 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 at the Automation Anywhere, Imagine 2018. 1,100 people milling around, looking at the ecosystem, looking at all the offers that all the partners have, and we're excited to have one of the strategic advisors from the company. He's Bill Raduchal, strategic advisor, been in the industry for... 50 years, 40 years, 50 years, whatever, forever. So Bill, thanks for taking a few minutes. Oh, my pleasure. So how did you get involved with Automation Anywhere? Oh, the way most things happen in life, friends, right, and get involved, and God, and I got to talking to him here, and we got, you know, we see the world much the same way, and see the importance of bots and bringing productivity back to the economy, and, you know, no other way to do it. So, just, you know, it grew. It grew. So it's interesting, right? Because I thought ERP was supposed to have wrung out all the efficiency that, in waste in the system, but clearly that was not the case. I won both CIO of the year and CTO of the year, and I put in an ERP system, and I understand it. It also failed three times going in. It was incredibly painful, but it produced over a billion dollars in cash saving. So, it did. The problem is, is the world changes, and the world changes now at a pace far faster than you can possibly change your ERP system. I mean, ERP systems are built to be changed every, I don't know, 15 to 25 years, and the world in 25 years is going to look very different than the world does today. So, we just have this huge disconnect between how fast we can create and deploy software, and how fast the world is changing to which that software has to relate. Right, and still so many of the process that people actually do in their day job are still spreadsheet-based, you know, my goodness, how much of the world's computational force power is used on Excel, on standalone literary ports and projects. Another question to ask is, how many errors are in those spreadsheets? That's right, right, not enough copy-paste. I mean, I was on a study for the National Academy of Sciences, and we looked at why productivity growth wasn't happening. And one answer, which we just talked about, is legacy software. I mean, you just couldn't change it, you couldn't, you know, that. When you had to rewrite the software, all productivity growth just slowed to a crawl. The other thing is something that economists call lore, and lore is basically oral tradition, but it's the way the company really works. You have all these processes and all these procedures, but when you get down and you start talking, it's sort of like, what is it, the secret boss show? I mean, you learn the little things that the people down at the bottom know. Well, so far automation has never really penetrated that, and yet that becomes the barrier to almost all change. So what RPA does is RPA actually begins to go after lore. RPA allows companies to begin to understand lore, understand how to optimize it, understand how to record it. I mean, you know, but it's not written down. It's below the level that people bother to document, and yet if you don't change the lore, you're not going to, you're not going to change anything. So this is why this is so exciting, is because for the first time, companies, organizations, people, I mean, we see all this stuff coming out just to help us on our everyday lives, you get to go at the lore. I mean, you know that, well, you don't put that field in, no, you wait 20 seconds after you filled in this field before you go and do that, because it takes that long for that, and you get an error over here. That's how things really work. And this is the kind of technology that can actually address that. And so for that point of view, it's really revolutionary because we've never been able, I mean, oral tradition has never been subject to a whole lot of scientific study. Well, the other thing is just so impressive, and you've been in the business a long time. You know, we're talking about AOL before we turn on the cameras and shipping CDs around. As we get closer and closer to, you know, infinite compute, infinite storage, infinite networking, 5G just around the corner, at a price point that keeps asymptotically getting closer and closer to zero, the opportunity for things like AI and to really apply a lot more horsepower to these problems opens up a whole different opportunity. Two comments to that. One is about 15 years ago, the National Science Foundation funded Monica Lam at Stanford to do a project on the open mobile internet, POMI. And one of their conclusions was that at some point in the future, which may be happening now, we would all have a digital butler. And everybody would have basically a bot. They would be living 24-7, operating on our behalf, doing the things that help make our life better. And that is, you know, really what's going to happen. Now you see AI. And then if you saw there was a report that got a lot of news from the speech given at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, I think, where the guy said, well, productivity is fine. It's just that the AI technology has been able to find a way to be effective or made real. Well, the way it's going to be made real is these bots because you