 From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to Las Vegas. The CUBE is here. We've been here for two days covering UiPath. Forward 4, Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We've talked about automation in many industries. Now this segment is going to focus on automation and healthcare. We've got two guests joining us. Jim Petrasi, CTO of Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Jaijit Daliwal, the global CIO industry lead at UiPath. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you. So let's start unpacking from the CTO level and the CIO level the agenda for automation. Jim, let's start with you. What does that look like? For us, it's actually pretty strategic and part of, as we think about digital and what digital transformation means, it actually plays a pretty key role. There are a lot of processes that can be very manual within a big organization like Blue Cross Blue Shield and to be able to streamline that and take away kind of what I would call the mundane work, the going through a spreadsheet and then typing it into a screen, there are a lot of processes like that that are legacy. But what if you could take that away and actually create a better work experience for the people that work there and focus on higher value type things and it's really key. It goes down to our business, folks. There are a lot of things we can drive with automation. We started a program in 2019 that's been quite successful. We now have 250 bots. We measure what we call annualized efficiency gain. So how much efficiency are we getting by these bots? So the bots are doing this repetitive work that people would do. And what we're finding is we've got about $11 million in annualized efficiency gain through the process and we're just getting started. But we're not stopping there, too, though. We're enabling citizen developers. So we're saying, hey, business, if you want to automate parts of your job, we're going to help you do that. So we've got about 60 people that we're training. We run botathons where they come together and they actually create bots. And it's really creating some impact and buzz in our business. Jiji, from your lens, where does automation fit within the CIO's agenda and how do you work together in unison with the CTO to help roll this out across the enterprise? Yeah, no definitely. And in fact, as a part of introduction, I can actually share that how I'm wearing a CIO hat within UiPath since I'm just joining UiPath and I'm actually now helping the client CIOs in their automation strategy. But I was a deputy CIO in my prior role at LA County where actually I ran the automation strategy. So if we look it from our organization perspective, be it complex as LA County, which is such a federated organization. From a CIO perspective, the way we look at the strategies, it's always driven by the business goals of the city or a county. And we typically drive into three different areas. One is how we can transform our operational processes so that we can save the tax dollars. It's all about doing more with the less dollars. And then second is about how we can transform our residents' experience. Because end of the day, it is all about how we can improve the quality of life for our residents, serving a 10 million people for LA County, a largest populous county in U.S. So it was an uphill task to serve such a diverse population need. And then the third area is about how to transform the new business models because as we are moving away from a government-centric approach to the resident-centric approach, you really need to come up with a new digital solutions. And CIO is in a center of all these three elements when you look at it. So it's a very uphill task to keep improving your efficiency and then at the same, keep adding the new digital solutions. And that's where automation strategy is kind of a horizontal strategy which enables all these components. So what I hear from that is alignment with the business. Yep, right? Change management. Absolutely. That's like really fundamental. And then the CIO is this agent of transformation. You can see here she has a horizontal purview across the organization. Now, Jim, the CTO role, is the automation at Blue Cross Blue Shield led by you? Or are you there to make sure the technology plugs into your enterprise architecture? What's your role there? You know, my role is really to drive what I'll call technology enabled business change, right? So I actually started our automation journey at HCSC and I did that by partnering with our business. There was actually a lot of buzz around automation and there were actually some small pockets of it. None of it was enterprise scale, right? And we really wanted to go big in this and working with the business sponsors, they saw value in it. And we've generated a lot of efficiency, better quality of work because of it, but I very closely had to partner with our business. We have a committee that is led of business folks that I facilitate. So I view my role as an enabler. We have to communicate. The change management pieces is huge. The education, just having a common vernacular on what does automation mean, right? Because everybody interpreted it differently. And then being able to do it at an enterprise scale is quite challenging. You know, I really enjoyed one of the keynotes. I don't know if you had a chance to see Schunker Badankin from the hidden brain, right? But he talked a lot about the brain aspect and how do you get people to change? And that's a large part of it. There's a lot about technology, but there's really a lot about being a change agent and really working