 theCUBE presents UiPath Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. Back to theCUBE's coverage of UiPath Forward 5. 2022, this is theCUBE's fourth UiPath Forward. They're mining automation gold here at the conference and in the customer base and we're creating Cube Gold. Dave Velate and Dave Nicholson. Sherlyn Chint is here. She's the Vice President of Global Alliances at UiPath. I'm Samir Bohra, who's the Director of Information Technology at Deloitte. Good to see you guys. Great, thank you. Now normally we would be talking about how Deloitte's out, doing its thing with its customers, but this is actually a case study on Deloitte's use of automation and UiPath. So that's cool, you not only partner with the GSIs, you actually sell to them as well. Okay, what's that all about? What's your relationship like? Why don't you start there? Absolutely, so we're thrilled to be here. Thanks for having us and really appreciate Samir being here with us. Deloitte was an early adopter of UiPath. Not just as a partner driving innovations and investing in getting skilled and building the capability. They were the first to become the USN Certified Partner Network. Investing in thousands and thousands of skilling up their consultants and resources to help us address our customer needs together. But it's not just about being a great partner. It's about being a customer with what they've done and built their own business around UiPath and automations. We've got an amazing story to tell you about today that we'd love to share. All right, Samir, let's hear it. What's the story? What was the catalyst to bring in automation, UiPath? Where are you applying it? Where'd you start? Fantastic, well, first of all, thanks for having me here. You're welcome. I'll start this journey with the predictions that we were making at some point. So Deloitte, as a company, we are in the business of predicting the technology trends. We have been tracking automation as a trend for quite some time and we have been following how this industry is going to come along. And we then started placing our bets not just on the technology but on the vendor as well in this case. Right around 2017, 18 is when we started kind of implementing automation with UiPaths for our internal purposes. And as it happens, different constituents in our member firms started doing it at the same time without kind of consulting with each other. But the surprising thing is that we all ended up with the same result. We all ended up with UiPath. We all ended up using the same technology set. And it was good that we all made the same choice because we could then all get along with it together. So we started our journey kind of disintegrated in a way and then we came along quickly all together. We then have COEs in each of our member firms or at least the big member firms. And around January last year is when we signed an enterprise license agreement with UiPath that really brought some of our mature COEs together. And now we are kind of utilizing the product quite well. We are exploring the benefits that ELA brings to us. So that has been our journey so far. Just in terms of some numbers, we have more than 400 million hours saved for our member firm. We have hundreds of processes that we have automated. I'm kind of losing account of that already. And we have a good 70, 80 team members across our three mature COEs that are constantly automating day in and day out. So there's a lot in terms of the history and there's a lot that we are looking forward to. Can you paint a picture of sort of where you're applying these automations in your business and maybe double click on that a little bit? Absolutely. So when we started our journey, there were some candidates right off the bat. There were some of our enabling areas where we were looking at, for instance, finance, our talent, which we also called as HR. Those were some of our preliminary areas that we started doing automations for. But another surprising thing is that our first automation use cases were actually contingent solutions that we built to help some of the other big deployments that were happening in the firm. And in absence of any good solution, we said, let's bring an RPA, let's bridge the gap. And that basically opened the door for us to use automation at a bigger scale. So it's enabling areas, talent, finance, business operations. Those are the prominent areas, marketing, chiefs, chiefs, culture. Those are the areas that we are applying it. And then our services, on the other hand, are using automation as well. Because we need our services people to be armed with the valuable time to be able to invest on our clients rather than being stuck in repetitive mundane tasks. So we are pretty much applying it all over the board now. So as director of IT at Deloitte, I'm curious about how this process works for you. You've heard the term drinking one's own champagne. Yeah. When you are looking... Or dog fooding, but okay, got it. I was trying to be polite, right? One throat to choke, one bat to pat. Bat to pat, right. Are you immediately and at all times under a microscope when you're deploying something internally because someone else in Deloitte is thinking, okay, let's see how this works for us. Because if it works well, if we gain expertise, we can turn this into a line of business to help our clients. Is that something that starts day one? Or do people come to you six months into a project and say, hey, I hear you have something going on, that's cool. Yeah. What's that look like? Very interesting question. I would like, the way I would like to describe it is we have a symbiotic relationship between our internal COE and our client-facing teams that are out in the market selling automation along with UiPath. And the way that symbiotic relationship work for us is when we are doing anything interesting in terms of an automation use case, and we have many that I can talk about, we do have this constant connect with our client-facing folks where we tell them about the use case, we tell them about the problem that we are solving and the way in which we are solving that problem. And in many cases, it generates interest and then we get into conversations where we see, okay, is it an asset that we can build out of it? Or is it simply a client use case that we could go in and implement and apply somewhere? So that's one side of the symbiotic relationship. The other side is whatever client service folks are seeing in the market. So when they see it, they come to us and they tell us, look, we see such and such client doing this and we did it for them. We should think about doing this in Deloitte and for ourselves. Okay. And then we say, fantastic, let's do it. So it's, It goes both ways. It goes both ways. And the fact that it is both ways, there is not that sense of pressure or that I'm under a microscope. It's all one big family. How do you measure success? It's a pretty interesting question again. Success is subjective, right? When it comes to automation, the typical matrix that people use to define and describe success is how many hours you have saved or how many hours, at least the way we use it, how many hours you have reinvested, right? So