 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward America's 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward here in Sin City, Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Vellante. We have two guests for this segment. We have Kurt Carlson, Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs at the Mason School of Business at the College of William and Mary. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. And we have Tom Clancy, the SVP of Learning at UiPath. Thank you so much. Great to be here. You're a CUBE alum, so thank you for coming back. I've been here a few times. CUBE veteran, I should say. I think 10 years or so. So we're talking today about a robot for every student. This was just announced in August. William and Mary is the first university in the U.S. to provide automation software to every undergraduate student. Thanks to a $4 million investment from UiPath. Tell us a little bit about this program. How it works and what you're trying to do here. Yeah, so first of all, to Tom and the people at UiPath for making this happen, this is a bold and incredible initiative. One that frankly, when we had it initially, we thought maybe we could get a robot for every student. We weren't sure that other people would be willing to go along with that. But UiPath was, they see the vision. And so it was really a meeting of the minds on a common purpose. The idea was pretty simple. This technology is transforming the world. The way that students, we think it's going to transform the way that students actually are students. It's certainly transforming the world that our students are going into. And so we wanted to give them exposure to it. We wanted to try and be the first business school on the planet to actually prepare students not just for the way that RPA is being used today, but the way that it's going to be used when AI starts to take hold, when it becomes the gateway to AI. And three, four, five years down the road. So we talked to UiPath. They thought it was a really good idea. We went all in on it. And yeah, all of our starting juniors in the business school have robots right now. They've all been trained through the Academy Live session. Putting together our course, it's very exciting. So, Tom, you've always been an innovator when it comes to learning and so. I had my questions. How come we didn't learn this cool stuff when we were in college? We learned Fortran. I don't know, I only learned basic, so I can't speak to that. But so, you know, last year we talked about how you're scaling, learning, some of the open sort of philosophy that you have. So give us the update on how you're pushing, you know, learning forward and why the College of William and Mary. Okay, so if you buy into a bot for every worker or a bot for every desktop, that's a lot of bots, that's a lot of desktops, right? There's studies out there from the research companies that say that there's somewhere between 100 and 200 million people that need to be educated on RPA, RPA slash AI. Right, so if you buy into that, which we do, then traditional learning isn't going to do it. We're going to miss the boat. So, we have a multi-pronged approach. The first thing is to democratize RPA learning. Two and a half years ago, we created RPA Academy, UiPath Academy, and it's 100% free. After two and a half years, we've had 451,000 people go through the academy courses. That's huge, but we think there's a lot more. Over the next couple, the next three years, we think we'll train at least two million people. But the challenge still is, if we train five million people, there's still 100 million that need to know about it. So, the second biggest thing we're doing is we went out last year at this event, we announced our academic alliance program. We had one university. Now we're approaching 400 universities. But what we're doing with William and Mary is a lot more than just providing a course. And I'll let Kurt talk to that, but there is so much more we could be doing to educate our students, our youth, upscaling, rescaling the existing workforce. When you break down that 100 million people, they come from a lot of different backgrounds. And we're trying to touch as many people as we can. Kurt, you guys are really out ahead of the curve. You know, oftentimes, I mean, you saw this a little bit with data science. We saw some colleges leaning in. But what led you guys to the decision to actually invest and prioritize RPA? I think what we're trying to accomplish requires incredibly smart students. It requires students that can sit at the interface between what we would think of today as sort of an RPA developer and a decision maker who would be stroking the check or signing the contract. There's got to be somebody that sits in that space that understands enough about how you would actually execute this implementation. What's the right build out of that? How are we going to build a portfolio of bots? How are we going to prioritize the different processes that we might automate? How are we going to balance some processes that might have a really nice ROI but be harder for the individual whose process is being automated to absorb against processes that the individual would love to have automated might not have as great of an ROI? How do you balance that whole set of things? So what we've done is we've worked with UiPath to bring together the ideas of automation with the ideas of being a strategic thinker in process automation. And we're designing a course in collaboration to help train our students to hit the ground running. Rebecca, it's really visionary, isn't