobile experience, they are avoiding making field of his trips and avoiding any kind of paper based processing right for our employees and customers as well. So bots are serving that need today as part of the transition strategy going from 1960 to 2022. In the future, they're going to continue to serve us. I think it's one of the things that was talked about by the previous sessions today that they are looking at empowering the employees to do their own work, back office work also in a full automation way and self empower them to automate their own processes. So that's one of the strategies we're going to look for but also we'll continue to have a strategy where we need to remain nimble with upcoming needs and have a faster go to market plan using the bots. Outstanding, well thanks so much for sharing your story and thanks for helping Dave. Real life testimony. Never thought I'd be coming on to praise the California DMV but here I am and it's legit. Yeah, well done. Can I make an introduction to our Massachusetts colleagues? Good to, well actually we have been working with State of New York, Massachusetts, Nevada, Arizona, so our goal is to share but also learn from that. Help us out, help us out. But nice to be here. Great to have you. And looking for feedback, next time you visit DMV. All right, yeah, fill out that NPS score. All right, thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson, Forward Five UI Pass Customer Conference from the Venetian in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.