we started with that as our measure and for some time that was really our measure of success. But lately we are seeing a change in that. We are now shifting more over to other matrix like cost avoidance. So for instance, your firm is growing at a certain pace. Do all your enabling areas need to grow at that pace? Maybe not. Maybe we can avoid that cost and maybe we bring in more automation to support that. So cost avoidance is kind of emerging as a bigger matrix for us now, especially given that all low hanging automation fruits have been plugged. That's a big one we are looking at. I think the other matrix which is a bit difficult to measure directly is the employee satisfaction. Somewhere I read that if you want happy clients, you need to have happy employees first, right? And one way of making your employees happy is to give them the tasks that they really value, that they really like to do. Now again, being a professional services firm or ours or people's ours is our currency, right? So we want to give them as much of their valuable time back so they can invest it in their client facing activities as opposed to doing mundane and repetitive ones. So those are some of the matrix and measures we are looking at. So I'd like to dig into that a little bit if I could. So aren't ours saved sort of related to cost avoidance? Is that an input to the cost avoidance calculation if you will? Yeah, so yes and no. And the reason I say that is because, yes, if you do the math, yes, it makes sense that. Not that it's direct. I understand it's not direct relationship but it's somewhere related, is it not? It is related in the sense that ours saved is an immediate measure of automation, right? So if me as a practitioner, if I can hand over a task to the bot which can take off five hours out of my week, that's an ours saved right away. But cost avoidance is more like, hey, I have these 10 engagements that are coming up. Do I need to amp up to meet those 10 engagements? Or I simply amp up my automation, right? So that's more around the cost avoidance piece. Okay, so there's an algorithm there which makes sense. So in other words, when you save ours, at some point it's going to translate it to your head count avoidance. Okay, are you finding that when you run a project, if you can automate that project that the proportion of savings is greater on that automation of the project than it is for those sort of hours saved, I'm just sort of curious as to what the balance looks like. Is it like overwhelmingly speeding up the project? Is the real benefit there? There is absolutely a benefit there. With automation, you can obviously speed up your project. You can do more with the staff and the team that you have. So that's definitely something that helps us a lot. Both internally and I believe on the client-facing side as well. Okay, and put my CFO hat on. So are those internal resources or there's sort of out-of-pocket expenses? In other words, it's a hard dollars that I don't spend or is it resources that I can deploy on another project? Or both? For the most part it's the resources, right? It's okay. Yeah, it's the resources that you can now have them do more value work with more clients as opposed to have them do many repetitive tasks at one place. Okay, I'm going to just keep going. So that's a productivity measure in my mind anyway. So I just like to keep peeling the onion on the metric. So I would at some point, so the two things, the cost avoidance and the employee satisfaction, I would ultimately as a CFO want to see that show up in terms of productivity increases and decreases in turnover. And you probably don't have enough experience yet to measure that, but ultimately isn't that where you want to go? I think that's essentially where it's going and I think that's the way it will probably go for pretty much everyone who is in this journey of automation at your CFO will eventually want to look at after this investment, where is it leading us, right? So that's definitely the direction we are also heading. Yeah, and so productivity revenue per employee, is that a good starting point? Maybe you get more sophisticated than that, but. Yeah, that's probably a good starting point. UIPass revenue per employee is about 250,000, which is pretty average for software companies. Now, maybe it's because they're investing more, but at some point I'd like to see that check into 350,000, anyway. I digress. And we are on that journey where we are essentially looking to arm everyone with a bot, right? There is a philosophy in UIPass around a bot for everyone. We are pretty close to getting to that stage where everybody should be able to leverage the technology, it shouldn't be limited to a certain business unit or certain pockets within a business unit. I want a bot, I do, I want a bot, I'm getting a bot. You should have a bot. Yeah, I want a bot, and I want to give that bot a very clever name. That's like, I keep thinking of naming bots. So are your activities evaluated completely independently as sort of your own P&L, or do you get credit for some of that symbiotic relationship that's developed? Because I can imagine a situation where you deploy something, intelligent automation, and you get a yield that translates into a practice for your firm that brings in a bunch of revenue with a bunch of satisfied customers. Do you get credit for that? Or is it like, no, no, no, no. I would love to get credit for that, but again, it's all in the family. It's all one big family. At this time, we are simply focused on bringing the right use cases forward for our client facing folks and the other way around. So we haven't gotten to that stage as yet. But you need to deliver standalone value. You're evaluated that way. As a COE, that's what we are evaluated upon. The matrix that I talked about earlier around cost avoidance, number of hours saved, employee satisfaction, those are some of the areas that we are being rated upon. And that's across all of our COEs. Well, Shirley, congratulations on landing Deloitte as a customer and of course a partner, and I'm sure there's big things in the future. We'll give you the last word, bring it home. You know, the takeaway here is we're leveraging partners like this who are going way beyond just automating processes for the sake of process and hours saved. They're using this to build their business, make their consultants more productive and really driving profitability for the business. So really the automation flywheel going beyond that's really trying to fuel digital transformation. By taking this, they make it go faster, more profitable, more agile. And they become an amazing customer and an amazing good market partner. Yeah, you guys take this pretty seriously. Behind us, there's this, I don't know what you call it, there's clouds floating above it. If you walk through there, there's some really inspiring commentary. And so I encourage you to do that if you're here at the show. All right, thanks guys, appreciate it. Thank you. All right, you're welcome. All right, keep it right there, Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson will be back at forward five UI pass customer event from Las Vegas. We're live, right back.