 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of UI Path Forward 6. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Dave Vellante. We are talking the future of work, the future of automation and AI, and we've got a great segment right here. We have Rocky Solomon. She is the business process AI automation and analytics lead at Eversource, which is the largest energy delivery company in New England, also, I'm a customer. And Azhaifa Basrae, managing director process AI and automation at EY. Welcome both of you. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Yeah, so I want to start with you, Rocky, because it has become clear at this conference that AI plus automation are a powerful combination. Tell us a little bit about the journey at Eversource and how you started using these tools and what you're doing to transform. Well, thank you so much. So back in 2018, our business leaders recognized an opportunity to enhance the employee experience and the customer experience by examining our business processes and looking for opportunities to infuse automation in those. So in 2018, we began that journey with RPA to start. So the robotic process automation captured some low-hanging fruit and expanded that to include multiple capabilities, so process mining, a chat bot, analytics as well. So we engaged our employees from the outset, asking them what processes annoy you the most and how good would you feel? Good question, too. What is it about your job you don't like? Exactly, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. They were happy to share their ideas and even happier that their leadership was interested in understanding what their experience was. So we took the voice of the employee in building that initial backlog of opportunities to automate and to look at understanding that automation was not necessarily the key for everything. It wasn't a silver bullet. What we needed to do was look at each process individually and determine which one should be automated and which one should actually be abolished. And the employees helped us with that. So that's how our journey began and over the past five years, we've delivered over 150 automated solutions that have not only given back to Eversource, over 400,000 hours of workforce capacity digitally, but we've also been able to leverage those automations to enhance the experience of our customers by avoiding negative customer interactions, over 2 million negative customer interactions avoided based on the work that the automations are doing. Additionally, over the past five years, there's been over 8 million transactions that bots have handled for our employees. So it's been really an awesome journey. Yeah, that sounds, I mean, that just sounds so incredible. The hours that you're giving back to employees and I want to bring in you here, Hazifa, what are, how do you think about the time you're giving back to employees? As you said, what don't you like doing? What are the mundane things you'd like off your plate? What can the bots do for you? And then you're going to get this time back, so then what? How do they use it? I think that's a really important question, right? What we saw earlier in these projects was we would save the hours, but then what are they doing? So what we started doing as a part of change management is to make sure that the managers of these people who were not going to do what they were doing before, how do they plan for their work going forward? And then a lot of times there is an, there's a thing where if there's an attrition for whatever reason, right, you don't have to backfill and because now the bots are doing their work themselves. So the savings is in twofold. So one is obviously you're doing your day to day work, but also you are now saving how many hours you are for your, from your employees and then you're doing the value added stuff, the stuff which was not being done before. So again, I think looking at the whole picture really helps showing the business value on a regular basis. So we're, you're a customer, I heard, right? So we're both customers. I find it very easy to pay my bills and if I need something, I can get it pretty easily. So I'm wondering, have those 150 automations and 8 million transactions, which ones have touched us? Wow, great question. So in any process, you're going to have business exceptions, especially when you're collecting millions of meter reads and processing those, validating those. And so some of the automations actually assist with those validations, which ensure that your bills get to you timely and accurately. Those are some of the initial automations that we deployed. We also have automations that enable our back office folks to free up their time by performing some of the routine calculations for special handling situations. Also making sure that our customers are billed as timely and accurately as possible. Yeah, and the paying a bill is easy because I mean, no offense, but I don't really want to, I don't want to interact with you. I mean, no offense, but unless I have to and I want it quick and so I can get on with my life. Exactly, and that's what we want. We want our customers to have an effortless experience and to delight them with an effortless experience. So your enthusiasm is so evident about, I want to hear number one about the most innovative use cases, that what you're doing here. But then I also want to hear about what the innovative things your employees are doing with their found time, you know, to help their customers have a better experience overall. Yeah, so really the success here and the real heroes here are our employees. They're the ones who champion the opportunities to improve processes that are not going to just make their lives easier, but also are going to make the experiences easier for our customers because they don't want to do the stuff that's frustrating, right? And they're just so happy to say, hey, here's an opportunity where we can do something better and this is what this will mean for our customers. So some of the innovative use cases that we've delivered, I think they're all innovative. Anytime we do something differently and we can leverage the capabilities that we have, whether it's RPA or RDA, so the robotic desktop automation, the attended automation. So I would say, man, it's hard to choose because each of them is really awesome and unique and different. So if I step through the capabilities for unattended automation, most recently we leveraged bots to assist with a brand new system implementation to handle all of the cutover tasks during that implementation period over that weekend and what was astounding about the performance of the automations, we actually had to build in a delay because they were processing transactions faster than the new system was. So that was pretty awesome to see that happen. We've also