 The Cube presents UiPath, Forward Five, brought to you by UiPath. We're back at Forward Five, UiPath's big customer event. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sands Convention Center, Dave Vellante and David Nicholson. Javier Castellanos is here. He's the robot factory director. How's that for a title for Orange Espana? And he's joined by Navash Pillay, who is senior director of telecommunications industry at UiPath. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Javier, just off the keynote, it was really amazing to see what you were doing with your dashboard. How much you've operationalized automation, you really far down the journey, but I want to start with your title. I've never seen this before. Robot Factory Director, that's unique. What is that all about? Yeah, the Robot Factory is our brand to create the RPA journey, to involve all the company in this amazing story regarding automation because for us, automation is only a piece of the digital transformation and the culture transformation for the employees. Your Robot Factory obviously builds robots for employees, and employees build them as well? Yeah, both. We have two different ways to build robots. We have a citizen developer program with more than 500 employees certified in UiPath technology, and they build small robots for the daily task for avoid repetitive tasks, very boring. And in the other hand, we have the Robot Factory team automating the business, the core business processes, very complex in the telco industry, you know. And both teams working together the community of employees, the best ambassadors to find new opportunities and for discovery for robots. And the Robot Factory automating real complex processes to impact in our customer satisfaction. So if a citizen developer develops a robot, does the factory then have to audit it and make sure it's governed? Do you add, maybe I'm not such a good developer? Do you make it better? How does that collaboration work? The good thing is with UiPath technology, you don't need to be a techie guy. You can be a finance guy and every morning you need a report, create an Excel, create a graph, put in a PowerPoint and send to your box. And you can create by your own, a robot doing that task and going to the band and to take a coffee in the meantime that the robot is working. And as soon as you discover in your domain a complex task, you can call us and say, hey guys, I need your job because we need to securize this process, you need trustability and we have a big savings below the task. It's not only my job, it's the area work. Now, Navash, you specialize in the telecommunications industry. Now, of course, the telcos are going through a massive transformation. It's almost, I call it revenge of the telcos. Now they're coming back with 5G, it's going to be a great new future, but what kind of patterns are you seeing in the industry for automation? Sure, look, as you said, telecom's going through quite a transformational era. There's this huge demand for connectivity around the whole world and that presents opportunities and some challenges, but the key areas of focus right now is really helping the telecom achieve their strategic goals and they include the customer experience at the most significant point and they're after driving a few more efficiencies and improving the employee experience, but organizations like Orange, they start with the customer experience. These are large areas, but they tend to be the patterns where we are really helping telecoms transform and deliver better outcomes. Javier, I'm curious about the concept of the citizen developer. Now you said that they don't have to have a deep technical background and they may come from finance or other places, but how do you recruit these people? What's in it for them? I can understand automating a process that is repetitive, mundane, something they don't want to do, but is there ever a concern that they might be automating themselves out of a job? Yeah, the people use the Excel and 30 years ago, the Excel does not exist and change our world. You iPad technology is more or less the same. It's changing the way that you are working with your desktop. Every morning you can create for your daily task a robot by yourself and executing your corporate desktop and then you can save this time or use to improve your satisfaction as an employee because sometimes in these kind of companies, we have telecommunications engineering with a lot of talent making repetitive tasks and with this technology, you can use your talent only to improve the processes. So we train these people, imagine the training is very easy, a robot enter on the web, search in Google, make different search regarding prices on device, creates an Excel and only in a few hours, that kind of people that we have in all companies, that very easy Excel, some macros and these kind of things, is the people prepared to jump to the next step to the robotic station. So in all areas, in all departments, there are people prepared. In our company, 500 people. I'd like to get into a little mini case study, if we could, and understand, I mean, Orange Espanyol is way deep. You should see this dashboard that Javier showed. I mean, it's amazing. I think you said $7 million euro business benefit so far to date, but you can slice it and dice it and look at a lot of different angles. But where did you get started? Did you get started? Was it a bottoms up? In other words, an individual started to automate on their desktop. Was it a top down? The CEO said, we're going to automate. How did that, I mean, I'm sure you get this question a lot, Navash, but where did it start at Orange? Yeah, our story is very linked with the finance department because the citizen developer are saving internal hours and transforming the employee satisfaction and improving the talent and the rescaling of the people. But in the other hand, from the efficiency point of view, if you look for the finance approach, what happened? We take one process and automate perhaps 80% of the process and next month, the invoice reduced because your external cost disappear because the robot is making the task, is improving the satisfaction of the customers because sometimes we have a human back office or another kind of task and the compliance, the SLAs, the delay on time with all, the people disappear with the robots because the robots are working at night, weekend and repeating the job one, one, one and every tracking of that task are controlled by finance because if you save in a transaction three minutes when you multiply for a thousand, a thousand, a thousand tasks, you save on real time, you can see how much money you are saving and making the things better is not only a question of money, it's a question of money but at them, below that, the customer is taking better experience for us. Robots don't sleep, Navaj. I know. So you started in finance and how much have you gone, permeated other parts of the organization? What other parts of the organization are adopting RPA and automation? Where are you on that journey? More or less our eight, nine hundred