Neeti Mehta Shukla: Work without the busywork

My favorite thing to say is you know we weren’t put on earth to transfer data from Excel to a database. That’s really not the human’s core strength. And yet so much of our jobs in some capacity or another has this element because of how software has been built over the last 30 50 years.

And we have a chance to change that efficiency and productivity and it’s exciting. It’s new. I mean we don’t even know the names of the jobs that will exist in 10 years from now just because the innovation of products and services that will come out of this revolution will be so extraordinary and all those will need jobs.

So hang in there, keep upskilling, keep learning just like every one of us has to but I think the promise of AI is significant. I want to make sure I’m pronouncing your name correct. Niti.

Niti. Nice. Niti.

Okay. Can you give us your your spiel? Who are you and and and maybe just tell us about sort of like your the short version of your origin story for Automation Anywhere.

All right. So automation anywhere as we said you know we started in 2003 and Mir who’s our CEO you know we were we were thinking about it and he was a big proponent of look there’s so much work being done with software and we both were in the tech field of course and but there’s so many inefficiencies and it was very glaringly obvious to us that there’s a lot of busy work being done so if you take that moment in time you know software had been around, computers had been around for whatever 30 plus years and we had created all these siloed applications and that that really had enabled us to do a lot more than we did before. But it needed kind of a reset to rethink and rearchitecture how to get that productivity and efficiency to that next level.

And the mission of the company right from the get-go was how can we enable humans to do more and fuel the future of work. You you use those exact same words. And that mission hasn’t changed in 23 years.

So our our roots are from that point of you know we created that early category of robotic process automation at that point which also had intelligence built in and then about 10 years ago we started the you know mainstream AI applications within the within the platform and come 2025 at this point in time it’s a very mature stable product that you know services obviously very any mission critical operations across many industries and verticals. So the reason I bring that up is it it can be relied upon at you know at at any level really at this stage. So it’s just a fantastic time for automation anywhere from where it’s come to where it is.

And we’re very super proud of you know what the technology is done and it continues to do robotic process automation RPA. I think it’s actually important for people who are you know I think beginning the learning journey around AI and their starting point is large language models to understand that you know depending on your definition of artificial intelligence like we’ve had a lot of the capabilities that I think folks assume you know just became available thanks to LLMs but is there do you have like maybe like an example that you could share to help someone understand what RPA looks like? You don’t have to give the actual name, but maybe just like an example of a type of company you might work with and and how they’re like what are they automating essentially?

Absolutely. So, maybe this is a good example because it tells you what is possible today, right? So, RPA just gets the work done and that was for us generation one of our platform and we’re at about generation three.

Let me kind of lay out a an example that kind of shows you the breadth and width of what is possible. So let’s say you are a company one of millions in many any industry or vertical and you have to onboard a vendor something as simple as that right and it’s complex because normally there’s just a lot of different steps that you have to do to onboard a vendor any company has this process. Now ideally speaking what we what we would do today and what the agentic platform that we have today will do is you just come up to the agent and you say I need to onboard a vendor.

I could be sitting in marketing or HR or in procurement it doesn’t matter and the agent would kind of figure out one what are the processes within your organization. So it’s already been trained using LLMs, using other things as to what this company requires for an vendor to be onboarded, understands and is already trained on compliance and governance around based on where you are or the governmental regulations and so forth, what is needed and then the pitfalls or you know things that that we have basically trained the agent to look for. And just by the person coming up the human coming up and saying look I need to onboard a vendor in less than a minute that vendor barring any complications that they have not submitted something should be onboarded.

Currently that takes anywhere between 2 to 4 weeks. Now if you look at that whole process being done in less than a minute, there are LLMs involved, there’s natural language processing involved, there’s RPA involved because what our platform is able to do is not just spew out these are the steps that you need to do to onboard this vendor, but it actually does that work. So it actually will go into multiple systems and do what it needs to do in order to onboard that vendor and that’s actually getting the work done.

So you know if you look at what agentic process automation can do today there are components of it from all these different aspects that come together and really is at that crucial point of changing how we do work not just talking about it or getting information about it or learning more about it but all of it and then actually getting it done. I think folks are coming around to this question of like okay we actually need to understand like what is the future of work look like and they’re hearing a lot of I think rhetoric around like you know techn AI and technology is going to be replacing a lot of jobs a lot of the like when I think about onboarding a vendor that’s I couldn’t imagine maybe a more boring aspect of of somebody’s job like I don’t think there is anybody that is going to shed a single tear for you know not having to go through the you said two to four weeks of of of time involved It’s like a lot of documentation and what would you say to a parent who’s asking this question of like you know how like how do I guide my my student how do I guide my my kid should they still go to college like is you know are there careers that are going to disappear because of these technologies that’s a really great question and there are many aspects to it I’ll mention a couple of them one is history has taught us that no industrial revolution is without the pain of transition So if you look at whether it’s the first or second or third industrial revolutions and right now we’re in the techn technological AI revolution transition is hard and so I understand the pain of okay what is happening how do I navigate this and what’s going on but understand that it is shortterm because we’re right in the crux of it in the middle of it and that transition has always been hard but what history has also taught us is any one of these revolutions has really unleashed a series of innovation and productivity for the globe at at large. Right?

