Bi-weekly newsletter series highlighting the stories and experiences of technologists, startups, and entrepreneurs who change the future of work through RPA (Robotic Process Automation), Intelligent Automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Process Mining #Low Code/No Code, and the broader future of work automation technologies.

We will cover how a technology area within the Future of Work space impacted and changed our lives. For the third article, I'd like to introduce the "The story of the product builder behind UiPath."

In the first episode, I was delighted to host Param Kahlon, the Chief Product Officer at UiPath. Param has been shaping the roadmap of platforms and the products for many years, previously at Microsoft and SAP before joining UiPath.

As the chief product officer, now he shapes the adoption of the future of work technologies like RPA, ProcessMining, Test Automation, Analytics, AI, and beyond. The work we do and the processes we interact with during our daily jobs now change based on the work that Param and his team and colleagues at UiPath do. He is a true master of automation.

In this newsletter, I will go over some of the discussed topics and bring some exciting insights. Listen to the episode to hear the whole story

The early days

An engineer's life is very efficient and highly optimized. It is designed within sprints, continuous improvement cycles, processes, and documentation. As Param entered into the product management after finishing his business school, he quickly realized that some of the tasks the product managers do were highly inefficient and repetitive. While the main focus of the role is articulating the product's value through a presentation of the features and the business case, custom demos can get quite repetitive, as you serve many different customers. If the number of prospects is very high, you'd have to give the same demo repeatedly. This was an example when Param's first automation journey kicked off. He designed a flexible dataset that is adaptable to multiple use cases and built automation scripts that can populate the script in the application, including the user flow. This allowed the demos to be customized for the audience's expectations in much shorter time spent on setting up servers, data and environments.

Contact Center & RPA

While at Microsoft and SAP, Param worked on software products built for customer service agents within Call Centers as a product manager. The contact center agent's jobs are pretty tough if you think about it. They need to find an answer to the customer's question very fast and accurately, and at the same time, shouldn't be upsetting them or starting to argue with them even though the customer is not very friendly.

A simple process like paying your bill, finding the correct medical payment code, or simply asking for a refund in most cases, requires the agent to navigate and jump between multiple applications while being on the phone. They have many applications they interact with to resolve the customer's issues. If done manually, this process is relatively inefficient, and as a result, the customers are not happy and start to get upset against the agents. This ultimately brings unhappy customers, poor Customer Experience (CX), and Employee Experience (EX).

Process automation acts as a key ingredient here because while an agent can handle one application simultaneously, a robot can go to 7 applications at once, collect all the data the agent needs and bring it in front of them. This parallel execution provides speed, agility, and robustness to the customer experience. It also helps the employee experience because now they don't have to deal with the legacy application and angry customers. We all know that not all customers call smiling, happy and excited to find the answer to their questions.

When at Microsoft in 2017 and running a business that focuses on call centers, Microsoft partnered with UiPath for an account to bring automation for financial services in a loan processing use case. Agents used the robots to go to multiple applications in real-time and bring in the data they needed. The value RPA brought to the table with this use case was undeniable, and it was clear that the technology would make a strong impact in people's lives very soon after.

Building the Future of Work Technologies

There are mundane and repetitive tasks and processes in all of the jobs in the world, including a Chief Product Officer or another business executive role. So do not think yours is an exception and automation is not for you. With the democratization of information, knowledge and automation, everyone will be able to build an automation robot for themselves to remove the mundane tasks in their daily jobs. As the hyperautomation platforms expand and grow with new capabilities, the low-code/no-code interface brought the emergence of citizen developer, the people who use low-code/no-code solution to build task and process automations for their jobs.

As CPO, Param is now building hyper-automation products for enterprises worldwide, focusing on building the right technologies and products to help the customer's needs. While doing that, a business executive also needs to manage people and administer data into HR applications for annual review cycle processes, along with many other responsibilities.

While robots can jump hoops to complete repetitive tasks, employees can focus on the interaction with the customer to make their experience more satisfying and happier. Automation makes sure you can focus on the jobs you are hired for. That job is customer-focused, creative, analytical, and insightful, whether you build products or provide services for them.

The robots allow him to take over some repetitive tasks away and let him and his team focus on building innovative products for the customers. Applying automation helps the teams free up their mind from dealing with datasets and setting up applications, and instead enable them to focus on articulating the business value of the products and the problem they solve. This is what the future of work is actually about. We all can start doing the jobs we are actually hired for instead of working out ways through systems and repetitive tasks that get in our way.

As the automation started within the back-office for end-to-end processes, we can vividly see the enablement of the citizen developer and move to the front office. Global enterprises can build automation to automate what the processes and tasks that block and prohibit the employees to excel and achieve in their defined job roles by freeing up the time for themselves to focus on other tasks and improving the end customer's experience. This allows for achieving a workforce transformation where the people are driven to focus on customer experiences because they are not frustrated in their jobs due to being too busy with tasks that get along the way.

The Future

There are three waves of automation we have seen so far. To learn more about the evolution of the RPA, read our newsletter #2.

1st wave of automation

In the 2015 to 2018 timeframe, the industry focused on automating the obvious, high-volume and end-to-end processes that people did not need to see or touch. Automation technology primarily leveraged UI automation techniques to allow screen scraping, mouse inputs, and keyboard strokes. The particular focus was on back-office automation.

2nd wave of automation

From 2018 until now, the focus is more on how automation platform is becoming an enabler for the enterprises to be more efficient with their processes within both back and front office while leveraging AI and ML like intelligent document processing or robot orchestration and scheduling, with the addition of running analytics on the robots to recognize their business value.

3rd wave of automation

2022 and beyond brings the 3rd wave of automation, which will be central to how companies think of the digital transformation. Every company around the world in the board room is thinking of we need to digitize our processes, find new ways to meet our customer demand and need more flexibility and agility to adapt to what the customers want to do. Yet, the investments the enterprises have made until this date have been focused less on agility but more on standardization, with a particular focus on being standard, conforming, and efficient.

The existing systems, ERP, and CRM systems were all built on a standard way of doing tasks and processes. They designed the applications this way because they wanted less variance in execution. However, when you get to the digital transformation, yes, you do want to be standardized, but you want flexibility and agility to be able to evolve new business models, create differentiation in the market segments for you, innovate and build new products, experiences, and service offerings that can leverage real-time business monitoring for successful executions, but at the same time allow exception tracking to make sure non-conformant, non-compliant and process variants are exposed and stopped.

For digital transformation to be successful, you want it to be flexible and agile that can create new markets, real-time business monitoring, innovate with new products, improve and optimize the processes for better customer experience.

Standardization to find and improve non-conformant cases and Agility to create new products, processes and services are the Future of Automation platforms and what they will be delivering.