 the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE at UiPath. Forward 4, Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Day two of our coverage. We've been giving a lot of really great perspectives on automation and how it is impacting significantly every industry. We're pleased to have, from the keynote stage, Junaid Ahmed, the Corporate Vice President of Finance at Applied Materials is going to talk us through why you have a, why can't we automate it all attitude. Junaid, welcome to the program. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. So you have a really aggressive strategy for digital transformation, automation-led digital transformation. Your keynote this morning was great. It was, I just thought, strategically it was so well thought out, and then when you got up here before we went live, you started talking about how fast the time frame was. Give the audience an overview of the strategy, what you were aiming to do, and how quickly you were expecting to see change. Yep, absolutely. So when we set out, when we launched about two and a half years ago, we were, the company had like doubled in size the prior five years. We were looking for it to double the gain. We were honest with ourselves with the CFO and Finance Leadership Team that could we support the new wave of growth? And the answer is no. Okay, what do we do? And we knew we had to do something, not just more things, but take a complete new view on things. That's how this whole initiative got incubated. And we took a bold approach. We said, we don't want just to cover the next five years, let's cover the next 20 years, set ourselves up to make sure we do this right for the company and for our people. So we basically set some very ambitious goals, which is the key KPI that we set as our true note is, we're going to get 50% of finance work effort all oriented around decision support. That's what helps move the needle for the company. Sure, we have our responsibilities to close the books, to do all the transactional stuff, to do all the reporting stuff. We will do that, but that can't be the mainstay anymore. That's just table stakes. We have, and the business is screaming for this. It's just that we didn't have the levers and the tools to be able to do it, to pivot. But given the technological advancements, we said this is possible now. And that's... I think we have to set the table here with your industry, because you started your journey to RPA Automation in 2019. Yes. You are participating in one of the most challenging, if not the most challenging industry on the planet. 100%. Everybody, I don't know, maybe not the insiders, but everybody else missed. Absolutely. No, the insiders missed it too. What was the impact of the pandemic? And now it's chips for every part of our lives. We've got this massive chip shortage. And, you know, Wall Street missed it. They said, oh, sell applied materials, sell every semiconductor company. And then they realized, oh wow, kind of late into the cycle, that this is like a multi-year, perhaps a decade-long transition to maybe this never-ending demand. Who knows? I mean, so that's the backdrop of your business that was driving on it. What was it like inside the company? So, Dave, you know, what we could see, obviously we couldn't predict the pandemic, we could see long-term growth, right? Really tangible market inflection on the back of AI, big data. If you want to say where we made a big bet as a company, we went all in on AI, right? We believed in that growth. At a time when I think not everyone was so convinced, okay, is this going to be, how strong is this going to hit us? So, we had the benefit of going all in on AI and saying this is a true, another big computing wave, right? The next big wave of computing coming off of mobile and social media. And Gary Dickerson, our CEO, bet the company that we're going to enable this growth. This is real. This is going to touch the whole global economy. So, yes, that's a successful bet the company made. No one could foresee what the pandemic would do, but we had the good fortune of saying we were reacting to the growth that we were committed to service. And we knew we had to get ahead of it. And so we quickly organized and got financed, our organization, well-positioned to successfully support the company. Now, we got hit with the pandemic. Luckily for us, we're proactive and then you know what we did? We accelerated. So your move to automation was an offensive move. 100%. Not a panic move to respond to a pandemic. 100%. What do investors want? Operating leverage, operating leverage, okay? And then, right now, all the models have a certain baseline. Size of company, complexity, okay. You need a certain amount of leverage coming out of this model. The models are going to change. Those that don't change ahead of the models, they're going to play catch up. It's not a fun ride. We want it to be ahead. Well, I mean, talk about operating leverage. You're a company with what? 120 plus billion dollar market cap. You got a 20 plus billion dollar revenue and you sell extremely expensive equipment. And a 5x revenue multiple, that's a trailing revenue multiple. I mean, that's impressive. That's operating leverage. Yes. And, but the bar keeps moving. Yeah. You go to stay ahead, right? You go to be a leader. We're a leader. We've been a leader for five decades. It's the leadership mindset I would say in the company and our leadership team that really propelled us towards this, the leadership of our CFO, Dan Dern, who invested. He made a bet. No one knew, you know, now we're sitting