 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. Live coverage of UiPath Forward here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Craig LeClaire. He is the vice president of Forrester and also the author of the book, Invisible Robots in the Quiet of the Night, how AI and automation will restructure the workforce. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And congratulations, it's already made number 11 on Amazon's AI and automation bestseller list, so. Well, it's not quite bestseller, but okay, that's great. Thank you. Thank you, it's doing well. If anyone calls your book a bestseller, you just take them out. I'll just take it. So, it is a story right now. I mean, there's a lot, there's so many changes going on in the workforce and there's so much anxiety on the part of workers that they're going to lose their job, that all these technologies are going to take away their livelihood. So, how are companies managing this? Are they managing it well, would you say? Or is the anxiety misplaced? Give us an overview. Yeah, so I don't think companies are really aware of focus on the things that companies focus on. They focus on efficiency and productivity and so forth. And underlying that, it's of the invisible robots. The point of invisible robot book is that there's a lot of media attention on the hardware aspects of robotics. In fact, the Superball last year had, you know, 10 commercials with hardware robots. But it's, if you look at this conference, you look at the number of people here, what are these people doing? You know, they're going back to their companies and saying, you know, this UI path and there are other providers in the market. We can build software robotics, we can build bots to do some of these tasks that a lot of these humans are doing. And while there is elevation of the human capability and a series of more exciting moments perhaps, but it's not going to make you more relaxed as an employee. And then you look at the overall job numbers and our estimates are very conservative compared to some of the other reports that are at 45, 50% of workers over 10 years being displaced, we think it's 16%. But still, when you look at just the US numbers, that's of 160 workers today, 160 million workers, that's a lot of people. So displaced and then sort of re-targeted or vaporized? No, well, the 16% is the automation, is the net loss of jobs. Now in that tremendous number of new jobs that are coming up, so we have a formula to calculate that. The work personas have different relationships to AI and all workers and be very well protected for a long time. People that have clipboards in their hands, a lot of people leaving those cubicles that aren't going to be able to migrate to other personas. And so we have a change management issue. We need to start driving more education from the workplace through certification. And that's a really critical thing I'll talk about tomorrow. That the refresh of technology with automation is 18 months to 24 months, you can't depend on traditional education to keep up. So we need a different way to look at training and education. And for many, it's going to be a much better life, but there's going to be many that it will not be. What was the timeframe for your net 16% loss? 10 years. 10 years, okay. To me, a lower net loss number makes sense. And in fact, if you could elongate your timeline, it probably shows a net job creation. You could make that argument anyway. I don't know if you- It's being made. You don't buy it though. I don't. The World Economic Foundation and others are having huge net new numbers for jobs based on AI. Some of the large integration companies that want to build AI platforms for you are talking about- Of course. Trillions of dollars that it would be added a value to the world economy. I just don't buy it. And the reason I wrote this book was because what's going on here is very quietly preparing to displace a lot of effort, starting with relatively small tasks. It's called task automation, but then expanding to more and more work and eventually adding a level of intelligence to the task automation going on here that's going to take a lot of jobs. And for most of those 20 million cubicle workers, they have high school educations. You know, the bigger problem is this level of anxiety. You know, you go into almost any bookstore and there's a whole section for dummy books. You know, and it's not, it's, you know, is it because we have this sort of cognitive recession or because, you know, there's a, it's because the world's getting faster and more complicated. And unless you have the digital skills to adapt to that, the digital skills graph is growing. And we need to have as much focus that you see here and energy on building automation. We need to have an equal amount of focus on the societal problems. Yeah, and it really comes down to education too. I mean, if I were able to, you know, snap my fingers and transform the educational system, you know, there might be a different outcome, but that's very unlikely to happen. Craig, one of the things we talked about last year was, you had made the statement that some of these moonshot digital transformations, you know, aren't happening for a variety of reasons, but RPA is kind of a practical way to achieve automation. Still very true. Have you seen sort of a greater awareness in your client base that, you know, hey, maybe we should dial down some of these moonshots and just try to pick some, you know, clear winners? Yeah, we have a number of prediction reports coming out from Forrester and they're all saying basically that. I'm doing reports on what I'm calling in the intelligent process automation market and that's really RPA plus AI, but not all aspects of AI. You know, it's AI that you can see in ROI around, you know, it's AI that deals with unstructured documents and content and email. It's not the moonshot more transformative AI that we have been very focused on for a number of years. Now, all that's very, very important. You're not going to transform your business by doing task automation, even if it's a little more intelligent and handles some decision management. You still need to think about how do I instantiate my business algorithmically, you know, with AI that's going to make predictions and move decision management and change the customer experience. All that's still true, as true as it was in 2014, 2015. We're just seeing a more realistic pullback in terms of the investment profile. Well, and so we've been talking about that, you know, all day is, you know, taking automating processes that have been around for a long time and you, I think, identified this as one of the potential blockers before. If you've got old processes that are legacy and I think you gave the story of, hey, I flew out here on American Airlines and it's the old Sabre system. How old are those processes? So we've, you know, the old term paving the cow path. So the question is, given all the hype around RPA, the valuations, et cetera, what role do you see RPA having in those sort of transformative use cases? Well, here's the interesting thing that was, I think, somewhat accidental by the, you know, what really changed from having a simple desktop automation? Well, you needed some place to house and centrally manage that automation. So the RPA platforms had to build a central management capability. UiPath calls it the orchestrator, others call it the control tower. But