 From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. UiPath, Forward 4, it is so great to be sitting in an anchor desk next to Dave and with guests in person. We're going to be talking about automation workforce of the future. I've got two guests here with Dave and me. Kevin Krohn is here, intelligent automation and digital upskilling leader from PWC. Kevin, welcome. Thank you. Can't wait to talk about upskilling. I'm excited. And Bettina Koblik is here, the chief people officer at UiPath. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. So as I understand it, PWC has embedded UiPath into a couple of product offerings. One of them we're going to talk about today, Kevin, that's ProEdge. Talk to me about that. What is that? Sure, so as we look at challenges that C-suite leaders are facing, I think one of the biggest emerging challenges right now is around the topic of upskilling. There's the number of jobs that are being displaced is growing by automation, but on the flip side, the number of jobs that are emerging is actually greater. And there is a consistent challenge that gets cited. There are all of our research, there are CEO survey, there work we've done with the World Economic Forum and other sources around the need to fill that gap. And most leaders feel like they're not doing a good job to fill that. So we at PWC have invested in developing a new software product called ProEdge, which is really focused on identifying the skills needed for the future, teaching those skills and helping to scale the usage of the skills in the organization. And one of the key skills as we look at the digital space is UiPath. And we really think that teaching non-technologists around the use of tools like robotic process automation is going to be one of those critical, kind of must-have skills in the future. And Bettina, you guys are using ProEdge? Yeah, we're using it. Why? I mean, you're like the automation pros. What do you need? We need it because we have the same challenges that every other company has that introduces automation, right? People's time, their tasks that they have been doing are basically displaced. And we're trying to figure out how do we upskill, re-skill? How do we position people who now no longer are working on maybe 50% of what they've done in the past for their next role? So it's incredibly important for us. You know this well, Bettina and Kevin, you as well. When the automation trend, RPA firsthand, everybody's like, oh, the trade has come on, it's going to take away jobs and blah, blah, blah. Now we're working perpetual work days, right? We have all weekend, all night, you never stop working, you're always on. So I think people will brace automation. But as the chief people officer, first of all, how was it getting through the pandemic? And have you seen, I presume that UiPath folks embrace automation, of course, it's in your DNA. But have you seen others sort of, is that narrative done and has COVID affected that? I think COVID has affected it for a number of reasons because so many things shifted in how we do work. Number one, and I can talk about that a little more, but yesterday I was in a customer advisory board meeting actually with Kevin, and the biggest conversation was not about the technology. It was around what happens when automation is introduced to a company and what happens with people as to whether they want, they're willing to adopt, embrace, have an automation mindset. So that conversation isn't done at all. And it's probably one of the biggest conversations after adopting the technology, trying to introduce it as how do you drive adoption? And a lot of that is people's ability to understand how it will make their life easier, but then not be afraid about what's next. So I think it's absolutely still a conversation. I don't know if you feel the same. Yeah, it's been interesting, I think, during the pandemic because people's day-to-day work lives have gone upended and they start to think about the mixture between what I'll call kind of transaction-oriented type work versus analytical type work. And I think historically everyone's like, I said we should do less transaction work and more analytic work, but I think the pandemic has almost forced that conversation on steroids and people had to figure out that like, I don't want to do this type of work and I'm more demands on me and I'm being asked to do other things, how can I do this more effectively? And so part of this becomes learning these skills to automate the things in front of you right now, but part of this becomes I need to be able to actually have that analytical skill set in the future. And I think that is almost a precursor for what we see happening and that was the fun part of the conversation yesterday is thinking about, okay, well what is the counting analyst role five years from now and what someone does today versus what someone does in five years and how do you actually plan for that? So Bettina, where in your organization, who's using it and talk to me about the adoption and their willingness to embrace it? Yeah, so we've introduced it to our finance organization, one of the reasons we did that is because our finance organization is also a big user of automation, right? So what's been really interesting is that because the technology or because Pro-Edge kind of takes biases out of mapping what a person can do, what learning paths there are for them and what their job will look like in the future and which job do they go to or could be a potential path. I think it actually motivates people much beyond having work shifting because of automation because in addition, you also get to see a path, right? And everywhere you turn, people just want to know what's the possibility for the future. So while I'd like to say it was genius for us to envision that, it's a pleasant surprise and something we should talk about more. I'm sensing a journey, it's always the case, where I know, I call it the force march to digital, we were thrown into this and so so much was unknown and I know our team, I mean our producers, it's death by a thousand paper cuts. Any one individual thing is not that bad but you add them up and that's what kills your work day, your work week and your mental health. And so maybe that's kind of the starting point is that RPA is a band-aid for that fundamental but then it's, wow, the light bulb goes off, I can see the potential, that's where the digital upscaling comes in. I mean, maybe that's oversimplifying it but how do you see that journey? Yeah, I think there's a couple of different pieces with this because it goes back to the divide between the things you need to do now and how do you think about making your life easier but then it really goes to what you need to do in the future and that journey to actually get there is tough because it's not just a question of, hey, I need to pick up a textbook or pick up an online training module and I'm just going to become an expert. It's really thinking about what's the combination of different skills I need to learn? Some of that's going to be hands-on technical skills, it's going to be platforms like UiPath, it may be other complimentary platforms in the analytics space and other things. Some of this may also be on the kind of softer side, how do I learn, how to work in a more agile way and have a design thinking mindset, have a product mindset. But then it's really how is that going to change my role in the future and how do I actually, for lack of a better word, start to embed these practices in my job in a way that I'm actually learning these skills and it will stick and how do you actually manage that culture change, for lack of a better word over time? That was probably the biggest thing I picked up from yesterday was just some of this talk around change management and culture which is, we have a lot of for lack of a better work techie except this conference who like to think about all the cool stuff that technology is doing, but the big lesson learned is really, you actually have to make the stick inside an organization. In the last year, Kevin, I'm curious about the adoption because everything, we've seen so much acceleration in the last year, the digital acceleration, the acceleration in automation. We've also seen tremendous upheaval and from a cultural perspective. I'd love for you to shed some light on what you've seen since you've rolled this product out. How is the pandemic, has it been an enabler of that change management and that cultural change which historically is very hard to do? It's very hard and I think this, if I went to a CFO or COO two years ago and talked about the skills gap and what was happening in the organization, I would probably get someone that would yawn and say, okay, yeah, that is happening. We need to think about this but I got 50 other things I need to worry about. I think over the past year or while, things like, what time is a big luxury or having excess time is a big luxury that most people don't have, I think there's a recognition that it's a challenging work environment right now. We're trying to get more done. People are not in person. People have, there's issues with mental health and other challenges and there's almost like a renewed focus on how do we make employees' lives better and better can mean different things but what I think about it is it's giving people hope that they have a future career path that their job is not gonna be eliminated that they're developing the right skills and they're being given the capacity to actually do that now. And so a lot of the discussions have really been around that fact and I would say probably more so than the traditional just cost saving discussion that most automation threads with our PA begin with. This really became, we need to do this and we need to send a message to our employees that we really care about you and this is something that is really gonna be us investing in you as a perk in the future. What's the role of the head of human capital management in the context of automation? Is she the champion? Is she the therapist? Is she the change agent? How do you see that? Well, clearly he should have been talking to the head of people two years ago, even because the way I think about it and I think a lot of people in my role think about it is you know, a CFO really looks after the financial health of the company. The focus for us is looking after the people health of the company, right? And so I think in my career what I've learned is that change is constant. We all know this and change for people is difficult. So the way I think about introducing new technology, introducing automation, introducing anything that changes or being forced to change because of something like a pandemic, what I really end up thinking a lot about is how does that impact people and how do we help them through it? So that's my lens and I think that's a chief people officer lens to all of this but makes a perfect partnership with platforms that make this easy for us. Because if you can imagine a C-suite person comes to an HR department and says, tell me what we should do here. How do we develop all our people? And it's an overwhelming task. What ProEdge does is just beautifully delivers this on a platter in a way that we could never do manually. So it's fantastic. Talk to me a little bit Bettina about the last year and a half and obviously as being the chief people officer you came in, you said about five months ago but obviously during a very, very challenging time I always think that the employee experience is directly related to the customer experience. I see them as inextricably linked. How have you been able to foster a good employee experience in your time here in a very strange world so that the customer experience I mean you guys are a fast moving company 8,000 plus customers so that that customer experience is as stellar as UI path has always had to be. Yeah, I think for us it came down to just some simple things. One, it's just being flexible. There was not a one size fits all. We had to recognize that we have to meet people in a place that works for them. Everybody dealt with a different reality and the same for our customers. And I agree with you. I think employees that feel enabled, that feel safe, that feel they have a future have a much different relationship with their customers than employees that are worried about their safety and security and whatnot. So we really took an approach of flexibility, safety, meeting people where they are, jumping in when there were big crises in India and whatnot to really, really take care of our people and help them understand that we're here for them. Big impact on mental health. Did you see that? There was an insert in the Wall Street Journal, I think it was last week, women at work. And it was a stat in there. I don't know if you're a working mom, but it said that 30, it was Qualtrics was the source. 30% of working moms said their mental health had declined since the pandemic. Interestingly only 15% of working dads. So that was sort of interesting and notable. But to your point, CFO, financial health of the company, the chief people officer, the human capital health. Yeah, very much so. And by the way, I'm not surprised by that stat. As a woman. I thought it was low. I was talking to my wife about it the other day and she's not a working mom, but she's like, my mental health, even though I'm not a working mom, my mental health, I'm a working dad, but I got it easier than she does. But and I'm not surprised at the disparity, I'm surprised that the only 30% and 15% I think it's a lot higher than that. And people maybe just like, I don't know, that's actually maybe some people like working at home and that's I could see that both sides of that equation. Yeah, they do, but there's also a stigma around mental health that we've that's been addressed and even during the Olympic coverage this last summer, but having your team be really focused and enabled and knowing that they, to your point, Kevin, from an upscale perspective, that they have a path where they can go, they can increase their own value to the company is huge, completely agree. And I think other studies show that what people really want is a future at work. And this is what I think, Pritch, addresses beautifully. Yeah, and it's interesting, right? Because I think when you talk about some of the mental health challenges, I think you can get down very quickly to okay, I'm just on this crazy schedule where I'm on Zoom for 14 hours a day and I don't have time to breathe and my time commuting where I may have had time to decompress has just been replaced with more meetings. And I think that that may be the surface issue, but I actually think if you go below the surface, not being in the office, not having some in-person networking, not having some of that creates anxiety about the future and you're not really sure around, okay, what does my career path look like? I may not be getting the amount of career counseling that I used to get just by impromptu conversations or just by more traditional ways. But I think the reality is when we look at the way most companies are thinking about their future work models, it's not going to go back to the way the world operated two years ago. We're going to be in some sort of hybrid model and so it really becomes more important to actually dig below where maybe some of the challenges were in the past and just not surfaced. And I think upskilling and thinking about kind of skills and roles, it just becomes a much more important conversation. Absolutely. Last question, Bettina, for you, we're almost out of time, but you started this in financial, in the finance organization. What do you see over the next couple of years in terms of being very much a UI path, land and expand with your customers? Where do you see it rolling out across UI path? We're already talking to our sales enablement group for a couple of reasons. We want them to experience it. We want them to have, also, we want them to have the conversations with our customers much like what we learned yesterday. It's a multi-dimensional conversation. It's not just a financial ROI, it's a people journey change management. So we're taking it to our sales enablement group. We're absolutely going to use it in HR, obviously. And I would just think we'll use it in two years, it'll be enterprise-wide. How different is ProEdge in the marketplace and just particularly in terms of its business impact? Yeah, I think it's to have, so when we think about the challenge in a topic like digital upskilling, I think in traditional approaches to learning, it would be okay we're going to enroll someone in a learning program, you're going to go through, do a certain amount of self-study, maybe there's some classroom-based training, and that's it. I think for us, we saw two different challenges on both sides of that. One was trying to identify who needs to learn what and what part of the organization and why is that important. What an executive may need to learn is going to be different from what someone who does transaction processing for their full-time job needs to learn and learning from basic digital acumen through hands-on skills. What are the different pieces? I think probably the more interesting part is the backend of that and thinking about how do you actually put these skills into practice and how do you put it scale. One of the buzzwords that's thrown around at this conference a lot is the concept of citizen-led automation as a topic and really how do you have your business users building bots or creating data dashboards or doing other things. That's challenging. So as we designed the product, what we really wanted to think about was that end-to-end journey from kind of the point of identifying skills through the point of scaling a citizen-led effort. It's one of the things we're really excited to be working with UI Path on is one of the core technologies that we view in this ecosystem is really thinking about how do you make that happen and if the outcome is not just people learn new things but the outcome are people are actually creating solutions that are having an impact on their job on a day-to-day basis. We think that's a really powerful concept. It's really important work what you guys are doing. Thank you both for joining David, me on the program today talking about this very interesting symbiotic relationship, partners, PwC, UI Path, customers. Really interesting, great work that you're doing. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas at the Bellagio at UI Path Forward 4. We'll be right back, stick around.