Welcome to our first ever Robocorp Product Hour. This will be a monthly recurring event focused on explaining in depth concepts of Robocorp Platform - Dev Tools, Control Room, Integrations and Solutions etc.

The first edition of the event will assist developers who have completed the Level 1 Certificate course in their journey to reach the next level.

It is interactive session hosted by Robocorp Technical Evangelist, Tejus Venkatesh, with live, hands-on examples and demos. This event will encourage participants to share their feedback, experience, ask questions during the live session. Q&A will be moderated via Chat.

Tejus Venkatesh

Technology Evangelist

Robocorp's Product Hour - First Edition

Robot Framework (RFW) is an open-source automation framework used for test automation and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). It utilizes human-readable keywords that can integrate with virtually any technology. That’s why Robocorp uses it as its framework of choice to help businesses create powerful automations that save time and money - and lets employees focus on what’s important.

Ready to learn how to create your own automations using Robot Framework libraries? If so, then this is the webinar for you!

You’ll learn how to create a Python project and the basic coding needed to build your first keyword library. We’ll spend time coding live in the VS Code developer environment and cover these topics:

Setting up and configuring your Python environment.
Creating a library based on an existing Python package from PyPi.
Importing your new library into a Robocorp project.

Robot Framework libraries will give you automation superpowers that your friends and coworkers will envy. So be sure to join us Wednesday, August 24th at noon EDT.

Tim Lopas

Technical Account Manager, Robocorp

Eric Hanson

Head of Customer Success, Robocorp

Blake Waud

Techincal Account Manager, Robocorp

Create your own Robot Framework Library with Python

Robotic Process Automation promises to speed up mundane and repetitive tasks. But what happens when one of those repetitive tasks gets a sudden influx of data that needs to be processed immediately? Enter Robocorp's Work Data Management! Using a producer-consumer automation coupled with Robocorp's proprietary orchestrator you can process even more data in a timely manner.

In this webinar you will learn how to use Robocorp and Robot Framework to manage data that goes through multiple steps and tasks by creating inputs and outputs that get passed along between steps. The majority of this webinar will be spent live coding in the VS Code IDE and topics will include:

- Work item structure
- Loading inputs
- Creating outputs
- Setting up Control Room to handle concurrency

Parallelization: Work Data Management using Producer-Consumer Automation

Come see our team set up and run a Python bot on Robocorp’s RPA solution and then take a second robot framework bot and add it into a Python library! The majority of this webinar will be spent live coding in VS Code IDE.

According to IEEE, Python is the most widely used programming language. It's ease of use and extensive library makes it the de-facto standard for development. With such flexibility, it is no wonder that it is also sneaking into the world of Robot Process Automation. Combining it with Robot Framework, you get an even more powerful tool for creating automations that makes your life as a developer easier as well as meet business owner's changing needs.


Learn how you can use your current Python libraries and applications in conjunction with Robocorp. Topics will include:
- High level overview of the Robocorp RPA solution
- How to leverage the Robocorp RPA solution for existing Python bots, code, and libraries
- Leverage Python open-source community to add functionality to a Robocorp Automation
- Build a Python bot from scratch using VS Code with the Robocorp Automation extensions

Bringing the Power of Python to Robocorp's Gen2 RPA

Organizations are under pressure to become digitally native, especially traditional ones with legacy technologies held back by lack of APIs or integrations. Robotic Process Automation has served as an important piece of the solution to this, yet historically has been challenging to adopt and scale, without significant upfront investment and maintenance risk.

Learn more on how the emergence of Gen2 automation platforms like Robocorp, service providers like Cognitive Automation Labs, and as-a-service “renting” of digital workers, the risks of deploying RPA solutions are now alleviated while results are the same, if not better!

The group will review:
-Macro scenarios and the pressures to become digital native
-The challenges embedded in legacy applications
-New automation options for organizations big and small

Peter Steube

Head of Global Partners & Alliances, Robocorp

Hanna Kettunen

Head of Partner Strategy, Robocorp

Jonathan Parsons

Co-Founder & CEO, Cognitive Automation Labs

Tylor Bunting

Co-Founder & Principal Engineer, Cognitive Automation Labs

Lowering the Risk, Raising the Bar

What do you do when you are overselling without enough stock to provide your customers? How do you keep track of the import of products to your store? How can you ensure a consistent feed of updated pricing and quantity each month?

That’s where Babybots comes in. They built a total of five bots that handle the pulling, formatting, and aggregation of 130K+ products for their client. Join us on November 3rd to learn how Babybots utilized Robocorp to help their clients automation project succeed.

Our panel of automation experts will help you understand how creating a digital workforce can improve your supply chain processes. They will discuss:

How automation can help supply chain functions

Why use automation and how to determine if it is right for you

The time savings and revenue opportunities that automation brings

Chris Etheredge

VP of Sales & Cutomer Operations, Robocorp

Cory Shreffler

Managing Director - Process Innovation & Automation, Babybots

Zack Schmitz

Senior Director - DevOps, Babybots

Automation for Field Services & Distribution

As our industry evolves, new RPA providers offer distinct benefits over the first generation tools. For example, Robocorp’s pricing model and modern, AutomationOps approach help businesses save money and accelerate innovation.

Could it possibly be worth the time and money to switch RPA platforms? What about the re-writes and risks of breaking bots? And are the Gen2 players all they’re cracked up to be?

There are many factors to consider when evaluating a platform migration. Which means there will be plenty to discuss during Robocorp's October 12th.

Our panel of automation experts will discuss:

How migrating can reduce costs and open new possibilities

Evaluating the risks and rewards of migrating platforms

What a replacement or dual vendor strategy can look like

The migration process: planning and technical conversions

Olivier Gomez (OG)

Co-Founder & CEO, IAC

Antti Karjalainen

Co-Founder & CEO, Robocorp

Shail Khiyara

Thought leader in Intelligent Automation and AI technologies

Peter: My name is Peter Steube, I'm proud to work with rower Robocorp. For those of you who don't know us, we are a company that is bringing forth an exciting new approach to the automation industry. In a single sentence, we are an open source cloud-native and modern platform focused on empowering RPA professionals to produce more sustainable and cost-effective automation. As most of you know, the RPA industry has historically been dominated by just a few vendors. What you may also realize is that these quote-unquote gen one providers of RPA are commonly constrained by, and this is not limited to their proprietary toolsets, licensed-based upfront pricing, high infrastructure costs, and antiquated development and deployment experiences. In light of the innovation that Robocorp is now offering the industry today, we will discuss the risks and rewards of migrating replacing end or a multi-vendor strategy. In order to do so we've enlisted a panel of automation, industry titans. Shail Khiyara will soon be moderating and driving the discussion. 

Shail has spent the last half-decade building the intelligent automation market, which comprises of both RPA and AI technologies. As a unicorn in intelligent automation and digital transformation he has served as a CMO and chief customer officer at three leading automation firms helping to shape this industry. He is also the founder of VOCAL, an independent automation customers-only group, which actually stands for the Voice of the Customer in the Automation Landscape and now has over 50 key decision-makers in the automation industry from across the globe. We are also joined by Olivier Gomez a.k.a. OG. He is a recognized global expert and pioneer in the field of intelligent automation and RPA, he is also the CEO and co-founder of Robocorp partner IAC as a senior executive with 23 plus years of experience. He is a leader of large-scale automation transformations with strong ROI for the fortune 2000. Olivier scaled and ran one of the largest automation footprints in the world for HP DXC, which included over 6,000 unique bots, which helps give him a very good grasp of operational aspects as well. 

And lastly, Antti Karjalainen, CEO and co-founder of Robocorp. Antti is a long-time open source enthusiast with a background in software engineering. He serves on the board of robot framework foundation and is leading the charge when it comes to evolution within the automation industry focusing specifically on eliminating the boundaries that have played the sector to date. Before handing the floor to Shail, please keep in mind that today's webinar is being recorded and a replay will be published soon after. Also at the end, we will leave a few minutes for audience Q and A. You may submit either in the chat or using the Q and A function in the zoom. With that said Shail, the floor is yours. Good luck guys.
 
 Shail: Peter, thank you, really appreciate it. Welcome all to this exciting session of the future of RPA migrating to gen two tools. RPA, as many of you know, has had an interesting history and it's continuing to evolve and with over 65 companies in the space, 12 acquisitions that have occurred in just the last 24 months. This industry continues to evolve and continues to be disruptive and disruption is a natural evolution, it's happening now. We've seen it in the first wave of RPA players, we've seen consolidations and we have also most recently amongst the big three, we're seeing a private equity takeover very recently. Antti is joining us from rainy Helsinki and Olivier is in what seems to be a very calm evening in your window there in the south of France. Welcome Antti and Olivier.

 Antti: Thank you.

 Shail: Well, let's dive right in. This is sort of a no spin zone where we want to talk about what's next beyond RPA and automation as you know, is a very hot topic. There's around $9 billion of investment that has gone in this space in the last 30 months and before we talk about gen two let's put the customer in the center of our conversation and talk about what are the customer needs? What is it that is not being fulfilled with the traditional automation, let's say gen one?

Antti: Yeah, I mean, Olivier, you go first. 

Olivier: Sure. Let me share my view here. So first of all, what's really important to understand is that this is a very normal and natural evolution for any new technology. RPA and the entire ecosystem is a new segment in the software industry, by the way. I think it is the fastest-growing segment in the software industry. If I'm trying to explain what's in the mind of most of the customers nowadays, it's very simple. They are starting to expect and demand outcome. They are slightly over the excitement wave that happens when something new is created. Trying to give a comparison, probably when electricity was invented people were super excited and super amazed by the capability. Very similar capability, maybe not for super geek people, but for most of the world having a bot that can do work for you and take over the tasks that you don't want to do is pretty cool. It's pretty overwhelming. 

I think now we are over this innovation wave and we are starting to enter what I would call an industrialized wave, where people are starting to have a normal expectations. Nowadays, when people talk about electricity, they talk about how much it costs, as simple as that. So they have an evolved expectation around this innovation. Very similar here, clients are expecting outcomes and there are things like what is the return on my investment? There are things like can you drop the total cost of ownership of running a bot? Can you increase my time to value so that I can basically get the result, not in six months, but in a matter of weeks? So those are the things that I would say the market is starting to request and expect and, again, pretty normal as we are starting to exit this excitement and new shiny object type of phase.
 
 Antti: Yes, so as I look at the first phase of RPA, it was driven by a few companies out there. Obviously UI Path has done great for themselves Automation Anywhere kind of the notable first growers in there, there probably has been others. Then at some point, let's say a few years back, I felt that there was an RPA company coming out every week. I used to see a new one entering the space, and it was always, we saw a lot of copycats like me too, we can do that too, it's the same thing and for the longest time, for instance, the licensing pattern has been the same. It's always bought licenses, it's orchestration license, something tied to the execution units and now finally we have with the first wave going past that first hype cycle in a way, starting to see something new emerging from this sort of second-wave companies that are starting to rethink how we do things in RPA, what is driving real customer value, how these RPA projects are being built and run and operated and maintained, and even sunset at the end of the project. Seeing this a few years ago, will buy in and understand a lot more. 

Because the goal here is once we are past this initial hype wave of I play with the tool, and I'm building trust that the tool can do the job. Now, I need to start scaling seriously and if you have a weak return on investment because you are using a technology that has a super high license cost, as an example, then I can tell you that there's no way you are going to scale, even if the technology does the job, because the CFOs and actually your business case will turn red everywhere. So again, what is gen two, it's simply the disruptors that come after the innovators that are listening to the requirements from the client, and they embed that natively in their technology, and those who are able to do that, they will basically do very well because they will enable the clients to achieve an outcome and to basically do what is required to have this digital workforce replace this human glue we've added forever.
 