here, over almost 300,000 hours automated. We didn't have the playbook when we did it. You created the playbook. We created the playbook. Talk to me about the appetite, because obviously aggressive leadership, bold leadership. Talk to me about the appetite to be able to transform so quickly, such that when, as Dave said, you were on the offensive, such that when the pandemic came, you leveraged that as an accelerator of what you've already been doing. Because culturally, that's challenging for folks to get on board to you. How did you do that? I have to say it is challenging. And it's, at times it feels counterintuitive. We were going through the pandemic. We were having a large M&A integration happening, okay? And we're transforming finance and we're a resource constrained organization. And then you tell your people, we got more work to do, transformation. And you're like, is that the right thing to do? Isn't everyone going to leave? But when you dig deep, you say, how do you get mines here? How do you, first of all, you have to get people to see the value. And then you have to make sure they can, you do it fast enough where they want to stick around. It's counterintuitive. Hey, oh, we're going to launch this new platform. It's going to take three and a half years. All right, everyone, we're going to do this. What happens? People like in, out. Okay, yeah, it'll come. We'll deal with it. Then instead you say, hey, we're going to transform the way we plan. Completely top to bottom. 10 months, we're going to do it. Here's what you're going to be at your hands. Here's what you're going to have at your disposal in 10 months. All right, oh, by the way, we're just showing you the high level. You get to really design. What do you want? Now, when you have credibility, street cred with your organization, and you come out and say, I'm going to give you top to bottom agility around forecasting, and you get to have input on what you really want. Now people get excited like, oh, I am going to work 25% more, but wait a second, I'm really excited about what I get at the end of 10 months. So the world was betting several years ago on the consolidation of fabs. Oh, that's bad for applied materials. The exact opposite happened. Arm changed the model, wafer volumes going through the roof. Now Intel is basically following that playbook, which is wonderful, they're breaking ground in Arizona, which is you have these massive tailwinds behind you. So I'm interested in how you forecast that and what role automation plays in that forecasting. Well, if you think about it right, the fundamental demand isn't changing, and capacity has to go in. And then people say, oh, wait a second, oh, so and so it's going to build less or whatever. For the capacity may be geographically going to get dispersed out, but it still has to go in. So I think it doesn't change the fundamental demand statement, right? And then how does automation play into it? I just think that the fundamental nature pace of business is changing for us, right? And our customers are going through the same. So we have to be able to respond to their needs. That whole thing cascades down into the organization all the way deep into finance analysts forecasting, right? And so if everyone has to work off a weekly, monthly, quarterly cadence, you're too slow, too late. Doesn't matter how good your plan is. It's old, it's stale. We're moving into a time and error where everything happens real time. It always happened real time, but we just never had the tools to react real time. Now we have real time business performance, enterprise grade dashboards. Every, any minute of the day, you can see what the revenue forecast is, what the margin associated with that is. Yes, when we get into the official commit cycle, everything firms up, but it's not the big crank, right? It's, you're fine tuning the knobs now, which is great. What do you want in a plan? You want greater optionality. Is there a perfect plan? Of course there isn't, right? What is the really, you know, the North Star and forecasting. Give me as much options as viable options. And then let me decide, because there's trade-offs. There's no one perfect plan, but you were limited. It just took too long to put a plan together, so you had very small degrees of freedom around it. Biable plans. We're changing all of that. This might be out of your swim lane, but you had a slide up today, and it had the IT in the middle, so technology is fundamental. And then you had the big, the elephant, the Hadoop elephant in the room. So I have to ask you, and you guys announced this thing earlier this year called AI to the power of X, Actionable Insights. I remember reading about it. It's like you're collecting data across all, you know, the estate. And so I'm like, wow, this is a data company. And becoming a data company. And so we've been talking a lot, and of course the CFO purview is the reporting, and I get that, the clothes, daily clothes, virtual clothes, all that. But then there's this whole other line of business data play. And I'm wondering how automation fits there. Is that, I mean, that's got to be part of the vision. Yeah, now I can't speak to the, you know, the capabilities you're talking to, but we are leveraging some of that infrastructure, right? We have an amazing IT organization. I have to say we, within applied, were a latecomer. From a product, customer product standpoint, already there was so much AI work being done, right? So we had the benefit of leveraging some of that capabilities, finance, when we launched agile finance. There is a lot