So any any region of the world, any vertical, any industry has really been better off or has come with more ideas and more products and services and so forth. So those jobs will be created. Yes, but we are in that transition of moving from one type of job to another type of job and some jobs are more impacted than others.

But I think it’s temporary. I think it’s within the next two or three years we will see that transition happen because some jobs are already absorbed by the AI of course but some jobs are getting morphed by the AI so like I said about vendor on boarding if you’re in a procurement team for example and you’re not doing vendor on boarding hopefully you’re doing something else and making your your internal customers life easier right look at health care I mean we have doctors and nurses who spend so much of their time, in fact, a majority of their time on administrative tasks. And I don’t know a single patient who wouldn’t want the doctor to spend an extra 10 minutes even handholding or having that emotional connect if you’re going through some health issue.

And that’s important. I think if the end goal of what technology can bring you and bring society at large is important enough, then then it’s worth that transition cost if I may. So that’s one aspect of it.

The second aspect of what you asked about is you know I don’t think knowledge is ever wasted and that might be coming from a from a view of a parent maybe but you know if you when you go to university and you study and you put together the skill sets that you might have and yes we are again in that transitionary time so you have to have continuous learning you have to continuously upskill because the industry is moving faster than speed of light at this point. So yes there is that transitionary learning that’s also needed but when you put all of that together it makes the human again come at any problem with a a level of innovation skill set and tools that they never had before. So if you took take a take a chance of I mean take a list of the biggest problems facing the world today and there are so many but take everything from you know capacity planning or climate change or the productivity crisis.

How are we going to increase GDP in most countries when the population is decreasing and one of the ways is when you increase the productivity of each individual person and these technological tools will allow us to do so. So by and large I think transition is hard. We’re in the midst of transition.

So it feels a little bit more in your face. But I think with the level of upskilling and the workforce development that we’re seeing come through I think we’ll deal with it better than we have in the past. You know my favorite thing to say is you know we weren’t put on earth to transfer data from Excel to a database.

That’s really not the human’s core strength. And yet so much of our jobs in some capacity or another has this element because of how software has been built over the last 30 50 years. And we have a chance to change that efficiency and productivity.

And it’s exciting. It’s new. I mean we don’t even know the names of the jobs that will exist in 10 years from now just because the innovation of products and services that will come out of this revolution will be so extraordinary.

And all those will need jobs. So hang in there, keep upskilling, keep learning just like any every one of us has to but I think the promise of AI is significant. Yeah, uncertainty can be really scary.

I it’s worth saying that uncertainty also brings opportunity and frankly the more I dig into it the more I feel like you know students today are probably in a much better position than even like a lot of folks who are in the middle of their careers because you know these kids are AI native they just and the example I give is like imagine trying to teach your your parent how to like create an Instagram story and then usually clicks for kids because they’re like oh yeah they never figured that out and yet here you are sort of like throwing together all these like very it’s I also struggle with Instagram stories. So so when you founded automation anywhere co-founded automation anywhere this is 2003 this is like so so computers had roughly proliferated the internet was in sort of like the still middle stage of maturing fiber had been I guess at this point overbuilt but there was you know there was like broadband was becoming more and more accessible we didn’t have I think any social media companies I’m trying to think when MySpace was maybe MySpace in heaven. So yeah, as you think back to what sort of equipped you to navigate, you know, what at the time was also a lot of change and disruption but ended up being in retrospect, you know, tremendous opportunity.

Yeah. Like what equipped you to navigate that and what, you know, even to get into a place where you were able to have that conversation with somebody about starting a company? That’s an interesting question.

But I think just like all innovation it comes from trying to understand what problem you’re trying to solve and and then you just go after that problem. So if the problem in our case was how do we enable humans to work more effectively and really fuel that productivity gain that will come from that. How how do we make them do more knowledge based work versus manual work and really look upon it as as a as a way of working a way of getting work done.

Then you find many ways to to tackle that problem and one of the ways that we focused on was okay how do we create that level of intelligence so that the boring manual repetitive work of course gets done and that was the advent of the RPA and then of course bringing more intelligence and artificial intelligence into it so that we can take it to the next level of really increasing productivity at an X factor looking at that problem consistently constantly and continuously and learning all the different mediums that we can bring into that problem to solve it and make it most absorbable for the market, for the industry, I think is what fueled us. I hope that answers your question. No, it does.