very closely with your business. How does one measure, I'm hearing a lot. Time saved, hour saved. How does one measure that and quantify the dollar impact? Which by the way, I'm on record of saying the soft dollars are way bigger. But when you're talking to the bottom line CFO and it's all about the cash flow, whatever it is, how do you measure that? I can take it. So what we do is as we define these use cases, right? We go through an actual structure process where we gather them. We then rate them and we actually prioritize them based on those that are going to have the biggest impact. And we can tell based on what is the manual effort today? So we understand there are X number of people that do this X number of days and we think this bot can take that some load off of them, right? So we go in with the business case and then the UIPath platform actually allows us to measure well how much is that pot running, right? So we can actually sit there and say, well we wanted that thing to run 10 hours a day and it did and it's generated this kind of efficiency because otherwise a human would have had to do that work. So the business case is kind of redeploying human hours, right? It is really maximizing human capital and really using, because the bots do repetitive stuff really well. They don't do higher level thinking and we don't view it as replacing people. We view it as augmenting and actually making them more efficient and more effective at what's up. But how do you get the dollars out of that? Well, a couple of ways, right? And so one of the things we've done is we create and measure the efficiency. Our business users, and finance by the way is one of our bigger ones and the CFO is one of the sponsors of the program, can decide how do we invest it. In a lot of cases it is actually cost avoidance as we grow, literally being able to grow without adding staff, I mean that's very measurable. In some cases it is actually taking, you know, cost out in certain cases. But a lot of times that's just through attrition, right? You don't backfill positions, you let it happen naturally. And then there's just things that happen to your business that you have to respond to. I'll give you a great example. State of Texas passes what's the equivalent of the No Surprises Act, but they did it there before the federal government did it. But it requires a lot of processes to be put in place because now you have providers and payers having to deal with disputes, right? It actually generates a boatload of work. And we thought there might be, you know, 5,000 of these in the first year. Well there were 21,000 in the first year. And so far this year we're doubling that amount, right? We were able to use automation to respond to that without having to add a bunch of staff. If we had to add staff for that, it would have literally been, you know, maybe hundreds of people, right? And but now, you know, you can clearly put a value on it and it's millions of dollars a year that we would have otherwise had to expect. The reason I'm harping on this, Lisa, is because I've been through a lot of cycles, as you know. And after the dot-com boom, the cost avoidance meant not writing the check to the software company, right? And that's when Nick Carr wrote to ZYT Matter. And then, you know, post the financial crisis we've entered a decade plus of awareness on the impact of technology. And I wonder if it's, I think this, I think this, the cycle is changing. I think, and I wonder if you have an opinion here. I do. Where people, I think organizations are going to look at technology completely different than they did, like in the early 2000s when it was just easy to cut. Now I think the other point I will add to it, I agree with the Jim, so we typically look at ROI but ROI doesn't always have to be the cost, right? If you look from the outcomes of the value, there are other measures also, right? If you look at the how automation was able to help in the COVID, it was never about cost at that time. It was about a human lives. So you always may not be able to quantify it, but you look at, okay, how are we maximizing the value or what kind of situations we are in where we may not even have a human power to do that work and we are running against the time. It could be the compliance needs. I'll give an example of our COVID use case, which was pretty big success within LA County. We deployed bots for the COVID contact tracing program. So we were actually interviewing all the people who were testing positive so that we actually can keep track of them and then bring back that data within REHR so that our epidemiologists actually can look at the trends and see how we are doing as a county as compared to other counties and nationally. And we were in the peak, we were interviewing about 5,000 people a day and we had to process that data manually into our EHR and we deployed 15 members to do that and they were doing like about 600 interviews a day. So every day we had a backlog of 2,500 interviews. So it is not about a cost saving or a dollar value here because nobody planned for these unplanned events and now we don't have a time and money to find more data entry operators and bots were able to actually clear up all the backlog. So the value which we were able to bring it is way beyond the cost element. I believe that 100% and I've been fighting this battle for a long time and it's easier to fight now because we're in this economic cycle even despite the pandemic. But I think it can be quantified. I honestly believe it can be tied to the income statement or in the case of a public sector, it can be tied to the budget and the mission, how