 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward 6. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Kelly DeCorti. She is the chief customer officer here at UiPath. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Kelly. Thank you for having me. So before we get started, I want to ask about your role because you are a tech veteran. You were at HPE for many years, Google. You've just joined UiPath in May of this year. How are you finding it? How are things going for you so far? I'm absolutely loving it, actually. So yeah, I've been here since six months, as you say. I'm leading everything to do with customer operations, the partner organization, a lot of our services to support, professional services, industries, enablement, incentive conf, and many other things in between. So really just everything that makes the go-to-market tick. And it's been an awesome ride so far. It's great to be here over the last two days and for the rest of this week with our customers and partners. Do you want to walk us through a little bit about how you work with customers and how you're helping them make this move to automation and AI, especially as AI is moving at this breakneck speed? Yeah, so we've got a lot of customers, as you probably know already. I think at the last county, it was about 10,800. And people are using automation to different extent, but I think even the ones that have been customers for a long time are finding new ways of doing things. So something I think is important for us to actually share the learnings amongst our customer base. So we're doing a lot of customer advisory boards, making sure we're getting out into the markets, making sure people can hear from other customers because that generates ideas as well. We're working on industry use cases to make sure that people can envisage for their industry sort of what are the top five to 10 use cases that automation and AI can be applied to and how they can learn from that as well. So those are just a couple of the examples. And one other thing maybe just to bring to light is the solution accelerators as well. So we've got 60 so far that are published on our marketplace and they really help customers get started. And some of our customers have said that by using them they've sort of shortened the implementation time from maybe weeks down to just a couple of days. So that's been great as well. So you knew Rob when you were at Google? I did, I worked from a Google Cloud. Okay, so we love Google, right? Awesome, we were just at Google next this summer. I wouldn't say it's a sales culture though. It's really an engineering driven culture. It's really product first, product takes care of itself. And it's been interesting to see Rob come over and the impact that he's had with the North Star and that whole thing and so it's working. How do you think about industry go to market specifically in the context of AI and what seems to be the need to have domain-specific or industry-specific capabilities? What's the conversations like six months in with customers and how do you think about that going forward? Yeah, I definitely think that the industry-specific use cases like I mentioned are super important and we decided that we were going to focus on a few to start off with, get those in a really good shape. So financial services, healthcare and life sciences, we focused on manufacturing and telecommunications and in North America we've been focusing on the public sector as well. We started to build out others now like oil and gas and there's actually a former colleague from HP who just joined us in the oil and gas space who I saw today super exciting. But we're starting to build out in other areas as well but we've been working very heavily on our marketing materials, our use cases, our case studies so that people can like repeat and see what other customers are doing and learn from that as well. And how do you think about balancing sort of the direct selling versus the partner selling, the ecosystems, what's your kind of general philosophy? How do you see that evolving? Good question. And in fact I spent all day yesterday with the partners and we really want to have a very partner-first mindset. So we're a software company at the end of the day and whilst we do professional services we really like our partners to be doing the majority of the implementations. So we're going to be focused very much with our services on first of a kind, new growth products, building out as well some level of partner assurance to help the partners be successful as well. And from our partner ecosystem I've literally just been meeting with some just now just really focusing on they're excited, they believe that there's a lot of potential with us and we want them to be able to make money with us as well and have great thriving businesses for the future. You've talked a lot about this drive for use cases and showing how it's actually bringing value to the enterprise. What are the messages that you find are resonating most with customers and what are your findings and how repeatable are they from organization to organization? They're quite repeatable actually. So I think if a customer is doing claims processing or mortgage processing then whilst the process itself may not look identical there's a lot of similarity in terms of sort of the steps that someone will go through. So that's something we can help to accelerate I would say and I'm for sure for those that are willing to share their stories and many are I think customers can learn a lot from what other customers have done and maybe even our own financial services sort of transformation internally so our organization has actually been transforming themselves we saved about $50 million in annual savings that we've actually taken out cost out of our own finance organization by automating processes so even just being able to share those types of use cases with others has been phenomenal. So there's a lot of talk about moving from the extending from the back office to the front office. I think Jarvis is the sales assistant, is that right? Yes. Okay, are you doing it? This is the dog fooding question. Are you doing it internally? How's that working? What kind of response are you getting from customers in the field? Yeah, we've had a number of customers who've been sort of on beta trials for some of these products. I was with British Airways in New York just a couple of weeks ago, my very own favorite airline and they've been using it pretty extensively for all types of use cases. I need to use it within my own support organization to provide better services and faster services to customers as well so we're both using them internally but also having some customers sort of trial things out as well so lots of good progress so far but it's going to be interesting now to take things more formally to market. As a sales executive there's also a lot of talk about how AI is going to change the whole go to market. I was at an LP meeting a couple months ago it was like BDRs are dead. I don't think that's true but I'd be interested in your take, I mean certainly it's changing marketing, making marketing people more productive, I can get ideas, write copy, et cetera. How is it changing the sales function? Actually interesting about BDRs so we've been launching some new sales plays for the second half here now and really been using some AI technologies to help us kind of generate some of the content in a more quick manner and also training our own models so we can build out content in the future much quicker when we know which standard assets we need, when we need them, how we're going to give that to BDRs to kind of help them. I think people still like to speak to a person at least I do but a number of our customers do but being able to move more quickly with those assets, being able to refresh things quicker as well. I think that's a great AI use case. It's the number one question I always ask when you do chat online, are you a bot? Yeah. But their voices are getting so much better. I mean Siri and Alexa are going to sound so lame in a couple years from now