 Antti: Yes, I'd like to add to that. First of all, human glue sounds pretty suspicious to me, by the way as a concept. But in general, we've seen RPA COEs in major corporations being built on the first generation. They get a lot of value from the first projects that they go through and build out a massive digital workforce. But at some point, they hit a ceiling. They say, no, we cannot actually go beyond what we have reached here so far with the first-gen technology. Whether it's depending on the licensing or the cost structure, or whether it's just the technical limitations or the tool that they've chosen, so they can kind of start looking for this dual vendor strategy where they want to bring in another tool to augment their capabilities. Obviously, if you've been in many of those discussions and a lot of times the first-gen vendors, what they've done now, obviously huge market penetration, like a ton of of sales, new sales happening, and now they need to expand. 

So what they start doing is they start horizontally adding solutions, whether it's process mining, whether it's chatbots, hyper-automation, all of that, and capability to expand on the customer accounts. But these customers that are saying that, okay, we've hit the ceiling. Now we don't need to add yet another high bill automation capability, we want to just add more bots, how can we do that? And that's where technologies like Robocorp come in and can really help them augment them.
 
 
 

Olivier: And just to add to that, because I want to give a practical example here. Typically when you start, you identify activity that you want to automate in ICOs location. When you start scaling and you are a global organization, and you want to scale across the world, including Asia, the cost structure is going to be totally different, and it's going to be more and more difficult to basically build a case to do automation in area where it is not Europe, it is not US. So those are examples of things that are, that ceiling that Antti is describing can materialize in different ways, but you want to start scaling, I don't want more features. I want the core structure of what I am deploying to be right and that's really important,
 
 Shail: I think Olivier, you make a very important point about the core structure and this ties back to what I was mentioning earlier about the bot based architecture with which gen one started, there was also mention of scale. So are you both saying that gen two actually allows you to scale faster because the core fundamental technology is a differentiator. What are your thoughts around what makes; first of all, does gen two allow you to scale faster, which there are challenges in gen one? And if so, what enables you to do that?
 
 Antti: If you think about we need to actually separate whether we're talking about mid-market versus the enterprise. Obviously the enterprise will stick around with gen one for a longer time. Mid-Market hasn't really started with RPA, so we've seen a ton of uptake with RPA in the mid-market where we can see a partner ecosystem, for instance, taking Robocorp and really running that as a service to offer the business outcome of bots and kind of scaled down market where we haven't been seeing RPA that much, but just talking about the enterprise itself, any thoughts on that, Olivier, on your side?
 
 Olivier: So for me, the scalability of a technology is not always related to the technology itself, but it's included. So again, back to my point, it's all about going through the different approvals inside an organization and validation inside an organization that actually what you are doing is positively impacting the P and L of the organization, top or bottom of the P and L, but you have to have visible effect of what you are doing. So back to the technology, if I am deploying something that is allowing me to positively impact the P and L, everyone in the organization, the CIO, the CFO, and the CEO will ask for more. If I am working with a technology provider that understands that I'm working is a service provider that understands that, then all the rest is virtually details. Of course, you will hit limitations with certain vendors, which will force you to move to someone who doesn't have those constraints. But conceptually the scalability of the is simply related to does it make a difference to the business? If yes, I want more, if I want more, I'm looking for the right technology. If I don't have the right partner right now, I switch, obvious.
 
 Antti: Yes, I see that the enterprise is still very focused on the COE-led model where we've seen RPA scale-up, it's always been driven by the COE. Teally the citizen developer model hasn't really come through in that way or I haven't been able to observe it in the market when talking with customers that they had adapted. I see this in developer lead path and just scaled tremendously with positive results. Where we have seen scaling up, definitely driven always by COE and there be typically see more technically capable COEs being able to take technologies like Robocorp, and then run with that and continue for over scaling past the first initiatives.
 
 Olivier: Another point that is important here, that is I would say related to running the automation. So automation ops or whatever you want to call it, you basically are going to scale if you can handle what you have today. And back to the point, we have seen many, many COE that are slowly evolving from a team of people building bots to a team of people doing support of the bots and then you are back to the typical IT issue, right? If I have 80, 90% of my resources maintaining what I have instead of innovating, and again, reaching a ceiling, it's a very typical situation. So the capability of the technology, the vendor, and the service provider to be able to run the footprint efficiently so that you can keep scaling and you don't collapse, this is absolutely critical and gen two, if I have a cloud-based, native cloud-based solution that is giving me instant let's say, instantiation of my bot that is giving me 99.9% uptime so I don't have to worry about that and plenty of other things that will help my run and maintain phase, then I am a lot more comfortable to grow my digital workforce because I can handle it.
 
 Antti: Great point by the way, we have a good article that we authored around automation ops, fully agree with that point of view. Just happens that we've actually incorporated that kind of modern DevOps type of operational model into the product itself, which again, didn't happen with the first generation because they started out with this model that this is going to be outside of the IT, like not part of the IT organization. Slip it in under the covers, and nobody needs to know, well, you'll build a hundred bots, somebody who needs to know about that and maintain them for sure.
 
 Shail: I think that's a very good point that you bring up and customers generally tend to migrate to alleviate the pain points that they have, and that are not being met with their current solutions. So clearly in the market, we are seeing a multi-vendor RPA strategy but in addition to that, additional technologies are being added to the stack. You've talked about chatbox analytics, AI process mining capabilities. Why is this migration required? Why do you think a customer should migrate? When should they migrate from a gen one to a gen two?
 
 Antti: From our perspective, sometimes it's just required because a vendor might be updating, you typically see in the enterprise specifically, you'll see that your customers are gonna be lagging multiple versions with on-premise deployment. Now, gen two, being typically cloud-native, you don't see that kind of lag behind in versions. So you actually might hit a natural point of, hey, we don't even support that version anymore, you need to rebuild your bots to the natural break point in that evolution where you might consider migrating away. Then there might be events like a private equity takeover that starts, let's say the customers start thinking about, hey, is this going to be the company that's going to be innovating in net for the next coming five years? Should I sign up for a multi-year license commitment to this company? That's another natural breakpoint, but all in all, this is something that happens with every technology out there, every possible technology that we see go through these evolution cycles is bound to have a first wave and another wave with migrations involved. 

We've seen it with video conferencing, for instance, everyone migrating over to zoom when we've seen a clear winner. Then Microsoft is in there with Teams, we've seen it with the I-PASS vendors. We used to have TIDCO started out in the late nineties, then we have other players MuleSoft and so forth. It's just a constant evolution that happens in the space and part of the natural progression of, well for it's just a cloud that really didn't exist when the first-generation RPA players were being created, that kind of sets it up for a generation change.
 
 Olivier: Yep. So the way I look at it right, is so first of all, obviously this is something that evolves all the time. This ecosystem that we are describing is changing all the time. It's alive and as anything alive, things die, things come in and that evolution is pretty much the same as any other IT space. It has to be managed and this idea of there is a risk to migrate, be careful, this is a very close to me, this is very close to, I'm trying to build stickiness here into this environment. At the end of the day we can talk about that in details, but obviously as any change, there is a risk that risk can be very easily managed. It's not too far away from, I have a bot that breaks and I got to fix it, it's a bit more advanced way of I'm rewriting it and redoing it, I'm converting, I'm migrating. But at the end of the day, I want to downplay that. I mean, it's very natural. It's very normal. You are totally free. You don't want to be stuck. You want to have multiple vendors. You want to go for the one that gives you what you need and the benefits that we see by having this freedom to move to the right place is by far exceeding the risk that you are taking to do so.
 
 Shail: One thought that comes to mind is that there is a lot of challenges with upgrades. Olivier, I'm sure as you went through 6,000 bots in prior engagements you've had, you may have gone through some upgrade cycles as well. In the market today, there are about 25,000 customers in the market and 50% of them are still sitting on legacy automation software, older versions of the software. And why, because upgrades are a pain and bots tend to break, the bot fragility that I was talking about earlier. And while the majority of the gen one vendors are adding to their TAM, their total addressable market, many customers still cannot take advantage of those new functionalities because they haven't upgraded. So if upgrades are a pain, what makes it easy for customers to migrate?
 
 Antti: Yes, that's a good point, upgrades are oftentimes a pain especially, like I said, running on-prem. We've seen that actually migration work, if you think about just pure migration of an existing bot that might have taken months to implement in the first run, then you do migrate it's typically fraction of the time involved. So it actually might be proportional to a migration workload that you might be looking at otherwise in any case. So we've seen instances where it takes, we had a customer who migrated away from one of the first gen platforms, and they had multiple bots that they had built across a six-month time period and they were coming up on their license terms. So they were a bit in a rush, they brought in a robocorp partner to handle the migration, took them under 30 days from zero to running in production, those new bots taking rid of the old gen one licenses. While the partner was doing that migration, their own internal team got ramped up on the technology and started producing other automations already on top of the platform. So think about six months initially implementation, 30-day replacement implementation. So that kind of gives you a perspective on the fact that when you architected the automation, you figured out all the pain points, you kind of have it defined already, it's much easier to go about and just go with the migration.

So I don't need to host this orchestrator here. I don't need to host these super PBMs. I can actually run these in containers or then run in lighter-weight virtual machines, run multiple bots on the same virtual machine, et cetera, that some of these examples actually include customers having their infrastructure bill in addition to having the license bill. So that has been pretty significant and my favorite type of migration may be being we've seen people running things like Python-based bots through platforms like UI path, which are definitely not designed to do that, but that somehow they have ended up with that kind of architecture. So that's like lift and shift to Robocorp, which is Python-native supported platform. So these are kind of that the things that we see out there, it just makes a ton of more sense to run those Python-based bots on a platform that's actually made for them instead of using a UI path orchestrated to do so. So maybe I've covered all the big three that I've seen, but so many other examples out there. I'll let Olivier, you chime in as well.
 
 Olivier: Yes, so we do a lot of assessment for the clients, and the typical trigger for them to consider another technology is please first reduce the complexity, bring simplicity. So we talk about infrastructure. So infrastructure has a cost, it's not just the cost. You have large companies that are relying on all the vendors and there is always let's say a very long process to create a new bought and provisioned infrastructure and do the network slash firewalls slash installation slash, so it is perceived as, it is not simple, it is difficult and please help me go to a place where it's a lot easier to do. What is connected to that is please also help me handle the fear that I have of making a change of basically. So right now, I'll give you a specific example, we have a client that has a certain install base, which is gen one and they now come to realize that they would like to have a dual vendor strategy. So we do introduce a gen two vendor in the mix so that they basically build trust, they see the value, they understand the simplicity of working off the cloud, of having a more flexible way of consuming and we also show them slowly that not only you can introduce a new vendor to build a new bot, but actually moving from this old bot to this new bot crossing technology is not a big deal. 

You assess correctly the situation, you understand the sending point, the receiving point to new technology, you understand the differences, they both have strengths and weaknesses that we have to handle. You basically convert the bot and then you help the client through very heavy testing, help the client understand that the input-output of the new bot is exactly the same as the old one. So at the end of the day the confidence that I can now use this technology that fulfills all my requirements and actually does exactly the same as the previous technology is something that it's very easy to articulate to the client, if you correctly assess, you correctly convert, and you correctly test once it's tested and the outcome is there, the output is same, then it's just the trigger to decommission the old is very simple.
 
Shail: So how long does this usually take in your mind as you've gone through this Olivier, this migration itself? Does it vary depending on the complexity?
 
