Unraveling the #AutomationFirst Mindset: Transforming Business and Society with One Robot for Every Person

I remember studying in a Chennai college in the early ‘90s, when owning a PC was still a rarity. We looked up in awe at any student who owned one.

Just a decade earlier, Bill Gates had announced the audacious vision of a PC on every desk and in ever home. And in the next 10 years, we all experienced this come true in dramatic fashion in our lives.

A few months ago, Daniel Dines, the founder CEO of UiPath unveiled a similar vision for UiPath RPA. “One robot one person”. And I predict that we are going to witness a similar automation revolution in our work environment in the next few years.

But what does this mean for Indian industry, our innovation edge and for India talent?

Let’s step back and look at what UiPath and RPA has achieved in 3 short years.

From RPA to BPA

From a small startup in Romania that started the RPA journey by automating a handful of BPO services, UiPath is now in 16 countries, partnering over 1800 enterprises in automating some of the most tedious and repetitive tasks across sectors and functions.

India is now the largest employee base of UiPath, with our technology centre in Bengaluru expanding rapidly to meet the ever-growing demand of UiPath product features and solutions.

Our open platform with a 250,000 strong global developer community, many of them from India, means every enterprise is benefiting from the collective experience and expertise of the UiPath ecosystem. And what started out as RPA of small formal processes, is now undergoing a paradigm shift, to BPA,; automation of end to end business processes with measurable business impact.

A Robot for Every Person.

We already have dedicated tools for every employee at our work place. But they require our input and intelligence - be it creating a plan, analyzing business numbers, or an email.

But imagine some of the mundane tasks that you do every month, say filling your monthly expenses that are in different formats - Uber receipts in email, physical bills from restaurants, scanned images, etc. A robot can tabulate it in one click. Or what a frequent business traveler does repeatedly: doing web check-in before every flight. Opening the e-ticket in the email., check the PNR, go to the airline’s web check in page, fill out the details, and so on. A robot will execute the entire step in one click.

 Similarly, every function has mundane tasks that a digital assistant can quickly learn and execute, some unassisted, a few supervised.

Imagine what this means for the average day of every employee. And what it means freeing up their time and minds.

Re-imagining the Future of Work. Redefining India Inc.

At UiPath we share Daniel’s belief that human work should be creative and inspiring, not monotonous. The goal of our solutions is enabling your employees to focus on creative, challenging problems. Creating a platform for unleashing true business transformation.

And the future is certainly not automation vs humans. It’s automation augmenting humans together enabling precisely the kind of innovation that will drive our industry up the value chain.

India has a head start in RPA, with 75,000 Indians having UiPath certifications. That’s 3 time more than any other country in the world. We recently announced the big, scary, audacious goal of training 500,000 students across more than 1,000 colleges and universities by 2022. This is truly “Skilling India” in one of the core skills of the future, and I could not be prouder as an Indian and an IT professional. Our Unique theme for the Students in India is "One Robot for Every Student" which can ultimately be instrumental in Making India the Automation Capital of the World and be the epicenter

I am honored to host an eminent panel of business and technology leaders on this topic of The ‘automation first’ Culture— One Robot for Every Employee, One Robot for Every Student at the prestigious Economic Times Global Business Summit in New Delhi on 22nd Feb 2019. Please follow the discussion and event on twitter here.

If you have any questions for the panel, please post it in the comments or @replying me on twitter @iamraghu0101.

The Panel:

Vipul Anand, Group CIO & Sr. V. P. – IT, HSIL

Pratibha K. Advani, CFO, Tata Communications

Irendar Chhabra, MD & CEO, EBEX, Essel Group

Jaspreet Bindra, Founder, Digital Matters

Anuj Mathur, MD & CEO, Canara HSBC Oriental Bank of Commerce Life Insurance

Antony Jacob, CEO, Apollo Munich Health Insurance

Anuranjita Kumar, MD & Head HR International Hubs, The Royal Bank of Scotland

Sumit Sawhney, Country CEO & MD, Renault India

Rajiv Gupta, Partner & Director, The Boston Consulting Group

I look forward to their insights and points of view, and will be sharing highlight of the discussions here in a new article next week.