 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Vellante. We have two guests for this segment. We have Chris Courier. He is the senior director service delivery at CenturyLink. Thanks so much for coming on the show. And Shaji Kumar, he is the client partner at Infosys. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So Shaji, I'm going to start with you. We're hearing so much about this automation first era. And when you are partnering with a company, and we hear that automation first requires this real mindset shift. So I'm wondering if you could walk us through the process when you are partnering with a company and you are saying we will help you add more automation to your work processes. How do you do it? How do you get the company to sort of adopt that mindset shift? So it is basically changing the mindset of the individual contributor. So the first thing is how do we make them adapt those changes into the organization and making sure that the learning experience and the human experience are getting changed are adapting by the individual contributor. That is more important for Infosys. As a client partner to CenturyLink, we are always thriving for. So Chris, maybe talk a little about your role. Your title has service delivery in it. What does that mean? Maybe play out there? So of course we're a telecommunications provider. So of course we sell our products. We have an extensive product portfolio. Once it's sold, we have to fulfill those products. And that's where service delivery comes in. Everything from order entry all the way through to activation and delivery to the customer of the final solution of whatever it is they purchase from us. All right, let's get into it. So we just had Gartner on. They were saying, hey, you know, there's a lot of things that can be cleaned up, cleaned up in there. There's a lot of things in there. If you think about technology today, telecommunications, especially as an industry, it's an industry of aggregation at this point and it has been for a number of years. So with aggregation you end up with is, I use kind of a phrase where we have a name over the front door and that's the name of how we do business. That becomes a brand. Behind the front door, we're still operating as many of those individual companies still. So we're trying to stitch together in the background the various networks, delivery options, products, et cetera, in a seamless way for our customers. So to do that, of course, using automation, it becomes a very powerful tool for us right now to do everything that we would have to stitch together with human glue. That's something that we have to deal with on a day in and day out basis. An area of the business I focus on is ordering. Ordering in our space is highly manual. You're doing a lot of transcription. So to give sales the right tools so they can sell, you give them a very elegant front end of the house and many of the discussions we've had today have centered around the front of the house, looks very elegant and very smooth. And the back of the house is where a lot of the stitched together work happens and that's where that automation comes into play. So partnering with somebody like Ashaji, trying to get onto the front end of how do we smooth those things out internally? We're an operations organization. What we are always challenged with is how do we provide the service and product to our customers at an efficient price point? People is a margin drag at the end of the day. But also we want our folks to be doing things that are more interesting. Which is what automation is really about is that digital transformation and how do you transform your employees with you. And I'm definitely in an area where I have an opportunity there. And so that is what UiPath is really selling. It's this idea that here your employees who are doing these mundane tasks, these dreariness, this drudgery, and we are giving them an opportunity to do more of the creative work, to use their brains in more interesting and compelling ways. Ashaji, I mean, is that the value of purpose? I mean, how much are customers buying into that? I mean, is that immediate, is it immediately clear to them? Oh, since I don't have to do that kind of data entry anymore, I can now do this. I mean, is it obvious how you'll spend the rest of your time? So it is more about analyzing the, what has happened in the history and making sure that how the data can be used and put it into the AI and making sure that how the automations can be revealed through that. That is a way of power we are making as a journey and central link as well. Like along with the other telco organizations we are doing it. So specifically that is what AI and automation we are specifically into making sure that how the customers can take advantage of the practice using the tools like a UI path. So where's your expertise, Ashaji? Is it automation, RPA, telecommunications, ordering, all of the above? So my expertise is telecommunication. I've been with telecommunication companies for about 25 years now. Majorly gone through the era from push button telephones to the era now it is standing up to 5G. So that's my experience. You sound like an old man. Yeah. So Chris, when you do a business case to bring in RPA, I mean, I know a lot of CFOs and they say, where's the hard dollars? You know, where are we going to save money? Well, we're going to shift people from here to here and they're going to do more productive work. Where's my hard dollars? Did you go through that? Or is it so blatantly obvious where the potential is? Talk about the business case. It's not always blatantly