 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, covering day one of UiPath Forward 6 from the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Next up we're going to be talking about automation in the financial industry. We've got two guests joining us, from Prudential, Shubro Gupta, VP of Disruptive Technologies, and Thais O'Dwara, VP of Global Financial Services for UiPath. They're both here. Great to have you. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. I love, Shubro, your title is rad, VP of Disruptive Technologies. Talk a little bit about your role before we dig into these cases. Yeah, so I come from a background with process re-engineering, Lean Six Sigma, and I did a lot of work for process improvement, continuous improvement, digital technology, deployment, et cetera, et cetera. And in Prudential I got this opportunity to research on more emerging technology, disruptive technology, and bring them to life. So my role and my team mostly focuses on introducing new technology to business process, and connect the dots between process and technology seamlessly. Talk a little bit about the automation program in your industry at your company. What's been the appetite, the kind of cultural shift mindset that you've seen? Maybe you were talking about the critical success factors, right? Like what actually drives our automation program. So in the last 20 years or so that I have been involved in different programs like this, I feel like the mindset will be driven by delivering four or five key attributes like ROI, return on investment is key, right? How much ROI you are driving through the program is very important. Then you need to think about how much straight through processing you are offering with the automation program? Are you offering a lot of automation that you promised or it's not working as expected? Then you need to think about a lot of business perception. It's not something that is always measured but every time you have automations in production and they don't work, there is a negative perception. So how you manage that, how you ensure that there is less bought downtime, how you have less system downtime, how you manage all those things is very critical. And then I would like to also say that it's extremely important to focus on re-engineering the process before you automate that. Those things together can drive a lot of value for any automation program. Please, I wonder if you could chime in on what you're seeing in the industry broadly. Prior to the pandemic, digital transformation was just kind of a buzzword, a little lip service. And then during pandemic, post pandemic automation, business resilience, digital transformation all came to four. As we came out of the pandemic it was digital transformation and now it's AI. But they're all coming together. And the center of it is data. So what do you see, you service, the financial services industry tends to be very technically astute, leading edge adopters, they're in the money business, so they're first. What are you seeing in terms of the broader trends in terms of the confluence of those things that we used to talk about as buzzwords but now are business mandates? Yeah, so it's actually a really exciting moment in time for financial services. If you think about it, this industry has really operated more or less in the same way for decades and decades, right? And so what we've seen in the last couple of years are, as you mentioned, the pandemic has changed the expectations of customers in terms of how they want to interact with their financial services organizations, the level of digital engagement that they have, the level of personalization of the products and services that they have. And so the industry really needs to react quickly to those changing expectations. The competition's pretty fierce. And so when you think about that in conduct with the fact that all this new technology is really becoming accessible, and you're right, AI is everywhere now. And it's not just a buzzword, it's really important technology to help organizations gain insights, understand what's happening with their customers better, offer better products and services to those customers. And so it's all really starting to converge. And as you mentioned, I actually love this title too. I think Intelligent Automation is the next big disruptor for financial services. If you think about the power that it has to understand the way that the business operates, the intelligence behind that, how the processes are orchestrated, just that kind of knowledge about an organization is super powerful. And then to add on top of that, the ability to think through the AI and to execute through the automation, the combination of those two is really game-changing. So how did Gen AI sort of change the way that you think about technology and the opportunities ahead of you? It's a great question. And I think if I can follow what Thais was saying, when you think about AI and Gen AI, it has a big role to play in the segment where people are today thinking and then doing things, right? So it's more about how AI can be introduced in the space where it is automating regular routine tasks. It is generating a lot of insights and it is also taking away the complex tasks from human beings, which cannot be processed in a very short period of time and allowing human to think on more strategic items. So that's where I feel like Gen AI also will play a big role. It does a fantastic job with summarization. It does a fantastic job with the intent recognition. It does a fantastic job with information-related inquiries, right? So if you think about the industry, a lot of interactions are all about interactions with information, interactions with issue resolution, interactions with transaction processing. But when you think about Gen AI, it can actually help you automate that entire segment of interactions with information seeking. You want some information, you get it with augmentation with Gen AI. So in my mind in the future, more than having the right answer, it is very important to have the right question. And that's how you will be integrating automation to the power of AI. I see two broad vectors. I know there's hundreds of use cases, but I can use these off-the-shelf tools and they're safe if I use them the right way and I interpret the answers the right way. I can be more productive. I can get ideation. But also I want a piece of that action. I want to build my own. And that's a data problem. How do you think about that as a technologist? So I think you to a great extent answered that part, right? That it's a data problem, but it's a data problem for a structured data or an unstructured data. The structured data problem has always been solved for a period of time, right? If it's a structured data, the input goes into the automation, it goes smoothly. Unstructured data is where we had problem. And with Gen AI and with all the other training that we are doing with AI-led tools, we will be able to convert a lot of unstructured data to a structured data and then fed that into Automation Engine. Can you share the automation journey at the organization? Where did you start? What were some of those critical success factors of where you started and where are you today? And how is UiPath at the facilitator? Yeah, I think it's more to do with how you can start small and scale rapidly. I think the platform with UiPath and its ability to bring in modern technology interventions with any of the companies like what I'm working for is great. So it brings in seamlessly the platform capabilities which you can integrate with and scale rapidly. That's where I see the benefit. Tell us, comment on some of the, we often talk about some of the barriers to automation, but I would like for you to talk about some of the key elements to success with automation that you're seeing in the insurance and financial industry. So there's a couple of things that are really important I think for customers to think about when they think about how to take advantage of this technology. Some of them are things that really kind of apply to a lot of different types of enterprise initiatives. For example, having the right kind of sponsorship, having the right kind of business engagement because they're often the benefactors of the value that you get as a result of using the technology. But one of the things I think is really important as well is the connection to the strategy for the organization. This is a key enabler of making that strategy happen. And so to the extent to which you can align those two together will make a much more successful program. And then lastly, I would also say that taking advantage of this end to end really creates a much more powerful impact on each company. So rather than let's say taking a piece of a process or a process in just one area over here and possibly over there, thinking about it holistically as an enterprise platform, a core part of the architecture for the organization is the best way to drive that kind of value. So given your title, I have a question. I've been noodling this since Gen AI and thinking about UI path. How do you think about Gen AI as a disruptor to, I mean, RPA I think is probably more clear but automation is a little less clear. And I guess what I'm ultimately asking is your advice to a UI path as to how to make Gen AI, specifically in AI, generally a tailwind versus a disruptive headwind. I feel like it's going to be all connected to what Thais just said, the end to end process. You look into things from an end to end holistic perspective, identify the hotspots where you want to introduce Gen AI versus where you can actually automate the process. It's more like Gen AI will be the brain and the automation will be more like the muscles in the hand, right? It's a cycle of do, think and learn. You need to still take action with all the intelligence that you will get from Gen AI and without those actions, you will not be able to drive out of it. So in my mind, it's more about how you integrate Gen AI with different automation technologies, not only UI path, but in any organization, there can be multiple other ways to automate the process, integrate both, then you see the best results. I'd also add to that, that one of the things that's really important to remember is that this is additive to what employees bring to work. If you think about what people spend their time on and it's potentially tasks or emails or documents, that's not the biggest value that they bring. It's really their minds and their ability to think critically and their judgment. And so this kind of technology really enables people to take some of the other type of work off of their plate, have that automated for them, so they can concentrate on the areas that bring a lot of value to their organizations. And so I think that's what creates that kind of tailwind that you were talking about, is thinking about it as a supplement additive, an extra set of hands and brain for a specific individual to be able to be as effective as possible. Really kind of driving that capacity, that mental creative capacity. Sorry, Shubha, go ahead. No, I wanted to mention one thing. The platform, UiPath, has got some cool components of task mining and process mining. I think those are great tools for any organization to use. It helps you to identify all those tasks that people are doing and categorize them in logical skill groups. We are doing that. For example, if we need to see all the work activities happening in our organization and try to group them in terms of how much of those activities are related to fetching information from different places. How much of that activities are related to data entry in the system of records. How much of those activities are more about research, right? Once you have that view, it is easy for you to understand where you will do GNI, where you will do GNI and RPA, et cetera, et cetera. But having that initial lens of end to end process with the power of task mining and process mining, I think it's critical to success. And how do you do that categorization? Is that something that the platform does or is that another tool? No, it's a platform as well as the domain. You cannot ignore the domain. The platform is going to give you the ability to collect more data, but you still need the domain to do the categorization and train the data over a period of time so that it can be done automatically. So it's the power of large data, right? What task mining and process mining is doing is, it is capturing all those different scenarios and bringing in higher degree of confidence to your analysis. And I want to add to that, because I think he's absolutely right in terms of taking advantage of capabilities like that. If you think about large organizations, many of them don't really know how many processes operate. These things can be opaque, people can be doing things on the side that help augment their jobs in different ways. But just to have the understanding of the way that the business is operating is so powerful for organizations. You can't change what you don't know, right? And so discovery of that, understanding of that, really is the first step in order to make things better than they were before in order to drive the efficiencies, manage the risk, even grow the business and drive new innovation in the organization. And you know, it's interesting, I did a lot of work in the financial services and insurance industry before theCUBE and it wasn't uncommon that Jennifer was responsible for the business process and she had a giant book of all the business processes. Of course, you know, they would change and she'd have to somehow keep up with that. I mean, that was impossible to get that right. And now we live in this digital age, things are changing daily, multiple times a day potentially. I can take one quick example with my experience again in the industry, in insurance, in banking, in financial services, you will find processes which are there, managed by many people, they are doing handling of males that came back to the company because of long address. Now think about that kind of a process. If you don't discover those kind of process which are like mundane and not very value added for the employee, but it is required from a regulatory standpoint, who will be motivated to do that particular male handling job over a period of 10, 15, 20 years. That's where the mindset is changing, right? You can automate those work to actually use those people to focus more on AI, more on automation. And the dependencies, all the dependencies associated with that. Oh, the check never got cached and so we have to get in touch with that person. They've moved to address and so it's very complicated to do that manually. It's virtually impossible to get right. Yeah, that's right. And I think even above and beyond some of the efficiency benefit that you get from that, this is a highly regulated industry, right? The burden of proof that needs to be maintained in order to assure customers that their financial lives are managed with safety and soundness is really, really high. And that bar continues to rise for a lot of organizations. And so just to have the understanding and the ability to use capabilities that we offer at UiPath in order to help manage those risks, help manage your control environment, find and detect errors that you might have overlooked before. Those are really impactful organizations. It has impact from everything from monetary fines all the way through to their brand and their reputation. And so there's a lot of different ways in which this adds value to companies that goes above and beyond what I think is the sort of backbone or bread and butter, which has to do with the operational efficiency component. Great point, KYC, anti-money laundering, crypto scams, I mean, things are changing so quickly. Huge impact. Thank you both so much for joining us on theCUBE, talking about the impact that Automation and AI are having in the financial and insurance industry. Huge, I wish we had more time, but we'll have to have you guys back because I know we could keep unpacking this. But thank you for your insights. Thanks a lot. Thank you guys. Our pleasure. For our guest and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of day one UI path forward six from Las Vegas. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute. We'll see you then.