Olivier: Yes, yes, yes. When you assess an environment, not all bots are equal, you can have a very small bot that does very simple copy and paste reporting type of task and then you have a monster of a bot that is not just RPA, that has a brain, it has vision, it has language. So it basically has a lot of capability and it depends on the size. That's why assessing the environment, phasing the conversion, the simple bots, it's a matter of weeks, it's a matter of weeks. The more complex bots, you also want to make sure that the technology you are selecting as the receiving end has all the capability because there's, of course, gaps and mismatch, not all the technology has the same, let's say objects available, the same libraries available. So there's a number of things that need to be done, but the assessment is really critical to understand what it is I can move as a first phase, quite easily to build confidence and then I can address the more complex one later on. So again, I would say from a few weeks to obviously a few months, if it's a monster of a bot
 
Shail: Fair enough. So Antti and Olivier, I've been asking some of the questions that have already been popping up in our Q and A box. So just continuing on that theme, because I think we're at the end of our narrative here today. But one other question that has come up beside some of the ones that I've asked is, does Robocorp have a control room that has an option to trigger multiple bots, dynamic group whenever a new transaction is received?
 
Antti: Yes, absolutely we have and we have been architecting the cloud-based control room solution from the ground up in a way that's going to be able to handle transactional data for the bus pretty scaleably, I'd say. We are running thousands and thousands of bots over there right now and we're just going to be launching some of our work item management features soon enough in a few weeks time I think, I don't want to speak for my marketing team's behalf here so there's already building capabilities to be able to route work to bots and launch multiple bots to process work, do the stuff like fan-out work to multiple bots in concurrent, and then found them in as resource get picked. So kind of that takes advantage of the licensing or that the fact that there is no licensing scheme that would limit your concurrency. So you can have an elastic workforce in the cloud to operate that kind of workload.
 
Shail: Excellent. Thank you. Thank you, Antti. I think we have time for one more question. We're a little bit over time for what we had scheduled, but there is one other question that has popped up that I want to make sure we address. With respect to the migration plan, the question is, do we rewrite the workflows in gen two? Or are there hoarding utilities in gen two?
 
Olivier: So there are multiple ways to approach this. So there are quite a few, first of all, there are quite a few vendors out there who are basically trying to address this market, this conversion market by if I move away from blue prism and I go into Robocorp. So there is a way to extract, let's say XML then to convert that to something that will be an obstructed view, a technology abstracted view of the bot, and then move that back into Robocorp. So there are a lot of people working on the converter. Having said that I don't believe that anyone is at a point where you can click a button and you can convert from A to B. So there is a need to rewrite a part of the bot, whether it's 10% or 90%, there was a need to rewrite a part of the bot. Now, having said that people are making a big fuss about this, but this is not a big deal. You know exactly what the bot is doing. The starting point is not, I need to reinvent the wheel. I need to define what the bot is doing. I need to do the discovery. I need to write a solution document. All of that is done. All you got to do is to take what the bot does, and you have visibility of that and to convert it, if you have a tool that does 50% of the work, that's great and you do the rest manually. This is not a big deal. I want to again downplay this idea that, it's not like moving a house, it's a lot easier to do the conversion.
  

The future of RPA: Migrating to Gen2 tools

From startup costs to implementation and maintenance, many small and mid-sized businesses assume that process automation is simply beyond their reach.

Meet DigiAssist, the new RPA as a Service (RPAaaS) platform from Robocorp partner WM Promus. DigiAssist can automate repetitive tasks for businesses of all sizes.

Built on Robocorp’s technology, DigiAssist brings the benefits of SaaS to automation—lower running costs, reduced time to ROI, increased scalability and ease of use.

Join WM Promus architect Mindaugas Mejeras and WM Promus General Manager Eileen O’Mahony in a discussion about digitizing SME operations and putting an end to inefficient manual processes. 

How RPA is available to all organizations regardless of size

Processes that SMBs can and should automate

DigiAssist fulfilling WM Promus’ vision of RPAaaS

Mindaugas Mejeras

Solutions Architect, WM Promus

Eileen O'Mahony

General Manager, WM Promus

Head of Partnerships, Robocorp

RPAaaS & automation for all businesses - transcript

My name is Peter Steube, I am head of partnerships and alliances with Robocorp. I'm very excited to host one of our key partners here today in WM Promus, represented by Mindaugas Mejeras, chief architect, and Eileen O’Mahony, General Manager. And also our yes, General Manager and go to market lead as well. We are excited to reveal their RPA as a service offering in the form of DigiAssist. So Eileen, I'm going to hand things off quickly to you, we're going to move fast today and make a lot of progress and share with everybody the future of automation. So I’m excited to be hosting you. Thanks for joining us, and looking forward to the discussion.

That's great. Thanks, Peter. And, we're hoping people are gonna have lots of questions for us, or maybe some comments. So you'll notice that there's a Q&A section on your zoom login. So please post any questions you have in there. Or maybe you've got something you want to chat about. But you know, do get involved here, we'd love to see a collaboration. And at the end of the webinar, we'll have time to answer your questions and tell you how you can get more information from us. So I'm just going to quickly talk for a second about Promus and our journey. So how we ended up in the RPA space. So we're going for over 10 years now. And we started off in the IT Asset Management space, you know, what are IT assets? You own, what they're worth, you know, the state of your software compliance and stuff like that. And we moved on into like service management, configuration management, and so on. And once we're in configuration management, what we realized is, automation is key. So we ended up in this sort of DevOps automation space and doing lots of integrations to big systems. And what was really interesting for us was, as we were talking to our clients, and our client interfaces used to generally be technologists, as we're talking to them, what they were keen to know about was how we could make improvements for the other members of the organization. You know, for those people who aren't necessarily tied to technology, the non IT people, you know, HR, finance, legal departments and all of that. So that's when we started getting interested in RPA. Because we saw that as a sort of suitable technology to deliver what those non IT people wanted. Now, having said that, there have been plenty of use cases where IT people love RPA, too. So let's talk really quickly for those of you who don't know what RPA is, what it's about, okay. So RPA, basically, it's just software. Okay, so it's software but what it does is, it does a series of tasks, it executes something, some part of a process that normally is done by an acumen employee. So if you just think of the obvious stuff, like invoicing, payroll, client onboarding, all of that kind of stuff, where they process the task, what you normally have to do is to enter data into computer application. So the differences with RPA, instead of the human logging into the computer, and going through the series of tasks, click here, click there, and so on. There's a piece of software known as a robot or a bot that tackles those tasks. So your bot there is basically supporting what your employee activities are. Now bots are capable of mimicking pretty much most computer interactions. So it doesn't really matter what the process is, you know, it could be HR process such as onboarding an employee, it could be a financial process, like generating an invoice, you know, it doesn't really matter, because RPA is cross functional. 

Now, the other great thing is, it doesn't actually matter what the computer application is that you're using for the process, you can build a bot to work with Salesforce, but with Sage, with SAP, whatever it is, okay. So you know, whatever, whatever your accounting software is, whatever your CRM system is, what but you know, RPA is both cross functional and cross application. So you just need to think of RPA, don't think of it in terms of technology, just think of an RPA bot, as a co-worker. It can read, it can click, it can type, it can enter information into applications, it can grab information from one programme or application or website to another place. But the really nice, the sweet spot is that the bot does it better. And Okay, so what do I mean by better? Well, the thing is that your bot is never going to need a coffee break, and your bot is never going to get ill, your bot isn't going to go on holiday. So your bot is run 24/7. So we're talking 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And as well as being able to be so continually available to you, bots are very efficient. They do things at a rate much, much faster than a human can. And they're accurate. Bots don't make mistakes typing data, they don't make mistakes where they copy and paste stuff to. Now you can include steps for your bot to pick up on data that has been provided, but that has got errors in it. Because the bot will run as directed. So you can in your bots specify what you want your bot to do for example, if there's data that isn't exactly what you want. So your bots are always reliable, always consistent. Now, when we use the term non disruptive, what we really like is, you don't have to go out and buy new accounting package to get your bot to do stuff, you don't have to go out and buy a new CRM system, that's all fine. And what we really like is the concept of, which is what we're talking about today. RPA as a service, you don't even have to go out and get tons of infrastructure to get the whole thing working for you. So, you know, we've talked about RPA, delivering so many benefits. 

And for us, it honestly has made a huge difference to our clients businesses, you know, driving huge improvements in terms of efficiencies, because you have these bot workers that never go sick. They're superfast, they're super accurate. And honestly, hand on heart, it makes life better for those employees that are human workers. So how come everyone's not furiously just embracing RPA? How come we're not, you know, seeing everybody rapidly moving towards a workforce that's augmented by bots. And so we are seeing that, we are certainly seeing traction in lots of organizations. And currently existing clients we have where we might do DevOps, or cloud work or whatever for them, they very happily listen to our story to say, you know, this is the future, this is the future and let us show you what it can do for you. But for other people, this caution around, you know, some stuff like I don't know what process to start with, or there's caution around vendor technology, they're worried about who they should choose what RPA technology they should choose, or there's caution around, and they're concerned about paying out a license fee, and not seeing a return on that investment. 

So or it might be infrastructure, you know, so you might have somebody in HR, who really relishes the idea of having a boss do some of the manual repetitive jobs they have to do. But now they feel they have to get IT people involved because they need to have some infrastructure which hosts this technology, and so on. So and that's even if you have, even if you think about having, you know, those vendors that provide, you know, a cloud solution for whatever they're selling, even still your concern is, well do I need some internal people or do I have to upskill a bunch of internal employees around RPA, so I can get to this. And that's where DigiAssist comes in. Because what we're really talking about is RPA is a type of outsourcing what we're saying is DigiAssist is an RPA as a service. So you just think about it as just as you would maybe engage with a temporary agency to get contractor or outsource your some of your workers. 

That's what you're getting, you're getting workers on demand. I mean, the other thing is, you're not tied into a long licensed contract, because you're paying for the service. So what we do, we see this is, with DigiAssist, we offer a monthly billing arrangement. So you pay for what you use. In fact, it's a bit like a mobile phone, it's actually that simple. And I can't wait to get to show you the demo later. Because that's really what we're talking about, we're talking about you being in great control of what you're using, and how it's been used. The fact that you pay monthly, you're not tied in forever, you know, you're in for as long as you're happy, basically. So with that sort of arrangement, what you're really accessing is a service as opposed to a technology. And you will see a far quicker return on your investment in this way. Because you haven't paid it for, you know, a three year arrangements with a vendor or whatever. Now, the other thing is, in terms of scaling up, it's all handled for you, you just need to ask what you want. You know, so basically, you approach in fact, your approach Promus via the DigiAssist platform or portal, and you say, you know, I'm really happy with this one bot I've got, I'd now like to scale up, I'd like to get a second bot. So maybe I had my first bot handle the expenses, let's say I'm a legal firm. So I've got my bot currently running and handling expenses, that are being submitted by my professional staff. And now that's worked out so successfully, maybe I'd like to have a boss that does something around resourcing. So if you want to request a new bot, you basically just ask for new bot via the existing DigiAssist portal that you have. So you've got all of this great stuff. On top of that, you've got all the stuff I already said that RPA provides; your 100% accuracy, your processes being 100% compliant, and so on. So what DigiAssist is actually giving you it's the benefits of RPA. It's your digital workers on demand, your improved efficiency, that really ramp up in productivity and accuracy, your timeliness, your 24/7 availability, all this great stuff. Do you have data confidentiality, that's another thing you'd get with a bot that you can't have with the human. You've got all that, plus, you've got the additional benefits of SAS, you've got lower running costs, reduce time to ROI, the ease of use, scalability, all of that. So, you know, it really is the way forward. And when you know, when we had this vision, so our vision was, you know, some people are seeing challenges and obstacles, you know, what can we do to get rid of those challenges for them? You know, we envisage a workforce that includes RPA bots. It's something every organization can aspire to, regardless of their size, and that was our vision. And we looked around to say who could we partner with to build this out? And this is a really good time to hear from you, Peter to reach out to you because Robocop were the people we reached out to.

