Redefining RPA for a Cause, for fun and of course for Enterprise!

The PowerUp Automation Hackathon Series of 2019 begins from Namma Bengaluru. India has highest UiPath user base and is rich in RPA talent. We want to grow this even further and also nurture the young talent. Hackathons are an interesting way to learn more and share knowledge and more importantly to challenge our ideas and bring innovation to life. So, we are organizing PowerUp Automation hackathons across varies cities in India.

The Bengaluru edition brought 150+ top RPA talents in the city under one roof over the weekend. (11th and 12th May). 24 hours of intense design and build phase started on Saturday morning after a short and sweet inaugural session. Raghunath Subramanian - President and CEO of UiPath India addressed the gathering and motivated the developers and RPA enthusiasts about the opportunity we have ahead of us. He truly believes that India has a unique advantage with a combination of process understanding and technology. India can become the Automation Capital of the world. For this to happen everyone must embrace RPA and that's why the hackathon was not for only developers but also the other roles like Business analysts, consultants and project managers. Raghu was joined by Prakash Thekkatte - Head of Engineering, UiPath India. Prakash leads one of the only three Dev Centres of UiPath(the other two are in Romania & US). He shared his vision of how RPA and AI could benefit the organizations and it could be applied across all the industries and geographies.

This hackathon was not just about competition. It was a platform to bring our UiPath user community together and build on the great ideas that they bring on to the table. To help the participants in building their prototypes, we had 25+ mentors who are RPA experts and helped the participants to design, build and debug their prototypes.

What we built in this hackathon is not just the Enterprise RPA solutions but also RPA solutions for a good cause. There are hundreds of Non-Profit Organisations and they need thousands of volunteers to help them. Our participants have built prototypes and solutions to some of these problems and it could certainly be used across NGO Categories. One of the simplest examples for this could be a robot which would look at volunteers on LinkedIn in and send them a message when the NGO needs their help. The robot could easily classify volunteers based on their interest and location.

In the Enterprise category, we had some amazing solutions built to reduce development effort while interacting with various Database, automating candidate interview process, automating legal processes, etc. demonstrated that the impact of RPA in various segments are huge. One thing which was common to see was the integration with Voice assistants. We know how much we Love Siri, Alexa, and their capabilities, but taking them to the next level, our participants showed the magic by combining the best of the two worlds. Voice assistants will help us augment more capabilities and increase the adoption of assisted robots. Just ask your assistants to show some important emails and their details and from hundreds of emails, it would bring up only necessary emails with the help of NLP and Machine Learning.

Again, this the hackathon was not only about competition, but we also wanted to ensure participants are engaged all the time and not miss their weekend fun. We had many Virtual Reality games, foosball board and Jenga to play any time during the day or night. If you were not such a sports person, you could dance! We had organized a Zumba activity at midnight. Zumba is so much fun that you forget that you are exercising. It's a great stress reliever and reduces fatigue and increases overall cognitive function. All the participants and our mentors enjoyed it thoroughly.

But we also had some fun with RPA. While automation, in general, is perceived to be something which does only repetitive, rule-driven automation, we at UiPath are always pushing our Robots to learn new skills. Whether it is recognizing MS Dhoni while hitting the ball or reading handwritten notes or even better-playing music. One of the teams successfully built a robot which could compose music based on your mood. So next time when you thank your DJ for that nice music, it could be one of our robots on their machine which did the trick.

This year we have also started a candid chat show Coffee with Tejus, in this show I talk to the participants about their experience in the hackathon, their RPA journey and their vision towards the future of work. It also opens up the personal perspectives of our participants. We get real and honest. It was heartening to hear some of their stories and their love towards UiPath and UiPath Community is unmatchable. We are absolutely lucky to have built this community.

To slightly digress and tickle their imagination I have this trump card question - "What would you do if RPA was your superpower?" This question works like a charm every time. You should think about this too. All the guests of the show received interesting gift hampers at the end of the show.

What's more interesting than the gift hampers? Cash Prize! Isn't it? We had more than $12,000 as total prize money at the Grand Jury round. We had our leaders from different functions wearing the hat of Grand Jury. Participants went through multiple rounds of assessment before presenting their solutions to Grand Jury, hence there was a fierce competition for the prizes. It was a tough time for us to decide a few bests among so many good solutions and prototypes. With almost an hour long deliberation we were able to call out the Grand winners and Jury winners. But everyone was a winner, we awarded each participant with a certificate of participation.

This hackathon was also a true reflection of our culture. We were bold, immersed, fast and humble. We had our colleagues from different teams from across the globe helping us with this event. Though it's tough to measure the humble part, some of the Social posts from our participants about the hospitality reflected our true value. I take this opportunity to thank all our colleagues in making this event successful and reflecting our core culture.

I am already looking forward to meeting more enthusiastic developers and RPA practitioners across India. We are planning to continue this series in Pune, Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, and Chennai regions.

Our Global Virtual PowerUp Automation hackathon has also started with a $50,000 to be grabbed as prize money. So, go ahead and submit your ideas here. We are also partnering with TechGig in Code Gladiators hackathon and sponsoring the RPA track. Encourage you to participate in that as well.

Beyond these hackathons let's also get in touch on Connect! Forum and local meetups across cities in India. Let's keep the josh high. See you soon.

Tejus Venkatesh - Chief Evangelist - India & APAC, UiPath