>> 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 the Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019.
We we're here last year, it was about 1,500 people.
And really, Automation Anywhere is really hot
in the RPA space, Robotic Process Automation,
but it's really a lot more than that,
it's not just automating some processes,
it's really about new ways to work,
personal digital assistants, and really changing the game.
We're excited to have our next guest, first time on theCUBE.
He's Prince Kohli, the CTO of Automation Anywhere.
Prince, great to see you.
>> Thank you, Jeff, good to be here.
>> Yeah, so you weren't here last year,
so I'm curious to get your general impressions of the event
and kind of the scene here
with the Automation Anywhere ecosystem.
>> Of course, I wasn't here last year,
I heard a lot about it,
but the sense of excitement, the sense of growth,
and the sense of opportunity that is there in everyone.
The number of customers who were here
and were excited to be here, partners who were here
and were really happy to be here,
and of course, the team, my own team.
It just, just the sense of excitement,
and the fact that we are on a hockey stick,
in terms of growth, is just palpable.
>> Right, so I'm curious to get your take,
you've been in the Valley for a long time,
and really the RPA theme is about digital workers.
In fact, they get roles, they get names,
they talk about 'em on stage like they're people.
And the idea is that we all have our own assistant,
which has been talked about forever
but maybe you kind of had an offshore person
you could help dial in your laundry,
nothing like what we're talking about today.
So, as you look back at the evolution as to how we got here,
what's your take on the role
of a personal digital assistant?
>> That's a great question.
The way, in my view, the way it evolved
was that it is similar to cloud computing.
I think the idea that these things could happen.
I mean, you know, Star Trek had it, right?
>> Right. >> So I think
those things have, as an idea, have existed,
but usually it was in fantasy.
But what has happened in the last five or ten years,
is that computing,
the need for automation across applications,
the need for work to be less mundane,
the need for creativity in our human jobs,
those have become really important.
And therefore the definition of work is evolving.
What can be automated therefore must be automated.
And it is not automation within an application,
it is automation across applications,
across processes, across whichever applications,
from whichever vendors there may be,
without changing the application itself.
And that, with the tenurial of AI and acceptance of AI,
I think has allowed people to start
accepting the notion of a digital worker.
>> It's pretty interesting,
one of the topics of the keynote
was that the people were the integration point
between (laughs) a lot of these systems, super inefficient.
And what I think is interesting
on the AI front and the automation,
the place I see it's just a little bit every day,
is on Google, or an app that most people are familiar with,
whether it's Google Maps,
and suddenly it's got restaurants on it,
and suddenly it's got reviews on it,
and suddenly it's got Street View
or whether it's now on the email
where suddenly it's guessing my response,
it's auto filling even before I start to complete my email.
And it really shows
that it's this ongoing continuous innovation
empowered by AI and a boatload of data
that lets these applications do, as you said,
things that before would be considered magical.
>> Absolutely, and if you look
at the digital worker paradigm, right?
It's not, if you look at a great example
of a digital worker, for example an AP clerk,
an account payables clerk.
Think of an invoicing function, an invoice comes in,
someone has to read it, interpret it,
the (coughs), excuse me,
the format of invoices are very different across vendors.
Reading, interpreting, tying it to a PO,
making sure the PO is correct,
making sure the PO is valid, was issued at the right time,
the item is not late, someone has signed up,
there are so many things one has to do.
And a person has to do all that today.
But it is really very boring work.
There is, you just follow a set of steps,
there is not judgment involved, really.
What an AP digital worker allows you to do (coughs)
is to be able to read the document, interpret it,
take all the steps that are necessary,
and then be able to do that job 24 hours a day,
and allow the offloading of this mundane,
boring work, right, from a human.
So they can be more creative,
they can actually make the process better,
as opposed to just following a set of simple rules.
>> Right, finishing one of the earlier conversations too,
and then defining that process so that you can automate it,
you're going to unwind inefficiency,
you're going to unwind biases,
you're going to unwind a whole bunch of stuff
to get it to the automated process.
