 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 in downtown Manhattan, actually, I guess midtown Manhattan at Automation Anywhere. Imagine 2018, 1100 people talking about bots, talking about robotics, process automation, or RPA. And we're excited to have the guy that counts the money at the end of the day. It's an important part of any business. He's a co-founder, Ankur Kothari, Chief Revenue Officer and co-founder Automation Anywhere. Ankur, great to see you. Great to be here, Jeff. So, first off, as a co-founder, I think you're the third or fourth co-founder we've had on today. A little bit of reflection since you guys started this like 14 years ago. Here we are, there's 1100 people, the room is packed, the overflow, they're actually all over us out here with the overflow from the keynote. Take a minute and kind of tell us how you feel about how this thing has evolved over time. It feels like a great party to be part of. Always, you're always happy. Right. One of the traits that you'll find in a lot of co-founders is that they are always happy, never satisfied. They're always looking for the next big one. Right. But it's amazing to be part of Imagine because we learn so much from our customers and our partner as well. It's not just that we bring them together and we are talking, we're learning every time this is becoming a big ecosystem. Right. And an idea as big as a bot or a future of work is too big an idea for one company to contribute. You want as many people to come. Right. So our idea of Imagine was that we'll build like fields of dreams, you build and they'll come and they'll collaborate and it'll become bigger and bigger. And look all around us. I mean we're surrounded by people and really the ecosystem. And the bots as well. That's right. The bots on the walls and everything. Bots on the walls, partners everywhere. So let's dive into a little bit. I mean one of the ways that you guys participate in the ecosystem and the ecosystem participates is the bot store. Yes. And then any other kind of an app store. So you've got people contributing. I assume you guys have contributed stuff but we saw earlier in the keynote by, you know, Accenture and E&Y and Deloitte and all types of companies are contributing bots into this ecosystem for lots of different functions or applications. So really interesting, interesting thing. How's that working out? Where'd you come up with the idea? And why is that so important? We, we, we, at Automation Anyway we like to ask ourselves hard questions as the leaders in the space. And we asked ourselves this question that what can we now do to further accelerate our journey of all our customers to become a digital enterprise? The answer came that we have to assure in the new body economy. Now once that answer was clear, every economy requires a marketplace. Right. That's where the bot store came. It's a marketplace where producers meet the consumers and you connect them. All we do is we curate and make sure that the right things go up. But other than that, it's just like any other marketplace. And we thought that if we'll build the right marketplace where the producers meet consumers, we have thousands of customers and everyone, large companies, looking at it. It will allow perfect place where all the right ideas get converted into product. Right. We have tons of partners who have domain expertise, functional expertise, vertical expertise. They can productize that expertise. They can convert it into IP. Right. They can give it for free. They can monetize it. So there's lots to gain for producers of all these bots. And if I'm a consumer, now suddenly, my time to automate further shrinks because instead of creating these bots from scratch, I can download them from this bot store and snap them together like a Lego block. Right. So that's how the whole idea came. We launched it just two months ago and we have hundreds of bots. Just launched it two months ago? Yeah, and we have hundreds of bots in it more than 80 to 100 partners have participated. We are getting at least 20 to 30 more submissions coming every day and we have a few hundred submissions coming every week. So just like any free marketplace, it has an exponential nature and that's the thing we are counting on. That's amazing that you've got that much traction in such a short period of time. Thousands of downloads on a daily basis, thousands of users just in two months, right? You know, we go to a ton of shows. We do over a hundred shows a year and you know, once shows get to a certain size, you know, it starts to change a little bit. But when they're small like this, it's a very intimate affair on a couple floors here at the Sheridan. Everyone is still really involved. They're really sharing. There's so much sharing of information, not so much, you know, because they're not really competitors. Within their own companies, they're all kind of part of the same team that are trying to implement this new thing and you really feel it. So the store is cool, but the bot economy, when you talk about the bot economy, we talk about the API economy a lot. How do you see the bot economy? What are the factors that drive the bot economy and how's it going to evolve over time? We look at it as a few elements. The current version, we think that bot economy, like any economy as a marketplace, which is our bot store. We have a program which is what we call Bot Games because any good economy, any new economy, one of the traits is that the good idea can come from anyone. It can come from any place, and like any customer, any partner, anyone can bring. A good economy, what it does is it brings that idea from anyone and it gives these vehicles for good ideas to take flight. If the idea is good, it becomes viral and it has vehicles where those ideas can go to market. What we did was, we created a program called Bot Games. Yesterday on May 29, we had the first inaugural Bot Games. We invited developers, people who are part of these programs in their companies, and we gamified and created different games. We thought that if we bring all these champions and pioneers and like-minded people in the same room, give them certain same problem, and then gamified, put a clock on it, a lot of great ideas will come out of it. And that came, and some of those ideas will make it to the marketplace, like a bot store, like an imagine. So that's where all the ideas connect to the customer and the people who bring those ideas, they also come up. So that's the other aspect. So the Bot Games is where the ideas, you can crowdsource from places. Bot store is where they go to the market. In between, there is a gap, and we are trying to remove that gap by creating a stimulus package for this new bot economy. Like any economy, time and again requires a stimulus pack, and we have created one. What we have done is that if you want to learn automation anywhere, if you want to understand, because that gap is, you have to understand automation anywhere. We have created automation anywhere at university a year ago, and now anyone can take courses for free to learn how to create bots, whether you are a customer or a partner. And then if you purchase these bots through one of our certified partners, the first three bots in year one are free. So we are removing the friction in between. If you have not started on this journey, your learning is free, you get ideas from different places, you can get these pre-built bots, and the first three bots, if you purchase it through a partner, they are free. So we are removing that friction. And then we are supporting that whole economy with the industry's largest customer success growth. Right. So I'm curious if you know, maybe you don't know of the bots in the bot store, how many are free, and how many are paid as a percentage? Interestingly, I don't have that stat because we don't actually worry about that. We let all our partners and people who are contributing to this bot store decide that. Right. Some bots, they may decide to monetize, some they may not be, it's listed on the bot store. Offhand, I would say. Take a guess, is it 50-50, a 30-30? The nature of it looks like 50-50. That's a good guess. Yeah. But full caveat, it's a guess. We didn't do the analysis. Exactly. But here's the unique aspect. Yesterday we had a bot game, and the winner had an amazing idea that none of us had ever think of. He created this bot that automates the COE of all these programs. Now, we are talking, he's thinking of putting that on bot store. That's the power of bringing multiple people together. That's the power of free economy, where the exponential nature of it is what we are counting on. And we are getting, on a daily basis, these new bot ideas, these new bots that are making it to the bot store. Just like your app store, now I go to app store to get ideas what I can do on my phone. Just like that, now we are finding our customers are going to bot store to figure out what else can they automate. Right, right. And that's been another amazing part of it. So, Assistant, all these shows we go to, right? How do you unlock innovation? There's some really simple ways. One is, give more people the power, give more people the tools, and give more people the data. And you'll get stuff out of it that the small subset of people that used to have access to those three things didn't ever found. They just didn't think of it that way, right? So, exactly. And then we firmly believe that any technology, anything, once you democratize it, you give it in hands of everyone. Right, right. You can't have a thriving economy unless everyone forms their own point of view, unless everyone creates their own perspective. And that's our vision of this bot economy. We are bringing everyone and giving them these vehicles to try it out. Look, the technology has reached a stage that it's cheaper to try it out than talk about it. And we are doing that so that everyone forms their own unique point of view. And then they express that point of view and we connect those point of view to these thousands of customers worldwide. Good ideas take flight. And all we have to do is create vehicles for those good ideas to take flight. All right. So, Alkar, I gave you the last word before we wrap up here. If we come back next year, year from now, inspired 2019, what are you going to be talking about? What's kind of on your roadmap? What are some of the priorities you guys are working on over the next 12 months? We are talking about the next 12 months. We are looking at how to further accelerate this journey. Because what people are in this, the real problem people are trying to achieve is how to become a digital enterprise, not just to automate, but how do you create a digital enterprise? You cannot become a digital enterprise unless your operations are digital. You cannot make your operations digital unless your processes are digital. And you cannot do that unless your workforce is digital. So we are trying to create technologies, vehicles, platforms, so that everyone can scale their program where pretty much everyone should have a digital colleague. Everyone should be able to create a board. Everyone should be able to work with a board. Every process, every department, every system should have a digital workforce working in it. And that can allow you to create a digital enterprise that can scale up and scale down with the demand and supply. That's what we are trying to do. We look forward to getting the update next year. All right, Ankur, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day with us. Thanks for having me here, and I appreciate you enjoyed the conversation. All right, he's Ankur, I'm Jeff. We're at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. See you next time.