because they laugh, they have expressions, it's really true. So how, one of the biggest questions with AI is there's so much resistance or skepticism from the workforce itself because people are nervous and people fear the unknown, that's human. How do you work, how, you mentioned how you're using it in your own organization. How are people, how are the rank and file experiencing AI in terms of how it's helping them do their jobs better? I can give you a very practical example, one that I've really enjoyed since I've started. So I've got my own personal bot who kind of reminds me to do certain things and we're using it in the HR sort of supply chain of information. So both for onboarding, to help you get onboarded quicker. So you know when you start a new organization and you maybe want to ask questions but you don't want to be silly or ask things that maybe you should have read somewhere and you can go in and just type and chat effectively the bot will respond to you with, you know, where you should go, which information you could look at and so on. But it also reminds me of things like people's work anniversaries, which I think is super personable. So and so and so and so has been here for like five years. Why don't you tell them congratulations and maybe follow up with them with a quick Slack and then the Slack's then integrated so you just have to click on it and you're able to respond really quickly. So you look very super engaged. You can do it in just a couple of clicks and just those small things that I think are really powerful for individuals. No, that's key, right? That is like super power. In the early days of sales training when I was younger we remember the book Swim with the Sharks I don't know if you guys ever and it was all about okay, write down their kid's names and their birthdays and you know, it took a lot of work. Right, right. You had to roll a dex. Of course, but those are the tricks because it makes people feel like you care about them. Now you can not only automate that in terms of the reminders, but you can actually have the AI take action for you. If you're not doing that, you're going to be falling behind, right? I mean, you got to really be leaning into that as a sales organization. Exactly. And that's just one process. Now take that automation and your entire company. I think it's just, people talk about is this overhyped? Is it underhyped? I don't know, but I do know this, that the next generation of leaders, your customers, I'm not even talking about technology companies, but them as well. It's the ones who apply automation are going to win. Just like ERP, back in the day. Right, right. You know, if you could have figured out who was going to be the best at implementing SAP, those companies did better. They made more money, their stocks went up. I think the same thing's going to happen here. I loved it when Rob talked this morning about sort of the four day week, getting a little bit of time back. Everyone can get behind that. Oh yeah, I like the idea of that. That would be awesome. I think that's important. We're not about cost savings necessarily only, it's really about allowing people to do more interesting work, allowing people to go into domains or areas where they may not have had the time to do so before because they were doing such a repetitive task. So I think really up-leveling the workforce as well. I think it could almost double your productivity. So in my mind, I'm thinking the eight day work week. Oh my God, give it up. In 50 hours. Come on. How fun would that be? He's not that fun. But I want to ask you about the idea of innovation and how you stay ahead of the curb on all of these things because the pace of change is so dizzyingly fast. How are you maintaining creativity, innovation, ingenuity within your organization? Well, we have the best head of innovation out there of course, Mr. Daniel Dines. I know you're going to have him on the show soon here. So I think it's great now with Rob taking over the sole CEO position from February. Daniel's going to be out to focus exclusively his time on innovation. And let me tell you, he's busy at it already, keeping everyone on their toes in terms of what's next. And having a really long-term vision, not just a short-term vision as well. We also work with a lot of partners in the ecosystem. So we're connected with all of the hyperscalers, as I mentioned yesterday. So not only AWS, Microsoft, and Google, but you saw this morning as well, Anthropic from the LLM perspective and others. So we're just keeping connected with as many organizations as we can so we can sort of become the connective tissue, I guess, and bring all of these things to our customers in a shorter manner, and not have them having to sort of bring all these things together. Yeah, bring that optionality. And Anthropics, they're everywhere. I mean, that's how they're doubled down. And are you getting, I asked, I think I asked Rob this question. Let me ask you as well. Are you getting customers saying, hey, some of our data's in the cloud, some of our data's on-prem. We're thinking about data at the edge in our factory. We want to bring the AI to the data. Are you hearing that? There's latency concerns. There's IP leakage. There's compliance, et cetera. Do you think, first of all, are you hearing that from customers? And how real is that versus the old days of cloud? Are we never going to go into the cloud? It's not secure. And that changed. Well, how do you think? I think, you know, I would say that for new customers, probably about 80% of them are going cloud first. But one of the things that we've offered, and one of the only companies to offer this was having an on-prem and a cloud solution. So we still do have a lot of customers who are actually either in both worlds or some even that are in an on-prem only world. I haven't really heard latency from the customers I've spoken to be so much of an issue. But for sure, customers are concerned always about security, so we have to work through that with them making sure that they fully understand where their data's going to be, how it's going to be utilized, and so on. So that's just a standard approach that we focus on. There's never any issues, but it's just one of the things that we just have to get through as part of the onboarding. Is security a use case for UI path? Maybe not so much, right? Not so much right now. Something we may consider. Because it's, I mean, the security guys are pretty AI savvy. So they're kind of doing it themselves. But things like software testing, obviously. Testing for sure is a huge area for us and a huge area of growth as well. So Kelly, this is your first forward ever. What are the kinds of conversations that you're having as chief customer officer with customers here on the floor and in breakout sessions and on the sidelines? What are you hearing and what are you going to go back to your desk on Monday and get going on? So I've already taken a lot of actions even over the last few hours. I think people, to your point earlier, about sort of getting together in person, it's just a great way. So we may have spoken to each other on the phone before, but we haven't actually met in person and created those connections. And I think people are inspired by a lot of things they see or from stories that they hear other customers telling where they want to jump on that and like, how can I move faster? How can I do better? And with which partners as well, should I be doing that with? So I've been spending time too with the partners in terms of making sure that we've got an action plan by geography, by industry of which partners we're going to operate with, in which segment of the market, in which country around the world and in which industry. So I sort of refer to it a little bit like a matchmaking. So you're trying to matchmake customer partner and UI path to have the best possible outcome. Exciting times. Yeah, indeed, indeed. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. This has been a really great conversation. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Forward Six here in Las Vegas.