 From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Automation Anywhere. Imagine 2018, a downtown New York City. We're really excited to have our next guest. The CEO is Mahir Shuka, the co-founder and also CEO. Great to see you. Thank you. So, just coming off your keynote, there was so many great themes. But before we jump into the keynote, for people that aren't as familiar with Automation Anywhere, give me kind of the short history. Why did you guys start this? When did you start it? And where are we today? Sure. Automation Anywhere started about 14 years ago. The goal was to bring power of automation to every businesses on every desktop. We have been true to our vision all along. This one took longer for the world to realize that this is the right way to go about it. But now it is virtually adopted by every business across every industry. So it's RPA, Robotic Process Automation, for those people that aren't familiar with it or more commonly referred to, I guess, as bots. That's right. So the RPA refers to the Robotic Process Automation, as you said. What it does is it simulates human behavior on a computer. So it can type on a computer, it can read a computer screen, it can apply a set of rules, and often it can make basic cognitive decisions as well, if it is as sophisticated RPA as ours is. So with combination of this, it can operate any application like people can and run lots and lots of things on a computer in an autonomous way. Right. But the scale and power of compute, of storage, and networking, not only for your internal systems, but for the customer systems coming in to interact with these has changed quite a bit in the last 14 years. That is absolutely right. I think one of the things that, as you said, with the compute, power, network bandwidth, everything increased, but the way we operated for a long time is everything comes to this manual operation, and then everything slows down because human beings can process only at so much speed. Right. Now with RPA coming in, you can have end-to-end digital where things that are coming digitally can get processed digitally and don't get bogged down. Oh, we go to a lot of shows and the consumerization of IT is something that comes up all the time, right? People expect now their work behavior, their work applications to act like Amazon or act like Google or act like the things that they're familiar with on their phone. You really nailed it, though, into instant gratification. That's really the thing that's driving businesses to have to perform at the level of, say, an Amazon e-commerce application or a Google search application. They're not quite there yet, but that is a driver that's just incessant and people need to perform for their customers. That's absolutely right. I think, as you said, this what I call digital native companies, the Amazon, Zuba, Netflix of the world, they have created this standard and it is such a wonderful experience that we all begin to expect it everywhere else we go. Right. And that expectation continues to increase and with more and more millennials and generation Z coming in, they don't know of any other way to begin with, right? So it is a must-have if you want to retain our customers. Right. They touched on one of my favorite numbers, a number of times in the keynote, the 80-20 rule. And you touched upon the fact that really only 20% of the processes in most enterprises now are automated, 80% are still not, and really that that's the end game. That's kind of your mission and where you see the opportunity. That is right. The idea is today, as you said, 20% of the processes are automated and 80% is manual. And the only way to get to 80% automation is to consumerize automation. So you touched upon that too. The consumerization automation is the only way we'll get there. As long as if you keep it limited, it will take us too long. Right. And one of the things we offer in automation anywhere is a product that is so intuitive to use that anybody can create a bond. And in our customer base, now there are thousands of people trained. Last year we had 35,000 people trained. This year we will cost that number over 100,000. And this could be any business user even could automate it. One interesting fact is that we had a, what games yesterday? This was the idea where lots of people come together and compete to create the smartest, best performing bond. And people from all over the companies and world came to compete against it. And the person who won was a business user. Right, right. And that kind of attest to the fact that how easy it is to be used by everybody. Well, you made an interesting comment again at one of the most popular breakout sessions if it's not a result out is the build the bond. Yes. And you specifically called out business executives, business leaders to take an hour out of their day and learn how to build one of these things so they get realize how easy it is, how simple it is and the power so that you really get this kind of top level down drivers to drive more automation. That's right. My experience has been that if this is such a large transformation, if business leaders experience it themselves, be the transformation you want to bring. Right, right. And I've learned that from other leaders in one of the previous sessions, I had one of the CFO who sat down, a very large Fortune 100 company CFO to build a bot. And when the bot ran, he was so excited about it. And he said, Meen, we just beat our forecast 10% last quarter, 10 days ago, and I was not this excited. This is doable. If I can do it, anybody. Right. You know, I don't do this for a living and if I could do it, anybody could do it. Right. And I think it's great for people to experience it. So another interesting thing, kind of the consumerization of the automation, if you will, is you guys have a bot store. And it's funny in the keynote, again, you showed a lot of different bots in there organized by integration to different SaaS applications or functions or a number of things. And what struck me is that they all look relatively, you know, the processes were relatively simple, but these are the crazy, boring tasks that unfortunately take up so much of our time. But you're basically building out a store. I don't even need to build my own bot. I can go in and use best practices. That's absolutely right. So there are so many things everybody does in finance, accounting, HR, and many, many other areas. And all of that is available. But there are vast kinds of bots. So there is a bot that is coming up, which is called a 6-O-6 bot. This is the new standard on how revenue recognition must happen. And that's a complex thing, usually done by big four and many others to kind of help you work this through. So there are bots available for that kind of high intellectual capacity work as well. And I mentioned in my keynote that in healthcare, in diagnostics, in the research, finding new drug treatments, in vast amount of things bots are being used. So I think it's an all-spectrum of our work style, whether it's routine Monday or very high-valued work. As long as it can be automated, why not? Why not? So another interesting topic that comes up at all the shows we go to is kind of this whole debate between machines and people are machines taking the work of people. But you've actually identified your bots, you call them out as a digital workforce. So you're really saying that it's the people plus the machines is really what we need to do even to just maintain the growth for our economy to continue on the path that it's been on. That is absolutely correct. I think that these digital bots act like act like your digital colleagues, right? And they work with you. I know there has been lots of discussions on this topic and lots of books written on it and whatnot. But I'll share with you my experience, which is I must have visited over, we have over 1,000 large customers, I must have visited over 500 of them, walked on the floor of those companies and talked to people who use bots. There is not a single person, Jeff, in my encounter in last 14 years, whether come across, who would go back to doing it manually. If you are a 20, 30-year plus year person doing this job, would you do that? Would you not work on a most cutting-edge technology so that you are more employable? And what we see is that companies who adopt these bots have three times more resume. That's also understandable. When you walk on the floor of some of these companies, there is a sense of excitement. On Friday, they have bot parties. They cut a cake because bots are being born. They have a name for it. Many of them are attached to it, right? Almost like a pat, I would say, right? That's the closest I can think of. When you see all of this excitement and how excited people are, it's hard to reconcile between what you hear on one side and the other side. I think people will come around like they have for all other things. When computers came, people had the same concern and internet and everything else. I think in many ways this will help us improve the standard of living and take us to a higher level. So it's interesting, you talked in the keynote about the difference between just kind of an interesting technology and really transformative technologies and you identified like mobile phones and internet, search, I think there was one more. E-commerce. E-commerce. And really what were the factors that make that so transformative, you know? Reducing friction and 80% of the value, 20% of the cost in real time. You've been at this for 14 years, but you seem pretty damn excited, if you excuse my French. So as you look out, give you the last word, how are things changing from when you started to today and as you look forward, I won't never ask you to look ahead 14 years. That's like forever, never, never. But over the next couple, how do you see the adoption and the ramp of this technology going forward? I think for us, we have always been on an exponential curve, but the way the world is built, you know, the first part of the exponential curve looks linear, although it is exponential, and now we are on the hockey stick part of the curve where everybody can see it, right? I think the next couple of years or even more are going to be most fascinating. The world has realized that this is the next large productivity driver. There are very few left now, and so it is being adopted worldwide. I mentioned the keynote that 70% of the largest organization in the world are now engaged with us, right? So to see the world transform through the lens of our software and these amazing stories that customer tell, it is very rewarding. All right, we'll hear it. Thanks for taking a few minutes. Thanks for having us here to the event and congratulations to you and the team. Thank you. Well, nice to talk to you. Mayir, I'm Jeff. Thank you. You're at Automation Anywhere, Imagine, 2018 in Manhattan. Thanks for watching.