Yeah, thanks so much, Eileen. And that was a very, very thorough and great overview of RPA as a service, and what I'll say is that Robocop is very proud to support this business model. You know, when it comes to aligning with WM Promus, we saw the same thing that you all saw. Customers are cautious to move forward with RPA because of the necessary infrastructure and overall commitment. So you know, looking at why Robocop ourselves was launched, you know, we dug deeper than the positive headlines that you read about with the RPA industry. We sought out an improved model that prioritizes true universal access, and more sensible plan to align closely with the business value that automation drives. And I think that that's exactly what you're talking about with RPA as a service here. 

So what that means in practice for us is that technologically, we're engineers and software developers by trade. It's a much longer and separate discussion, but it's one of our tent poles is that the nitty gritty of building, maintaining automations should be left to professionals like Mindaugas and his team and the business results are what should be prioritized when it comes to delivery to the customer. And more importantly, for today's discussion in the market, you know, the vision of a bot for every person, something that has been floated around the automation industry for quite some time now. Quite frankly, in our mind, we don't really feel like the industry is doing a good job on delivering that. The first generation of providers are more or less riddled with barriers to entry. It really only makes it accessible for large organizations to have access to automation. And we think that small and medium sized businesses should have the right to compete with their large, their large counterparts. 

And worse yet, there's also barriers to exit with the generation one providers of RPA. They are built on a foundation of expensive per bot and upfront payments. They are also proprietary tools that lock their users in and limit them to that specific offering. And when it comes to actual delivery and thinking about the future of technology, they're most frequently doing it in an antiquated way. So whether it's on premise(Promus, not clear) you're not utilizing the power of cloud, that's something that Robocorp enables our partners with as well. And lastly, you know, what we see robotics as a service through DigitAssist doing right, is bringing the focus again on delivering those business results first. There's flexibility and low upfront commitment, followed by sustainable and simple maintenance on. 

And what we like to say here is that the success of automation isn't about dropping an RPA tool into the lap of your business users and hoping that they figure out a way to build, run and maintain it all on their own. It's about creating an experience where every person can be impacted positively by automation, without necessarily giving them the burden of again, building it and maintaining it, etc. So, you know, that's where digit assist comes into play. And we're very excited to you know, have Mindaugas go through this demonstration. The final thing that I'll share in terms of you know, benefits that are passed through to the DigiAssist platform, you know, Robocorp users are not locked in to us as a vendor, our code lifts and shifts, our consumption is cost based, or our costs are consumption base and tied directly to the value that we are driving. And our billing is also month to month as well. So DigitAssist users may never realise that they are attached to Robocop and that's okay. But that's not to say that we don't take our obligation to ensure things run smoothly, very seriously. 

In just the past two years, we've raised over $32 million of venture capital funding, and we're heavily invested in this future. Our tagline is automation without boundaries. And we're proud to support Promus on this journey of delivering that to their customers of all shapes and sizes. So Mindaugas, we can't wait to see the demo, we're going to hand things off to you now, sir. And looking forward to it.

Yeah. Great. Thanks, Peter. So Mindaugas DigiAssist, let's see what it's all about.

Thanks. Thanks Eileen. Let me just set that up. And let's just have a look. Yeah, so DigiAssist. Here we are at the login page, you can see the obvious options that you usually see with a solution such as resetting your password and signing up for the very first time. And as you would expect, DigiAssist has some built in roles that allow access to the various parts of the solution. So for this demonstration, I'm going to log in as a fictional character named Mindaugas, who is the owner of a team and has access to all the team features. So let me just log in, I ended up in the dashboard. Currently, I will skip explaining the dashboard and I will talk a little bit later about the roles that access to, but now let's have a look at what Mindaugas is most interested in, which is his robots. 

I go to robot processes, and our fictional character Mindaugas works in finance, and his job is to handle invoices. For that purpose he has several robots that allow him to perform various activities related to his job. So I have a robot that processes PDF invoices and puts data into an Excel spreadsheet. Also, there is a certain website that he wants to monitor for various changes. Additionally, he may want to process Excel spreadsheet and generate invoices from the PDF. He can perform various activities on these robots, he can edit them, run them, archive, if he doesn't need them, he can view the reports. So let's have a look at the PDF at the Excel processor. Robot which, as the name suggests, reads data from the PDF folder, from the folder where PDF files are located, reads the data and puts the data into the Excel spreadsheet. What usually Mindaugas does each Monday is to instruct the PDF to excel processor bot to do his job by clicking the run icon. I'm going to do that now.

And here you go, you can see the robot running. So there are three invoices that for this demo are going to be processed. This is going to take about 50 seconds to process. The bot takes data from PDF files located in my own laptop, extracts data and puts the extracts of data in the Excel spreadsheet for further processing. This is my local folder and you can see that I have three invoices and invoices Excel spreadsheet has just been placed into my local folder. So this means that the data has been processed from PDF into an Excel spreadsheet. For now we'll just have a quick look at the PDF invoice as a sample. So there's for example, an invoice number or the number balance. And the data from this PDF has been extracted and placed into the Excel spreadsheet with the balance, with the invoice number or the number.

Having said that, I've configured my robots to also place files not only in my laptop, but I have also placed the files to be accessible from DigiAssist itself. Just have a look at the run report. Here we can see the detailed report of my last run. I have attached a sample error warning messages to my robots just to demonstrate that if there is an error or a warning in the robot, or any information message, you would see what the robot is outputting and telling you so we can react to that. And most importantly, as you can see, I can also download the same Excel file that has been generated, I just would click the Download button it would download the Excel file. So let me get back to the robot processes for now. Obviously, logging in into DigiAssist and running the robot manually is easy enough job to do. But if my character Mindaugas wants to, he can schedule the robots to run, he can edit the robot process. Click the schedule robot. And you can see that I can change the time and frequency of when I want my robot around.

And the great thing is that I do not even need to touch any line of code, log into remote service to manage the robot or ask anyone else to run and manage my robot for me. Mindaugas remains in charge of the whole process, IT is not his role so he performs activities on the robot itself which is, I just saved this And the schedule has been done. With this, I want to also outline that in the dashboard Mindaugas can manage his bots just like real employees, it's easy enough to go and ask the bot what is happening, what is either wrong or if there are any warnings, we can look at the dashboard and to see if there are any problems with any of the bots. The dashboard provides me a summary of what my digital employees or bots have been doing. So for example, if there is a failing bot, or the ones with a warning message, the failing warning bot would be captured in the bot’s failures or bot waning cards. 

So I'm just going to go and drill down and see what it was. So we'll just have a look quickly. So it just tells me which robot failed when I can go directly into the run report if I want. Going back to the dashboard, the dashboard tells me also how many times certain bots have been run. How many minutes have been consumed in a selected time period, so for today it's 15 minutes. But for example during yesterday it was 26 minutes. Additionally, it shows me what is my consumption of minutes as compared to my minute allowance indigency. So I have used up 43 minutes and I have 457 remaining of my monthly 500 minute allowance. And in the bot runs you can see which ones they were and how many times they ran, you can also drill down into the bots. 

So actually Mindaugas is so happy with having a bot help him with the workload that his manager has agreed to Mindaugas using the second bot to do the tests. So what should he do if you want more? Mindaugas goes to the marketplace to locate a bot to do what's needed. He goes into a marketplace, he can see robots that WM Promus can currently develop for him. He wants to do CogHR to sage processing, he can click just order. He can describe what is his requirement and just click Place Order. So Mindaugas now is able to track the progress of his request, receive and ask updates from WM Promus. So the process discovery and robot development process is as usual with RPA, WM Promus receives this request talks through with the customer directly to capture what's the process to automate is and then WM Promus develops the robots and assigns the robot to Mindaugas account. So Mindaugas will be able to use the new robot by creating a new process around in the robot processes. 

So let's just have a look how that seemingly new robot that has just been developed by the WM Promus after say a week can be employed. I go to robot process and click new process run. I choose which process I want to run. I can provide various inputs that drive how the bot will behave. So for example, if I provide this very simple, it may say that go and pick up certain files from a predefined location and place the files that are generated  into this location. So Mindaugas is planning to take an annual leave soon. And this is where Eileen will take over from him during that time. So what's needed is that Eileen has access to the bots that Mindaugas is working on. To facilitate this, team management can be used. So in team management as the name suggests, I as the team owner can have team members that will do jobs for me. So at management, Mindaugas as the team owner can invite other users to join the team and assign the roles to them. When inviting new users, he can see, he can set what permission level this users will have, which will allow or deny certain actions to them in DigiAssist. 

In this example, Eileen has already been invited and accepted the invitation to join Mindaugas team and Mindaugas now assigns the robots that he wants Eileen to run while he's away. Let's have a look at how that's done. I click the Edit symbol, go to the assigned robots, click the Assign robots on the top right. Then Excel to PDF, and click Assign. The robot now is assigned to Eileen. Eileen will have now permissions to run the robot that Mindaugas wants her to. I'm going to log off and log in as Eileen. I just have a look

So currently, since Eileen has not been running any robots, there are no, there's no data in the dashboard. But in the robot processes, I can create a new process run together with that there were some robot processes that Eileen used to run previously, but these have now been archived, so they are no longer running. Eileen, since she has just received a new robot to her account, can choose the Excel to PDF invoices and that's very similar. It's actually the same robot I've shown before within Mindaugas account, where you can say what the robot can do with the info you provided. And that's exactly the same process that Mindaugas followed when creating his own robot. So they're like sharing the same robots. They can schedule them in such a way that they are, they have different inputs, and they have different outputs too. And yeah, this wraps up the shorts digital demo. I'm happy to answer any questions at the end of the webinar. Eileen was that what you wanted to see?

Thanks Mindaugas, that was terrific. That was absolutely terrific. I was loving it. And for me, what I was getting out of that was and the great stuff was about the fact that Mindaugas used to produce invoices and used to produce the expenses from CogHR to sage, but now Mindaugas had bots doing it. I love that because it means Mindaugas is now free to answer other questions that might come in to HR, like questions about their pension plans or stuff like that. So it really frees Mindaugas up to do stuff that adds human value. And the other thing I loved was how easy you made it seem to scale up, so when you wanted to introduce a second bot. And also what I liked was that in terms of scaling up, you just went to the marketplace. You know, you didn't have to go out and buy new tech and stuff because of course it's all a service. Now what you should see now is a slide that I'm showing called Be prepared to change and this is my call out to the world. This is my call out which basically I'm saying things change Get ready. So the two shots I have here are and I've nicked them from someone else. 

In 2011 Morgan Stanley came out with a really huge sort of bullish report on Tesla and in the report they had these two pictures of Fifth Avenue in history and it was to illustrate how rapidly things change. Now I think it's a great visual in terms of keeping at the forefront of your mind technology moves fast. Now technology makes business improvement move fast and that means the competitive landscape changes, which means you have to move with it. So my call out is basically with RPA driving down costs by you know the figures now are 20 to 40%, it delivers your 100% data accuracy, it slashes processing time for 50% and increases your capacity by 35%. This really is a huge opportunity here to redeploy your human employees to do higher value activities. And you know if not now when? You know today is the day to do it. Right. Lastly I just want to display here some other ways that you can get in touch with us. You've got us now, you've got us now on the zoom and you can ask stuff in the chat and in the Q&A but also we've got an email address here displayed and our website and phone numbers. So you've got lots of ways that you can reach out to us. And I leave that displayed while I hand back to you Peter because I believe you've got some questions for us, am I right? 

Yeah, definitely. That's a good call out for everybody on the line now here to please feel free to submit to the chat. We'll keep an eye on that as we go through these ones that were submitted in advance. And I think Eileen, you did an incredible job today kind of going over this question but I'm still gonna ask it here and I might take a different approach you know. For people who haven't heard of RPA they're entirely new to it you know the benefits of DigitAssist you know, I think again you went over it in great detail but maybe let's you know specifically as you bring this to market what is the primary pain point that is resonating most t with people? You know, we mentioned cost savings, accuracy, but also we hear things about you know, I really need to expand my business as well too. So, maybe from your perspective, like what's been the most interesting thing that has driven people towards DigiAssist?