obvious, right? So when I'm building a business case, there's a number of things as an operations leader that I have to focus on, right? I own budget for my organization. So at the end of the day, I own making sure that I hit my budget targets for the business. Business is always refining those based on our opportunities in the marketplace and so forth. But I also have a lot of people that work for me. So part of the big area for me, and it's an area that I've spent a lot of time with consultants like Shajian, is how do I transform my workforce? How do I bring them with me? How do I make it less scary for my employees? Because the first reaction, human reaction to employees, they've been doing a function for so long. We heard it today about the cognitive changes opening up your brain paths, so on and so forth. And the first reaction to them is going to be that shortest path to, oh my God, I'm going to lose my job. I have to then become the salesperson in addition to operations leader, in addition to a budget manager, to say no, this is an opportunity for you to do something more interesting. You have that 20 years of experience in the industry. I want to use that knowledge in a different way. I want to open up some doors and career paths for you. So for me, it's interesting in trying to break a sedentary workforce into a more dynamic workforce to initiate them into the digital age. When I write a business case, mostly what I'm looking at is very similar to IT classical things. How do I save those dollars? What's my payback? What's my return on investment? More and more in the automation space, we're thinking much more customer first, employee experience first. How do I provide the customer a better experience? How do I provide an employee a better experience? So the business cases have become a little bit more challenging because you're also offering some soft benefits, which is our employee experience is a really big deal. Our customer's experience is going to be how we differentiate ourselves. Could be the difference between the next sale and not making the next sale. So those have to get factored into the business cases and it becomes a bit art and science on how to quantify that. So there's a lot to unpack there. I want to start with kind of the sentiment of, hey, I'm going to lose my job. How did you deal with that with your team? Is it carrot, stick, combination, hold the bot-a-thon so they can try it? I think a lot of it is first listening. At least my style as a leader is to listen to what my people are saying first and then address it with as many facts as I possibly can, right? Most folks think emotion first and you can end up in an adversarial type of situation there where you really don't want to be in an adversarial situation with your employees. You want your employees to support the change, the transformation that shift into a digital space. So for me, I have to listen a lot first and depending on who I'm listening to, I'm getting a very different story. I have employees from millennials to baby boomers. So as a result, each one of them are coming from a very different place. Carrot versus stick, interesting concept because from a carrot perspective, the company's getting the carrot. The employee may not necessarily see that at first or we're saying, hey, we want you to do more interesting work. But to them, they feel it's more of a stick at first. So it's interesting. In my space, it's been, I've consulted with other folks. I've talked to a lot of my peer leaders, seeking a lot of advice on how do we navigate this? Because we're cutting a new path as leaders. I'm more akin to a baby boomer and a Gen X type of a person. That's who I came up under in industry. So I have to temper my own thinking. So it's interesting because for instance, I looked at my people managers and maybe it's a little bit more stick with my people managers, where it's very much of a, give me ideas. How do we crowdsource that information? Our employees are going to be the best source of our ideas for automating. What do we automate? How do we automate the things that they really dislike doing first, right? So you're kind of giving them a carrot with you're giving them a little bit of quick wins. We've heard about that today as well. But then it becomes a matter of what about the individual contributor developer, right? How do I take somebody today who hasn't maybe been retooled from a career perspective in many, many years and give them the ability to say, no, you're not a programmer, but you can automate things and UiPath gives us some of those tools to do that with. The purveyors of RPA would tell you that people actually love it because it's taking away the undifferentiated heavy lifting. Once they get a taste for it. And they can do other things, freeze up time. Having said that, it may be really good at entering data into a form. They may not be good at doing other strategic things. So there's got to be some kind of retraining exercise. And my question is, are you seeing either specifically at CenturyLink or broadly in the industry some kind of notion of gain share? In other words, if you're going to save this much time slash money in your business case, we'll give you back a portion. I don't know, 30%, 50%, whatever, so that you can retrain people. You can actually advance that career. So you see, are you having conversations like that? Or is it? I think we're having conversations akin to that, not necessarily that conversation. Conversations that I'm having are more of the nature of chicken and the egg kind of a thing when it comes to automation. You're under