 From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Good afternoon, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward 4. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We're on day two of our coverage. We've been talking a lot about automation, all of the opportunities that it's uncovering across industries. We're now going to be talking about a big company undergoing its own automation-led digital transformation. Joining us next, Marisa Kokenauer, head of Automation Advisory Services at Cognizant. Marisa, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here today. So let's talk. So Cognizant is both a partner and a customer of UiPath. We're going to talk about you in the customer realm today. Cognizant is undergoing its own automation-led digital transformation. Let's talk about that. Talk to me about some of the business outcomes that you're expecting. How it's going to transform the employee experience, the customer experience. Sure, absolutely. We actually started working with automation ourselves back in 2018, where we just put in a COE. We said we want to drive it into our business operations. But about a year ago, we said, let's go further. I really wanted to play with all of our employees. We wanted to empower them. We talk about citizen development, a robot for every person. And we know that that's really the future. That's where we're going. We're digitally transforming our organizations. And so what we did is we sat down. We worked really closely with UiPath on how we do this. What kind of training do we need? We're going to need some process, some governance in there. And so we put that in place. And we said, let's get this going this year. So we went out. We did our first hackathon. Went really well was bring your own bots, so BYOB, so fun themes. And we got some good savings. We actually drove over 10,000, close to 20,000 hours back into the organization. And we said after that, let's go a bit bigger though. And we did what's called Game of Bots. So obviously we know where that came from, right? And we said, we're going to go a little bit longer and we want to go bigger. So we went and had 2,500 people participate over eight weeks. We built over 1,000 bots. And guess what? We drove over 200,000 hours back into the organization in just eight weeks. So super big success story. People loved it. Our teams were excited. We recognized over 200 people out of that with team awards, who submitted the most ideas. And even our top leadership said, let's do a presentation. So the guys and gals who had the top, biggest impact automations got to meet with our top senior leaders and present out to them. It's been awesome. And now we're starting to move that forward because we're scaling bigger. We're actually going pretty big in Cognizant. We have some big goals right now. That's a gob of hours game of bots. Get it? Come on, with me. It is a gob of hours. How do you measure the hours? Is it a back of napkin kind of thing? We ask people, hey, how much? How do you actually measure? No, we actually track it. We could see how many hours people were doing certain tasks and things that they do every day, whether they're running reports, submitting claims for a customer. And so we're able to see that that time is actually going down. We're faster, we get better quality. People are also able to get hours back in their day so they could do more value added work in the organization. So we actually do track it, and we're able to really measure those tangible outcomes for the teams. Sounds like you guys have been moving pretty quickly on this. So the appetite at Cognizant was there. The culture was there to embrace it. Those are probably, I imagine, two big facilitators of being able to move at the speed and the scale with what you're doing. Culture was there. We're really digitally savvy. I would say we're digital at heart in Cognizant. We're really a tech company and we really focus on how to be at the forefront of all things when it comes to technology. But we said, we also want to transform how we work. So starting to shift the conversation from, you know, do you want to automate to why not? How do we actually start talking about, you know, I have this to-do list, but you know what, actually we can improve if we did some of this other stuff instead. So let's free up that time, let's use automation there, and we can actually grow things. We can add more value. We do all that stuff on your to-do list that I think everybody has and they want to get to, but you get caught up in your day to day job all the time. So we're actually getting people to be more excited about and have a real voice. And I actually think that's important is that it's not just about giving people the tool, it's about shifting our culture to really embrace digital, embrace this technology, because we're trying to transform how we all work. And we want to lead by example. So we're talking about BPO, business process optimization, right? It was kind of the buzzword in the 90s and early 2000s. A lot of times it meant putting an SAP, right? So that's evolved. And there are some companies that would say, hey, we specialize in that technology companies, obviously, you know, SIs as well. How do you think about the difference between end-to-end enterprise automation and sort of traditional BPO? I think it has to come together a bit is one thing. So when you do the BPO or you do shared services or you outsource some of the work, we actually put into those contracts because we do a lot of that for our customers and we put in automation. The step we took further was we actually started to empower people to actually build the automations themselves, which meant we actually had to work with customers too, so they knew we were doing this. We wanted to make sure they understood, they were comfortable. We put any controls in place that they also needed to make sure that, you know, we didn't impact any other services. We want to make it better. We want them to feel nothing but bigger, better results and outcomes. And then as you think about the enterprise side, we have to compliment because a lot of those processes do feedback into how you run a business. And so we focus on how do you bring both of those stories together so that you're driving synergies across the board. And actually some good lessons learned along the way because some of this stuff becomes reusable, you know, best practices you could share across the board and we want to make sure that we are connecting the dots from the shared services BPO work back into the enterprise because really a process is end-to-end and organization and we want to help people think that way and also get the results that way too. Is that end-to-end automation, that enterprise automation more tech heavy or maybe it's tech light in a way whereas BPO was maybe a lot more sort of lean thinking, a lot more chalkboard, going deep into the, so sometimes you're saying they have to come together. They do, yeah. From where, I guess is what I'm trying to better understand. So I would think about it this way. When you think about a process, right? From when you even place an order the whole way through when you fulfill it for a customer. There's work that we do outsource all the time, right? So maybe it's the PO process, some of the order transactions, some of the payment. But you also have the pieces is actually touching the customer too. You have the pieces that are fulfilling the order. So we say end-to-end, that is really thinking about that beginning from a conversation with the customer the whole way to when we're delivering. And I do think there's a lot of technology. That is something I think everyone gravitates to because there is a lot, especially if you're going to go end-to-end. You have to be able to take in documents, you have automation. You're not going to know all the rules. No matter how many times you ask, you're going to need machine learning to be able to help figure it out and get smarter as you go along the way. But as you're putting this into place, what's important is as you're thinking about kind of transforming that business so that they're feeling the results the whole way through. Because if you just focus on one, you might create a bottleneck, right? You might have got super fast, but the guy who's going to get the work from you, they're going to feel like, oh my goodness, there's all this work on my plate. So we really want to make sure that we create that seamless experience for everyone across the board as we put it in. And how does UiPath help facilitate that? On that, across the board. I mean, we're sitting down, we were laying out our program because we're actually trying to get to 60,000 strong. So we have 7,000 trained today. We're going to get to 60,000, that's our plan. So we're working very closely with UiPath. What is that training that you need to have in place? What's that model? How do we get people comfortable? Cause one thing you'll find is not everyone's in the same spot. Some are going to jump in, dive right in, give me the tool I want to build. I love this. Others might need a little bit more confidence boost. They might need more hand holding. And I think that's really important. And it's probably the one thing I would add too, as you do talk a lot about the technology as we put it in, but it's the people at the end of the day. And it's how you help them adopt, feel comfortable with this technology and really embrace it. That's really going to be the difference on whether, how fast you get down that line for transformation. Is it a classic bell curve? You got 10% early adopters, you got a big fat middle and then you got some laggards who come along. It kind of is. And I think what's important is that middle is all up in how you do it. Because 10% are always going to love it. You always have a few people that are a little extra nervous maybe. But in the middle, if you really think about it and you're able to put in that culture, you're able to put in, your leadership is engaged. You're putting in some gamification. Make it fun. That's what we found is if we got people really having fun up front with it, it gave people a reason to be a part of it. And also, why don't we let people partner up? We can give them the technology, but if someone's not as comfortable, let us do teams. Let's meet people where they're at and then move them along this journey. And let's try to accelerate the best we can. How did you gamify it? Crypto? No. No, no crypto. But I will say we have some really cool prizes and people were super excited to get to do the presentations because they got to show their bots live, their creations to the team. And I think that was important. Not everyone always is able to capture all the results, but we wanted to actually talk about what were the ideas, share it across the board, because it also generated ideas. Because what you'll find is when you hear something like, you know what, that's kind of what I do. Wonder if I can do some automation too. I'll at least submit an idea and then maybe they're moving down the line, they're getting their hands on the technology and I think that's how we all push the needle forward and move this along faster. Well, one of the most important things about automation is letting people be able to move away from the mundane, the repetitive tasks that they probably don't enjoy and being able to focus more on their core competencies or more strategic initiatives that really make them more relevant to themselves and to their company. It sounds like you guys have achieved that pretty quickly and you have an aggressive plan to go from 7,000 to 60,000. Yes, that's really the power of automation if you think about it. We all have things in our job we don't like to do. I don't know about you guys but there's things that I'm like, oh man, like can we please automate this? Expense reports, for example. All about automated expense reports. But it's really about freeing people up. Think about it, these people went to school, they often have degrees and things and they do get caught in a lot of the manual things, downloading reports, consolidating data, submitting spreadsheets and forms. Imagine if we're able to make that easier for people. We give them what they need to do their job so that all that stuff you would like to do that you know would improve things. You know would make the company better, the culture better. Heck, maybe it's a new product that people know would be really awesome to go build but everyone just feels like they're so busy they don't have the time to do it. I mean that's one of the big values of automation is this value creation conversation that you get to have with people and you get to start asking why not? A little bit more. You mentioned a couple of times the IDC presentation this morning and we were talking about it earlier and the pie chart of value benefits was cost savings which was very large, new revenue which was very large and I think 15% was quality improvements and I think that's an underappreciated slice of the pie. Somebody I think years ago at a UI path forward said to me, I can very inexpensively apply Six Sigma to business process and I could never afford to do that before RPA and so I wonder if you could talk to the quality impacts that you're seeing. Absolutely, I actually spent a lot of time in lean Six Sigma at my early career days and one of the things about it too is when you're doing automation when we actually ask that question up front, can we just simplify, can we just stop doing this? Because you don't want to automate a bad process either so you want to ask some of those questions but you're spot on, there's a ton of quality benefits that you get from automation and one of the things I've actually seen is if you focus on some of the quality up front, process gets better, gets better impact that's what you get faster. If you have better quality and get faster you also get your cost out targets and that really matters because quality also beyond being able to drive the cost out it also helps a lot with the experience that people face. Customers are frustrated if they have poor quality, something doesn't work the way it's supposed to, a site's not working the way it should and also even employees, think of how many times if you try to do something and you try to follow a process and something's hung up or who knows what happened, right? It's frustrating so if you're able to improve the quality and the process, not only do you get the cost savings but you get these softer, they're still tangible experiences that get better and actually it motivates people to want to do more. And those motivated people are probably dealing with customers much, much better. I mean, I always think the employee experience is a critical component of the customer experience so how has the customer experience improved at Cognizant as a result of building in automation and enabling all these people? They're loving the results because we're giving them back efficiencies in their process immediately by putting this automation in. These are quick impacts or feeling and we're able to do more for them as well so we're actually having conversations now on how do we drive more efficiencies for you and also how can we do more? Is there more volume of work? Is there more we could be doing to add value back to your organization? And that's what you want to talk about with customers is we're able to give you this value and by the way we actually did X for you now as well because we knew you needed it and we have the capacity to do this for you so it's a really positive conversation but we did have to upfront talk to them about to make sure that we, everyone was on board, they're comfortable and we're continuing to have those conversations because sometimes you're in a regulated business and we need to put a little extra control in. Absolutely okay. But we want to be able to drive these efficiencies back for them so they feel it in their own operations internally too and it hits their bottom line and oftentimes helps their employees too because we interact with them so those downstream benefits and sometimes even upstream get some nice returns there as well. We've heard from, well, we're going to have Daniel on soon, the CEO. We of course heard from CFOs, that's kind of one of the main springs of RPA in the early days. We've heard a lot more CIOs at this event and we have a CTO coming on later. Are these C-suite executives totally aligned in their objectives? Do they have different agendas? What are you seeing in terms of serving the C-suite? Yeah, they're all going to have a little bit different agendas because their roles have different objectives but they all align back to the strategy obviously for their company but they're going to have portions of it that they're trying to drive and deliver. What we do see is that there's still some merging that needs to happen between the operations, the more business focused side and the more technical side but we're starting to see that convergence happen because what happens is that you have these technologists who really are going to have to help move you forward. We're applying AI, ML, very technical technologies and we want to make sure we do it right though we put the right governance in. We think about the security that we have to have in place for this too and we also have the business outcomes and coming together is where you really see the results. If you look at all those that have reached true maturity it's where you see these agendas aligning a bit more because you also have to shift the culture too and it's a collaboration point. You need to be able to have the tech savvy folks that helps bring them along this journey but you also have to have the business depth because you're