And and I because I think what you’re describing is it’s really sort of at the heart of Silicon Valley and really advice that like all these startup founders are getting. And I think that there’s a lot of folks who assume that, you know, being involved in technology means you’re a STEM person, means that you’re a hardcore engineer. I think what really draw me drew me to you was, you know, this focus that you have on social impact, which is a decidedly I think there’s obviously a technology component to it, but it’s also really bringing in the humanities and these questions of ethics and and so I I I’m curious like if if you like do you buy that that this sort of like as we move into sort of this the next phase like so the next technology revolution that you don’t have to be a STEM kid necessarily to be able to identify those problems to be able to think about solutions and sort of like have a role in sort of shaping the future.

Yes and no. I think you you can be anything you want to be in this world. I tell my children that and I truly believe it. So I think you may or may not be in STEM but what you need to be is somebody who looks at something and is able to solve for it.

That’s one aspect of it. The other aspect of it and I am a techie at heart I guess. And I feel like it is a language.

It is like English or French or something you know where you if you understand code even if it is in a very basic way it enables you to understand how to solve for certain things. So it’s a it’s a it’s a mechanism that teaches you how to find solutions and look at a problem in different lights. So I would encourage everybody even if it’s not native to you just to get a dabble in it even if you can you know and then of course if you take to it and I think as you put it this generation is born AI native so they are very very clear on how to deal with technology and so coding might help or might not help them.

But I think that’s important for me. But but career-wise look I’m not an engineer but I do know how to code. I learned to code when I was in high school and I continued coding for HTML and other things for from a marketing aspect which is what my career was in.

But it enabled me again to look at problems from different solutions and how to structure them, how to framework it, how to deliver it and I think it has made me a better marketer for that. And then now moving into impact. I see you know we work with nonprofits and we have a a huge arm of reskilling that we do.

And what I see is that when when people are equipped with platforms like ours they are able to do more as a nonprofit or they are able to get skilled even if they’ve never I’ll give you an example for reskilling. We work with refugees and we have this one organization we work with who brings refugees out of Afghanistan and you know the way it works is they they land in whichever country obviously that takes them in and they land in Japan. Now, if you’re an Afghani national in Japan, and you can hardly speak Japanese, so you can’t work in the gig economy, you can’t get a job at Starbucks, but you can talk code.

So, if you know a little bit of technology, and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve, you know, worked with these refugees through these social organizations to help them upskill on on our platform for about 3 months, and they’re able to land a job even living in Japan, knowing Afghani. And so it’s just it’s to me it’s it’s a it’s something that brings people together as well.

And allows for collaboration and engagement at another level. So if you can, I think you must learn to code. Even if it’s at the basic level, understand STEM in that sense.

And I’m using STEM very broadly here. But it enables you to do more. So curiosity for that is important.

And I find this fascinating because there’s there’s been a lot of rhetoric around well because large language models are really good at coding or writing code that that’s you know I think there are some who are asking the question well do kids even need to learn computer science anymore? And my intuition is actually that we’re going to see a lot more examples like the one you shared where you know whether you’re hiring a marketer or a you know a customer success manager or you know a salesperson I think having the technical the computational thinking skills the computational literacy also the problem solving that you build that like the coding is just a bunch of problem solving iteration like sort of like constantly there’s all this like durable skills in addition to the computational thinking that you build in CS that it’s not that you can’t in some way get that but it’s just a very if you have the opportunity in front of you it’s just a very powerful way to build that but that’s like actually a bit of a contrarian take and like I you know because there’s a lot of other CEOs of tech companies that are saying yeah you know I wouldn’t tell my daughter to bother learning computer science and I I’m oppos I I’m I feel oppositional to that and it’s it’s refreshing to hear that from you I’m curious Like have you seen it, you know, at your company? I mean, is there have you seen the value of coding decrease?

Maybe like that might be one one thing that we might if this is playing out the way some are claiming, you know, are you starting to hire people that just have vibe coding experience without actually knowing CS? Again, yes or no. So, yes, absolutely. We are seeing a lot of coding being autogenerated even at Automation Anywhere, enabled elsewhere, right?

But to your point you know let let’s look at a a coding degree over the last 10 years for example even that instructional educational curriculum is going to have to morph and change. So what you typically learned in a computer science course or a coding diploma might change a little bit. It might be the basics of coding and how to use these tools more effectively and then and then add a layer of strategic frameworking or prompt engineering or whatever else it may be to get it right.

But it’s it’s a little bit like in my opinion like math or art. You know math, art, literature, philosophy, coding or STEM in some form or fashion I think are all essential human skills that enable us to do better and understand the world around us better and then produce better work product. And so having some element of it is important whether it is at the exact same way it has been over the last 10 years I think probably not.

