 Good afternoon everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's day two coverage of UiPath Forward 6, live from the stunning MGM Grand in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're going to be talking about the ecosystem of UiPath, its customers, its partners, and really how it's evolving there. We've got two guests with us. One of them is an alumni. Brandon Nott is here, the Chief Product Officer at Emilia, great to have you. And Sean and Delhiero is here. Most recently the Chief Information Technology Officer at Sportsman Morehouse. Welcome to theCUBE guys. Thank you for having us. Brandon let's go ahead and start with you. Talk about Emilia, about the organization and then get into the partnership which is relatively new with UiPath. That's right. So Emilia is all about conversational AI. So when you think about how we communicate with each other, being able to effectively use natural language in order to interact with technology just like you would with another human, this presents a ton of opportunity for automation, for customer experience, for employee experience. So Emilia is all about extending the value, extending the capabilities of systems and automation programs by providing that conversational layer on top. And how do you work with UiPath and why? Great question. So UiPath has been helping companies automate their systems, their legacy systems, their modern systems for over a decade. Companies have invested all this time during building of these efficiencies, driving automation throughout their organizations. And Emilia partnering with UiPath gets to extend all of that work, gets to add that conversational layer and open up new use cases at value to existing use cases. So really what you have is this synergistic partnership that both companies with a similar type of methodology around development and bringing automations to market can work together and one plus one equals three, right? Sean, talk to us a little bit about sport and warehouse and what were some of your challenges from an automation perspective, maybe productivity perspective that you were looking for technology partners like UiPath and Emilia Tussoff? Yeah, even predating that, going back into COVID a few years back at VisionWorks and BSP when we were experiencing pandemic and had locations that were closed and needing to be able to still provide that level of service and information to our customers, we had been using UiPath for quite some time but in very disparate areas of our business and enterprise when we didn't have the ability to answer and field those phone calls and to provide that same service that we had been with people in each of those locations, we had the opportunity to be able to leverage and automation such as Emilia and so as we went that journey and began to take some of those quick wins and started to reemerge, we were able to then leverage what we had in the way of the data and the availability of data via our UiPath engagement and the bots that were available. It was this, with these CIO led, IT led sort of initiatives was a business led combination, where was the genesis? Yeah, great question. So I think, you know, initially it very much was a conversation around we have a huge problem, how do we go and solve it? And we leveraged technology as being that catalyst for how can we quickly find an answer to the most pressing question, the most pressing need but I think the great part of that and the evolution, that maturation of technology cross enterprise becomes a point where it's the aha moment of other executives, of other leaders in different business units where I have another problem is this technology, something that can also be the solve for it. So you know, as you grow, we went from pandemic into great resignation, we had a different problem, we had a labor issue, we saw seasonality, we had other challenges that the technology was able to help us to solve for. Is like many initiatives in new initiatives in tech, you get a lot of shadow, whatever, fill in the blank. Andy Grove had us saying, let chaos rain then rain in the chaos. Usually what happens is you get all this shadow IT, shadow AI, shadow RPA and then the CIO's office is called in to clean it up. Sure. Was that kind of similar pendulum swing your experience here or was it different? I think in this case, it actually, because we had such success stories in quick wins early days and we brought people the journey, we took the time to do road shows if you will, understanding that everyone was sitting in a different seat in different locations and suddenly it was, you know, you can flip, people were working from home, but what we did was we gave people the opportunity to voice their opinions, to give their solutions or ideas or share their problems and so as we did that, they understood that we were there as the solve and not that we wanted them to Google their questions and their challenges, we wanted them to come to us with that, so that we could engage with them. So I think that we were fortunate in that we had a high level of engagement and we didn't see the challenges of shadow. What I will say is that's one of the beautiful things about both UiPath and Emilia Technologies is the ease of use. You actually want to introduce some more of that shadow type of behavior. You want those citizen developers, you want people to become more familiar so that that becomes their second thought versus the laborious processes and the manual behaviors of yesterday. Yeah, and maybe not even, maybe in the open behavior because there's not that, they're not hiding, they're in plain sight. Right, and I wonder, it's an NLP mission. Lisa and I were at CrowdStrike a couple weeks ago, three weeks ago, right? And they had this demo, this AI called Charlotte AI and the CEO George Kurtz was on stage talking to Charlotte. It was very powerful, we asked him about this, he was like, you're not really talking to this thing, are you? He's like, no, no, no, it's text and then we translated it, but do you see the day or is it already here where you're actually interacting with systems, I know we do it with Alexa and Siri and it's, but very sort of narrow use cases. What do you see as the human interaction going forward? Yeah, I think that's a great question. Already we have extremely robust use cases and by robust I mean, when you're interacting with Amelia, you can make that as narrow or as broad as you want and pile on many use cases into a single instance of Amelia, single domain. Such that it becomes almost a universal agent for you or help or for you. Or you could say, look, we are a highly regulated industry, we have to be very narrow and specific, I need data separation, you choose the scope of the implementation that you have. So even now when we think about using large language models to do generative question and answer, you can have that question and answer capability sitting right next to very specific processes and depending on how I ask my question or what I want to know, Amelia can route me to the best way to deliver what I need. And do you, would you, well, you guys, do you prefer to talk to the system or type to the system? Do you have a preference? I think it depends on the scenario, right? And that's where, I mean, I think it's so critical that whether we're talking about our internal customer or external customer, it's showing up where they are. So I don't believe that we'll ever have a time where we don't have a live agent to respond to certain customer needs or patient needs. But what we do have is where we see that there are people who are not, they don't have a heightened sense of urgency around talking to someone. That's not the way that we operate. We want the information to be available to us. We want to be able to self-service as much as we possibly can. But we want to do so in a way that we have confidence around the information that's being returned to us. So having that solution that continues to mature, continues to grow, and it's not, it doesn't come off as being something that's a very canned response, but it's something that's very natural, and it's in response to my specific question or my specific need, is one of the things that, again, the Amelia solution brings to the table. And that's what we all want. Whether it's our personal lives or our business lives, we expect things to be tailored to us. We want to be able to do self-service, but we also need, to your point, to be able to trust. Talk a little bit about, so you've worked with Amelia and UIPAT that now a couple companies, you brought them in, you talked about COVID being a catalyst. What are some of the things that you're achieving now? Like what are some of the key use cases for your current company that these two organizations are going to help you to really dissect? Yeah, I think, as we just continue to look ahead at the way that we've taken the platforms, we've taken the solutions, we bring them together, how can we continue to drive what we saw, which was, I mean, a radical number of $37 million in annualized savings? And that is a huge number, but it's true. It's tangible, it's real. In the labor savings and the efficiency gains and the continued operational gains that are seen across the fleet of retail stores, when we look at the other things that can be done and the way of claims processing and seeing the efficacy of the claims handling, those things continue to mature and grow as well. So, again, you look outside of the enterprise and you look to other lines of business, you look at other industry and the agility that needs to be present, and that's how you start to leverage those technologies as a combined unit. And that's the point, the combined unit. Brandon, talk a little bit about that in terms of the synergies that you alluded to earlier with Emilia, with UiPath, and how did this partnership really originate? What was the catalyst? Yeah, great, probably one of my favorite topics. So, I'll talk about it by persona first. So, when we think about the people writing the code, building out these experiences, even the way that you build out the capabilities in Emilia and UiPath are very similar to the point that if you understand how to write a process with UiPath, it's a minimal additional lift to learn how to write a conversational flow in Emilia. Just, they're adjacent, even in how they're coded. Now, they're both platforms. So, as an administrator, somebody writes that code and I move that code, I promote that code to production, very similar in both platforms. So, again, I have these synergies about how they're the same, and then the same way as the process runs, that's still an Emilia or UiPath-hosted thing that's doing those executions. So, technology-wise, very, very similar. And then the complementary part is what we talked about earlier, where I have this process, I have these capabilities, I've automated, I've invested so much time and effort in automation as a UiPath customer, I can use Emilia to generate more value from that by, as a customer, maybe I'm calling up and requesting an upgrade for something. And Emilia can handle that request, and when it's time to actually do the work, UiPath kicks in, there's that handoff, the work gets done, responded back, and then Emilia can tell me that this is complete. Okay. Go ahead, please. I was just going to say, Shauna, I want to get your perspectives on, in terms of some of the things that were announced, we were talking about really the evolution of UiPath, Daniel Dines was on with Dave earlier today. I didn't get to see you as keen, because we were here, but the evolution of the company, the evolution of the event, what are some of the things that you heard, Shauna, and then I'll get your perspective and sprint in as well, in terms of the enhancements and the evolution of their platform and where they're going with AI at work, anything that stuck out at you in terms of what you heard this week? Yeah, I think it's a level of excitement, that the sense of everyone can appreciate now why we have to be so agile and having that ability to grow to scale, to right size business, we make these sizable investments, we recognize that we're investing time and resources, attention, and from a leadership perspective, when we do that, we want to see the long run, we want to see that that roadmap is something that's going to stick, that there's going to be great success and wins that come for the long run. I think in talking about the way that we're expanding the utilization of AI across enterprise, across the different platforms and being able to bring them together and leveraging our partners more effectively, certainly there was a lot of excitement around that today. And what were some of the things that you heard and saw? You know, I saw the maturing of this idea of making AI accessible and if you look at the history of Amelia and the history of UiPath, AI has been part of the platform and as time goes on, it's a bigger part. It has more capabilities, it's being expanded. And now, today, we're talking about these capabilities as both embedded AI, where it's just behind the scenes doing work, you don't need to be a practitioner, you don't need to know what a large language model is, it's just using that as part of the way that the platform works, but also leveraging AI directly, hitting your own model that you've trained or taking advantage of an industry-specific, large language model that's going to help add more value to the use case. So I think we're really at this point where it's not just a buzzword, it's not a promise that goes unfulfilled, it's part of how we do work. I was looking for that picture of, I don't know if you guys are on the keynote, this one, I know you had to leave, but you saw Bryn Jolson though. Yes, yes. So Eric Bryn Jolson had this chart of the history of, the recent history of AI, you're nodding, did you see it? Okay, and it started with understanding language, and then it just got more advanced, can do math, can take the bar, but things got really compressed in the last four or five years, and so as technologists, I'm curious, in so many industries within tech you have these point products, and then all of a sudden they come together. As a product person and as a practitioner, how do you think about envision AI being embedded in virtually everything you do? And wow, what effect will that have on all these, this tools creep that we've had over the years? You know, I think that's one of the points that we're all trying to find the solve for, and at what point do we even kind of pause a little bit to really, to right size that? I mean, we all find ourselves falling into the trap of layering in and adding on additional technologies and making additional investments, and then maybe the cleanup effort comes a bit later. But I think this is a point in time where we're all collectively talking about it more openly than we have in the past, and we're all looking to find the same solution and the same path forward, and I think this is a great time as technologists and as leaders, and as we really try to understand how we can better grow and scale. I think if anything, COVID most certainly taught us that there's no such thing as a norm in consumer behaviors or the things that we once expected to see in the way of what we had in retail traffic, what we had in patient behavior as well. So I think that looking into how do we get back to, to your point, in being able to right size our tech stack, it's everyone's challenge, so. It's so true, Shana. I mean, we solve complexity with complexity in this industry and just keep layering things on, but it feels like some of that could get blown up, and we're all kind of confronted. We are ripe for disruption right now, right? When you look at the number of new foundation models that are being introduced, if you're not paying attention on a daily basis, you're missing a new company that's come up, that's offering a new capability, and so this acceleration is going to continue, and with it, I think you're going to see a couple trends. One, just our overall AI IQ, if you will, or our automation IQ, it goes up. All of a sudden, we're seeing engineers that are starting to incorporate prompt engineering into their daily life, into how they code. That's just a different level of savviness than even two years ago. So we will continue to raise in our ability to leverage the technologies. I think it's going to get a little tough because so much new technology and new evolution is happening, but that's what the markets are really good at. They're really good at selecting winners. They're good at identifying where the value actually is and companies adjust accordingly. Speaking of adjustments, Shona, as a leader, I'd love to get your perspectives on how do you help the culture of an organization really be receptive, because you're very future forward. You are at your last company, you are here, what you've brought these two companies in to continue to do for you on this automation journey, but how do you help the culture, especially the business folks, really embrace why this change is going to be so impactful and beneficial? Yeah, no, that I think is probably one of the most key factors in the success in the overall journey. Being able to effectively tackle that early days, understanding that the cultural shift, I mean, it really is a shift. Not just acknowledging it, but developing a plan. So establishing that governance council, establishing the intake process. I said something that maybe somewhat frowned upon sometimes, but just because it can be automated doesn't mean that it should be. But qualifying those things, and then making certain that, as an organization, that there's alignment. And from an executive seat, it's one of the challenges that we have to make sure it's when a business is operating well and we're running aggressively and we're profitable, is it really necessary that we go and change up the way that we're doing things? And I think that, again, this is a time where we look at it and if things are going to continue to scale and to grow and to continue to be profitable and we're going to continue to operate effectively and efficiently, we have to have that embedded agility. We have to have these solutions that are already in place within our environment that allow for us to be able to make changes and to pivot very quickly when we see that things are occurring within the macroeconomic impacts that we are experiencing every day. Agility is absolutely key. Thank you both. Oh, sorry. So much disruption, I was going to say. I mean, you can't go through a one-way door. That's right. You're going to be in trouble. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story, what you're doing, what Amelia and UiPath are doing together for helping us understand that and we'll be keeping our eyes on this space because that future forward is moving forward and we are excited to see where you guys go. Thank you for your time. Thank you. We appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks for having us. For our guests and for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, covering day two of UiPath Forward 6. Stay around next is our show wrap with Andy Turai from Constellation Research. Rebecca Knight will join Dave and me. We'll see you in a minute.