looking at a process and you're going really deep into it to apply the technology so it's when people partner is when we really see the results become more exponential. So digital transformation, we hear that term a lot and automation led digital transformation. I hear a lot of data led digital transformations. Are those parallel tracks? Are they talking a lot about convergence? Are they, I mean they're not competing. They're obviously very much related. How do you see the data agenda and the automation agenda coming together? Yeah they have to because you really need good quality data to be able to enable your automation at the end of the day but they actually play nicely together. You can actually use automation to help go back and improve your master data management too which is the core of your information because that's actually where a lot of the struggle sometimes comes is in the quality of the data that everyone has to work with. So you see the data agenda working on how do I clean this, how do I get more insightful, predictable information and then from an automation standpoint how do I then use that to go take action? So what we see is you bring it together to be able to identify where do you need to get in the process, how do I get the right information so the automation also is proven data behind it that we drove the outcomes because that's where you take it to the bank at the end of the day, is that you see it in the data itself but I think one of the things I've seen with automation that helps drive the digital transformation conversation is the business and IT teams are coming together and having a joint conversation now. People are excited, they're understanding it. I think that's why people jumped on with RPA so quickly was because they're like, I get this, this is rule-based, this is my business process, I just tell it what to do, I'll take that, I want to do that. And so people got excited about that and then they said let's do more. How do I make it more intelligent? How do I help it do things in my process that it's harder for me to explain because there's just so much information here, there's so many nuances. Well, we have the technology that can help make it more intelligent, smarter and learn so that we're able to drive that back into the business itself to transform. You mentioned master data management. Is the data agenda, as it relates to automation, primarily reporting, is it moving, is it transcending reporting into the building of data products, for example, and data services that can be monetized either within Cognizant or in your customer base? So it's really evolving. I would say some start with reports, that's easy, that's where we all start. But I'll just kind of give you maybe a little example. So we have a customer and we work with them so they have customers where they need to, when they call in the sales folks and the contact centers, they have to upsell. So they work with a lot of different restaurants and different maybe bars and different companies that have different type of beverages and things like that. So we worked with them to show how are they performing today with all their sales reps? And then we started to use some automation to be able to get them more helpful information the moment the customer is calling in. And we also did some semantic analysis on how people were, how are they sounding? How was their tone? Were they happy? Were they upset? Were they sad during the call? And we fed that information back to those teams, back to those managers and went back even to their training programs. What they actually saw was a ton of top line growth. They saw all of their metrics starting to get better and they also started to get more predictive on ways that they can use more data to drive the support for those teams and their customers. Like for example, if you know holidays are coming up or a certain time of year with weather, we're able to actually put that type of information in and helps those sales reps better serve their customers. Last question, some of the announcements that came out yesterday and some of the news today about UiPath. What excites you about the technology and how it's going to continue to enable you to foster this new culture that you've shifted? I think, so one thing about UiPath that we've always loved to be able to partner with them is we're so customer centric. And you see that in every announcement that they're doing. And also their focus on this true process transformation intelligent end-to-end thinking because I think a lot of times when we've had conversations most get stuck at kind of point solutions. And that's just because people are trying to solve today's problems. But where UiPath is moving and where we want to move to is how do we help you to really transform how people work? We know automation is a part of our future. We know it's going to be how we work in the future. And we love about UiPath is to really think about how do we integrate it? How do we make those connections? So we can drive the bigger results. We can make it easier for people to adopt and really embrace it because we need to bring the people along this journey and we need to be able to actually impact our processes too so we could transform them. So I think that's one thing that's been really exciting is just watching them in general involved but with the announcements the last couple of days we really see them continue to push that needle. Excellent. Well, Marisa, thanks for joining us talking to us about the automation led digital transformation at Cognizant. Good luck raising your trained individuals from 7K to 60K. It sounds like the momentum is there, the culture is there. We can't wait to hear what happens next. Awesome, thanks again for having me today. Our pleasure. Thank you. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio. UiPath Forward 4 is the event we're covering. We'll be right back with our next guest.