I think it’s going to morph and change and we’re seeing universities and vocational training and continuous training change to to deal with that. So the answer is yes and no. a traditional computer science coding degree from 10 years ago might not look the same tomorrow. It will look a little bit different.

Yeah. I was Philip Colligan at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and I had this conversation actually like it was like two years ago and I was asking him basically the same question. And he was like, "Well, Alex, you know, we had, you know, GitHub and there were a lot of, you know, and and Stack Overflow and there’s been like all these sort of advances that have made it significantly easier to code.

You know, a lot of coding was, you know, it may not have been automated by AI, but a lot of it was sort of automated by, you know, just like, you know, developer operations and other process improvements. And all of those corresponded with an increase in the the value of computer science, not a decrease. Correct.

And it also increases what is possible because you know if if you were to do it the traditional way I mean I I look at maths right like I mean if you didn’t have the calculator for example and you had to do everything by hand it is going you’ll still do it but you’ll take that much longer to do it. And the fact that you have a that you have a calculator and now a computer and now something else just enables you to do that much much faster. And that allows you to actually innovate even more.

You know maybe there’s there’s that much more research in space because of that and there’s that much more research in biotech and healthcare because of that. So it it is about evolution of any of the STEM disciplines and the tools available to every human to get to the next level in that discipline. You you also me you said something that was important was you you you mentioned CS alongside you know math and and literature and sort of these other subjects that we I think consider to be sort of like fundamental to learning certainly when I was in school computer science felt a lot more like a vocational track you know like you go into CS to get a job and at a tech company and you said something that really stood out to me which is like CS is a way of understanding the world around you which you know it’s Everybody learns physics in school and you know I don’t know that I use physics every day but it is sort of I think like math it’s it’s one of those things where there’s sort of intrinsic value in understanding the world to say nothing of the actual other skills that you develop in the process like how often do you sort of like run into challenges with people even like being aware of you know some of the both say the possibilities of technology or maybe the challenges that it poses because like my my sense is that we’re not quite, you know, I think most people don’t don’t actually understand what’s sort of happening.

You know, they kind of like they they have these magical tools that they use. But I’m just from your vantage point, I’m just curious. No, absolutely.

I think you’re right. I think like we live obviously in Silicon Valley and so we see the world with a with tech glasses if that makes sense, right? And we see everything and understand the technologies behind certain thing or how complex something might be or how how uncomplex it might be or simple it might be I think you know the more products and services utilize these new technologies so I’ll give you an example if you’re a farmer let’s say in rural India and you’re utilizing AI to figure out automatically what the water requirement of your field is and And it’s it’s on a day-to-day basis using satellite imagery as well as soil sampling and 100 other things which you couldn’t do before.

So you would you would understand the value it provides you understand that the science behind it. You may not understand the full science behind it. You may just look at it upon a tool that delivered for you.

But you have to engage with that tool. You have to engage with that science and you have to understand and be part of that ecosystem. So the more products and services that you utilize and I think we already do right from healthcare, biotech, pharma, logistics, governments, I mean across the board all these services now utilize tech in some form or fashion.

So whether you are an end recipient of that and you understand that there’s something behind it and that might be the most rudimentary way and then or you’re a scientist or you’re a tech technologist in Silicon Valley and you understand it fully and wholesomely. I think there’s always a range. But I think the world is understanding that digital and technology is an integral part of a lot of things we do now.

You know I mean look at the mobile phone and what it did you know and if you if you look at there’s there’s an example always from Africa that says they never went through the ATM revolution because their banking went you know leaprogged and went straight into mobile technology but they understand that there’s tech involved there and they understand that the value of that tech that they bring so to some extent I think they understand it they may not comprehend it fully but I think people people by and large understand that there’s value to be had from this. Yeah. And like like on that thread there’s you know as I’ve been thinking about sort of like how to talk about the future of work and the future of let’s say like let’s say tech jobs you know one one thing that I’ve heard people raise is this Jebins paradox this idea that like as the cost of certain commodities comes down you actually see an increase in demand.

And that was the case for like vehicle fuel efficiency standards. We consume more gas as fuel fuel efficiency went up because it was more people could then drive and you could drive further and I I think about small businesses which like right now and we’re small business you know the the cost of having a team of an engineering team is like astronomical you know like you need a front end and a backend developer then a system architect if in the future we could have engineering capabilities with let’s say one or two people on staff instead of like five or six or I don’t even know how many dozens or maybe even hundreds that your company employs. I bet there’s a huge long tale of of businesses that actually could do a lot with an engineering team that had you know that was sort of augmented by AI.

Are are you seeing a bit like are there any sort of signals that you might be seeing just from Automation Anywhere’s work like businesses that maybe people wouldn’t expect to be technology forward that are able to kind of use these tools? Absolutely. I mean you know I work in the impact side on the impact side and obviously with a lot of nonprofits and you know I feel you know nonprofits the the requirements that have come to nonprofits over the last 10 years has just been phenomenal.

