Positioning UiPath for Today & Tomorrow
Yiannis Broustas - Product, Marketing & Growth at UiPath
In the next round of my interview series, I had the opportunity to sit down with Yiannis Broustas who is a jack of all trades over at UiPath. Our conversation ranged from marketing to value realization and lastly to how the industry is evolving. With Yiannis’s background being aligned closer to AI and B2B focused, he has a different perspective than most featured on The Process Mine.
How has marketing shifted from a singular product to a suite of tools?
Historically, we have had several standalone process mining customers due to the Process Gold acquisition into UiPath. However, as the process mining journey goes for most customers, you have an amazing first impression from process mining and then you want to know what is next from the technology.
They might implement it in one team, or region and that takes a bit of time at first. But eventually they get to this point, where they are able to understand the power, how to deploy it, how can we get even more value, and leverage the tool’s complete offerings.
That’s where UiPath is suited to customers that are going through this as you have an ecosystem that not only gives you the insight, but it helps you take the action to achieve those business outcomes that you're targeting. It is one of those things where customers can pick and choose and say, I wanna start with process mining today and then in a month from now or six months from now I wanna to expand to task mining or take action with RPA, so it’s a value platform approach and differs by each customer’s needs and business goals.
In terms of education, and in particular for new customers, it is all about how to frame the problem and associated value. The most challenging aspect is understanding the specific use cases that potential customers want to go for. So it is all about qualifying the use case, qualifying the specific value that they're trying to achieve and what is the most suitable technology for that. This could be process or task mining, RPA or Machine Learning (ML), all of which have something slightly different to offer in problem solving.
Most of the time in qualifying the use case, the value, the specific business outcomes which are being targeted will reveal how process mining, automation, task mining, all these different technologies can play in the mix to arrive at the desired business goal.
Our goal should be to produce the outcome that is being targeted, this is why process mining is a very important pillar and enabler for multiple different technologies and platforms. If we are able to produce the desired outcomes, then we are able to go higher and higher into the organization driving C-Level conversations around processes and then enabling technologies.
In terms of future growth, the most exciting near-term item will be how Generative
and Specialized AI will change the way users interact with their process insights and take the necessary action. This could be something similar to Google where you are able to ask text based questions and have specific insights generated by your company and industry standard data. The real game changer here is that users will not need to sift through their data as much, as insights will be generated, monitored and improvements all potentially tracked within a single toolset.
As users mature, and processes are being monitored from a more end-to-end perspective, additional capabilities such as task and communication mining will continue to rise in popularity. This enables teams the ability to further extrapolate or extract a set or a part of your process.
Having said that, Yiannis believes more companies will look to focus on “pockets of value” in conjunction with mapping of entire end-to-end processes and systems. This is because there are so many different stakeholders and systems which must be managed in an end to end flow. As a result, he is focused on enabling people to go deeper than going wider in finding value. This is very different from how others are looking at this space, but it makes sense when looking at how organizations are structured and where UiPath can add value in more powerful use cases leveraging AI, integrations and multiple technologies to enable value.
This ties into a prediction of where the broader Process Intelligence space is going, which is more consolidation. A good example of this is in the task mining space where there are many small to medium vendors whose customers will eventually want and need more functionality. As companies look to integrate their offerings, they will focus on outcomes first and how these tools can drive changes.
Lastly, these consolidations will be focused on making it easier to understand insights from a process, perform cost/benefit analysis and reliably predict what is needed to enable automation. We are already seeing this with the enablement of “citizen development” being pushed by automation companies, but combining that with process insights will vastly change the organization’s processes.
The key takeaways from this conversation is how much further investment is going into transforming processes. At The Process Mine, we harp on how process needs should be equal to business and IT needs, and you are able to see that in action. Today’s tools inform and enable users to solve their specific problems today. Tomorrow’s tools will be even more intuitive and able to provide context for what is occurring in your processes and why you should take action. Powerful Stuff!