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>> Welcome back to Miami everybody.
This is theCUBE.
The leader in live tech coverage
and we're here covering UiPathForward.
Looking, unpacking...
Software robots, robotic process automation,
Jeff Aldridge is here.
He's advisory principal for EY.
Great to see you Jeff.
Thanks for coming on.
Stu Miniman, myself: Dave Vellante.
We're excited to have you.
Thanks for coming. >> Great.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
>> So I was at a chief data officer conference
early this year, and the speaker asked,
"How many of you are involved
in robotic process automation projects?"
I would say,
two-thirds, maybe even three-quarters of the hands went up.
So, these are guys in suits, right?
>> Jeff: Right, right.
>> Kind of staid individuals.
But, I've seen data that suggests that,
while everybody's interested in, you know,
kicking the tires,
that there's not a lot of companies that are at scale.
Single digits at scale.
What are you seeing?
Does that match and why do you think that is?
>> Yeah, I think that's pretty consistent with what we see
in the market.
I think a lot of folks have bought a few licenses.
They've done a few exploratory pilots,
but very few companies have gone to production
with more than 30 bots.
We do think that's going to change dramatically
in the next 12 to 24 months
based on what we're seeing in the market.
So it's an exciting period of time.
>> What's the headwind to scale?
And how do you...
Reducing friction?
>> Yeah, I think it varies, but I think change is just hard
for organizations right?
So I think they've started a little bit slow.
Trying to figure out what's their purpose?
Why are they doing this?
Is is about headcount reduction?
Is it about trying to scale?
Is it about accuracy?
So trying to define that common purpose
and common metrics to measure success, I think,
has been slow for some organizations,
but I think once they have that purpose,
and they can kind of see what the potential is,
then I think it starts to pick up speed.
So, we've certainly seen more
and more companies going to scale.
>> It's always something new.
It's, right, how do I measure success?
What was the outcome you're expecting?
We talked to a number of customers today already
and the answer's been different for every one of them.
They are all very similar as to what they're doing,
but what it means to their business,
I thought I was going to reduce cost, but oh wait.
I'm going to drive more revenue.
>> Jeff: Right.
>> I thought I was going to so this, oh wait.
It's great ROI.
It turned around really different.
How do you deal with that in the field?
>> Yeah, I think you're right.
I think at some point, to do a few pilots,
and kind of kick the tires,
you don't have to know what the purpose is.
So it's pretty easy to do that.
But I think, once you start thinking,
we're really going to do this,
you got to coalesce around what our purpose is.
And so we like to talk to people about different examples
of what other companies have done
and in particular, how do you measure success?
For some companies, they're looking at the same goal.
For example, cost reduction.
They look at that differently so,
we've had a very large client who said,
"We're going to measure cost reduction based
on next year's budget.
So if we're able to not have to hire additional resources,
we get to count that.
If we're able to find hard dollar savings,
we get to count that."
So, for example, in peak periods of the year,
when we hire a lot of contingent labor,
if we automate something that keeps us from having
to hire that amount of contingent labor,
then we get to count that.
Others will count against the prior year.
So, I think even when you have similar goal,
you can have different metrics of how you measure it.
>> That next year's budget is actually quite interesting,
cause if you could do more with the same,
now you're getting operating leverage,
that's almost as good as like dropping
to the bottom line to a CFO.
>> Yeah, and some would say it's better.
Because you don't have a disruption
of your current workforce.
It's not about reducing heads that we have today,
but it's how can we grow and how can we scale
without having to add back office cost
and other cost in the organization?
So I think that's going to become pretty common
for fast-growing companies.
>> What's your interest, Jeff, in automation?
Robotic process automation?
How did you get here?
Kind of, what's your background?
>> Yeah, so I'm a CPA, finance person by background.
Went to law school, but I've always been
about process improvement and helping organizations improve.
And so I think this is just the next step in that, right?
Technology has taken a leap and now organizations
can take a leap in terms of additional process improvement.
And I think the best companies are looking at it as,
how do I use my top resources to do more?
And so I think that's another objective of some
of the better companies is, you know,
how do I free up my people to do what they were hired to do?
>> Jeff, one thing I'm trying to understand,
when I think about process, one of the challenges,
I think back to outsourcing is.
When I outsource something, it made me not be able
to change as much as I might want to.
I lost some skill set and therefore I had a disconnect
between the business and keeping operations going.
How is this different?
How do I make sure that when I put a robot in place,
that I'm not frozen into,
kind of, the way things were before?
>> Yeah, that's a good question.
I mean, first of all, I think outsourcing is great
in the right situation, but you're right.
For a lot of organizations it was sort of,
out of sight, out of mind.
And once I off-shored cost, it just seemed to grow
and never reduce right?
And we never improved the process.
>> I thought it would be my mess for less,
but it turned out not to be the case.
>> Yeah, I think this is fundamentally different
because the bots are sort of part of your on-shore team.
They're a virtual workforce and I think as companies see
what they can do, it's actually the opposite.
They find more things that the bot can do
so that humans can focus on the higher
value-added decision support.
>> Do you think RPA will reverse some
of the outsourcing trends and the pendulum will swing back?
>> I think we're already seeing it.
I do think it will do that.
I think is allows you to in-source some of those things
and reduce cost in the process.
>> And then, just talking from a parochial US view,
those software robots are global, presumably,
but it reduces the need to ship jobs overseas,
to use the pejorative.
>> It does, which obviously is popular
in the current, kind of current political environment.
But you know, there's also entire industries like healthcare
where because of HIPAA laws,
they can't off-shore activities.
So they by and large, have not been able to take advantage
of outsourcing and so this is now an opportunity
to reduce cost through bots.
>> Yeah, I mean there's two sides to that coin, right?
The political rhetoric says, oh outsourcing's bad, bad, bad,
but you remember Jack Welsh, he's like, "Listen,
this is actually really good, you know."
And of course GE is going through some troubles now,
but under his reign, their profitability
was pretty substantial so,
your point about healthcare is quite interesting because,
first of all, that's an industry
that's ripe for transformation.
It really hasn't transformed.
I think you'd agree, every industry is going to
get digitally transformed in some way, shape, and form.
Healthcare, financial services, defense haven't yet.
Maybe cause they're high risk.
But what are you seeing?
>> Yeah, I think this is coming and it's not going to stop.
I think you're going to see all industries
taking advantage of automation.
And frankly, I think RPA is just the beginning.
I think that we all see this moving
into artificial intelligence but for most organizations,
they want to learn with RPA.
They want to capture some low-hanging fruit,
so they can move then to the next level.
So it's about training employees.
It's about setting up a governance structure
and kind of preparing for that future.
>> When I see companies like yours at an event like this,
I say okay, there's big dollars in this event.
And big dollars means that...
Big dollars not just for you guys
and not just for guys like UiPath,
but for customers.
Certainly ERP was that way.
I mean, you hear all the jokes about SAP implementations,
but if you could have bet on the companies
that bet on ERP early, SAP specifically,
you could have made some decent money in the stock market,
cause those guys drove efficiencies.
Are we seeing the same thing here?
Is this kind of big dollar transformations?
And my real question is, does it apply
for all companies?
Like Amazon, AWS.
Lot of small companies can take advantage of that.
Can smaller companies take advantage of RPA,
or is it a big, giant enterprise trend?
>> Yeah, I think they can.
I think if you talk about a smaller company,
you've got to activate multiple functional areas,
so it's not going to be a single automation
and a single function like finance,
that's going to bring you the ROI that's big.
So in a smaller company, I think you've got to activate
other back office areas like HR and supply chain
and procurement whereas a larger company,
we worked with some very large companies, where even a
single process area can generate significant savings.
>> What does a successful...
The profile of a successful customer look like?
A couple that we've talked to, it's like,
well I know I need the executive support
and I usually have somebody that's operations,
maybe six sigma, that focuses on that kind of environment,
and they're like, "oh, this is a new tool that will help me
accomplish what I've been trying to do for years."
>> I think there's a few things.
I think, number one, having that common purpose.
We know why we're doing this and we have specific goals,
but I think to your point,
it's having that executive sponsor.
When this gets hard, they push through it
and everybody knows they're behind it.
Be it a CEO or someone of that stature.
And so, what I've seen is, when that's in place,
you'll see multiple functions jumping on board.
And one of the things we've used is media for example.
So doing videos where the people that have been involved,
kind of get highlighted for what they've done
and that tends to spur efforts
and now you want to be a part of it right?
And you want to show that you're looking
for improvement in your area.
And so, we're definitely seeing some people
have some pretty tremendous success.
>> You said, when things get hard.
What are some of the headwinds that you're seeing?
Is that just the natural aversion to change
inside of an organization or?
>> Well I think there's, in addition to the natural aversion
to change, I think there's this idea about,
I don't want my team to lose their jobs right?
And I'm worried about what that means.
I don't want to get to a situation where I've reduced
so many heads that I'm afraid I can't be effective
in the future as we grow, right?
And so there's naturally, people wondering
why are we doing this?
What's the purpose?
What's it mean to me?
And so, I do think it's important to do
that strategy phase up front.
Identify the opportunities.
Identify the ROI so that we can all see why we're doing this
and it really is pretty impactful.
>> So we started this segment talking
about how most companies aren't at scale with RPA.
Are there any examples you can share with us that...
Where your clients are either headed there
or actually have scaled?
>> Yeah, there are actually several now, right?
And so, I always start with ourselves.
I mean believe it or not, EY over three years ago
started automation in our own back office
and today, we're one of the largest users of RPA, robotics,
as well as chatbots, machine learning, NLP.
We think we've save two million hours a year,
out of our own back office,
which has been fantastic for us.
And so we took those learnings, at scale,
and have now started applying those to clients.
But there are some big-name clients.
I think...
Like you mentioned a few industries like oil and gas,
and consumer products.
We have some big clients that have gone to scale
in those areas.
So you know, I think there's several examples
that people can learn from.
>> And that's primarily squeezing the back office lemon,
or are there...
>> You know, it's been more of that to begin with.
I think now what's really next for this,
is next generation use cases that include the front office,
and how do we make our sales force more effective?
How do we improve our supply chain?
I think there's bigger opportunities for next generation RPA
and first generation AI.
>> Hey, I wonder.
Jeff, you look at the market forecast, and they're like
the classic market forecast.
They're a straight line and you're looking at how many
people will get replaced by robots.
But it feels like there's this sort of blind spot,
where you don't really know where the innovation
is going to come from, but like you said,
it could be sales.
It could be marketing.
It could be, you a customer in the field.
But, it feels like there's a lot of revenue potential
in other parts of the organization
that are hard to forecast.
Your thoughts?
>> Yeah, we have really come up with a pretty exhaustive list
of use cases from some of our clients
and every day we're kind of thinking of new applications.
And so, I think you're going to see a lot more front office
applications that are going to drive revenue
as opposed to just reducing cost.
And then, of course, as you move into the AI realm,
I think there's a lot more there
in terms of revenue generation.
But, I think we've just scratched the surface.
There's a lot of opportunity out there.
>> What's your relationship with these guys at UiPath?
>> You know, we've had a tremendous relationship
for quite a while with UiPath.
Some of our largest clients...
Two of our Fortune five companies have gone
to scale with UiPath.
As Bill just mentioned in the overall session,
we've created some solutions with them
around SAP migrations.
We've also done some things around document recognition,
where we've combined ABBYY with UiPath
and some other tools from Microsoft.
So we think that these guys...
They are on the right track.
They've gotten some investment dollars.
They're partnering with the right people.
And we like their strategy of knowing where they play
and integrating with others who are better at other things
as opposed to trying to build it themselves.
So it's a great relationship and we look forward
to continuing it.
>> Well it's certainly attracting a lot of money.
I think these guys have raised over 400 million.
I think is the number.
225 was the latest round so the VCs are paying attention.
Google's in there, throwing money at it
and so Jeff, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE.
Really appreciate your time.
>> Yeah, thanks for having me.
>> Dave: Good luck with everything.
>> Appreciate it. >> Alright take care.
>> Thank you. >> Keep it right
there everybody, Stu and I will be right back
with our next guest.
We're live from Miami.
UiPathForward.
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