2019 - A golden page of my Life!

This is my fourth Christmas with UiPath. It is the season of the year which is festive, celebratory and also a good period to introspect. It's time to reflect back on the incredible achievements and the learning from the wealth of experimental experiences. But this year, in particular, was exemplary. 2019 surely goes to my diary in golden fonts and glitter. And I want to thank every one of you who made this very special for me.

This Christmas season is significantly different from the last couple of years. It is quite relaxed as we are all in the planning the execution strategy for the big goals for 2020. It's unlike the last consecutive years where I was completely immersed in the preparation for Developer's Conference in Bengaluru. 2016 Christmas was also different as we had rolled out a new platform for Product support. While the Romania office was on the holiday break, the Fantastic Four in India was supporting the queries and tickets coming from customers and partners.

2019 has been an eventful year

Literally it has been event-full. The flagship event Forward III hosted 3000 RPA enthusiasts, practitioners, analysts and friends gathering in Las Vegas for two amazing days. Two years ago, we could not have imagined pulling off such a star-studded event. And here we are where Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Craig LeClair said FORWARD has become “the primary conference in the industry.”

We had our customer and partner events all around the world and not just in Vegas. We had UiPath Together events in Paris, Shanghai, Sydney and many cities across the globe. In India, we hosted four Together events which brought customers to experience the Future of Technology and Innovation at UiPath. These events were important for us to talk to our customers Face to Face. And more importantly to listen to them which helps us build better product features. I feel extremely fortunate to have spoken at many of these events and help our customers achieve the maximum potential of their robots.

Building a sustainable ecosystem

Our goal of Democratising the technology has not taken a back seat. We hosted over 10,000 people in our Developer Community engagements all over the world. UiPath Connect became a platform for all RPA enthusiasts to learn, collaborate and share ideas between the peers. Local meet-ups and hackathons were a great way of connecting with the ground and create some unbelievable automation. Did you ever think the Robots could identify stages of pneumonia using chest x-rays? One of the winners of our hackathon demonstrated how RPA can work with Deep learning in detecting pneumonia. This is a year we learnt RPA has its benefits beyond enterprise automation. RPA is good, automation is for good. Numerous NGOs have started using technology to work on several social causes. And I feel privileged and humbled to be part of many of these meet-ups, hackathons where I could interact with people who are building a better world with our technology. A special mention about a partner-led hackathon we ran for students in the southern city of India which is the biggest ever on-site hackathon in the industry. It was an electrifying atmosphere just like a cricket stadium.

While the future of work is evolving, we wanted to ensure we take the right skill set to the next generation of students. We are partnering with leading Institutions, Universities, and Colleges and we craft the global RPA knowledge ecosystem. To promote and popularise this we had two Academic Summit events one each in Bengaluru and Singapore. I visited multiple universities and interacted with students, faculties, and management. I was really excited to see how willing they all are in embracing the future technology into their curriculum.

Also Read: Academic Summit in Singapore

This has been also the year where a lot of our customers have ramped up their automation. Setting up the Center of Excellence (COE) or Robotic Operation Center (ROC) was a common conversation we had with our customers who were committed to scaling up their processes. As we have all said and heard about the importance of cultural change that is needed to embrace RPA / AI in the organizations, several customers and partners had invited me to speak at their town hall to evangelize the benefits of working with a digital co-worker., which is a friendly robot on your machine. Industry forums like NASSCOM, CII, and others have taken considerable effort in helping the customers demystify the technology.

Major analysts and research firms have evaluated the technology and its benefits. They have published elaborated white papers and playbooks that are helping enterprises to trust and adopt technology with open arms. It was exciting to see an impartial view of the global RPA landscape. We are happy that in all of the major reports from analysts we are called Leaders in the space. The latest entrant to this is Gartner with their first-ever Magic quadrant for RPA where UiPath is recognized as the highest and furthest overall position for our ability to execute and completeness of vision. We have been consistently recognized as leaders and star performers - thanks to all our customers and partners who have trusted us and got us here.

This year was also the most challenging year. We had bold and bigger dreams. I categorically remember a three day trip in India which included cities in south and north of India for back to back conferences, meet-ups, and hackathons. And many more trips for sponsored events, partner events, and customer workshops kept me busy the entire year. But I never felt physical exhaustion or emotional fatigue. Every time I went on to the stage to speak, it was a new experience, the adrenaline rush is kind of addictive. One of the highlights was in Seoul, Korea where I had to have a simultaneous translation. And hosting Community Celebration at our biggest event Forward was a life-time experience.

In addition to the events, we hosted several webinars to effectively communicate with our customers and partners about our product releases, new features, and integrations. We partnered with our technology integration partners and federations in evangelizing technology and its benefits. There is a great need for us to educate everyone about the future trends of technology and how it is changing the Future of Work. It is also quintessential to burst the myths. I thank Analytics India Magazine for covering my interview where we demystified the RPA journey.

Taking a Detour

While Robots took care of repetitive work, I pursued my creative passion. I sang, danced and also started learning guitar. However, the bigger leap of faith was in the form of a movie. I wrote a story, screenplay and also acted in an independent movie. It is now on the editing table and we should release it early 2020. Making this movie was a great learning experience. I did not procrastinate and made new friends. If you want to watch the movie please subscribe here. I am also co-producing mainstream Kannada cinema under the banner Tejus Publications.

2020 An exciting year ahead

We predict Bigger, Better and Bolder things to happen in the space of automation. Heard of Hyperautomation yet? Gartner has listed it in the Top Technology trend for 2020. This is great news for all of us in the RPA industry as Hyperautomation has RPA in the core and brings on complementing and supplementing technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), process discovery, process mining and analytics. Chief Information Officers (CIO) across the globe will have Hyperautomation as their top priority.

So, in short - more opportunities to learn, more opportunities to listen and to speak on technology. I have piloted a talk show with my colleagues titled "TT with Tejus" which will be aired in 2020. So, please stay tuned.

A big Thank You!

This is a lengthy article. I appreciate your patience, I could not have made this any shorter. In fact, I wanted to write even more, but in the spirit of holidays, I held myself back. I want to thank everyone that I met this year online and offline. I want to thank those whom I did not meet yet was influenced by your thoughts and inspired by your contributions. Thanks to those with whom I have made special memories.

Wishing you all happy holidays and a prosperous and joyful new year.

Tejus Venkatesh - Chief Evangelist - India & APAC - UiPath