budgetary pressures. How do you take out your employee, retool them and train them on how to automate something using UiPath's tool suite? And then reinvest that same knowledge, right? Because if you automate something, you free up somebody else, you can train to do more automation. A lot of our employees who are first adopters, if you will, the willing hands that are going up, some are millennials, some are many other generations. But it's been very interesting because it's very powerful for those who have learned the tools. And it's very powerful and a peer-to-peer solicitation of, look what I can do for you. We've been complaining about this manual step for 20 years. How come it we're still having to do it? So it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? You get those who evangelize it based on learning the new technology and then they train into their peers. Retooling employees is something that you brought up or at least that's a little bit of what I heard. Many areas, hey, I've been doing data entry for a long time. What else am I good at? And a lot of that just becomes creativity. Who else, who do you interact with the most? Who are the employees? Or who are the customers? Who are the sales organizations, et cetera, where you end up, they know your name. They're going to call you because you know that answer. Well, guess what? You're a knowledge base for them. And that often becomes where I end up retooling and shifting employees. They see new opportunities that they've never seen before. One of the most interesting things I think I hear constantly is I never expected to be in sales from an operations type of person. They always think of a salesman as that sales person kind of personality and they don't see themselves in it. But they never think of themselves as sales support, which is that what that's what they end up becoming. And they always were to begin with, they just never thought of themselves that way. So we're moving a lot more of my customers or my employees, if you will, closer to the customer than they ever saw in themselves. And RPA is enabling that. So that's kind of a knowledge revolution. It's a self-actualization change. It becomes a skill ad that they never thought they had. They're all interesting concepts, but they all, you know, I'm learning something new every day as a leader. Well, and you're bringing up so many interesting points that what this revolution actually means for people's careers. I mean, the rebooting of work and really changing how we spend our time at the office and changing what we do during the course of our days. Shaji, I mean, Chris has been talking about how people are now closer to the customer and therefore the human, the soft skills are becoming increasingly important. So how are you helping companies think through those challenges to make sure that their people do have the appropriate skills? And as Chris said, it could be the difference of not making a sale versus making a sale. So it is about, it's about learning. Learning can make the people transform as well as the companies transform. So while we are adopting technology, we needed to ensure that how do we ensure the learning platforms are brought in to ensure that is part of their curriculum, like what we have done for school or colleges in the organization, make it live enterprise for every organization to move into a live organization. It is always about learning. So what Infosys does is about, it's about knowledge, what we carry. So we have created platforms like Lex for internal to our organization and Wingspan is an external customized version for all of our external customers. That is plugging into all the transformation programs what we do to ensure that the learning is parading for the transformation. Chris, why UiPath? Do you look at others? We have looked at others and I think in my career, you're always going to have multiple partners. So when it comes to UiPath, it's one of those UiPath invested very early. They wanted to be that partner. I think today, part of the message we heard from some of the UiPath executives were that we want to be humble. And therefore it's not always about, hey, how do I win this dollar? So much as how do I educate on technology? And how do we help you transform and pull you forward to a certain degree? So I think UiPath has a lot of very human possibilities and human traits and how it educates its clients. Generally just a question as a buyer and a practitioner, if you have a choice between best of breed and a suite, right? Let's say, I don't know if you're an ERP customer, but some ERP vendor all of a sudden bolts, you know, RPA on to their solution. How do you decide with the convenience of, oh yeah, all in one versus best of breed? I think it depends on the size of your firm because throughout my career, I've seen many different answers to that same question. Shaji has probably had a relationship with me for a number of years in various forms, if you will, as a consultant and a partner. What he often hears from me is both, I'm going to do both, because some way I'm going to learn something from each of those engagements. So more often than not, the answer is you do a lot, you do both, you don't just pick a single partner. The smaller you are, the more likely you are to do a single partner, the larger you are, the less likely you are to do a single partner. Diversity is a good thing and so is competition. Word to live by Chris Shaji, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, a great conversation. That's good, thanks for having us. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward.