 From New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Automation Anywhere, Imagine. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in midtown Manhattan at the Automation Anywhere, Imagine 2019. We're here last year, it's about 1500 people, and really Automation Anywhere is really hot in the RPA space, robotic process automation, but it's really a lot more than that. It's not just automating some processes. It's really about new ways to work, personal digital assistance, and really changing the game. We're excited to have our next guest. First time on theCUBE, he's Prince Coley, the CTO of Automation Anywhere. Prince, great to see you. Thank you, Jeff. Good to be here. Yeah, so you weren't here last year, so I'm curious to get your general impressions of the event and kind of the scene here with the Automation Anywhere ecosystem. Of course. I wasn't here last year, I heard a lot about it, but the sense of excitement, the sense of growth, the sense of opportunity that is there in everyone. The number of customers who are here and who are excited to be here, partners who are here and who are really happy to be here, and of course, the team, my own team, just the sense of excitement and the fact that we are on a hockey stick in terms of growth is just palpable. Right, so I'm curious to get your take. You've been in the valley for a long time and really the RPA theme is about this kind of digital workers. In fact, they get roles, they get names, they talk about them on stage like they're people, and the idea is that we all have our own assistant, which has been talked about forever, but maybe kind of had an offshore person you could help dial in your laundry. Nothing like what we're talking about today. So as you look back and kind of evolution as to how we got here, what's kind of your take on the role of a personal digital assistant? That's a great question. The way, in my view, the way it evolves was that if you're similar to cloud computing, I think the idea that these things could happen, I mean, Star Trek had it, right? So I think those things have, as an idea, have existed, but usually it was in fantasy. But what has happened in the last, I would say, five or 10 years is that computing, the need for automation across applications, the need for work to be less mundane, the need for creativity in a human job, those have become really important. And therefore, the definition of work is evolving. What can be automated, therefore must be automated. And it is not automation, within an application, it is automation across applications, across processes, across whichever applications from whichever vendors there may be, without changing the application itself. And that, with the changing role of AI and the acceptance of AI, I think has created, has allowed people to start accepting the notion of a digital worker. It's pretty interesting, one of the topics of the keynote was that the people were the integration point between a lot of these systems, super inefficient. And what I think is interesting on the AI front and the automation, the place I see it just a little bit every day, it's on Google, or an app that most people are familiar with, whether it's Google Maps, and suddenly it's got restaurants on it, and suddenly it's got reviews on it, and suddenly it's got Street View, or whether it's now on the email, where suddenly it's guessing my response, it's auto-filling even before I start to complete my email. And it really shows that it's this ongoing, continuous innovation, empowered by AI, and a boatload of data that lets these applications do, as you said, things that before would be considered magical. Absolutely, and if you look at the digital worker paradigm, it's not, if you look at a great example of a digital worker, for example, an AP clerk, an account payable clerk, think of an invoicing function. An invoice has to come in, someone has to read it, interpret it, excuse me, the formats of invoices are very different across vendors. Reading, interpreting, tying it to a PO, making sure the PO is correct, making sure the PO is valid, was issued at the right time, the item is not late, someone has signed up, there are so many things one has to do, and a person has to do all that today. But it is really a very boring work, there is, you know, years follow a set of steps, there is no judgment involved, really. What an AP digital worker allows you to do is to be able to read that document, interpret it, take all the steps that are necessary, and then be able to do that job 24 hours a day, and allow the offloading of this mundane, boring work, from a human. So they can be more creative, they can actually make the process better, as opposed to just following a set of simple rules. Right, it's interesting, one of the earlier conversations too, within defining that process so that you can automate it, you're going to unwind, in efficiency, you're going to unwind biases, you're going to unwind a whole bunch of stuff to get it to the automated process. So there's all kinds of secondary benefits beyond simply freeing up your time to do more creative work. That is correct, that is correct. And I think, you know, as you say, there are biases, there are also things that must work together and enterprise, and today don't. And you know, the vendors, the application vendors are not going to do that, not in their own interest. So someone has to, and we are the fabric that brings it together. Right, and just people as an integration point, I thought that was classic, it's like the worst part, the worst place you want to be. And then the other concept that I think doesn't come out enough is a lot of people are thinking about RPA as a rip and replace for the people. It's not a rip and replace at all, it's really augment, just like you augment with your laptop, your phone, the other software applications that you work in with every day. It's a great point, we have never, we have never seen any customer even talking about ripping and replacing people. What they're trying to do is give people the tools and the augmentation necessary for them to make their own life, make their own life better. And that improves the morale of the employees, that improves the company's productivity, of course. And probably the best output, the best way to measure that, it improves their customer satisfaction. Because customers are able to get great cards faster, able to get responses faster, claims get adjusted faster. All these things work very well. Right. This is really when you sit back and look at the whole technology stack. You know, some really fundamental changes in microprocessor power, networking speed, storage, now cloud, that puts all this thing, you know, this access together, and then you add the ale and the machine learning on top of it. It's really kind of this crazy, perfect storm of technologies that are coming together that are enabling this, which we really couldn't, we couldn't really do before. All those pieces weren't there. So as you look forward to CTO, what are some of the things you're excited about? How do you see this kind of evolving over the next little time and mid-time? I'd never go long time. Long time is forever in the future and we don't even guess. Long time, I can predict one thing for sure about long time, that whatever we say today will be wrong, in the long term. Short to medium term, I think we'll probably be right. I think short to medium term, what I see happening is that AI becoming a part of pretty much every layer of every product. For us, for example, as an intelligent RPA platform, AI is embedded in interaction with the application, interaction with the screen, interaction with the person, interaction with the documents. So, whichever way we interact with the outside world, as well as how we get better ourselves, AI is embedded in that. And then we use many third-party as well as our own bots to add AI-enabled skills. For example, understanding if a credit card claim, if an insurance claim should be denied or not, a credit card should be issued or not. So all these things become part of how AI helps us in day to day. So I think that will be the biggest change. I think people, I mean, an example that you brought up, right, Google email. I don't think that people predicted that with the first use of AI in Google. But it is a very useful, you know, I use it all the time because it happens to get better all the time. You know, it knows all my phrases, it knows how I respond. I think that will happen again and again. Right, right. Just like spell check. The great, the great unwashed AI that we've all been using for years and years and years. I'm tapping it now, it's gross. All right, Prince. So, final word is really, I think that's important is you're talking about the intelligence. It's not just a process that we apply software to but this kind of ongoing iterative intelligence applied whether it's machine learning or AI to make it better and better and better and better. It's not just going to be static. Not at all, not at all. I think it understands what it needs to be doing and then provides ideas on how it could be doing better and then integrates those ideas back. Everything gets better over time and everything that a human finds, repetitive, high volume, boring, will eventually get farmed off to an augmentation, a digital worker or a digital assistant. I know, by the way, the number of open recs is still not going to go down, right? Because, you know, if you remember the ATM world, an ATM side coming in, people side worrying, tellers will go away and the number of jobs will go down. Actually, banks are doing really well, right? And they started hiring more people. The nature of the job changes. The value that humans provide, you know, go higher and higher. Up the stack. But that's what happens, actually. All right, Prince, well, congratulations for you for jumping on a rocket ship. I'm sure it's going to be a really fun ride. It's going to be a lot of fun, yes. And having us here at the show. Excellent, thank you, Jeff. All right. He's Prince, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're Automation Anywhere. Imagine 2019 in Midtown Manhattan. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.