Okay, so you're saying people who haven't heard about RPA. Okay, so if you haven't heard of RPA, in terms of DigiAssist, you don't have to actually distinguish RPA, and RPA as a service or pass. If you haven't heard of RPA, just think of DigiAssist as a way to increase your efficiencies without increasing costs. It's an opportunity to have a new workers, they're digital, they're bots, they're a new type of worker who's going to augment your current human workers activities, it's going to let you be more efficient. 

It's a non-disruptive approach to improving your business. And you don't have to be concerned with the same level of caution. Because you're not adopting a new technology in the way that you have to get IT security IT, infrastructure training department involved because people have to be internally scaled up and so on. What you're actually doing is embracing the future, embracing new technology without having those worries that a lot of people have, especially if you're a small medium enterprise to say, I really want a piece of that but I'm very concerned about the expense. Because as Mindaugas showed you, it's more like adding a mobile phone, it's a monthly expenditure, you're not into long licensed costs. And also, Peter, as you were saying, you know, Robocorp is built on the concept of everyone should have a boss, you know, we're not tying you to us forever. So that's what I'd say to those who haven't heard of RPA before.

And, you know, I think it's a great question or a segue to say, okay, well, if you have heard of RPA, maybe you've tried to implement it in your organization, you failed to do so. You know, what is DigiAssist doing here to make that experience just, you know, all the all the better and make it show a positive one? Because we hear so frequently, the negative experiences and you know, that's what Robocorp was built on a lot here to, you know, not that we're pessimistic people. It's just our eyes and ears are open to the negative experiences.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so Promus too, we are, you know, and that's, I think one of the reasons we partner so nicely with you guys, is we always say, and if you check our website at, we're vendor agnostic. You know, there's lots of fantastic RPA technology out there. But what we focus on, the same as you guys, as we say, okay, so there is fabulous technology out there, but what's gone wrong for other people? What's gone wrong for the people we're meeting? So one of the things is, and people want, they liked the idea of having bots, what they want is they'd like the control over who works for them. So they'd like to control the bots just as Mindaugas did, you know. I can tell my bot when I want it to run, but they don't want those people don't have to have coding or technical experience necessarily. So if you've got bots that look after your invoicing, you really don't want to have to have IT help you do that. So that's a big plus, if you go for something like you know, if you go for what we're proposing you do, DigiAssist, if you go for something as an RPA as a service, you're saying, you guys can still control those workers but we're not asking you to then engage with your own IT departments to keep them running, you know. 

So the other bit we would sort of say is, and if you're a small medium enterprise, and you are probably more intensely desperate to see a return on your investment faster, and that is something you will definitely see if you can reach out and have your bots working fairly quickly. Like Mindaugas saying we're talking about weeks instead of month long projects. Because you haven't got that whole thing of so are we going to do this on Promus? Are we going to go for a cloud offering, okay, if we're doing this on Promus, we now need to talk to the guys in the server, it's, you know, you haven't got all that. So if you like the idea of RPA, and you understand what RPA is, but you're saying okay, but my reluctance to get involved is I don't want to have to upskill workers, I'm a small business, I can't all of a sudden start turning around to my IT department saying right, who's going to be the guy who knows a lot about RPA, you know. Our account already, I've got a stretched bunch of you know, Linux and Windows, guys who look after my servers, I really don't want to have to lean on them further, to stand up platform so that I can run these bots. And that would be what I would say, you've got no infrastructure works, you've got no technical concerns, you've got no training concerns. You've just got workers, you've got these software workers. And that's what I say to those people out there who are going I want a piece of that pie, I want some RPA. You know, come grab some DigiAssist.

You I think, what caught my eye in the demonstration was the marketplace. And I think that could be a very powerful tool for just onboarding new opportunities and expanding, you know, the use cases of automation within your organization. So I guess the question there would be, you know, what is the onboarding experience when you have a new process or a new idea? You know, can you guys talk a little bit about, you know, what might be, quote unquote, pre-built versus customized? I think, you know, there's a question in the chat right now about, you know, it seems that the focus here is more on generic processes. But maybe you could confirm or deny that to what do you guys thought? 

Yeah, so I think I'm going to answer this one. And I'll be providing the answer to your question, Peter and to Iman as well, which kind of will be related. So just start with DigiAssist, as we have seen, it's very simple. After you've signed up, you are provided a free plan that includes 50 bot run minutes. Obviously, we will, there are no robots deployed into your account, because your processes are yours, we first need to develop the bots board. 

But WM Promus via the marketplace can take in your request of which robot you want to build. Obviously, you know, building the robot, the time to build it depends really on the complexity of the robot itself. So it could be you know, from a couple of days to a couple of weeks or even a month, depending on you know how long the robot is. So during the development phase, after you've submitted the requests, WM Promus is with you all the way, we are the service providers who are going to, you know, understand what your process is, what are your systems that are involved in this, any access that the board may need, all of that stuff is ironed out during the discovery phase. And obviously, during the development phase, we keep contact with you to see how can we test the robots that we're going to deploy in your systems. 

And  really it's us being kind of upfront with you just to ask you the questions, to ask the questions that we have, and make suggestions for process improvements and any automation. So obviously, one may think that if you are using the marketplace, and this is where I'm coming for the answer for Iman is that, you know, you only can buy or ask the robots that are only so pre-built, or they may not be customized. That's obviously not the case, though, is that because, as I've said, we can tailor the process to you now regarding access, because since DigiAssist is a SAS solution that's, you know, hosted say, on one of the cloud providers, and it seemingly may not have access to your internal systems. During the development, we can decide what are the access requirements that DigiAssist will need to perform the tasks. So if there is a requirement to access your internal system, what we can do is be it on a Unix machine or a Windows machine, what we can deploy what's called an agent. So the DigiAssist will speak to the agent on that machine, it will tell the robot who actually uploads the robot into that agent and the agent will run the robot on that machine. That's actually how the demonstration that I just shown with my local laptop, that it read invoices and generated an Excel spreadsheet on my own folder. So that's how DigiAssist did it. 

So it sits on a cloud provider that without the agent wouldn't have access to my local laptop, but I have an agent on my local laptop that allows me to have DigiAssist talk to the laptop and perform the actions. So just finishing off with answer the signup and requesting the robot is very easy. The rest is as usual robot development process where we take the lead and take you through the through the process.

That's excellent. I'm sure your customers, your current and future will appreciate that white glove service. And, you know, in terms of, you know, okay, so people often ask Robocorp directly to like, Okay, what are the best processes to automate, right? And our response is, well, if you're going fish in the ocean, what fish do you want to catch kind of type of thing, which presents a little bit of a challenge, but hopefully, you know, you all can talk a little bit about the process of figuring out what's best to automate. Do you guys have a specialty? Is it you know, is there a particular target application? We saw a few of them on the page. Can you guys talk a little bit more about that, what you think is the bread and butter of DigiAssist platform? 

Sure. I'm gonna grab this one Mindaugas. So I think that's a really good analogy where you say, you know, someone says, what should I catch? Oh, but you know, it depends on what your needs are. So and I mean, WM Promus are a software consultancy, so providing guidance and advice is what we do. That's what we do. So the answer is, you know, would you would we be able to help people, that's a definite yes. In terms of sectors, we work across a lot of sectors. I mean, interestingly, over 10 years ago, where we started was the banking sector, a lot of finance and stuff. And I suppose there, we will often revert and some of the examples we had, in the DigiAssist demo, where around sort of financing and billing, invoicing, that sort of thing, expense management. And we also work across I mean, because we're in business nearly 15 years now, we've moved in across a lot of other sectors. 

So we work in defense, we work, in fact, a lot of the parts we have been in public sector in healthcare, which is, you know, certainly a far cry from the banking sector. And because if you think about it, an awful lot of the processes that you do, there are the same, regardless of your core business. So typically, everybody is sending invoices, typically, everybody is managing suppliers, everybody has a payroll. You know, there is a lot of moving data from one system to another that everybody does. The only difference there is which applications they use to do it, how many people they have to do it, you know, where they click on the screen, you know, and so on. But as I said, RPA is cross functional and cross application. So you know, that's not something people should concern themselves with. In terms of where should they start? So what we run for people is what we call a Discovery Service, where we spend time with you and we say, right, let's see what you do. Let's see which processes you run very often. Now, it's actually and I just cracked myself here, it isn't necessarily the ones you run very often, for example, one of the bot we're currently building, again, it's for an NHS Trust. And what they have is data in a legacy system that needs to be cleaned up. Now, the lack of quality data is impeding lots of the processes they run, they know what the rules are in their own head to clean up the data, you know, if this data is here, and it doesn't match that date, that record should be deleted or archived. But the volume of the data would require dedicated human resources to do it, and will be hugely time consuming. So the obvious thing, and also it will drive human nuts having to do it, it's a very tedious process. So a bot, we've built them a bot to do it. There's another process we've done for somebody in the legal sector where they want to have, again, they have a legacy system and they want to run a once off task, which is to migrate data from one system to another. So again, with my bots to do that. So although we talk about processes being something that you know, you might run every day with, you might run it very often, and therefore there's a high overhead. And in some cases, it can be a one off chore that you want to do, the repetitiveness of it is the number of records you want to process over and over again. And so the value of having someone like us talk you through which process is best to automate is that we have worked in multiple sectors, and we have worked across lots of processes. And we know what criteria you should use to make that judgement. So one judgement will be what's the opportunity cost of not doing the process correctly? You know, what's the issue with data accuracy? Is this process causing a bottleneck to other critical processes in the business? Is this something that you will only do once, but perhaps it will make an amazing transformation to how the business will operate in the future, such as moving off a legacy system? So I would say reach out to somebody who's done it before, reach out to somebody like us who have. So even if it's not Digi Assist, you know, even if DigiAssist hasn't made you feel like yes, yes, reach out to us. Just open that conversation and talk to us more about why you should get started. I'm just a big, you know, I'm waving the flag here for get started with RPA today. Don't let not knowing what process to start with impede you.

Absolutely. And you're right. In terms of that, so we only have a few minutes left here. So we'll keep our final questions brief. But, you know, maybe you guys can talk about, you know, there's always limitations, right. But, you know, are there any specific to DigiAssists that, you know, people should be aware of, you know, is the scale of the process limited? So, like the number of steps involved? You know, is it only able to be distributed to a certain number of people? Like can you guys kind of talk about, you know, or is it, just let your imagination run wild and you could go nuts with it. But kind of just is there any framework that people should be considering to keep themselves in when they think of processes to bring to you?

Yeah, so, there are no such limitations that are showstoppers. So really, for you to use the service or get your process developed, there aren't any technical limitations that we can say that we have, there is no limitation on scaling. For example, if workloads require longer run times, or they require certain multiple robots to run concurrently, you can do that. You can have as many robots as you want, essentially. It really depends on the plan. With, DigiAssist cloud resources, we can run workloads for you if all you want is to, you know, perform robot activities against publicly available resources. Or if you want, if you have certain systems that are accessible internally, placing the agent, we can tap in into your own computing resources, and use your own service that we may need to run the robot. So, regarding that, perhaps the only limits might be the imagination of the customer, I think.

Excellent, excellent and in terms of, you know, RPA, I know, New York Times a few months ago, wrote an article that had in the headline that robots are coming for your job, and it sent a lot of, I guess, negative waves through the RPA industry, or people that were considering automation. So, you know, maybe we can wrap here is what's Promus’s approach to dispelling some of those misconceptions about automation, right? Because as much as there's, you know, positive things to be driven with cost savings and things like that, there is also of course, a human element to the involvement of bots and software robots. So, you know, what is you guys approach, what would you advise a customer say that would was bringing this to their board or bringing this to the executive to help dispel some of those, or put the rest some of those concerns?

