 The Cube presents UiPath Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. Hi everybody, we're winding down day two of Forward 5 UiPath's customer conference. This is the fourth time the Cube has been at a Forward. Dave Nicholson, Dave Vellante, Maureen Fleming is here. She's a program vice president at IDC. She's got the data, fresh survey data. We'd love to have the analysts on it. Kevin Krohn is back on the Cube. He's a partner for intelligent automation digital upscaling is the operative word. Kevin, good to see you again, PWC. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on you guys. Yep. All right, we love IDC. We love the data. You guys are all about it. So you've just completed a recent study. Tell us all about it. Who'd you survey? What was the objective? What'd you learn? Yeah, what we wanted to do was try to learn more about people who are adopting robotic process automation. So mainly, you know, larger mid-sized enterprises. And we wanted to figure out how many of them had a citizen developer program. And then we wanted to compare the difference between people who do not have that program and people who do. And what the difference is in terms of what kind of reach they have inside the enterprise and also the different ways that they valued it. So the difference. So we asked the same questions of these people without them knowing that we were actually looking for a citizen developer. And then we compared the results of that to see, is it more valuable to have citizen developer and enterprise or is it more valuable to have enterprise only? So what was the impact? Global survey? It was North America. North America. Was it any kind of slice and dice in terms of industry or targets? We kept it across industry. Across industry? We're finding that RPA is adopting across industry in a way. Was it UI path specific or more any tech, any automation tech? Any RPA. Okay, and top two or three findings. So one thing was, first off, the rapid growth rate in citizen developer programs grew 47% over a two year period. And so now for people that adopted RPA, it's a majority, it's a pervasive trend to see. You're taking over. Right now the conclusion from that and some other studies that I did that have similar conclusions is that we have to start learning to live with this idea that business users can learn how to develop. They are developing their driving value and so now we just need to figure out how to build these sorts of programs accurately. And the other, the really key finding of it was that there was much more significant reach for people that were doing citizen developer plus enterprise automation, more reach, more processes touched, more employees impacted by it. And then on top of it, they rated the value, the people who had the combination rated the programs at a higher value across different measures. So effectively the combination is working out better than standalone top down automation. So Kevin, what's your takeaway here? What does this mean to you and your customers? So I guess a couple of things and just anecdotally, building on what Marine found in the survey, the concept of citizen development is a real concept and it's something that organizations are applying and trying to figure out how to apply at scale. The reason why they're doing it is twofold. One, early automation efforts struggled to get scale and they struggled to deliver value. From a scale perspective, there were two major problems, the ability to identify the right opportunities and the ability to tackle a wide range from the little to the very large. Often teams focus on the very large, but don't focus on the little, the little is important. The second part is thinking about how you create a better culture of innovation and actually drive identifying opportunities for the more, I'll call it technology professionals to focus on. And so there's been, based on that, a big drive to say, okay, not how do we replace automation professionals with business users, the random accountant, the random operations analyst, it's more around how do you actually engage them in innovation and that engagement may involve actual hands-on building of bots and technologies like UiPath or it might just involve generating ideas to get it further engaged. So 47% growth, what's the catalyst for that kind of growth? Where's that come from? I think scarcity. So, well, there are a couple of things. One is, we all know about developer scarcity and it's drive to automate. If you have an automation strategy in place, you want to do this quickly and aggressively, but if you've got a shortage of people, developers don't have enough, they're turning over, then you go and figure out, well, this is low code. And so why can't we train our business users who are the subject matter experts to do automation for themselves or their teams? So sort of think about this as the long tail, the things that top down enterprise. I think UiPath is calling it enterprise automation versus people automation. So, you know, so there's just different things that they work on as well. And there's also, you know, fearlessness on the part of a lot of people on the business side, they're not afraid of technology. They're not afraid of getting trained. And the other piece to me that made, like I've covered this topic for a long time. And what I found originally when people started talking about citizen developers is that they were calling me having a good query about why these programs were failing. And when we would decompose the failure was because their managers didn't give them any, put them in training, but wouldn't give them time to develop. And so they just could not, you know, they just were running into problems. And so with things that, things like PWC and what they're doing, they're sort of saying, here are the features of a program that matter, including being given time to develop and do that as part of your job. So. Maureen, is there a minimum level size of organization that you find taking advantage of this? I mean, you know, where's the sweet spot for the value delivered from this kind of observation? Do you have an idea? So we, we tended, in some of the surveys we tended to do like 1,000 employees up. So we were screening for that. But I also met with our analysts who covered SMB, small and mid-sized. She said that they've had that for a long time because they don't have these clear distinctions between IT and business. So then the question is, who are adopters of RPA, for example? And, you know, that, that's still a little bit at, at, you know, the enterprise level. But, but citizen developer and IT in SMB is just a given concept. But is there, is there an economy of scale that kicks in at a certain point? Have we been able to figure that out? I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of business process automation being such a competitive advantage that there becomes almost a divide because a smaller organization, yes, they could go out and they can buy, they have access to the same software packages. But you have to build all of those processes. You have to develop those processes over time. So is there any sense for a divide possibly happening or what the? It's a really good question because, you know, in a way people have to understand what a business process is, you know? And they need to understand what the technology can do. And so from that perspective, people who have thought leaders inside their organization and maybe have a chance to get out and look at broader topics might be more inclined to try this out and also identify directly as a problem. SMB also tends to try to buy package solutions and you see larger enterprises say, well, you know, what we do is unique and so we should just sort of use horizontal technology and apply it at will where it's needed. And so for me, that's kind of why we organize toward higher, you know, higher, larger sizes. As it gets simplified, it's going to go down into the SMB market though. So Kevin, when it comes to you guys, your client engagements, upscaling, keep coming back to that word. Low code is a fundamental component of upscaling. Is it, I wouldn't say synonymous, but is it a prerequisite to have low code capabilities to scale? You know, from our perspective, I think the two biggest challenges with making this work. One is learning and development. How do you actually teach the skills in a way that allows people to apply them very quickly and give them the time to actually function, right? To the finding about managers, not necessarily being supportive. And so you have to figure out what, you know, how do you actually create that right environment and give people the right tools? It's an area that we invested really heavily in from the PWC side with the launch of our ProEdge platform and really thinking about how to solve that. But then the problem that you're ultimately getting at once you've solved the people equation is how do you get scale and how do you move quicker? And so the biggest challenge is not should you let a business user build a bot, it's, you know, how do we actually build many bots generate many ideas for the professional developers and actually create an ecosystem to move faster. Every client that we work with, it's all about, you know, we're not moving fast enough. A COE cannot, you know, by itself automate an entire organization. And so, you know, this theme of scale really becomes, you know, the critical aspect of this. Is the former, in other words, the teaching an individual how to build a bot, is that trivial or is that really not the big gate? Is that what you're saying? We don't think it's a big gate. I think that, you know, to the original question, I think that the low code space is a ripe spot for this, you know, upskilling construct because you're not, you're not, you're engaging with employees who don't have an undergraduate degree in computer science who are not IT professionals. And so giving someone, you know, a book on job and saying go build an application, it's probably not going to be very productive. But with tools in the low code space, be it RPA or be it other forms of lower code technology, you get people opportunity where they need to learn some technical concepts. You need to understand how the technology works and how basic programming techniques work. But you don't need to understand everything. And again, going back to the simple versus the complex, the goal here is not to turn people into professional developers. The goal is to get them engaged and create, you know, make them part of that company's digital transformation. From what you just described, to me, it's basic logic skills. I mean, you don't have to be, like you say, an assembly language programmer. But you got to understand, and you got to know the business process, right? I mean, you have to be a domain expert. Yeah. But that's the biggest advantage of this. You're engaging the people closest to the business process, right? You look at how most big IT projects failed. It was the same reason a lot of early automation efforts failed. You're creating, you know, a function that essentially lives in an ivory tower that's focused on, you know, where can I go and find opportunities and automate? But you're not, those aren't the people that were on the process day to day. You put it, you make those people that were on the process day to day accountable, you're going to get a different outcome. And they'll lean in and get excited. Exactly. So where is that transition? I know it's easy to say, oh, you know, it's logic and people can do it, but what about having a bot whisperer in your organization who literally says, you know, Maureen, I'm going to come and sit with you on Friday, and you're going to explain your frustrations to me, and I'm going to sit right next to you, and I'm going to code this bot for you, when we're going to test it, and you're going to tell me if it does what you want it to do. And Maureen doesn't need to understand how to move the widgets around and do anything. It's, you know, it's a great question because I think it's changing the nature of how you accelerate these efforts, right? I think, you know, the, and if I go into early RPA days, the initial kind of thought process was, let's just get a factory in here and build as many bots as possible. A lot of our client engagement today isn't always around our bot development services. It's around, can you bring in coaches? Can you hold office hours? We have an office hour construct, which I've never really had in my consulting career where we put, you know, I mean, this is obviously post COVID, when people are in their offices, we put someone in a room and people can come by and get help. And I think having that, that coaching and mentoring construct is very helpful. What we've also seen, and I think it's a really critical success after for clients to make this work, is thinking about how they pick a subset of their population and making them, digital accelerators, digital champions, pick your word, not IT professionals, peers, who will actually get real-time dedicated, right? And maybe a full-time or a half-time job, where that's exactly what they do. Maureen, we're out of time, but my last question for you is, when you do a survey like this, you know, you have open-ended sometimes and you analyze the survey, you take a bath in the data, write it up, there's always something that you wish you'd asked, which is great, because then you can do it on the next one. Was there anything in there that you wish you'd ask that you're going to ask on the next one, or are you going to explore in the next survey? Yeah, one of the things that I asked, one thing that I was glad I asked was, we spent time finding what were considered business-side product champions or RPA champions, and then we asked them what they did, how often they did, how much time they spent. But what I really, really want to ask in my next survey, and I will, I've got it planned, is to find out what percentage of population is involved with being a citizen developer and what activities are common and what are less common and, you know, what their challenges are. So we'll be looking at a different kind of audience with this next survey. Well, we'd love to have you back to talk about that. Just to invite me. Thank you very much. I'll be there. I'll be there. Really appreciate it. Kevin, good to see you again. Good to see you. All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante, we're here wrapping up day two of UiPath Forward 5 Live from the Venetian on Las Vegas. We'll be right back.