So whether it’s from a capacity perspective or the speed of delivery for example if you’re you know if you’re the Red Cross and you there’s just that many more natural disasters there’s that many more wars there’s that many more people that you have to serve very instantly or you know etc right so the the demand healthcare I mean you just name any nonprofit from education right the capacity requirement has just doubled tripled quadrupled in very short periods of time and So when they embrace technology and there’s a light bulb moment when they realize how it can help them do more because they’re so missiondriven obviously and they want to kind of accomplish more towards their mission. So I’ll give you one example. We work with a nonprofit in India called Ashaiatra and they are they they provide food meals the the lunch meal for about 2.4 4 million children every day.

Every day. And they run 70 kitchens around the world, etc., etc. Now, their requirement is that within 5 years, they’ve got to hit 5 million children. And so now, how do you build that?

You know, you can’t just throw money at a problem and make it happen because there’s just so much other things going on. Not to mention capital is hard to get as well for nonprofits and grants are hard to to get. But we we work with them in order to increase the efficiency and productivity of that of their entire operations right now and we’re hoping to kind of help them to get there because we can get faster productivity.

So whether it’s grant management, vendor management, fleet management, supply chain, there’s just so many things that they have to do that we can directly impact the bottom line of a nonprofit. And so we’re seeing and once once you have somebody in their leadership who understands of course this has a vision behind it and then they see the value or the ROI that a tech company like ours can deliver to their operations then they immediately obviously become believers but they have a plan of action. Okay, we can utilize this in order to get where we want to go.

And that’s that’s significant. Another example I’d like to give you would be you know, a smaller nonprofit that we work with. They are an aid agency, Step with Hope, in you know, they basically set up these aid tents in war areas or, you know, where IDPs or refugees can come up and basically request diabetes medication or whatever.

And we helped automate the intake process and they were able to deliver 400% more aid at any given time than they could before. Fantastic opportunity. But that’s was not the cool part.

The cool part was the humans on the ground who were not technative, the volunteers on the ground realized that okay, now that we’ve automated this process, we are able to get the results obviously very immediately and we’re touching three systems. So why are we not flagging for trafficking victims when they walk in through the door? So if I walk in through the door with a 10-year-old child and ask for aid, have I actually filed a tax return with that child?

Etc etc right so now again not technative understands the value that is being given and is able to innovate and and deliver so much more to humanity and society because of how they think and innovate around it right so I think we’re seeing across the board a lot of organizations and of course the corporate side is is well documented but I give you one more example from the corporate side which I found very interesting. We have a large energy company that’s a customer and their tax department decided to you know create an LLM an agent that and they fed it the entire tax code of Brazil. It happens to be in Brazil.

And then had a human at the helm, you know, basically take care of ambiguities and things like this. And then it fed the agent the tax filing that they had for the year. And then the agent was able to spew out basically areas to re relook and find and decide.

And they were able to serve $120 million in savings in 3 weeks end to end. Again, cool part is that $120 million that that energy company saved hopefully will go into clean energy R&D because that money otherwise would not exist for that program. So again just fantastic use cases of again I call it human innovation of how to use these technologies to get to that next level.

And yes, we see it across the board. Small businesses, large businesses. We have one all volunteer organization in New Jersey.

Jersey STEMs, they run a science STEM program for after after school for kids in New Jersey. And they automated quite a few of their processes and given its volunteer run, those volunteers were then able to do a lot more than they could before. Of course, run more programs in more schools.

Not to mention when a volunteer joins, again, they’re not joined to transfer data between Excel and the database, right? They want to kind of do the the more touchyfey and emotionally high work that is involved. So fantastic and so many use cases and this is just with our technology.

So imagine all the other technologies and innovations that are coming out and what can be done. It’s it’s an amazing time. It’s funny because you don’t hear about these stories as much.

I think we hear a lot about, you know, companies that are replacing people with AI and even that I’m there’s a lot of fuzziness to the data, right, in terms of like what how much of that was actually like people being replaced versus just sort of cyclical layoffs. And and I think we hear about, you know, the frontiers of science. So the idea of AI maybe helping cure cancer you know things like AlphaFold like what you’re describing is you know in some ways some of the more boring stuff that happens in the background and yet you know when you’re talking about a 400% increase in you know like scale and impact for nonprofit.

I mean most of the time achieving a 400% increase corresponds with raising 400% more money. I mean like it’s really really hard to grow like that. Are there any sort of common threads as you think about some of these different organizations that you support that that sort of are are sort of like strongly leading indicators of their ability to like harness the technology really effectively?