that budget supports the mission of the company. I really believe it. And I've always said that those soft factors are dwarf the cost savings. But sometimes the CFO doesn't listen because he or she has to cut. But I think automation could change that. For public sector, we look at how we can do more about it. So it's because we don't look at bottom line. It's about the tax dollars. We have limited dollars. But how we can maximize the value which we are giving to residents. Sure, it is not about a profit for us. We look at a different lens when it comes to the commercial side. It's similar for us though as a healthcare payer because we're a mutual, right? Our members, and we have 17 million of them, are really the folks that own the company and we're very purpose driven. Our purpose is to do everything in our power to stand by our members in sickness and in health. So how do you get the highest quality, cost effective healthcare for them? So if automation allows you to be more effective and actually keep that cost down, that means you can cover more people and provide higher quality care to our members. So that's really the driver for us. Mission driven, yep. I was going to ask you as a member, as one of your 17 million members, what are some of the ways in which automation is benefiting me? You know a number of different ways. First off, it lowers our administrative costs, right? So that means we can actually lower our rates as we go out and work with folks. That's probably the bottom line impact. But we're also automating processes to make it easier for the member, right? The example I used earlier was the equivalent of no surprises, right? How do we take the member out of the middle of this dispute between, you know, out of network providers and the payer and just make it go away, right? And we take care of it. But that creates potentially administrative burden on our side but we want to keep that cost down when we do it efficiently using it. So there's a number of use cases that we've done across different parts of our business. We automate a lot of our customer service, right? When you call, there's bots in the background that are helping that agent do their job. And what that means is you're on the phone a lot shorter of a period of time and that agent can be more concise and more accurate in answering your question. So your employee experience is dramatically improved as is the member experience. Yes, they go hand in hand. They do go hand in hand. Yeah, unhappy members means unhappy employees. 100%. You mentioned scale before. You said you can't scale in this particular, the departmental, you know, pockets. Talk about scale a little bit. I'm curious as to how important cloud is to scale. Is it not matter? Can you scale without cloud? What are the other dimensions of scale? Well, you know, especially with my CTO head, we're pushing very heavily to cloud. We view ourselves as a cloud first. We want to do things in a cloud versus our own data centers. Partially because of the scale that it gives us. But because we're healthcare, we have to do it very securely. So we are very meticulous about guarding our data, how we encrypt information, not only in our data center, but in the cloud and controlling the keys and having all the controls in place. You know, the CISO and I are probably the best friends right now in the company because we have to do it together. And you have to take that security mindset upfront, right? Cloud first, but security first with it. So we're moving what we can to the cloud because we think it's just going to give us better scale as we grow and better economics overall. Any thoughts on that? Jaiji? I think there are similar thoughts, but if you look from LA County because of the sheer volume itself, because the data which we are talking about, we had 40 departments within the county. Each department is serving a different business purpose for the resident, be it voting or be it justice or be it social services and all. And the amount of data which we are generating for 10 million residents and the amount of duplicacy which comes at because it's a very government centering model, you have a different systems and they may not be talking to each other. The amount of duplicacy and identity duplicacy which we are creating. And as we are enabling the interoperability between these functions to give a seamless experience, keeping security in mind. So fully agree on that because end of the day we have to ensure the customer identity. But it's a sheer volume that as in when we are adding these data sets and the patient's data as well as the resident's data. And now we have started adding a machine data because we have deployed so many IoT solutions. So the data which is coming from those machines, the logs and all, it's exponential. So that's where the scale comes into picture and how we can ensure that we are future ready for the upscale which we need. And that's where cloud ability definitely helps a lot. What do you mean by future ready? So if you look at from a future smart city or a smart community perspective, imagine when machines are everywhere, machines and IoT solutions are deployed, be it even healthcare, your bed information, your even patient information, everything is interconnected and amount of data which is getting generated in that. Your automobile, they're going to start talking to entertainment or we have to potentially track a single resident might be going, same person going to the justice or maybe same person might be having a mental health issues. A same person might be looking for a social services. How are we going to connect those dots and what all systems they are touching? So all that interconnections needs to happen. So that exponential increase of data is the future readiness which I'm talking about. And are we future ready from a technology perspective? Are we future ready from the other ecosystem perspective? And how are we going to manage those situations? So those are the things which we look at. One, it's a multiplier too, right? We all have this influx of information and you need to figure out what to do with it, right? This is where artificial intelligence with machine learning is so important. But you also have interoperability standards that are coming. We have this massive data that each of our organizations have but now you have interoperability which is a good thing for the member saying now I need to be able to share that data. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that because a lot of changes in healthcare, EMR, meaningful use, you had to show that to get paid but the standards weren't mature, right? And so now that's changing. What role does automation play in facilitating those standards? So we're big supporters of the FHIR standard that's out there. In order to be able to support the standards and create APIs and pull together the information, what will happen sometimes in the background is there's actually artificial intelligence machine learning models that create algorithms, right? The output of that though often has to be acted. Now a person can do something with that information or a bot could, right? So when you start taking the ideal of artificial intelligence and now you have a robotic process that can use that to pull together the information and assimilate it in a way to make it higher quality but now it's available. It's kind of in the background, you don't see it but it's there helping. What are some of the things that you see? I know we're out of time but I've just got a couple more questions. Some of the things that you see, here we are at UI Path Forward 4, we're in person. This is a bold company that's growing very quickly. Some of the announcements that were made, what are some of your reaction to that and how do you see it helping move Blue Crush, Blue Shield forward even faster? Well, you know, a lot of the announcements in terms of some of the features that they've added around their robotic processing are great, right? The fact that they're in the cloud and some of the capabilities and better ability to support that. The process mining is key, right? In order for bots to be effective, you have to understand your process and you just don't want to necessarily automate the bad practices, right? So you want to take a look at those processes and figure out how you can automate things smartly and some of their capabilities around that are very interesting. We're going to explore that quite a bit. But I think the ambition here is beyond robotics, right? It's actually creating applications that actually are using bots in the background which is very intriguing and has a lot of potential, potentially to drive even more digital transformation. This could really affect all of our workers and allow us to take digital solutions out to the market a lot faster. And Jiji, what was I going to ask you? You are here for four weeks at UiPath. You got to meet a lot of your colleagues, which is great. But what about this company attracted you to leave your former role and come over here to the technology vendor side? I mean, I think I was able to achieve the similar role within LA County, able to establish the automation practice and achieve the maturity, able to stand up things. And I feel that this is the same practitioner activity which I can actually take it back to the other client CIOs. Because the one thing which I really like about UiPath is, RPA is just a small component of it. I really want to change that mindset that we have to start looking UiPath as an end-to-end full automation enterprise solution. And it is not only the business automation, it's the IT automation, and it's the UI plus API combination. And whether we are developing a new industry solutions with our partners to help the different industry segments. And we are actually helping CIO in the center of it. Because CIO is the one who is driving the IT automation, enabling the business automation, and actually managing the automation COE and the governance. So CIO is in the left and center of it. And my role is to ensure that I actually help those CIOs to make successful and get that maturity. And UiPath as a platform is giving that ability of length and breadth. And that's what is really fascinating me. And I'm really looking forward that how, that spectrum is changing, that we are getting matured in a process mining area, and how we are expanding our horizon to look at the whole automation suite, not just the RPA product. And that's something which I'm really looking forward and seeing that how we're going to continue to expand in other magic quadrants. And we actually going to give the seamless experience so that client doesn't have to worry about, okay, for this I have to pick this and for other I have to pick something else. That seamless experience is absolutely table stakes these days. Guys, we're out of time, but thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about automation and healthcare, your recommendations for best practices, how to go about doing that, and the change management piece. That's a critical piece. We appreciate your time. Well, thanks for having me. Thank you. Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas. The cubes coverage of UiPath Forward 4 continues next.