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A McKinsey report entitled ‘Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy’ predicts automation technologies will have an economic impact of between $ 5.2 and $ 6.7 trillion by 2025. Some of the technologies accompanying this trend include machine learning and big-data technologies. And the connection between these platforms and automation is robotic process automation (RPA) which draws from each of these systems to position itself as one of the leading automation technologies.
In an exclusive interview with Daily FT, Raghu Subramanian, President and CEO of global RPA solutions provider UiPath, spoke on how this emerging technology will benefit different industry sectors, UiPath’s growth in Sri Lanka and how RPA will be a key driver for the country’s overall economic growth. Below is an excerpt of his interview:
Q: To set the context for the interview, could you briefly explain what RPA is?
RPA is the application of technology to manipulate and interpret existing applications. Unlike traditional software, RPA can operate multiple software applications through a separate user interface. Thanks to RPA, it’s possible to think about business processes in a whole new way. From back-office functions to remote IT infrastructure, myriad enterprise functions can be streamlined. The benefits add up quickly; employees can now focus on higher-level work, rather than repetitive tasks. The potential for human error is completely eliminated because robots are involved in different functions.
On the other hand, RPA dramatically reduces the time necessary to complete a wide variety of business processes, including purchase processing, customer service, and any other process that requires access to multiple existing systems. With every transaction completed through RPA gets recorded in a detailed log, business analytics have become more robust and easily accessible. That data may be manipulated to yield comprehensive analysis of virtually any completed process.
Q: What are some of RPA’s key applications?
IT professionals rely on RPA to deploy applications and monitor network devices. RPA is also the ideal solution for remote management of IT infrastructure because it can investigate and solve problems more quickly than a human could – and it’s available 24/7.
Finance and accounting departments use RPA to eliminate human error and streamline data entry time. Automation can easily be scaled up or down based on demand. In call centres and other customer service environments, robots can assist agents in making them more productive. This way, human resources can be reserved for more complex interactions.
RPA enables the integration of enterprise applications, simplifying the workflow for sales teams. With improved pipeline management, most sales teams enjoy shorter sales cycles and higher conversion rates. Business process outsourcers (BPOs) can easily use RPA to leverage information across shared services teams and to streamline the management of multiple client operations.
RPA is an attractive option for many industries because it confers benefits like cost reduction, improved efficiency and greater accuracy.
Q: Research firm Gartner expects the RPA software market to touch $ 2.5 billion by 2022. In such a context, UiPath is on a rapid progression in terms of generating huge revenues and adding more talented employees across different regions. What are some of the key factors driving this progression?
I think one of the core reasons why we are leaders in the industry is the culture we work in. The core value we believe is humility. We are extremely humble as a company. People constitute humbleness as a weakness. It is not a weakness; humbleness is the strongest character somebody could have. We are also extremely transparent as a company. You speak to anybody else in this company and we represent the same ideas and perspectives. We are probably one of the few new age technology companies who are very open with our financials.
The other three values are being bold, being fast and being immersed. Our culture has always been a unique distinction and that is why we have been able to attract a top talent globally. Our customers love us because we are one of the easiest organisations to work with. This is also tied to our working culture.
The second quadrant is the product innovation that we do which consistently makes us a unique differentiator. We are able to predict the shape of things to come in the future and we are able to advance that innovation as fast as possible. During our Developer Conference in India last February, we did a breakthrough innovation in terms of automating tasks in a Citrix environment or a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) using deep learning and computer vision. Few companies have done it globally and we are the pioneers of it. We continue to do innovation which really makes us apart.
The third factor is that our product is literally open and extensible. It is not a black box to anyone out there who would like to see how our product has been structured. We have a community version which can be used for educational purposes and non-commercial use for organisations with less than million dollar revenue. So anybody will be able to download it and play with it. You can build any solution, any tool on top of it; that is the kind of flexibility that we give.
The fourth element would be the democratisation of the whole technology. The solution is available free for everybody. We created something known as ‘UiPathGo’, which is a market place for people to create great components and we created something known as ‘UiPathConnect’, something which brings together the community and also could help you with commercialising your effort.
These things clearly make us distinctly apart and it entices all our customers. They would feel that they are not married to UiPath for commercial purposes but are married for the product supremacy and the way we work. And another thing I want to add is that we are truly a global company. We are probably the only company existing in a maximum number of countries and cities hence we are culturally diversified. We have a diversified customer and partner eco-system around us. We believe that will help us to get to the next level of growth we want to see.
Q: What is UiPath’s strategy when it comes to markets like Sri Lanka?
We have been focusing on multi-national companies who are operating in either Japan or in APAC area who have a vast amount of operations in countries like the Philippines, India and Malaysia. A couple of years back, we consciously and strategically took a decision that RPA is not only applicable to global companies. Our target always has been 20,000 companies globally. Similarly, in the global twenty thousand firms, we want to have more than 50% market share.
But we also took a strategy that when we went across all the countries, we need to have a direct presence in 30-35 cities and indirect presence 60 cities. When I say indirectly, for an example we might be present in Colombo but we might be selling in the Maldives. We found out that RPA is directly applicable. While we want to focus on global 20,000 companies, we want to cover top private companies in every country that we operate. And it is working extremely well.
In the second quarter of 2018, we started incubating Indian subcontinent as geography. When I say Indian subcontinent it is India, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Myanmar and Bangladesh. We thought that let us invest in 2018 and by mid of 2019, we will see the returns and we started setting up offices, hiring people and doing investments because these are local markets which are bit cost sensitive. And that has actually started giving us wonderful insights and wonderful returns. Right from third and fourth quarters, we are seeing a good amount of traction in Sri Lanka. I can say at least two of our salespeople visit Sri Lanka at least once or twice every two months.
Currently, we have partnered with John Keels and we are doing a lot of work for MAS Legato. I think we have 10 or 12 Sri Lankan companies who have shown interest to partner with us. Along with that, we are seeing a good opportunity to replicate some of the key initiatives we are planning in India. We democratise the technology we are focusing on creating for our community and by doing that, we are building interest for RPA and UiPath. In such a background, we do a lot of academic alliance and community-related activities in India in order to create a global impact.
We are planning to run those initiatives in Sri Lanka as well. We feel it is a unique opportunity for the current talent pool in Sri Lanka and create awareness among them to embrace RPA and AI which could give them a global advantage.
Q: Automation is going to play a key role globally and if you focus on emerging economies, how would you think automation is going to boost a number of economic developments happening in these nations?
If you take a Sri Lankan organisation – be it government sector or private sector – there are tons and tons of operations. And when I say operations, this is a set of activities which is being done in a manual or a semi-manual manner. When you look at industries, they usually have a lot of systems but these systems are not connected; they don’t speak to each other. If you need to do that, you have to spend a huge sum of money on it so you basically put a human being to do that or work with an IT services company in building an API layer.
Because there are a lot of transactions happening and for countries like Sri Lanka, they do not want to invest a lot because of huge budgets or the dependency they have on other economies to support them. In such context, automation or RPA gives them a unique edge to be self-sufficient. They do not want to be seen as below par, they will be able to climb up the ladder of competitiveness. If Sri Lanka as a country embraces ‘automation first’ mindset and they start to communicate differently about it, they will be able to fix problems which is prevalent today and the accumulation of fixing all these problems is going to improve the productivity of the country.
The focus of automation is to improve the efficiency, the speed and accuracy so that it ultimately helps you to differentiate yourself from the competition. I think the beauty of RPA is the quick realisation of value. Under the automation umbrella, we talk about a lot of things but RPA is one aspect which you can start seeing value from day one and you can start seeing the benefits and take advantage of that.
Q: Some people see automation as a key benefactor to the so-called technology unemployment; people think that automation would take out their jobs. However, the industry experts over the years have pointed out that emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and RPA would create unique, higher-paying jobs. As a company, how would you look to address this sentiment?
A: At a conference which I took part in, I saw a slide where it said the next 60 million jobs will be created from automation. For me, I think it is an industrial revolution. Every time we go through an industrial revolution, people are going to think that whatever they were doing manually would be taken over by a machine. For centuries, this has been happening
However, the world has been growing economically; every country has been growing and new jobs have been created in numbers. Two decades ago, when people came out of universities as computer science graduates, a lot of people said that computer science will not pick up whatsoever because people did not like computers coming into industries. People thought computers would rob them out of their jobs.
Fast forward 25 years, everyone uses computers and it has created more and more jobs for us. Losing jobs to machines has been a myth for a long time and it has been demystified. It is just a fear I think we need to get over and think about what the human brain could do differently on a day-to-day basis; create more jobs, more opportunities and find more and more solutions which are needed for humans to have a better life.
Q: What does the future hold for RPA in your opinion?
RPA technologies have significantly developed since the days of basic screen scraping and simple workflow management tools first emerged in the 1990s. Today, RPA has transformed how companies across the globe approach their business activities, especially in terms of enhancing and streamlining operations. We cannot know exactly how automation technologies will unfold in the upcoming years, yet we have a good indication that the future of RPA is very promising. As the prevalence of RPA increases and automation experiences a larger degree of deployment in more varied industries, the full benefits of automation technology will not only be realised, but they will also be leveraged as a critical competitive advantage in a number of crowded, expanding industries.