I mean does this come down to like different individuals within organizations or sort of innovation culture or cultures of innovation? Absolutely. I mean there are many things and many things put together can make great success or great failure, right?

So absolutely I think we call them champions within organizations who who want to kind of embrace a new technology or understand it and see how it can be applied. Definitely that helps. I think what also helps is when a customer doesn’t necessarily go after see when you’re trying something new you don’t want to go after the most complex problem because your teams are not ready to tackle it.

So if you go with a with a with a good starting point, a leveler in a way then you have a better chance of success. So you get quick early wins so that the team one understands what’s involved believes in it has then you know things fall in place. There’s this collaboration and you know computation within the organization that has to happen and then you can tackle a really large problem.

So sometimes we see that make a difference as well. Then yes absolutely there’s internal change management that’s required in many cases if it’s a very large organization and people are worried because of you know the job losses that are coming or something like that and some of it might be true as you said and some of it might actually be just you know being you know attributed to AI but it’s something else within the organization. So definitely some level of change management and I find that organizations that do a lot of training for their employees on new tools and new software and make them comfortable with trying them out have better success of it.

So all of the above in a way can lead to success. In a nonprofit’s case, it’s a little bit I would say nonprofit and healthcare. They’re both areas where we see that the mission is so strong within the organizations to to obviously provide service in some form or fashion.

That as as long as they know that this is going to enable them to achieve their mission better, faster, easier, then they are believers. Sometimes not technative, so there’s a little bit more handholding or more training that’s required. But they also have the biggest ROIs.

Are there any examples of nonprofits that you think we need to be doing a better job sort of like bringing them into this sort of like spirit of innovation? Like maybe it’s like untapped opportunities for social impact and and perhaps even that the latest advances in sort of AI technology, you know, might have enabled that were were possible. You know, five years ago.

I mean, all of them, if you ask me. You know, but but that’s my tech hat, talking. When I wear my impact officer hat, I I feel for them because, they’re, you know, these are fantastic people who so clearly believe in the mission.

Anything is a distraction if it’s not missiondriven, you know. So to some extent to pause what you’re doing to get your tech stack ready or work on the back office integration or work on application API or whatever else it may be is hard you know and I I understand that it’s not easy and I’m glad they do it the way they do it because they serve us better by doing it. Serve society better by doing it.

But having somebody in the organization who who is techdriven is important in these cases because again from our vantage point we feel the ROI is you know I mean we’re talking 2 3 months of ROI not even you know not even a year two years or 5 years which was traditional right for a lot of software development to provide ROI if you had if you had to hire an engineer and have him code something for you and then that you know by the time it actually gets to market for that nonprofit. It used to be a two-year time frame. Now it’s 2 months, 3 months.

So I think talking to them more, enabling them more, having volunteers who understand tech contribute to them more many ways that that it can be achieved. No, that makes sense. Are there any you mentioned one use case in education?

I I was curious if there was any others. You know, we we work with a lot of a lot a lot of peer nonprofits but also a lot of schools and this this question of like what are the ways that you know AI can can support learners is coming up more and more. What this is a STEM program in New Jersey I think you had brought up.

Correct. We work with so many academic institutions. So like in the US we work with the University of Florida, we have we have Carnegie Melon who have about 160 universities worldwide.

In for example in Australia we’re working with RMIT and University of Melbourne with RMIT they had a goal of improving student experience that was their goal and what what are the things we can automate so that students have a better experience and I don’t have all the use cases at the top of my the tip of my fingers but there’s a there’s a case study on our website that talks about it and it’s it’s about that and how they are improving student experiences by making sure they’re responsive. They’re quick to deliver whatever they have to deliver to the students. You know, financial planning and if you’re if you’re dispersing scholarships, how do you get that faster, better without errors?

These are all things that make or break a university’s operations and we we’re part of it. And there’s just a plethora of institutes that utilize automation and AI in the regular operations even in the intake process and so forth. Yeah, I I think a lot about you know schools are especially in K-12 you know they’re always struggling with you know how to engage stakeholders especially parents.

They’re also struggling with student engagement and just you know a a worrying number of students are are not showing up to school and it’s kind of across the board. It’s you know it used to be that like underperforming students used to do that and now there’s even even you know good students are just like they just like I don’t see the value. I think schools often have traditional mediums like channels to communicate like you a newsletter maybe a bulletin board literally and what you’re describing is I think much more like responsive in like sort of like real time systems that can you know especially like I’m thinking about like parent back and forth a lot of teachers time is spent just responding to parents what I mean what advice would you have for you know a leader of a nonprofit a school if they’re thinking about okay how do I want to get myself set up so that we can be one of those exemplars that you know whether it’s automation anywhere or sort of like any technology provider that can come in you mentioned having an internal champion you mentioned training is there anything else and maybe it’s that simple but is is there anything else that you would you would share and and I I say this as as myself someone who’s you know trying to figure out the answer to that question you know I mean there’s no two institutes that are alike only because there’s just so much of differences in the way they operate or their culture and how they’re funded and other things of course but again I think if the end goal it’s just like any other institution or organization if the end goal is very clear like let’s say you’re saying I want to increase student experience speed of delivery by 10%.