still got your ERP system. Great, I can have AI over here. But if it doesn't talk to the ERP system, how is the order going to get placed? How is the product going to get built? How is it going to get shipped? So something has to go bring these together. So again, you're not going to have an impact from AI unless you have an impact from bots because there are the interface to the real world. Right. Well, the other huge thing that happened, right, was this mobile and the Googles and the Amazons of the world resetting our expectations of the way we should be interacting with our technology. And, you know, it's funny, but there's little things that are in our day all the time. I mean, Waze is a phenomenal example, right? An autofill on an address. You know, this is the address you typed in. This is the one the USPS says is the official address from your home. So it's all these little tiny things that are just happening without even a spell check. Spell check. The inventive spell check is John Sealy Brown. And he was giving a speech at the University of Michigan 15 years ago. And the graduates weren't pleased. Here was a computer scientist going to come talk to them. And it's at the Michigan stadium and they're throwing beach balls. No one's paying any attention. And the person who introduced them said, and I want to introduce John Sealy Brown, the man who invented spell check. And he had a standing ovation from 100,000 people because that caught their attention. They all knew that that really important. No, you're right. I mean, the iPhone is 10 years old. Well, I mean, smartphone's a 20 years old, but the iPhone is 10 years old, a little 10 and a half now. I mean, it's changed how we live our lives, how we do business, how everything goes. You know, anybody who thinks that the next 10 years is going to be less changed? No, it's only accelerating. There's so many vectors. I mean, a year ago a friend coined the Cambrian extinction, basically a play on words on the Cambrian extinction. And it's cloud, AI, mobile, big data, robotics, internet of things and cybersecurity. And he pointed out that any one of those is being incredibly disruptive. They were all hitting at the same time. Right. The thing that's amazing is that's a two-year-old comment. Blockchain wasn't around. Right. And today, blockchain may be more disruptive than any of those. And yet, how do all of those connect to the legacy systems for some long period of time? It's what's going on in this room. Right, right. Well, because I was going to ask you, because you advise a ton of companies. Yeah. So you've seen it and you continue to see it across a large spectrum. What's special about this company, what's special about this leadership team that keeps you excited and keeps you involved? It's the people side of this, right? I mean, I have been through more computer-related conferences in my life than I can count. I've never seen as much enthusiasm as there is here. Right? Well, maybe at a Mac conference then, but I mean, it's that same level of enthusiasm. It's passion. How does technology get adopted when you have to go and invest in it? It takes passion. You got to get people who believe, people who are committed, people who want to go and do something with it. And that's what they've been able to do. That's what here has done. And it's been brilliant in bringing that on board. Yeah, you can certainly feel it here in the room. And especially when it's still relatively intimate. Right. People are sharing ideas, you know, they're excited, it's really not kind of a competitive vendor fair, right? It's more of a community that's really trying to help each other out. Well, I mean, they're at that stage yet, when that, it may get a little bit, you know, this, well, no, I'm not going to tell you about my bot. Yes. It's a great bot and it does great things, but no, I'm not going to tell you how it works. Right. So just last parting word, you know, as you see kind of the bot economy, we've seen they had the bot store, I guess they have a hundred bots, they've only had it open for a very short period of time. You can buy, sell, free. I mean, what do you see kind of the next short-term evolution of this? Well, if you base, I mean, I think that bots are probably worth somewhere around a point in productivity growth. Well, a point, not a basis point, but a point point. A point. That's what McKinsey says, that's what, I mean, that, you know, because there's, this is allowing you to capture benefits that you should have and you haven't. A point in global productivity is about a trillion dollars. So then your question for the bot economy is, okay, if the value of the bots is a trillion dollars, what portion of that can the bot economy capture? And that, you know, I mean, 20, 30% is certainly a reasonable number to go look at, but the real world lives over here, all this technology changes over here, and bots are going to be the bridge by which you bring those two things together. So, yes, it should be big and growing all the time. Well, Bill, thanks for taking a minute. I really appreciate the conversation. Great, thank you. All right, he's Bill, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from Automation Anywhere. Imagine 2018, thanks for watching.