and fifty-three FDs equivalent robots working, okay? It's like a contact center. It's robots navigating through the user interface applications, making transactions for our customers. So when you put in the middle of your customer relation, you can transform all because if a human agent is making a very complex process for because Telco is a complex market perhaps the robot can help the human agent saving time and taking advantage of that part of the operations and at the end, the operation is short and the customer satisfaction is better and we measure the NPA, the net promoter score and when you combine human agents with robots the satisfaction improve because the transaction is made on real time, very fast and it doesn't fail. Is this a common story, Navash, that you're seeing in Telco in terms of the starting points? Does it tend to be bottoms up? Is it more top down? What are you seeing? Look, it actually varies by telecom. You know, Orange started their journey with us four years ago. So companies that have started a while they tend to start in finance or IT or HR but the customer experience I think is the ultimate area where many telecoms focus and what Harvey just shared is it doesn't matter if a customer is calling you through a contact center or reaching you through a chatbot they want their issue resolved at the first point and what the robots do is they integrate information from multiple sources and provide that data to the agent so you can actually resolve the issue and that is the beautiful example of humans and robots working together because if you know what the data is telling you if it's a billing issue and a customer's been billed because they have gone overseas and used international roaming and they weren't aware that the contract had that as a leader or a person in a contact center you can make the right decision. Quite often it takes a long time to find the data but in this way you can actually address the issue of real time first point of resolution and we're seeing up to 60% increase in first time resolutions across telecoms irrespective of whether it's a chatbot or a contact center or a service desk. That's key. I mean, as a consumer that's what you just want to get off the phone or you want to get off the chat notice. So I have to ask you what would you say is your secret to success? The secret is to be transparent with the organization. Sir, the savings and put on the table and we put on the table to the finance guys every month all the robots that we put in production the month before and it's finance who declare officially the savings for each robot. As soon as you reach this the credibility appear because it's not the robot factory team telling or unsaving a lot of money of the company. No, no, it's the finance guys that trust on you and as soon as you ask more money to buy more license or to improve the processes on whatever finance say, okay, these guys as soon as we invest money in robots we obtain twice or three times more by savings and they are improving not only for the quantity point of view the quality is improving too because when you, a brief example when you have a wifi problem connection and you call to our contact center there is an ecosystem for more than 25 robots working from the beginning of your call testing your line and making decisions if we are going to send you a new router or you have a connectivity problem and the robot decide we are going to send to you a new installer at your home and then the human managed you and take the conversation but all the decisions are made by robots so it's very powerful from the point of view of customer satisfaction. So what I'm hearing is you started four years ago and the ROI for your first instantiation was very fast I presume, inside of 12 months or what was, how fast did you get a return with the technology? In the first three months we developed 25 robots and we saved more than one million to the company In three months Okay, so it was self-funding Yeah Right, you took that million dollars and you said okay let's double down on that let's do it again, do it again, do it again It's only a question of resources and budget and all the companies wants to create robots but sometimes big companies only put on that one people, two people from the beginning of our story we put 13 people and a budget so if you have resources, the things happen because the process are very complex sometimes you start one process sometimes our blog and we started at the beginning a lot of process and imagine in Telco we developed 900 processes but every day we have a new opportunity to discover it so I think the scalability is a challenge but it's possible if you put people and money And we focused on, we talk a lot in the broader IT world about the edge and so I sort of think of the citizen developers as living at the edge part of your robot factory is at the core of the enterprise also, is that correct? Yes Now what has that looked like in terms of ROI cycles and development cycles what kinds of projects do you work on at the core that are different than what citizen soldiers are doing at the edge? When we need to apply a discount or change of tariff or switch on your bonus or your voicemail that kind of transactions with impacting customers are made by the robot factory with robots made by the robot factory team with a big traceability, with a big security because, okay, which human awake the robot? We need to make a traceability because we have thousands of agents in the contact center working with robots and we have a lot of security, torsability and these kind of things but in the other hand, internally we have a lot of tasks and a lot of processes for the citizen developers they are very important tasks for the employee perhaps not impacting in final customers but we combine both because if you only work in one way the citizen developers are making a lot of savings in terms of internal hours but it's not real money but in the other hand, you have the robot factory business processes impacting the money combining both, you obtain the most powerful tool because the ambassadors, the employees are discovering new opportunities. Last question Javier, why did you choose UiPath? What were the determining factors four years ago? Yeah, we were researching a lot in the market but UiPath is very easy you don't need to be an IT guy people from customer care people from finance in every areas we have a lot of people learning this technology because it's easy intuitive and very nice from the point of view of look and feel. This is a common story this is really, we've reported on this a lot this is how UiPath really was able to get its foothold in the marketplace because of the simplicity if you look at the legacy tools and even some of the modern tools they were a lot more complicated now of course UiPath is expanding its platform thank you very much Thank you very much Thank you very much Alright, you're going to hear a lot of customer stories because that's what UiPath brings in the cube proof is in the pudding we were right back at Forward 5 from Las Vegas keep it right there