it? I mean, it's not just about using the tooling. It's about how to apply the tooling to create competitive advantage or change lives. I used to cover business education for the financial time, so I completely agree that this really is a game changer for the students to have this kind of access to technology and ability to explore this leading edge of software robotics and really be and graduate from college. This isn't even graduate school. The graduate from college really already having these skills. So tell me, Kurt, what are they doing? What is the course? What does it look like? How are they using this in the classroom? So the course is called a one credit. It's 14 hours, but it actually turns into about 42 when you add this stuff that's going on inside a class. They're learning about these large conceptual issues around how do you prioritize which processes, what's the process you should go through to make sure that you measure in advance of implementation so that you can do an audit on the back end to have proof points on the effectiveness. So you got to measure in advance, creating a portfolio of perspective processes and then scoring them, how do you do that? So they're learning all that sort of conceptual straight business slash strategy implementation stuff. That's on the first half. And to keep them engaged with the software, we're giving them small skills, we call them skillettes, small skills in every one of those sessions that add up to having a fully automated and programmed robot. Then they're going to go into a series of days where every one of those days, they're going to learn a big skill. And the big skills are ones that are going to be useful for the students in their lives as people, useful for their, in their lives as students and useful for their lives as entrepreneurs using RPA to create new ventures or in the organizations they go to. We've worked with UiPath and with our alums to implement this, folks at EY, Booz, Bank. We went up to DC. We had a three hour meeting with these folks. So what are the skills students need to learn? And they told us. And so we've built these three big classes each around each one of those skills so that our students are going to come out with the ability to be business translators, not necessarily the hardcore programmers. We're not going to prevent them from doing that, but to be these business translators that sit between the programming and the decision makers. I mean, that's huge because, you know, my son's a senior in college. Oh, he and his friends, they all either want to work for Amazon, Google, an investment bank, or one of the big SIs, right? So this is a perfect role for a consultant to go in and advise. Tom, I wanted to ask you, and you and I have known each other for a long time. One of the reasons I think you were successful at your previous company is because you weren't just focused on a narrow vendor, how to make a symmetric work, for instance. I presume you're taking the same philosophy here. It transcends UiPath and it's really more about the category, if you will, of the potential. Can you talk about that? So we listen to our customers and now we listen to the universities, too. And they're going to help guide us to where we need to go. Most companies in tech, you work with marketing and you work with engineering and you build product courses. And you also try to sell those courses because it's a really good P&L when you sell training. We don't think that's right for the industry, for UiPath or our customers or our partners. So when we democratize learning, everything else falls into place. So as we go forward, we have a bunch of ideas. As we get more into AI, you'll see more AI type courses. We'll team with 400 universities now, by the end of next year, we'll probably have 1,000 universities signed up. And so there's a lot of subject matter expertise. And if they come to us with ideas, you mentioned a 14 hour course. We have a four hour course and we also have a 60 hour course. So we want to be as flexible as possible because different universities want to apply it in different ways. So we also heard about Lean Six Sigma. I mean, sorry, Lean RPA. So we might build a course on Lean RPA because that's really important. Solution Architect is one of the biggest gaps in the industry right now. So we look where these gaps are, we listen to everybody and then we just execute. Now it seems as if you said Six Sigma. We have Jean Younger coming on later. She's a Six Sigma expert. I don't know if she's a black belt, but she's pretty sure. She talks about how to apply RPA to make business processes Six Sigma, which you would never spend the time and money. I mean, it's an airplane engine for sure, but now, so that's kind of transformative. Kurg, I'm curious as to how you as a college market this, you know, your very competitive industry, if you will. So how do you see this attracting students and separating you guys from the pack? Well, the two separate things. How do we actively try to take advantage of this and what effects are it as it having already? Enrollments to the business school. Students at William & Mary get admitted to William & Mary and they're fantastic. Amazingly good undergraduate students. The best students at William & Mary come to the Raymond A. Mason School of Business. If you take our undergraduate GPAs of students in the business school, they're top five in the country. So what we've seen since we've announced this is that our applications to the business school are up. Okay, I don't know that it's a one-to-one correlation, but I- I think it is. I believe