And that's, honestly, Peter we've seen that as well. And we've seen that sort of tone in the press and drama makes for a great story. And, I mean, the other thing is people sort of saying, oh, the bots are coming, that type of thing, I’m like the bots are here, you know, the bots. So yes, that's the first thing it's already happened. And I do get that people don't like change but what people do love is a better life. And that is what RPA gives you. If you consider, you know, I mean, I go back to the hospital trust that I spoke of, the people who were building bots for are in the HR department, they are incredibly busy. Outside of the sort of normal description of you need to process this data, this data, this data, they are inundated with phone calls around people asking them, the intricacies around their maternity leave and some details about their pensions, so they have tons of work to do. That when we built a bot for them, this freed them up to do the role, to do the jobs that required their emotional intelligence, the type of stuff that a bot can't do. So I suppose when we talk about limitations, that's what bots don't do. They don't do the great human stuff, they don't do the stuff like building relationships with your customers. They don't hold someone's hand while you walk them through which training course they should attend. But what they do is the mundane stuff that you don't need a person to do. So what you're saying to an organization when you go in, is let's make life better for you and life better for your employees. You're now giving your employees someone to work alongside of them, this person is going to improve your working life, it's not taking over your working life. The bot doesn't tell you what to do you tell the bot what to do. And that's really what it's about. It is it is to say to people don't be frightened of this, this is a better life for you. You know, and obviously there's the efficiencies improved in your organization and you know, more efficient organizations are much more pleasurable place to work. I'm an advocate, we have bots running here at Promus, it changes your life

DigiAssist: Automation for all businesses

Automation for insurance carriers & brokers

Constantly extracting and entering policy information into your systems, moving data between software platforms that don't communicate, and other heavy administrative work - there are certain tasks that are very important, but are expensive and no one likes to do.

These tasks are repetitive and you can better spend your human resources - talking to customers for instance. How can we fix this? Automation is the answer.

By using a digital workforce, companies can save money, get back precious time and refocus employees on customers, not administrative work. Become more competitive in a very competitive market.

Our panel of insurance leaders and automation experts will demystify automation and help you understand how to implement a digital worker in your business and add directly to your bottom line.

Click here to learn more about automation for the insurance industry.

Jamieson Fregeau

Co-Founder, Quandri

Jackson Fregeau

Brock Longworth

COO, Cornerstone Insurance Services

Automation for insurance carriers and brokers - Robocorp x Q

Thank you for joining us. My name is Peter Steube speaking on behalf of Robocorp. You are listening to our shared webinar with Quandri as well as Brock Longworth of Cornerstone Insurance Services. And we're going to be kind of going over all the ins and outs of RPA and its applications for the insurance industry today. So again, my name is Peter Steube. I work with Robocorp. We are a company that is enabling the next generation of automation. I'm proud to be responsible for our global partnerships and I'm honored to share the stage with one of our top partners. They are early adopters also innovative entrepreneurs and not to mention they're also related as well. So, co-founders of Quandri, Jamieson and Jackson Fregeau. They have graciously enlisted the presence of their customer. He deserves substantial amount of credit for his own vision to embrace automation as a valuable tool in battling industry wide challenges and competition that is Brock Longworth, CEO of Cornerstone Insurance Services. 

So, over the course of today's webinar, we will be touching upon a broad range of topics which are designed to have something for everybody whether you're an automation veteran, a new entrant or insurance practitioner and everybody in between. So, we're going to start out with a brief introduction to Robocorp, our technology and how it's helping Quandri deliver the future of automation. Then also, we're going to hand things off to the brothers themselves for a business overview, an introduction to what exactly is RPA, the concept of digital workers and how that's augmenting workforces as well as some of the results they've been able to achieve for Brock and other insurance brokerages and providers. Our arguably most exciting portion is a panel Q&A with Brock taking center stage to discuss his experiences pursuing automation with Quandri and some guidance for those who wish to do the same. Then we will wrap with audience submitted questions so please feel free to place them in the chat or the Q&A section of the webinar here and we will hopefully answer all your questions at the end. And definitely, we hope that the people here with us now stay on the entire time. But keep in mind, we will have a replay published soon afterwards. So, for those of you who choose wisely to work with Quandri, you may never interact with Robocorp directly and for us, that's okay. We're thrilled to be the technology platform that enables minds like Jackson and Jamieson to bring high ROI automated processes to life. For those of you who are curious just who we are, we're a startup who's just beginning to transform the robotic process automation industry but we're also very much the real deal. 

In over the past two years, we've taken on in excess of 30 million in US dollars funding from some of venture capitals best and brightest. We've also on boarded 1000s of developers around the globe and touched organizations of all shapes and sizes. I'm excited to share today that these metrics are compounding in multiples not just percentage points. So, we have a great headway ahead of us and plenty of opportunities to continue to support the efforts of Quandri.

So, one might ask, why are you so special? Why have you raised so much money and achieve such great things in such a short amount of time. For those of you who have worked with automation before, it is very likely that this slide will resonate with you. For those of you who are maybe learning what RPA is and just also recognizing that it has been the fastest growing sector within technology for quite some time now and you want to be involved, you might not realize that behind those great headlines which are still very much true and what it's able to achieve exists some lesser known, we'll call them dirty truths about automation in practice. To date, RPA has been a market dominated by what are called proprietary brittle or expensive tools to bring automations to life and they typically have a vision that every user can build, maintain and run bots. It's more or less been a luxury afforded only by large organizations and even for them, there's been deployment struggles, sustainability issues and ultimately false promises of fast and carefree ROI. For us, Robocorp’s approach is different. 

We don't disagree that everyone should have access to automation or better yet be impacted by it. It's more or less that we just think especially as automated processes become more complex and unwieldy, the development should be left to professionals like Quandri. So well, we don't necessarily disagree entirely with the vision of “citizen developers or users creating their own automations.” We just think that at a certain point of mission criticality or complexity, it's best to leave the building and maintenance in the hands of experts. And well, line of business users can focus on ways to use their newly discovered free time as they wave goodbye to administrative, repetitive and mundane tasks. Altogether, for us, the antidote to the challenge is highlighted on the previous slide we believe lies in what's programmable, open source flexible and more or less a modern approach that is more sustainable, easily scaled and fairly priced technology. So, when it comes to Quandri’s projects, it's both important and valuable to know that they aren't alone. We have invested significantly to build an “enterprise grade platform” that is accessible by all. Our infrastructure is fast to set up, elegant and it's intuitive for developers and includes modern architecture features like CICD pipelines, GitHub integrations and it's built on serverless technology for those of you who are aware of what that might be and the best part is we have our entire team, venture backing and expertise to keep it up and running smoothly. There is also built in security that is proven for some of the world's most discerning organizations. There are also dashboards and one place to monitor all the bot operations effectively including secure access control and user management and our community is incredible. Open source is a mentality that extends beyond just our business model. We have a legion of active members providing help when needed and problem solving and innovating together. 

And lastly, when it comes to support for business models and processes and all that you may want to automate, we have an extreme number of libraries and also in alignment with the coding language python which is very ubiquitous and makes it very easy for expert developers like Jamieson and his team to bring anything to market. 

So, with that said, next, we're going to hand things off to an introduction of Jamieson and Jackson. Jackson Jamison, thanks for joining us today and we appreciate everybody sitting through the Robocorp portion of the intro but we'd love to kick things off with your story. Where did Quandri originate and more importantly, did you start with another RPA tool or are you fresh on Robocorp? Why don't we get right into it there as well?

Sure, thanks a lot, Peter. So, as Peter related to, we are brothers. So, I'm Jackson and the other co-founder here is Jamieson. And when Quandri started, Jamieson and I have wanted to go into business together for a long time so we've been looking at different business ideas for a while, kind of waiting for that right opportunity. And where Quandri originated, I was at another company and it came out of a real-world problem where we had really high volume, repetitive operations. So, we were a sales and marketing company and we had 1000s of emails that came in every day and we had people that needed to categorize and respond to those emails and they had to bucket them and we had a pretty large operations team dealing with that. And we knew that there had to be a better way to do it but we couldn't really figure out how to do it properly. So, after a lot of research and looking around, we landed on this bot building technology but actually with the different tools. Some of you may know them, UiPath which is an older version of RPA software and which Robocorp is now displacing tools like that. But what UiPath allows you to do is to build these bots with drag and drop software but it's a little bit clunky and it has really high upfront costs. But we built a few bots with UiPath and even there, we're still blown away with the results. And then Jamieson and I started talking about it and we came to the conclusion that there was a fairly large underserved need in the SMB market for this kind of technology that typically been reserved for large enterprise organizations. 

So, Jamieson and I fairly quickly decided to go into business together and fairly quickly after that, we found Robocorp which really fit the business that we want to build as there weren't high upfront licensing costs. It was usage pricing and you can build all of the bots in Python. So, Jamieson's a developer, we want to work with developers and allows developers to do what they do best which is code. So that was about two years ago at this point. Since then, we've really focused on the insurance broker market. So, we've been with brokers all across North America at this point and all of this is based on Robocorp’s technology. So, we've been growing quickly focusing and helping insurance brokers and that's why we're here today because we want to be able to get this technology into the hands of brokers and allow them to continue to benefit from this kind of technology.

Excellent! Thanks, so much for that Jackson. As we kind of dive deeper here into what is robotic process automation, how would you guys define that and what problems do you think it's solving and more or less, why would somebody pursue automation?

Yeah, so while we're in the business of building these bots, really, at the end of the day, it comes down to the people. So, as Jackson said, we were starting and looking at this industry and providing automation in many different industries. And what we found when we were looking across industries is that people were spending an enormous amount of time on these high volume, repetitive processes. And Quandri is really born out of is the idea of taking the best of people and the best of computers and putting that together and you're able to achieve something you wouldn't be able to achieve without either of those. And that really is, in our minds, what automation and what robotic process automation is in the most tangible form of taking those repetitive processes that people really shouldn't be working on and putting computers to work on that so that people can work on the things that they should be like talking to customers, collaborating with other people, problem solving, all these really incredible skills that people are great at but in so many industries and so many jobs, people are spending their time bogged down on these high volume processes. 

So, for us, robotic process automation allows people to essentially get that work done but enable them to focus on the skills that they're great at.

And one thing we like to say in that same line is really taking the robot out of the person and giving that work back to the robot. You don't want that person doing the robot work, let the robot do that work. And ultimately, like what these digital workers are, they're automations that are mimicking what a person is doing. So, they're logging in with the username and password, they're clicking over here, they're typing over there. They're running that same process but they're doing it hundreds of times faster for 50% or less of the cost and they don't make mistakes or take vacation. It allows people to really focus on what they do best which in a lot of brokers cases is talking to customers.

Excellent! Thanks, guys for that additional color. And of course, let's have actual data do the talking here. So maybe you guys can walk us through some of what you've been able to accomplish for the insurance industry and some of the benefits that brokers are seeing. I'm sure Brock will also chime in as part of the panel here very momentarily but maybe you can walk us through especially the case study that we're showing here on the screen which is available on Robocorp’s website as well. Kind of talk about some of the results that you've been able to drive.

Yeah, and really initially, I think there's important reasons why we ended up in the insurance industry. So, as Jackson alluded to, we started doing this across many different industries and we're doing that to see where these digital workers have produced the most value. So, as we were doing that, that led us pretty quickly into the insurance industry because there are a large number of high volume and repetitive processes. They're super important to do but shouldn't necessarily be done by people. 

And so, as we're looking at the insurance industry, we think this is because that there are just a lot of different technology platforms that brokers and insurance companies use but there isn't necessarily a way to connect these platforms. Now, a lot of these companies are saying they're coming out with an API or a way to connect the platforms together. But what we're trying to do is provide a solution to that now where essentially as opposed to waiting for five or 10 years for these companies to come out with something to connect their platforms, we can build a digital worker to essentially move data in between these platforms and alleviate these high volume and repetitive processes. And really a great example of that is this case study we're looking at now. So, this is a case study with Cornerstone that we'll dive into a little bit here and essentially, where they had an employee spending up to six hours a day downloading and renaming policies. Essentially, we were able to build a digital world to come in and completely automate this process so that that employee can move on to higher volume processes and work. 

So, on the staff side, we've now been able to cut the cost on this process by 55% while saving them 120 hours every single month. This process is completed overnight so that when they come up to work in the morning, it's completely finished and it is finished 88% faster overnight. What this enables the employee to do is to go and focus on those more important processes like speaking with customers and generating new revenue for the business.

Excellent, thanks so much. And our final slide here before the panel Q&A was to discuss the relationship between Robocop and Quandri. I was kind of giving my bias pitch of Robocorp here for the first five minutes of the call but we'd love to hear from you guys at Quandri, why Robocorp? Why is this where you're building your business or why are you moving forward in using our technology for the folks on the line that might be interested in that relationship? 

I really do think you hit the nail on the head with what you're saying. As Jackson said, we started out with another RPA platform. We started out with UiPath and as we were diving into that, the entire time we were working with them, we were thinking about why we couldn't just do this on our own in programming languages in Python. 

So, as we were looking at that, and looking for ways to do it on our own, where we aren't restricted by the actual platform they make you build in and they are extremely expensive upfront cost, we came across Robocorp. And essentially, there's really a few things that make Robocorp stand out and one is just that it's incredibly flexible. We can bring in any technology we need to get the job done to build a digital worker and it's imported by Robocorp because Robocorp supports the most popular programming language, Python. And the costs are extremely reasonable because we only pay for what we use and when we upload our digital workers to Robocorp, we don't have to pay any strict licensing fees and it's all baked into the digital worker.

And just to add one thing onto what you're saying together, ultimately, what that allows us to do is that allows us to pass cost savings on to our customers. So instead of us making our customer pay a high upfront cost, we can have a small upfront development fee and then we can run that on a monthly subscription sometimes based on strictly what they use. So, it allows us to provide a much more flexible pricing model to our customer and ultimately, that's why we really like Robocorp.

Great! Thanks, so much for that, guys. Now, let's move on to our main attraction here. Brock, thank you very much for joining and I know that you know Jackson and Jamieson well. We've had a chance to get to know each other just a little bit but very excited to hear your insights. And I'm going to hand things off mostly to the guys at Quandri and yourself to kind of take the conversation from here but wanted to say thanks for joining the line.

And thanks a lot for the introduction Peter and going through all of that. It's really helpful for us to see that it's everyone's smiling, I'm sure for everybody on the line too. And now to Brock maybe to kick things off Brock, why don't you just give us a brief description of Cornerstone your business, how you fit into the insurance market?

Sure, yeah. So, we are an insurance broker. So essentially, our function is to attract and interact with customers and then we will present those customers to the insurance marketplace, securing insurance products that meet their specific needs and then we will ultimately attempt to make that sale to the customer and with that insurance product. So, we source the products from the entire marketplace and then ultimately make a sale. So, we are a sales organization at the end of the day and we're very much driven on relationships with the customers that we have and relationships with the customers that we're trying to attract as well. And there's one little differentiator with us like we are a traditional bricks and mortar broker like we do have five off office locations where people walk in the front door. But we also have another brand called Swift Digital Insurance which is our online broker brand operating in the four western provinces of Canada. 

So, because of Swift we've always been or since Swift launched in 2018, we've been pretty focused on kind of technology and what's next and how can we use technology to enable the insurance process as best as possible. I think that is ultimately how we ended up with the guys at Qunadri and how our relationship tickets serve with them.

Thanks, Brock. And I guess ultimately like what was that? You mentioned having that digital brokerage swift kind of pushed in that direction. But with the digital workers or the bots specifically, what really pushed you to look for that kind of solution or what was the pain point that you were feeling in your brokerage to push you in that direction?

Yeah, I think like a lot of insurance brokers like we are suffering from an inability to attract staff. So, we're having a really hard time finding people to come in and work actually in those high processing manual jobs. Like there are 1000s of repetitive clicks and types and touches in some cases of our business. So, it's hard to find someone that wants to sit in the basement and just type all day. So ultimately, it was just an inability to staff those positions that was the driver for us after engaging with you guys in the process. So, we did realize there was going to be cost savings, accuracy, reliability. There's a whole myriad of reasons why it made sense for us once we actually dove into it further. But the initial driver for us actually wasn't inability to staff those positions. 

Hmm. Interesting. And then I think what we're going to do here is insert a little bit of a poll and see from the audience who might be experiencing some of those pain points themselves or who is having that inability to staff or a difficult time running those processes internally. Great music Peter.

I think we can leave the poll open. We have respondents yeah. 12 out of 12 have said yes, they agree Longworth (21:54) so let me just cut it off there and recognize that a lot of people are experiencing the same thing.

So that was 12 out of 12 were experiencing the same thing and that's what we've noticed with a lot of our conversations as well with brokers is that a lot of these businesses, they are similar and you see a lot of these problems across the industry. And that's ultimately why we're building Qunadri is to solve those pain points. But maybe Brock, it'd be good for you to kind of describe to the audience what bots that you have built to solve some of these problems.

Yeah, for sure. So, the first thing that we looked at was, basically, as an insurance broker, we interact with a dozen insurance companies. Those dozen insurance companies work with hundreds of brokers. Those hundreds of brokers use half a dozen different broker management systems. So, there's multiple companies using a ton of different kinds of software and we're all trying to accomplish a similar task. But as Jay said earlier, there's not a lot of integration between those different companies and software’s. I've been in the industry 20 years and it's kind of been the holy grail of insurance companies and insurance brokers that we're going to find this seamless integration where this one software system we all play nice in and it hasn't happened and I'm not holding my breath it's going to happen before I retire. So, I do think that there needed to be something that could kind of bridge that gap for us. And another issue we have too is that just because I want to present myself to my customer this way doesn't mean broker B, C, and D want to present themselves in that way too. So, if ever the industry does reach that situation where we have that harmonious system that we're all using, there's a risk that we don't have the ability to differentiate ourselves as well. 

So that's kind of I guess the background on why we wanted to automate our e-doc process which is the first process that we automated. So basically, our insurance companies will download our client’s policies to us. They're downloaded into formats whether it's a PDF document that isn't attractive, it's named something really strange. And they all come from different insurance companies, different transactions look different. And so, because we email the documents to clients, we have a client portal where clients can see the documents. We don't want them just looking like a string of random letters and numbers. We want them looking presentable of course. So, we've had somebody manually renaming the documents daily for many years. It's hundreds of touches a day, 1000s of touches a month. It's very expensive for us in terms of hours. It's very repetitive, very boring, you have a hard time finding someone that wants to spend their life doing that. So, it was a really difficult pain point for us and it was a really good case I think for automation. 

So, when we first met the guys at Quandri, that was the first thing we pitch to them and that's the first process we automated. And as Jay said it's been automated 100% and we've been able to redeploy that staff member elsewhere to make an impact on our customers which is what we ultimately wanted. So that was kind of our first process to be automated. Before we even got through the first launch of that bot, we were all thinking like, what's next? And so, we've now launched bot number two. And the swift digital brand that I mentioned, it's an online broker of course. So, we are spending a lot of our energy trying to get customers to complete online forms and to filter information to us that way about the risks they're looking to insure. So that information is coming into our system by email or by download depending on the application the customer is accessing, that information comes to us and then we were manually transferring that into our broker management system to typing their name, their address, entering their risk information. And so the new bot that we just launched in the last week or so here is actually collecting all that information that our customers are giving us online, it's passing it over into our various software systems and putting in a format that our brokers can then take it and run with it and do the process with the customer. 

Prior, I think I haven't done many of them myself but prior, I think our brokers were telling me it's about 15 minutes they were spending taking six or seven emails and typing everything into our system. And then they would contact the customer and then they would carry on their process from there. Now it's really beautiful, actually. They're just getting an activity in their list that says hey, this lead is ready to go. They're opening it up, the files completely built for them, the code systems already built for them and they're just contacting the customer and carrying on. 

Another benefit we're seeing huge just in this first week with that is that with online leads and sales in the insurance industry, you have to be extremely fast because after the customer leaves your website, they're probably heading to the next person's website to the same thing. So, we were finding that was taking us 15-20 minutes to notice it was in our inbox and then it's taking us 15-20 minutes to type everything into our system so we were ready to call the customer and it was often like 30 minutes, 45 minutes. If we are A game on like 45 minutes maybe to give this person a phone call. With the bot doing it though, the leads are coming into our system. It's going into our program that we're using all the time so we're seeing the lead instantly. We're not doing any of the background typing for it so we're getting these calls out probably in like 10-15 minutes. And I mean, it's week one but all indications are that our success and closing rate on those sales will be higher because we're being faster with it. So that's another unexpected way and with the automation we had. So those are two bots

Great. Yeah and so when you're looking and you're thinking about those thoughts Brock and you're thinking about kind of the benefits that you get from those, would you say the top benefits of those are kind of more financial or is it more on the side of enabling your employees go and work on other things or talk to customers and things like that?

Yeah, when I first met you guys actually earlier this year, I was driven financially. I was thinking this is going to be an expense saver and it is. I mean the ROI is definitely there and we look at what we're paying people for the hours they're working versus what we're paying for our subscription to the bot, we are saving money there for sure which is great. But I wasn't actually also considering that our HR director is not spending time recruiting for data entry staff anymore and now she's spending more time recruiting for salespeople. So, there's an added benefit for us. There's a lot of benefits like that that have come up that I wasn't expecting initially. 

So now having been months into having a bot working for us though, I would actually say that the ability to take our people and to have them doing things that are more in human natural talents is actually the big win for us. Like we actually have happier people in our data and operations team because they're not just hammering data constantly. They're actually getting to like work on more complex tasks that aren't boring them to tears and that kind of stuff. So, I've actually even noticed like a morale lift for that particular group because I mean, we knew they were in the basement and we knew they were typing data and we knew it was boring but we I don't think they even knew actually how bored they were with it until it was taken away from them. 

So, it's been like morale benefits as well. There's been recruiting benefits, there's been definitely the financial benefits that we hope for initially. But I think the biggest win for us to your question Jay actually is that we're seeing that we're providing a better customer experience because we're faster and we're actually able to deploy expert people to customers faster because I don't have a licensed broker renaming an email or a licensed broker typing a phone number anymore. They're actually contacting their customer and they're giving insurance advice which is what we should be doing. So, I think it's just allowed us to redeploy our resources in a more meaningful way for our customers and I'd put that as a number one win for sure.

Yeah, that's interesting. And it's interesting to see how that evolves over time of the of the bots running.

So, it surprised me actually. I definitely came at it from let's save some money and there was a trickledown effect of all kinds of benefit we weren't expecting.

In our insurance automation webinar, learn from industry leaders how you can use RPA for insurance broker and carrier automation and elevate your business.

Insurance Automation Webinar - Broker Automation

You already know the power of automation. You know that the uses of automation are countless and the possibilities endless.

You also know that while businesses are interested in automation, many simply don’t know where to turn. That’s where you come in.

And that’s where Robocorp comes in. With an open-source tech stack and consumption-based pricing, it is Robocorp’s goal to give our partners the tools, technology, and service to succeed.

Join Robocorp’s team on August 24 to hear why it makes sense to become a Robocorp partner. Our team will discuss:

Why Robocorp’s product is ideal for partners

The training, support, and other program benefits

Glad have you all here and share some exciting new announcements on our partner program and what we're doing to work with you to help you scale your business and be as collaborative as we can in the market. So, let me introduce everyone that's going to be speaking on the session today. My name is Chris Etheredge. I lead our go to market operations, I'm based out of the Dallas Texas area. On with me is Peter who leads our partner ecosystem and Saana who is responsible for customer success internationally for us, thank you probably all maybe interacted with them at different times and I'm sure they all get to look forward to meeting those of you that are new to Robocorp. 