Then that that goal setting is super important because I think then it allows you to go in one direction versus doing a 100 things and not seeing the benefit come through. So I think that’s important. So strategizing around it is is super important.

I think the ROI will speak to itself very quickly. At least in our platform we see that the aha moment come very quickly once they start the journey because you’re like oh if I could do this I can do five more things and I can do 10 more things and they never want to go back to the old way of doing it because they see the value of course but they become more humanlike in my opinion when they stop doing things that AI can do which which is interesting and beneficial. I’m trying to think bringing it into the curriculum is important I think also because again you know like for automation anywhere for example we use our own product and we call ourselves customer zero and we document what we’ve learned and the ROI we’re we’re seeing and how it portrays and so forth.

So when you self-learn I think you bring out a better product or solution and so if any institute also is learning themselves training their students or training their professors on it then that that also comes back into that ecosystem you know so many things that you can do there and the larger the organization obviously the more processes and more compliance and governance and more everything which can be done well. Yeah, I like this idea of starting small and picking something where you can and what you said is important about this like RO like seeing the ROI in just a few months because what you need is even if you have your champion, you know, you want to be able to win win over the rest of the organization and and it’s you want to point them to something measurable and tangible. I think part of the challenge with large language models is they are they’re so multiaceted and multimodal and I think there’s a sense of and also I think very high expectations that were set certainly a year ago and so I think people have this this assumption that they need to be going in like truly transforming replacing entire jobs and what you’re describing is is much more tactical.

It’s like, you know, find something just like that that and the fact that it’s boring maybe actually is going to be important because people will that’s not going to be a task that people will will ask, oh, is this something that a human should be doing? It’s like your example of like importing an Excel spreadsheet. Nobody wants to import an Excel spreadsheet by hand obviously.

Yes. And then this idea of like documenting learning is I wish that more or were doing it because I you know right now the challenge you know for AID is as we think about our own digital transformation and we go to look for examples we can find or works that have done it right but then you you try to understand okay well how did you how did you get there and it’s like well this is actually kind of complicated and we had you know like you had someone on our seuite that was like really pushing this but then we also had you we internal learning groups that sort of met and I always there have been a few times where I think to myself I wish they had just literally like documented all of this and and now you just plug it into an LLM I guess and probably ask some questions but you described it as not just documentation for the sake of sharing externally but also as a as a process for encouraging learning which really makes sense it’s like even even if even even if you’re automating things you you also want to be building expertise across the organization and being more tech forward. No, this is it’s very validating to be honest to like hear and I think it’s important that you’ve been doing this work you know before Chad GBT so it gives you credibility this is not just like some new thing that you’re trying to pitch like this is proven correct and you know I was going to say that but the impact office even when we started our mission anywhere one of our key factors was okay if we really do believe in this the way this is going to work out and how industry is going to use it and we do believe in reskilling and upskilling then how do we make sure that everybody can become part of that ecosystem.

So there’s again the strategy aspect of it and so what we’ve done is we have something called automation anywhere university and we put in all our impact funding into creating byite-sized learning that’s free of cost that can be taken by anybody right so it can be taken by university it can be taken by a social learning platform for refugees it just doesn’t matter it’s it’s free of cost there it’s bite-sized you can take play do whatever you need with it Then we also realized that you know like most people people have to have the chance to play with it otherwise it’s just like watching a YouTube video it’s not going to help you you know after a while you really need to play with it. So we have a free licensing model as well that people can use. And then we have instructor manuals and things like this.

But our our strategy was let’s take away the barriers to learning and let’s take away any barrier for anybody in the world to really become part of the tech ecosystem as much as possible by automation anywhere. And that has been you know really successful for us and very good results coming out of the academic institutions we work with our own community of partners and customers and also these impact learners that we have right so I think coming at it from that strategy has been important for us and hopefully is helping make a difference in the community and you have like you have three certifications right it’s like essentials advanced and master correct Is this do you have to have a tech background or a computer science background? Oh, I tell the stories I can tell you, Alex.

The these are the human stories that touch your heart. I you know we like I said we we trained one lady who fled the Ministry of Education in Afghanistan, landed in Japan, had to suddenly you know find job and keep her family floated in Japan and learned our systems in 3 months as a working learning model. Now that she manages and does and has a great job.

We had one person so we set up an RPA center of excellence and AI center of excellence in the Mississippi Delta with another social partner, People Shores. And we’ve had use cases there where people were literally for 15 years flipping burgers at McDonald’s because that was the only employer in a 200 mile radius go from there to 120k job because tech can be remote and once you get trained you know we’ve had single mothers it’s been a great one because if you have bite-sized learning for example I don’t know a single mother who can take a year off work in order to train herself and also provide for the family at at the same time. But byite-size learning allows her to do that and then she can land a job in 3 to 6 months.

She was employed and didn’t have to work nights and etc etc. Better better life for her and her family. But lifts the entire community when something like that happens. So just fantastic use cases all around.

We’ve had amazing stories of courage of persistence of wanting to really be trained in this and they always surprise and inspire us so much. I I think that’s really important is like because only what I think sub 4% maybe even less 2% of Americans actually work in you know technology fields and so a lot of the folks who are going to be you know navigating career disruption and that they’re not tech people but I think you know the these these certifications you mentioned like bite-size learning it it feels like it’s going to be mo more and more important as there’s more disruption because like to your point like there’s going to be we don’t know what the jobs of the future are like the one thing we can bet on is there’s going to be just transition of some kind that people are going to have to be reinventing themselves to some degree or another and not everybody necessarily the single mother is a great example of not everybody can just go back to college you know that that will be a solution for some yeah ni has been this has been really awesome is there anything else that you you know that you would share and especially with an eye towards you know the folks who are listening in are you I think it’s a mix of parents it’s it’s educators and it’s also decision makers within sort of like the education apparatus that are I think feeling a bit overwhelmed by all of the yeah all of the change that’s coming and and and maybe looking for some you know either hopeful or at least a instructive message to kind of like help them figure out what to be focused on. I think I think knowing that the industry is undergoing this transformation is an important understanding and learning it is important because then you understand that it’s temporary or it’s short-term.

I I you know in 3 to 5 years again the number of jobs that are expected to increase is 2 million more jobs is I think what the jobs report said from World Economic Forum. And and so things like this it it is a transition. So knowing that I think helps two is I’m a big believer and this may be a personal belief but no education is wasted.

Somehow somewhere it all comes together in how you perform whether at a job or for an innovation or as an entrepreneur it doesn’t matter. So I think learning is always a good thing and there’s so much of free learning available as well as paid learning. But there is there’s just a lot of information available now and so you really utilize that you know take advantage of it and be part of that ecosystem and you know I’m a big believer that the you know especially with large language models and others but we have to have more and more people engage with these new AI products and services because if we don’t then the new innovation that comes out will cater to the few that were engaged and that’s really not what we we would really like for healthcare to you know be for everyone and pharma to consider you know drugs for not just the male body but the female body as well etc. Right?

There’s just the more we engage with these systems the better the products and services that will come out of it for the next 50 years even. So, being aware, being, you know, and whatever, wherever you’re comfortable, whether a little bit or a lot, I think is important. Yeah.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Just get on the learning journey wherever you are, it’s doesn’t matter how far you want to go. Yeah.

But just get on. And I don’t know if it’s relevant to this audience, but responsible AI. So, one of the things that we do with the impact office is we run the responsible AI council within Automation Anywhere.

And that’s important because I think there’s so much new AI and so much new data and so many new products and services and you have to have a framework of compliance, governance and responsibility. And I think that’s that’s also good to learn. So if you’re a student or a university or a training institute, it doesn’t matter understanding and teaching the students about responsible AI governance is important.

And understanding that is important. So that’s something we take very much to heart and we have a lot of programs around that internally for automation anywhere. But I think it’s important for society at large.

Does it does it intersect with your like when you do work for example with NOS’s do you help them kind of navigate some of these like responsible AI questions along with like the technology? Some do we are happy to share what we have done or what we do but a lot of times the compliance and governance will be different. So we’re not experts in the nonprofit field of course and things like this but having that having that framework understanding that okay this is how we look at data this is how we look at privacy and cyber security and transparency and whatever else may be that allows them also to look at okay what what should our policy be internally how should we set this up I think having it at the top of mind is important because this is a new area and we’ve learned with tech over the last 30 years that we we didn’t do very well with certain things including social media for children.

That that we can do better with AI. So you know take that learning and create those frameworks that enable us to be a little bit more protected as society is important. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean it bring bringing it back to what you’re saying about you know having leadership and having sort of like internal champions that can you know make it a priority but yeah like the the responsible AI for you know a health organization versus an education organization be really different. Yeah, we just completed ISO 4201 which is the responsible AI certification for ISO. And I think we’re one of less than 100 companies, 75 companies in the world that has it and and that’s why I think it’s important because I feel to we have to deliver amazing things but we have to deliver it very responsibly.

That’s wild only 100. Excellent. Well, ET, thank you so much again.

Like it was absolutely a pleasure, Alex. Thank you so much for having me.