when you think of all the categories of AI, none of them have a orchestration capability. You know, so the ability to use events to link in machine intelligence and dispatch digital workers or task automation to coordinate various AI building blocks, as we call them, and apply it to a use case, that orchestration capability is pretty unique to the RPA platforms. So the sort of secret value of RPA is not in everything that's being talked about here, but eventually it's going to be as a coordinating mechanism for bringing together, you know, machine learning that'll begin the cloud, conversational intelligence that might be in Google, you know, having the RPA bots, you know, work in conjunction with those. But if I recall, I mean, that's something that you pointed out last year as well, that, you know, RPA today struggles with unstructured data, you know. Well, it can't do it. Right, we talked about NLP versus RPA. RPA, give me structured data, I can go after it. Yeah, but that's the RPA plus AI bit, though. I mean, you take text analytics layer, and you combine it with RPA bots, and now you have the unstructured capability plus the structured capability that RPA does so well. And with the combination of the two, you can reach, I think what the industry needs to do, or the buyers of RPA, they need to take the pressure off this immediacy of the ROI. In a sense, that's what's driven the value. I can deploy something, I can get value in a few months. But to really make it effective and transformative, you need to combine it with these AI components, that's going to take a little longer. So this sort of impatience that you see in a lot of companies, they should really step back, take a look at the more end-to-end capabilities, you know, and take a little hit on the ROI immediately so that you can do that. Yeah, I mean, I can definitely see a step function. Okay, great, we've absorbed that value, we get a quick ROI, but to your point, there's got to be some patient capital to allow you to truly transform. In order for RPA, if I'm, I won't put words in your mouth to live up to the hype. Absolutely, I totally agree. And I'm still very, very high on the market. And I think it's going to do extremely well. Well, if you look at the spending data, it's quite interesting. I mean, RPA is a category, it's off the charts. Yep. You know, UI path from your last wave kind of took the lead, but automation anywhere, blue prism spending, even in traditional incumbents, maybe not even RPA, but maybe more process automation like Pegasystems. The spending data suggests that it's the rising tide lifting all boats. So my question to you is, how do you see this all shaking out? Huge valuations, the bankers are swarming around, you saw them in the meeting yesterday. You know, at some point, there's got to be a winner takes most, the number two guy will do pretty well and then everybody else kind of consolidates. What's your outlook? Well, there are a lot of emerging players coming into the market. And part of my life is having to fend them off and talk to them, you know, but, you know, in the RPA wave that's coming out in a week, it's going to have four new players in it. Companies like SAP, well, they acquired a company, right? So they acquired and they built internally and have some interesting approaches to the market. So you are going to see the big players come into the market, others I wouldn't mention that'll be in the market in a month. And it's getting a lot of attention. But also I think that there are domains, business domains that the different platforms can start to specialize in. The majors, the UI paths of the world, you know, will be horizontal and remain that way. And depend on partners to tailor it for a particular application area. But you're going to see RPA companies come into the testing market, software testing market. You're going to see them come into the contact centers to deal with intended mode in more sophisticated ways, perhaps, and those that don't have that background. You're going to see tailored robots that are going to be in these robot communities that are springing up. That'll give a lot of juice to others to come into the market. And like you said, you're going to see, we've talked about this as well, Rebecca, the best of breed versus, you know, the sweet, right? Whether it's SAP, Enforce talking about it, I'm sure Oracle, throw its hat in the ring. Why not? Hey, we have that too. Well, if you're those companies that the RPA bots are feasting on, you know, they're slowing the upgrades to your core platforms in some ways making them less relevant because their argument has been, let's integrate, you get self-integration when you buy SAP, when you buy Oracle, when you buy these big platforms. Well, the bots actually make that argument less powerful because you can use the bots to give you that integration as a layer. And so they're going to have to come up with some different stories, I think, if they're going to, you know, continue to move forward their platforms, move them to the cloud and so forth. So, best advice for workers in this new landscape and how it is going to alter their working lives. And also your best advice for companies and managers as you said, maybe not quite, they're grappling with this issue, but maybe not, and they're not being disingenuous to workers about who's going to lose their jobs, but this idea of as they're coming to terms with understanding quite all of the implications of this new world. Yeah, no, and I'm presenting data tomorrow that shows that organizations, employees, and leaders are not ready, and I have data to show that. They're not understanding it. My best advice, I love the concept of, it's not a forest or concept, it's called constructive ambition. And this is the ability in an employee to want to go a little bit out of the box and learn and to challenge themselves and move into more digital, to close that digital skills gap. And we have to get better at identifying, companies need to get better at identifying constructive ambition in people they're hiring and also ways to draw it out and to walk these employees up the mountain in a way that's good for their career and good for the company. I could tell you, I'll tell a few stories on the main stage last night. I've interviewed Walmart employees and machinists that could no longer deal with their machine because they had to put codes into it. So they had to set it up with programming steps and the digital anxiety was such that they quit the job. So a clear lack of constructive ambition. On the other hand, Walmart employee graduated from one of their 200 academies and was able to take on more and more responsibility. Somebody with no high school degree at all. She said, I've never graduated from anything in my life. My kids have never seen me succeed in anything. And I got this certification from Walmart that said that I was doing this level of standard work and that felt really, really good. So companies can take a different view towards this, but they have to have some model of future of work and what it's going to look like so they can take a more strategic view. Well, Craig, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a really great talk. I always love to come on. Another plug for the book, Invisible Robots in the Quiet of the Night, you can buy it on Amazon. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more of the CUBE's live coverage of UI Path Forward.