So, we thought we'd take some time today just to walk you through a little bit about Robocorp. I apologize, we've got a mix of people on the line here from partners that have been with us from the very beginning of our journey all the way to new people that are considering going to market with Robo Corp and welcome to you all. So, I'll walk us through just a quick overview of who Robocop is how we're approaching the market and then Peter and Saana will take us into more details on the partner program itself to a lot of really interesting stories and talk about some of the programs we're putting in place. 

So, if you're not familiar with us, we've been on this journey officially since 2019 but our founders go back even further than that in the RPA space. But they brought the company to market, we've been very fortunate to have the backing of some of the very best in Silicon Valley. Benchmarking Canvas Ventures have gotten behind us at this point and are helping us really scale the organization and make the solution available to the entire globe. And one of the key parts of our entire go to market strategy is our partners and we believe that we have the ability together to make the value and the power of automation available to companies of all sizes and break down those barriers of functionality cost that often keep companies from either starting an automation journey or taking it to scale. And that's what we're really all about as an organization is giving you the partners the tooling and the capabilities in a cost-effective pricing model that allows you to help us take that to market and make that vision a reality. So when we brought the company to market, there were kind of a few sets of challenges that our founders saw that were common across the first generation of solutions that we're out there, the UI pass, the blue prisms, the automation anywhere and the other usual suspects that you see out there largely GUI based automations with a citizen developer type model and with that comes a lot of challenges and I hear this every day from companies of all sizes that I interact with. They're dealing with fragile bots because of the gooey based nature of those recording and playback type automations. They have a great deal of challenges developing within those proprietary systems. I haven't met a developer yet that has told me that they like coding in UiPath. 

When it comes to actually getting to deploy these automations into the customers, they're burdened by high startup costs which lead to a very delayed ROI. And ultimately, that plus the impact of the fragility that is often associated with these bots keeps companies from being able to get to scale. So, our founders saw the need for a solution in the market, that would take a different approach and bring about an opportunity for companies of all sizes to take advantage of automation. And you know, it's a popular and crowded space. So often get asked the question what's different about Robocorp compared to the people that we see out there in the market every day. And this slide is coming up is just kind of a simple list of how we compare and how we approach it. We're not actively out there going after the citizen developer market, we're bringing a set of developer tools that allow you to have a more programmable approach to building sustainable automations. We're very fortunate to be able to leverage a very powerful open source ecosystem of tooling that is ripe with innovation that allows you to have the capabilities of automating against any system that's out there. When we built the platform itself, it was done ground up, cloud native and introduces a lot of flexibility in how these bots are ultimately operated and orchestrated. It aligns well with modern software development practices. We talk a lot about agile automation ops and how that aligns with the way companies are using a DevOps based approach to build software. We believe bots should be built in the same exact way. And then finally, we've introduced a pricing model that's purely based on consumption so that we directly align the clients or the partners expenditure with the value that the bots are generating. We don't have a bot licensing model, we don't have a per seat model, we don't add extra charges for maintenance, etc. It's all encapsulated in one simple price that counts minutes of execution at the bot level and that gives you a lot of flexibility. We'll talk about that more as we go through the presentation. 

So just at a high level, how our solution works, there's really two primary parts to it. On the left, you see set of open source development tooling. It is based on Python which gives us a very vibrant and powerful ecosystem to take advantage of. Our CEO likes to say that every molecule in the universe has a Python library associated with these days. What that simply means is we're able to give you the power to automate against almost any target system that's out there and be able to bring the automations that your clients need to bear on their problems. We abstract that with another open source project called Robot Framework. We'll talk more about that in a second but it allows people that are not necessarily Python experts to ramp up on our technology very quickly and efficiently build out their automations. Once the bots are built, you can deploy them in a variety of ways including integration to popular source code repositories and then orchestrate those in our control room in both an unattended and attended fashion. And the other point that I'll make on here is because of the foundational components of the solution, we're able to support you operating in a variety of operating systems. A lot of our competitors are heavily windows focused. We support both Windows as well as Mac and Linux right out of the box which really impacts your overhead from an infrastructure standpoint.

If you think about the dev tooling in detail, we spent a lot of time on this. As I mentioned, it is Python based, there's over 7 million developers out there in the Python ecosystem doing all kinds of things. Robot framework, as I mentioned, is an abstraction layer. It's a keyword driven syntax that makes it very easy for anyone with basic scripting skills to build out automations. We coupled that with a very broad set of automation libraries that have come out of these open source projects and things that we have built, our partners and our customers have built and contributed to the open source projects so that you have at your disposal hundreds of different libraries and keyword actions out there for integrations to popular systems as well as common bot actions. And then there's a variety of things from a dev tool chain standpoint that make it very easy to manage your Python environments, etc. and allow you to be as efficient as possible. And really where that all becomes super powerful for you as a partner is the ability to build a multi-channel or a best path automation that makes that robot as sustainable and powerful. as you can. We obviously support automation at the UI level. But we make it very easy for you to go deeper into the application stack to build bots against locators and UI elements directly against API's or all the way down to the data layer itself. And we see this in single use cases all the time where an automation will start at the UI level in SAP for example then go against the API of Salesforce and then manipulate data at the Excel data layer versus going through Excel the app. So, it gives you a lot of flexibility and how you ultimately architect these solutions and bring them to bear for your clients and we think there's a lot of inherent advantage there. And it gives you the ability to build bots that are much less fragile than the first-generation players often. 

And then once the bots are built, you have the opportunity to leverage our cloud control room for securely orchestrating and running and monitoring the bots. So often talk to customers that have been using a competitor's technology and they talk about the constraints they operate under all the time around I've got a set number of robot licenses and execution environments and I'm trying to deal with scheduling those bots so I can meet the SLA’s of my business stakeholders and it becomes an issue with just being able to run that as efficiently as possible. 

With us, all of that goes away. It's truly cloud scale in that if you had 100 automation sitting on our platform today, you could theoretically run them all at the same time. You have the ability to make multiple copies of bots and run them in parallel. You have the ability to take a single automation and break apart steps of it so some of it operates sequentially, some of it operates in parallel to improve your throughput and efficiency on that bot itself. So, there's a lot of inherent benefits of the architecture and the features that we enable coupled with our pricing model allows you to rethink how you can bring this to bear on your customers.

And then we often ask the question about well, what are my choices for how to architect this and ultimately deploy it to the customer. We provide some optionality there are multiple ways, you know, the control room if you've experimented with our technology, you can go out to our website today, sign up for a free account and start orchestrating and operating bots in minutes. We also provide the opportunity to deploy it as a private cloud version. So, in cases where clients would like that kind of deployment option, we can fully support that. But then on the other end, the bots themselves can be designed in such a way that you have complete control over what data gets processed locally versus what has to go to the cloud for processing. So, there are partners on this call right now. They're building bots for healthcare organizations for example. Obviously, lots of concerns over data privacy and so they have architected those bots in such a way that no sensitive data leaves the customer's premises. The control room is only used for just controlling the bot start, stop, pass, fail, basic information from a logging standpoint. 

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the ability to deploy these fully in the cloud, utilize containers to deploy them out to the target systems and take full advantage of all of the scale up scale down features that are associated with cloud operations as well as some of the advanced things that we're doing around being able to manage work items in a variety of ways within the bots themselves. So we have a lot of inbuilt security within the platform. I will tell you that in conversations with large financial organizations here in the US, infosec discussions can often be a little bit of a tightrope to walk. We get glowing feedback from the infosec teams on what we've built in the platform and the native security that is there. So we're becoming more and more confident about the things that we can do to meet the regulatory and data privacy needs of your clients. And just as an aside, the platform we have sock two type one certification already, type two will be coming within the next couple of weeks. 

And then finally, when it comes to the pricing side of things, this is often an important slide to share with customers and talk to them about the difference. And the fact that we are completely consumption based, it's really a game changer for them and how they look at the potential ROI of their projects right. And so, no bot licensing, no per seat licensing, no developer licenses, you as a partner can get started immediately and started developing these models for nothing other than your cost of time to do so. And you only start, we only monetize at the point of the bot being deployed to the control room and being orchestrated through and so there's a great deal of potential savings there just on the licensing side. But if you're engaging with customers that may be have a blue prism or an automation anywhere already installed, it's important to talk to them about the infrastructure costs that they're incurring through those platforms. I've talked to multiple fortune 500 customers within the last month that have told me that they spend more on their infrastructure to run Blue Prism or AA or UiPath than they do on those licenses associated with it. We have a real opportunity around affecting that spin and make it much more accessible for those large clients as well as those in the SMB market. 

So, with that, I'll wrap up my comments and hand it over to Peter to talk to you more about the partner program itself. Thank you.

Thanks so much, Chris. Tough pill to follow there with an excellent overview of just Robocop in general and the technology that we're bringing to market. So, what I hope to do here is to maybe add a little bit more color about why partner with Robocorp and why work with us specifically and the opportunity that it presents to services providers. 

In addition to the obviously the technology and the next generation capabilities that we're bringing there, Sanna will also be helping out as we move along here. So, as we get started, I wish I was a little bit better with sound effects. I was in charge of the DJ at the beginning but drumroll please. We have great news for everybody. The total addressable market for automation services just got a heck of a lot bigger. Altogether, well, we're built for professional developers. We have the belief that access to automation should be democratized just like our competitors do. But specifically, in that everyone should be impacted by automation not necessarily building automations whereas up until now, as more or less been reserved for large enterprises and even then, it's difficult to scale because of not only licensing issues but just fundamentally how the genuine providers have been built. 

So, partnering with Robocorp offers the unique and powerful opportunity for our partners to win at both ends of the marketplace. So, what that means is that there are now Greenfield, small and medium sized both businesses and projects that now have ROI or an increasing amount of ROI underneath Robocorp’s platform or built on top of Robocorp’s platform. We see partners all the time revisiting “failed pitches” with customers, things that they couldn't just make work in the traditional tools and traditional providers. Not only that but we are seeing bigger projects actually get done when it comes to flexibility and the scalability and complexity of bots not necessarily the actual volume we see. And Chris was talking about the fortune 500 type conversations that we have. Anecdotally, we hear from these large enterprises that have been massively successful with RPA already is that they're really only touching 30% of the use cases that they've laid out and that's really all that's getting effectively deployed. So that's what we've tried to visualize here and we think that there's a lot being left on the table with automation. And this is where our partners can step in to provide those services and deliver those automations to customers and do it in a sustainable way. 

So, throughout today's discussion, we'll touch upon some of the business models that are transforming and emerging due to our platform’s existence. Maybe the most obvious Chris has already alluded to it is we are actively supporting migration projects that make existing automations more cost effective and more sustainable and altogether make a little bit more sense for your customer. 

Second, for all types, the reality is that within our framework, there is potential for an elusive combination of both higher margins for you and happier end customers with you as well. We see faster deployment times. Again, I'll continue to reiterate more sustainable deployments altogether, that makes for a more positive experience for you and your services and delivery team and then also your end customers as well. 

RPA Resources

Learn about the many uses of automation and the technology behind it with original content from Robocorp.

Upcoming webinars

Robocorp's Product Hour - First Edition

Past webinars

Create your own Robot Framework Library with Python

Parallelization: Work Data Management using Producer-Consumer Automation

Bringing the Power of Python to Robocorp's Gen2 RPA

Lowering the Risk, Raising the Bar

Automation for Field Services & Distribution

The future of RPA: Migrating to Gen2 tools

DigiAssist: Automation for all businesses

Insurance Automation Webinar - Broker Automation

Let's automate together: Robocorp partners

On Demand Webinar: Healthcare RPA

Reimagining the automation playbook

Robot Assistants: A bot for every task

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