leveraged. Slow down. Like that scene in Lucy years ago. Yes, exactly, the conveyor belt, yeah. Exactly. And the fun part about that, like we also name our bots. So we really make it part of our team. We've got some really cool. Like what? What's your favorite bot here? Oh my gosh, we've got clever and intuitive. We have mission and plausible. We have bot of a builder. We have finding Nemo. So we've got some really fun names. We have an exciting time with our employees because it's important that they're comfortable working alongside these digital workers. Our employees are the most valuable asset that we have in assisting us with providing our customers with a delightful experience. An experience where you don't have to interact with us unless you really need to. No offense. No offense taken. No one's dying to spend more time on the phone with the power company, yeah. How do you work out a roadmap? So as you said, you've been able to implement all of these exciting new innovations. How do you then determine what's next? Or do you ask your AI? What should we be doing next? Well, it's really around the business need. Technology has to follow the need. So in working with all of our business areas, looking at the challenges that are faced, looking at the different opportunities, we start there. What are the things that we need to accomplish? What are our objectives? And how can we meet those using the variety of tools at our disposal? And that's how we map out that roadmap. How about portfolio management applied to automations? Now that we've got, in the case of Eversource, 150 automated solutions, I mean, things change over time. You've got a velcro of a value. Things age out. How are companies dealing with that? Does EY have a sort of perspective point of view on that kind of portfolio management? Is that even something that organizations are thinking about at this point? Great question again, right? So from a portfolio perspective, I think when it started this journey many years back of the dark lines, it used to be mainly RPA. But over the last four or five years, now you have a much wider, you have a bigger toolkit. So you have chatbots, you have, what do you call it, intelligent document processing? You have RPA, now you have Gen AI. So now those solutions, it's no more like a one technology solution anymore. It's a combination. The way we look at it from a value perspective, it's, you started with saying it's giving the X number of hours back or so much of revenue. What it might be? Over time, if your business process changes and you are not getting that value from it, you retire them. And we do that constant retiring of automation so that we don't have to run them all the time if it's not bringing the value it's required. So it's a combination of how much value that automation, whichever technology you're using, how much is it giving you and for how long? And then you retire it when, it's like the same thing, hire to retire. You buy it, you build it and then you retire it when it's not bringing the value. Thank you. So what are you hearing at this conference that's exciting you? You are obviously, you are a use case darling and that the UI path is excited about what you're doing and wants to show you off what you're doing at Eversource. But what are you hearing from other companies like yours or maybe companies that are completely different from yours that you are excited to go back home and implement at Eversource? Wow, that's a good question. Because we already leveraged so many of the capabilities and I think there's going to be a lot more in the generative AI space. We've been able to connect with some peers in the utility industry and we're going to be doing some knowledge sharing of ideas and use cases because a lot of our processes and our systems are very similar. But process mining is an awesome opportunity to gain granular insights into some key processes and then to use those insights to improve those processes. So I see us doing more around the process automation using those capabilities that we already have and continuing to work with the business areas to say where are we going next? What are we hearing from our customers? What are we seeing from our employees that will drive how we apply all of those capabilities going forward? How about you, Hazifa, Hazifa? Okay, I couldn't hear the question. Oh it is, what are you hearing that's exciting you but that you want to take back with you and start talking to your colleagues about, hey I saw this company doing this cool thing over here. And we are doing that all over the place, right? So I think we have our internal, trying to internal networking sessions to understand what other of our clients are doing. We're always taking that back to all our clients as long as it's within reason to say here is what somebody else is doing. And I think the big thing here is obviously the SAP integration from a UI path perspective. And I think we are bringing that to light right now. Rocky and I did back at Eversus a couple of years back. We implemented the first time as part of the SAP implementation included bots. And so on the day of SAP Go Live, a handful of bots went live as well which helped them mitigate the risk at Go Live and search staffing was had to be minimized. But that's the kind of stuff which we share across our various peers. And then I think this today, like this two days is really validating that we can do this. And I think that's the vision which SAP and UI path will have. Yeah, exactly. And how are you going to pitch any further improvements that you want to make? I mean is your leadership just so bought in by virtue of what they're already seeing in terms of the value add and employees too because even though as you've said, employees are so excited to have their boring tasks no longer part of their day to day jobs, there is still some trepidation I imagine of, wow, if the AI can continue to chip away at my workload, what's there left for me to do? Or are you continuing to say, no, now you can work on this, now you can do this more value impact project? Yeah, it's about shifting the focus really from the mindless and monotonous to the meaningful for our employees. So that's going to continue to happen. And the leadership is bought in, they realize that we want to keep our employees and we want to keep them happy in order to keep them. And so if we can free them up from the rote of the mundane and the frustrating tasks, that enables us to have a more engaged workforce that's continuing to innovate and give ideas to improve our customer experience. I love that, going from mundane to meaningful, excellent. Well, Rocky and Izefa, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, really great talking to you. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of Forward Six. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.