it's a strong predictor, right? In part because it's such an easy sell. And so when we talked to those alums and friends in DC and said, tell us why this is, why are students should do this? They said, well, if for no other reason, we are hiring students that have these skills into data science lines in the mid-90s. When I said that to my students, they fell out of their chairs. So there's incredible opportunity for them. That's the easy way to market it internally. It aligns with things that are happening at William & Mary trying to be innovative, nimble and entrepreneurial. We've been talking about being innovative, nimble and entrepreneurial for longer than we've been doing it. We believe we're getting there. We believe this is the type of activity that would fit for that. As far as promoting it, we're telling everybody that will listen, that this is interesting and people are listening. You know, the standard sort of marketing strategy that goes around and we're coordinating with UiPath on that. But internally, the sell's actually pretty easy. This is something people are looking for. We're going to make you ready for the world the way that it's going to be now and in the future. Well, imagine the big consultancies are hovering as well. You know, you mentioned DC, Booz Allen, huge in DC, Accenture, EY, Deloitte, PWC, IBM itself. I mean, it's just, they all want the best and the brightest. And you're going to have this skill set that is a sweet spot for their businesses. That's the plan. I'm just thinking back to remembering who these people are. These are 19 and 20-year-olds. They've never experienced the dreariness of work and the drudge tasks that we all know well. So what are you, in terms of this whole business translator idea, that they're the people who sit between, sit in the middle and can sort of be these people who can speak both languages. What kind of skills are you trying to impart to them? Because it is a whole different skill set. Our vision is that in two or three years, the nodes in the process that are currently, that currently make implementing RPA complex and require significant programmer skills. These places where right now there's a human making a relatively mundane decision, but it's still a model. There's a decision node there. We think AI is going to take over that. AI is going to simply put models into those decision limits. We also think a lot of the programming that takes place, you're seeing it now with Studio X, a lot of the programming is going to go away. And what that's going to do is it's going to elevate the business process from the mundane to the more human intelligence, what would currently be considered a human intelligence process. When we get into that space, people skills are going to be really important. Prioritizing is going to be really important. Identifying organizations that are ripe for this at this moment in time, which processes automate. So those are the kind of skills we're trying to get the students to develop. And what we're selling it partly as is this is going to make you ready for the world the way we think it's going to be. It's a bit of a guess. But we're also saying, if you don't want to automate mundane processes, then come with us on a different magic carpet ride. And that magic carpet ride is, imagine all the processes that don't exist right now because nobody would ever conceive of them because they couldn't possibly be sustained or they would be too mundane. Now think about those processes through a business lens. So take a business student and think about all the potential when you look at it that way. So this course that we're building has that, it's everything in the course is wrapped in that. And so at the end of the course, they're going to be doing a project. And the project is to bring a new process to the world that doesn't currently exist. Don't program it. Don't worry about whether or not you have a team that could actually execute it. Just conceive of a process that doesn't currently exist. And let's imagine with the potential of RPA how we would make that happen. That's going to be, so we think we're going to be able to bring a lot of students along through that innovative lens, even though they are 19 and 20 because 19 and 20 year olds love innovation. Well, they've never submitted a procurement report. Innovation resonates with that. We'll need to do a cute follow up with that. What Kurcha said is the reason why, Tom, I think this market is being way under counted. I think it's hard for the IDCs and the forces of sale because they look back and say, okay, how big was it last year? How fast are these companies growing? But to your point, there's so much unknown processes that could be attacked. The TAM on this could be enormous. We agree. Yeah, I know what you do. But I think that it's a point worth mentioning because it touches so many different parts of every organization that I think people perhaps don't realize the impact that it could have. When listening to you, Craig, when you look at these young kids, at least compared to me, all the coding and setting up a robot, that's the easy part. They'll pick that up right away. It's really the thought process that goes into identifying new opportunities. And that's, I think, your challenge, you're going to do that. But learning how to do robots, I think is going to be pretty easy for this new digital generation. He's the kid. Tom and Kurt, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a really fascinating conversation. Thank you. Thanks, you guys. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward.