 From New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Automation Anywhere, Imagine. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Midtown Manhattan at Automation Anywhere, Imagine 2019. We were here last year for the first time. We're really excited to be back. Since we were here, I think they raised like $550 million. The RPA space is going bananas and it's a really exciting place to be both for the company and also for us at CUBEs. We're excited to be back and we got a return visit from last year. She's Needy Mehta. She's the co-founder, which we always love to get co-founders, SVP brand strategy and culture. Welcome back. Good to see you again, Jeff. Absolutely. So first off, congratulations. I mean, what a move you guys have made in only one short year. Thank you. The space has really taken off and we're very excited to see the growth. So we're excited to talk about the technology all day long, but you're getting involved in some of the little higher level discussions, which are really, really important. We see it in AI and these are the conversations, I think are much more important and that's about ethics and how are these tools being used? What do people need to think about when they're using their tools? We don't just want to codify bad behavior or bad biases or bad ways of doing things in the past. That doesn't help. So what are you thinking about? How are you helping customers? What are some of the things they should be thinking about in this space? So two things. One is, I think society unfortunately has had a lot of unconscious bias in a lot of different ways. It may not be intentional. It may be something that is inherent in the way we behave as a society or as a community or a race, religion, as a gender, it doesn't matter. And somehow when we do AI and machine learning and we are training these bots, when we feed all this data to them, there are two things that AI helps us with. One is we get to see it outside in. So we are looking at it as how the data is looked upon by the machine and these biases become a little bit more obvious to us than otherwise. And then two, we can actually take that as a learning point and fix those biases so that we are not always targeting the most populous religion or the most populous race or the most populous gender at that point. But we're looking at it absolutely gender neutral or race neutral or religion neutral and so forth. So AI really helps in those two things. One is it allows you to see it and identify it. And two, it allows you to rectify it as you're training these bots to make certain decisions using the analysis and the data that they have at their disposal. I'm curious how the outside in kind of exposes it because for a lot of people, they don't see it, right? That's why the term unconscious bias. So is it in kind of the documentation that you maybe never really had to write it down or what are some of the things that suddenly surface oh, I didn't really realize we were doing that. So two things, one again in that sense, the data that we had, there was a lot of data. So having AI and machine learning actually helps us digitize that data. And that means we have a lot more data that can be analyzed, first of all, which was not possible before. And second, we can actually look at that data and cut it and dice it in any way we want to to kind of see those biases a little bit more. When you couldn't have digitized data, then how are you going to have one human brain, for example, look at all the data that was not digitized and analyze it without the digitization, and then actually find analysis around that or biases around that. So it really does help to digitize that data. And for example, automation anywhere's IQ bot helps you digitize dark data or hidden data and convert it to digitized data. And then you can analyze it and do things with that data that you could never before. So one of the things that came up here at a great keynote this morning, a lot of stuff I could go on for probably two hours. But one of them is really rethinking this concept of what a bot is as a digital assistant or even a digital employee and thinking of it not as something that's going to replace what I do per se, but it's just another tool in my toolbox, just like I have a laptop, I have mobile phone, I have Salesforce, I have all these other systems and really thinking of it more that way to offload some of this mundane, kind of soul-crushing work that unfortunately takes up way too much of all of our time. Very different approach than this is a substitute for what I do now. Technology is always a human enabler and this is extremely important. So the RPA and the Digital Workforce is something we believe that every human who's working could leverage and enable themselves to get to that new level of creativity, the innovation, get rid of the repetitive and mundane and do things that you never could before or you never could get to because of a time perspective. And so it's extremely important for people to utilize this to actually help themselves, their careers, their teams, their divisions, their organizations and their societies to get to the next level. Right, and open up this productivity gain because the other thing I think is really funny is all this conversation about robots taking jobs and yet companies have thousands and thousands of open recs, they can't hire enough people even with the technology. And I'm always drawn to this great interview we did at Google Cloud a couple of years ago where when they were starting to scale they realized they could not do it with people. They just couldn't hire fast enough and had to start incorporating software-defined automation or else they could never take advantage of that. We're seeing that here and here and that's really part of the whole story and why RPA is so exciting right now is because you're an enabler for productivity force multiplier. That's right, and a lot of businesses have certain things that are inherent in their industries. For example, there might be a seasonality requirement or there might be a requirement where they suddenly have a surge of customers and so forth. And in order to stock that many claims or accounts that they're opening or whatever their process is doing in order to get that many humans onboard them, train them, at least give them a breathing space to get onboard and actually be responsive to that organization, you can help them by having bots to kind of bridge that gap and allow them to be successful. Right, another interesting statement here. I got great notes again, it was a terrific keynote. He talked about only 4% of US jobs require a medium level of creativity and I was struck, I remember being in grade school and we watched a movie about people in an auto manufacturing plant, just the worst kind of monotony that they were doing this one guy used to load cars on a train and every once in a while he would just drop one on purpose or run the forklift to it just to kind of break up his day. So again, the purpose is not to replace but to really enable people to start to use their brains and be more creative. It is to unleash the human potential and that is what automation will do for it. Now you guys have recently came out with some new research, I wonder if you can give us some of the highlights on some of your new research. Absolutely, so last year we worked with the Goldsmiths University of London to see if automation, and we believe so but we wanted to see and validate that automation actually did make work more human. So did people actually free themselves of their repetitive and mundane and become more creative and innovative and solve problems that they wanted to and they couldn't before and the answer was overwhelmingly yes. So this year we went the next step in that research and we did a second wave of research where we said, what do organizations, what are the challenges organizations will face if they want to implement this automation and unleash that human potential and you should read the research, it's on our website but it was very, very interesting. 72% of people didn't believe that AI or machine learning or automation would be taking over their jobs. Yet only 38% of them were exposed or had the opportunity to work with this. So the potential is enormous. Technology has to be an organizational change, that's another thing that came out of the research and corporations should work towards it but I think this research was very insightful. Please do look at it. I think it'll be very useful to you. Right, so one of the announcements too that came out today was about the community addition. And I think that's a really interesting play, right? Because you're introducing a freemium. So people, myself, individuals, I think, educations, small businesses have access to your whole suite for free. I'm sure there was some interesting conversations internally to really make that leap but it really supports kind of your theme of the democratization of the automation which we hear over and over around data and a lot of pieces of the stack. And so obviously the bigger picture, the bigger opportunity far outweighs a couple of bucks of revenue from this small company or that small company. I wonder if you can kind of share some of the thought behind that. Absolutely, this was always part of the strategy but it was part of the strategy to do it at the right time when the technology was mature and robust enough, one. But when we could actually allow and give that opportunity to every human who wanted to get rid of the repetitive and mundane, give them the opportunity to be better at what they do, to create more and innovate more. And so we're very excited about it. We've had such great response from the market on it and the idea from the beginning, and I think we are very committed to it and automation anywhere is to create opportunity for automation for everyone. That's great. So last question, Nithi, what are you working on in 2019? I mean, I don't expect you to raise another hundred, another half a billion dollars. Great, great year from last time. What are some of your priorities as we look at the balance of 2019? I think this industry is under tremendous growth. I think we are seeing a lot of results for the customers and for employees. And so we are very, very excited. I think it's a great time for the industry. It will create a lot more innovation. We'll have a lot more new things coming out this year, a lot more engagement from all over the world. And it's a super exciting time to be in this industry. Great. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day and for having us back here at the show. Absolutely my pleasure. All right. Thanks, Nithi. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019 in Midtown Manhattan. Thanks for watching. See you next time.