going on over there. I think we actually enhanced that by introducing this RPA capabilities. And we did so from partnering with, I wouldn't say partnering, IT co-piloted this with us. Fundamentally co-piloted this, okay? And now IT is taking it to other organizations. And they're taking it to product, they're taking it to operation, taking it to sales. So it will have a role, 100%. But they're obviously starting out, you know, over the past three to six months is when they got started. So the answer is yes, in many, for sure, but I can't speak to exactly how it plays into that specific technology. But you addressed the dynamic, which is it started in a quick win part of the company, finance. Which is logical, that's where I first introduced RPA a decade ago, it was a CFO conference, right? And then that now applies to the rest of the business. And I talk about operating leverage. Fundamental, yeah, 100%. How do you get that buy-in? How do you get finance and how do you get IT to work with finance such that IT becomes a catalyst and all these downstream reactions to get this going across the thing? Important question. Well, they work for you. They don't. Oh, they don't. They don't work for us. They don't work for me. I'm a customer of theirs. Okay. The first person that I needed to convince that we were serious and we're gonna do it is the CIO, okay? So you ask, how do you get IT bought-in? Well, first thing, you have to get them in the tent, okay? This is not about, oh, can you go do this for me? I need this from you. Can you do that? Too slow, okay? This RPA, especially RPA, fundamentally, is a technology that really needs to get embedded throughout the IT operating model. So you really need IT co-piloting this with you. This is how we did it. We said we're gonna learn together. This is a must-have for finance. We believe strongly this is gonna become a must-have for the enterprise, but we're gonna make the investment. In that must-have for the enterprise, IT has to play the role, right? So we started this together and we learned together and they've been fundamental in us being able to get to scale in 12 months. How do you federate governance? Who in the organization, what part of the organization owns governance, if you will? Yeah, so we create, establish an RPA, COE. They own the governance, the policies, the processes, and then, obviously, there's a role to play for the business side. So we finance a business organization to them and there's roles to play. We actually, like I showed today in the presentation, there's multiple other players across the enterprise that has to bet these automations, right? Especially in finance. We have to be SOCs compliant. We have to be data privacy compliant. We set all of those processes up. So multiple parties have to engage, but engage in a efficient way. We're seeing the CFO role emerge. I think of you as a CFO. I mean, I just use that umbrella. Emerge as an innovator. I see this all over the place now, especially in Silicon Valley. You look at a company like Snowflake, I don't know if you know Mike Scarpelli, but he kind of changed the world of software in some ways. And so you're seeing very innovative CFOs emerge that are technology savvy. They understand the operating leverage. We've used that term several times so that you can get out of technology. It just reminds me, I don't know how long ago it was when Nick Carr wrote the book, Does IT Matter? And it seems like technology has never been more important, along with people in process, of course, but in terms of creating that operating leverage, it's really a key part of the equation, the playbook going forward. I think it is a mindset change. We're trying to drive mindset change, right? But it's also, I think, come about because I think technology has become more friendly to non-IT people. I think that's a fundamental driver. All of these SaaS platforms in the marketplace, right? What are they designing for? Business users. Of course, IT has a very prominent role in that whole process and supporting it and implementing it, but the target audience is business users. What was the target audience for ERP? IT, okay? Fundamental, the technology is changing by design and you're seeing now the impact of that where, hey, wait, I can do this, I can do this by myself, okay? IT always has been and will be a very important partner. They will service your data needs. This is how we're setting up the collaboration, right? But we really want the finance users to be able to iterate, model, like analyze on the fly in the moment and they need to do it alone. Self-serve, yeah? That's it. Self-serve in real-time, I think one of the things you mentioned up this morning, you mentioned it on our program and one of the things we've learned in the pandemic that real-time and access to real-time data is no longer a nice to have. It's really a business critical element of any industry. 100%. When do you think you'll put crypto on your balance sheet? I asked all the CFOs. It's an easy answer, I'm not authorized to answer. Above my pay grade. That's a good answer. Ginay, thank you so much for joining us, talking to us about the transformation and applied materials, how you're partnering with UiPath to achieve that and the aggressive strategy that you've set out and our congratulations on the success of it. We'll look forward to see what's going on in the next couple of years. Great story. Of course, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE at UiPath Forward 4. Day two of our coverage, stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest.