Mihir Shukla, Automation Anywhere | Google Cloud Next ’24

[Rebecca Knight]

Introduction

Hello everyone, we are getting toward the end of day one of theCUBE’s live coverage of Google Cloud Next here in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. I’m your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Rob Strecce. Rob, we are talking so much about collaborations here.

Google Cloud Ecosystem

I mean, that really seems to be a big theme at this conference.

[Rob Strecce]

Yeah, I think so. And I think, again, the big piece of this is that Google has brought quite the ecosystem to bear here. And I think, again, it is about all of the different pieces that make Gen AI and AI real, which is why this is going to be such an exciting conversation.

[Rebecca Knight]

Automation Anywhere Introduction

Exactly. Let me welcome to the show, a first-timer here on theCUBE, Mihir Shukla. He is the founder and CEO of Automation Anywhere. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Mihir.

[Mihir Shukla]

Glad to be here.

[Rebecca Knight]

So, why don’t you begin by telling our viewers a little bit about Automation Anywhere?

[Mihir Shukla]

Of course.

[00:01:00]

Automation Anywhere is a software company. It is an AI-powered automation platform. Our vision is to transform how work happens, and we do that by automating processes end-to-end. We have about 300 million of these processes automated, and they’ve been growing three times a year. So, the world as we know it is changing in front of our eyes. And we are looking forward to a world where every human being is empowered to be assisted with this technology and being able to unleash their true potential. And that’s the future we are all working towards.

[Rob Strecce]

Automation Anywhere and Google Cloud Partnership

And I think, again, it makes so much sense with automation and AI and ML underneath the hood and things of that nature. Why is it with Google and Google Cloud now? What’s the intersection between Automation Anywhere and Google Cloud?

[00:02:00]

[Mihir Shukla]

It’s a very timely question. So, what is happening is the combination of technologies are coming together, automation, AI, and now generative AI. And we did an announcement today where we are expanding our long-time partnership with Google with their AI models, Vertex and Gemini. And what we are doing is we are combining these technologies in a way and making things possible that weren’t possible just a year ago in a way that it expands our imagination. Let me take an example of kind of things we are able to do together to ground this conversation.

Healthcare Use Case

So, think about in a healthcare setup, a discharge post-after-visit summaries. Now, this platform, because Google is multimodal model, we are able to create automatic after-visit summaries, but not just that, but in a native language, in an audio format, and that’s automatically done.

[00:03:07]

So, completely taking a patient experience to a level that you could never imagine before. So, this is the power of technology. It is being able to do things that you could never imagine before. And now it is coming together with Google and Automation Anywhere partnership.

[Rebecca Knight]

Healthcare Use Case Details

So, talk a little bit more about that use case because that is fascinating and it is something that all of us really can grasp. What that would do to change both the patient experience of our medical lives as well as the doctor or practitioners. So, can you just dive into that a little bit about how that works and what actually the upshot of it is?

[Mihir Shukla]

So, if you think about our healthcare practice, there are a couple of big challenges. One is the burnout for nurses and doctors and amount of administrative work they have to do while taking care of us. Another is all of the patient understanding of what the diagnosis is and what are the things they are supposed to do.

[00:04:07]

And in the diverse world that we live in, often we find that there is a gap between their understanding of what they need to follow through with. So, in some of the projects, we are working on both ends. So, assisting, putting the power of AI, generative AI and automation in the hands of doctors directly, so that they used to spend about 25% of their time in administrative work. And if you can cut it down to 5 to 10%, we all know that that time could be better spent. And then, I described the patient outcomes. If a patient understands what they need to do, sometimes the healthcare outcome can be 60% better just by doing that piece right. If they understood it.

[Rob Strecce]

Other Use Cases

And I think that’s a great use case because, again, knowing people who’ve gone to the hospital and even people who may not understand the doctor speak.

[00:05:06]

They’re not always, it doesn’t seem like English or any other language sometimes. But what other use cases are you running into that really are benefiting from this and you’re seeing with your work with Google?

[Mihir Shukla]

There are hundreds of these fascinating use cases. So, we today have 300 large, many, many, about 300 of them running on Google Cloud today. Let me maybe share a few of them. Let’s take underwriting process for a bank. So, again, using Google’s multi-modal capability, what we are able to do is take a property’s videos, images, hundreds of documents, summarize all of them and creating an underwriting proposal that is automatically generated, waiting for a human being to provide their inputs and validate it.

[00:06:01]

But you could automate that process 90, 95% of the way in a way that you could never imagine before. This process used to take sometimes a few days and now it’s a matter of minutes, right? Another area where we apply is in anti-money laundering processes. It’s a complex process for many of the banks. A large number of people are occupied just with compliance work. And, again, by looking at thousands of documents and data points, you’re able to ingest all of it, make sense out of it, make decisions, and create alerts where appropriate. So, I can go on across virtually every single industry. Take an example of a tax processing. So, we all know it can be complicated.

[Rob Strecce]

Very timely.

[Mihir Shukla]

Very complicated and very timely. And it is even more complex for large enterprises.

[00:07:02]

By feeding it a set of tax laws and providing it tax documents, it can quickly figure out which tax laws to apply. When in doubt, it can take a human input. But it can quickly figure out a process that could take months into just a couple of days.

[Rebecca Knight]

Workforce Impact

When you are talking about the different ways that automation can automate different processes, what is the effect on the workforce? Because, I mean, I’m thinking about those underwriters and those tax assessors and the people who are dealing with money laundering. What is it doing for their day-to-day to have so much of their job just taken care of? I mean, what are they able to do? And what is the upshot for businesses? Are they seeing a rise in morale or overall productivity?

[Mihir Shukla]

So, you could look at this picture from multiple angles. So, if you look at it from macroeconomic perspective, and I’ll come to the individual story as well, but from macroeconomic perspective, if you think about it, first time in human history we have a declining workforce.

[00:08:09]

That has never, ever happened in the history of humanity. So, the next 10 years, the working age population is going to decline by 3%. Now, unless somebody knows another million people on some island that we don’t know about, this is all the people we have to work with, right? So, the fact that these technologies will allow us to do things in a declining workforce environment is a need of an hour. Without it, our social infrastructure, none of this could work, right? So, this is very timely. What is amazing about individuals is, the more and more people that are coming to the workforce are looking to build a career and not just a job. And they’re looking to do a purposeful work. And so, these technologies are allowing them to kind of remove the mundane work and allow them to apply their human skills to the workforce.

[00:09:09]

It will transform workplaces. So, it will make some jobs redundant, just like it always does. But it will create many more jobs. The best information we have today says that it will create 10 million new jobs. So, this entire transformation is about reskilling our workforce and allowing them to achieve their true potential.

[Rob Strecce]

Democratizing AI

Yeah, I think, to me, that’s really the fascinating piece about this is, people are going to be able to do more with less people on particular jobs. But it also should help them from a cognitive fatigue type of aspect as well. What are you finding from working with Google that democratizing AI, and where do you see that going over the course of this year with bringing these customers in?

[00:10:03]

Because you’re seeing a lot more. In fact, you’ve already talked about use cases that are more direct in production than we hear about out there. And we see that 30% of organizations still don’t even know what use case to pick.

[Mihir Shukla]

Enterprise Transformation

I think what Google and Automation Anywhere are doing together is, we are taking this conversation to an enterprise transformation. I think a lot of generative AI conversation has been limited to personal productivity, and there is an aspect of personal productivity that is useful. But this is so much bigger, right? Completely, we talked about a few examples of how an enterprise could operate, how patient or a customer experience could completely transform, and creating a new way of doing everything. And that phrase is very timely, given you see everywhere. This is really a new way of imagining how work happens.

[00:11:01]

So anyway, that’s the future that Google and Automation Anywhere are charting together.

[Rebecca Knight]

Customer Experiences

I know that you’re spending a lot of this conference talking with customers about their experiences with Automation Anywhere, but also their experiences, what their pain points are in coming up with new ways to use Gen AI, choose the right pilots. What are you finding, what are you hearing from your customers, and what are you going to take back with you after being at this conference?

[Mihir Shukla]

Customer Pain Points

So one of the things our joint customers struggle with is, what are the areas they can create the most impact? Opportunity seems like it’s everywhere, so when it is everywhere, what are the right places to start? So one of the things that we are able to offer our customers is, they have this large database of 300 million processes, and we have a before and after effect. So we are able to use that as a benchmarking tool to allow customers to see what is possible in the art of the AI.

[00:12:03]

And we are able to show them that this is their current state of operations. They could be operating here, which is what a good looks like. The difference between here and here is sometimes a difference of a few hundred million to a few billion dollar impact to the business. And then it is about charting a true transformative path. This is not an overnight journey, it’s a multi-year journey. But allowing them to a path to it that leads them to a new operating model. And it is rewarding for everybody to take them from this point to this point.

[Rob Strecce]

Future Successes

What do you, when you look out a year from now, and you’re sitting there and you have even more, as you were talking about the number of processes compounding that you have, what do you hope for that you can talk to us about, that here’s the successes in democratizing AI that we’ve had over the course of the last year?

[00:13:03]

[Mihir Shukla]

Exponential Capabilities

I think most people when they talk about capabilities today, they are thinking about what they could automate that they do today. I think the real power of this technology is doing things that you could never did before. And that’s a step that would naturally happen in this journey. If you travel the same distance in a car that a horse would cover, what’s the point of having a technology, right? So these technologies are exponential and I think this time next year, we should be talking about amazing new experiences that we could never experience before, and how they transformed patient, customer, and employee experiences in a way that fascinates us and stretches our imagination. That’s what I would love to see.

[Rebecca Knight]

Inspiration and Wonder

Mahir, I love the way you’re talking about this because you just have such a sense of awe and wonder when you’re talking about these technologies.

[00:14:00]

And frankly, a lot of times on theCUBE, we are talking about really the nuts and bolts of the tech and we kind of lose sight of just how incredible this technology is. Do you find that you’re an outlier in the conversations that you’re having?

ROI vs Inspiration

Do you think other people are similarly as inspired by the power of this technology or are they thinking really in terms of, okay, how do we get the ROI? How do we…

[Mihir Shukla]

I think people are beginning to see the potential of it. I think if you step back and look at the true capability of human race as a race, we weren’t put on this planet to type from one screen to another. We are capable of doing so much more. And I often remind people that we as a civilization, we have a potential to, you know, 100 years from now, surf on the slopes of the Mars. Then 200 years from now, surf the Saturn rings. You can imagine what the potential of this race is.

[00:15:00]

Inclusive Future

And if 70% of us are doing repetitive work that could be automated, we are not going to accomplish any of those things. So if you step back and look at the journey that we are on, we have to be inclusive. We have to retrain our workforce. We have to take everybody with us, make sure the benefits are spread to every part of the society. Nevertheless, the journey is an amazing journey. Just imagine how far we have come the last 100 years. Imagine what the next 50 to 70 years will bring to us. And what an exciting time to be alive. Absolutely.

[Rebecca Knight]

Conclusion

Indeed. Powerful. Mahir, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. A really, really fun and inspiring conversation.

[Mihir Shukla]

My pleasure. Thank you.

[Rebecca Knight]

I’m Rebecca Knight for my co-host Rob Strecha. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE’s live coverage. You are watching theCUBE, the leading source of enterprise news.