So there's all kinds of secondary benefits
beyond simply freeing up your time to do more creative work.
>> That is correct, and I think,
as you said, there are biases,
there are also things that must work together in enterprise
and today don't.
And you know, the vendors, the application vendors
are not going to do that, it is not in their own interest.
So someone has to, and we are the fabric
that brings it together.
>> Right, and just people as an integration point,
I thought that was classic,
that's like the worst place you want to be.
And then the other concept
that I think doesn't come out enough
is a lot of people can be thinking about RPA
as a rip and replace for the people.
It's not rip and replace at all, it's really augment,
just like you augment with your laptop, your phone,
other software applications
that you're working with every day.
>> It's a great point, we have never seen any customer,
even talking about ripping and replacing people.
What they're trying to do
is give people the tools and the augmentation
necessary for them to make their own life better.
And that improves the moral of the employees,
that improves the company's productivity, of course, right,
and probably the best output, the best of vidimation that,
it improves their customer satisfaction.
Because customers are able to create cards faster,
are able to get responses faster,
claims get adjusted faster, all these things work very well.
>> Right, it's interesting,
when you sit back and look at the whole technology stack,
some really fundamental changes in microprocesser power,
networking speed, storage, now the cloud
that puts all this access together,
and then you add the AL,
and the machine learning on top of it,
it's really kind of this crazy perfect storm of technologies
that are coming together, that are enabling this,
which we really couldn't do before,
all those pieces weren't there.
So if look forward, as CTO,
what are some of the things you're excited about,
how do you see this evolving,
over the next little time, and mid time,
I never go longtime, longtime is forever in the future
we don't even guess. >> Longtime, I can predict
one thing for sure about long time,
that whatever we say today will be wrong, in the long-term.
Short and medium-term I think we probably will be right.
I think short and medium-term,
what I see happening, is that AI becoming a part
of pretty much every layer of every product,
for us for example, as an intelligent RPA platform,
AI is embedded in the interaction with the application,
interaction with the screen, interaction with the person,
interaction with the document,
so whichever way we interact with the outside world,
as well as how we get better ourselves,
AI is embedded in that.
And then we use many third-party AI's
as our own part to add AI enabled skills,
for example understanding
if a insurance claim should be denied or not,
a credit card should be issued or not.
So all these things become part
of how AI helps us in day-to-day.
So I think that will be the biggest change,
I think people, the example that you brought up,
right, Google email.
I don't think that people predicted
that with the first use of AI, in Google,
but it is very useful, I use it all the time,
because it happens to get better all the time,
it knows all my phrases, it knows how I respond,
I think that'll happen again and again.
>> Right, right, it's just like spell-check,
the great unwashed AI that we've all been using
for years, and years, and years.
Alright Prince, so, the final word is really,
I think that's important, is,
you're talking about the intelligence.
It's not just a process that we apply software to,
but this ongoing iterative intelligence applied,
whether it's machine learning, or AI,
to make it better, and better, and better.
It's not just going to be static.
>> Not at all, not at all.
I think it understands what it needs to be doing,
and it then provides ideas on how it could be doing better,
and then it integrates those ideas back.
Everything gets better over time,
and everything that a human finds repetitive,
high volume, boring, will eventually get farmed off,
to an augmentation, additional worker, additional system.
>> And oh, by the way, the number of open rec's
is still not going to go down, right?
>> Because, you know, if you remember the ATM world,
as an ATM started coming in
people started worrying tellers will go away
and the number of jobs will go down.
Actually banks are doing really well, right,
and they started hiring more people.
The nature of the job changes,
the value that humans provide go higher and higher,
but that's what happens, eventually.
>> Alright Prince, congratulations for you
for jumping on a rocket ship,
I'm sure it's going to be (laughs) a really fun ride,
and having us here at the show.
>> Excellent, thank you Jeff,
thank you so much. >> Alright,
he's Prince, I'm Jeff, your watching theCube,
we're on Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019
in midtown Manhattan,
thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.
(energetic music)