Rob Enslin joined UiPath most recently from Google Cloud, serving as President of Global Customer Operations. In that role, he led global field operations, tripling the size of the sales organization and driving Google Cloud's growth at scale. Enslin also spent 27 years at SAP in various leadership roles across sales and operations. In his final role with SAP, Enslin served as President of Cloud Business Group and Executive Board Member, where he led the development and delivery of SAP's entire portfolio of cloud applications and services, including SAP Concur, SAP Ariba, SAP Customer Experience, SAPSuccessFactors, and the Qualtrics business. In addition, he developed and managed SAP's entire cloud product portfolio, led the field revenue and enablement efforts across multiple geographies, and oversaw core functions, including professional services, ecosystems, channels, and solutions.

Rob has excellent international experience, working in South Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States. Also an avid supporter of youth advancement and development, Enslin has served as the honorary global Chairman of the Els for Autism Golf Challenge.

Some questions we discussed:

How did the journey start that led you to the technology space and then SAP and Google?

You worked at two of the world's largest Tech giants and led their revenue teams to very successful outcomes. My audience would love to learn more about some of your learnings in handling complex challenges and helping the tech giants grow and scale. Can you share your experiences at Google Cloud and SAP, such as building high-performance teams, challenges you faced, and how people adapted and reacted to the change? (Overcoming challenges)

What led you to the RPA World, and what attracted you the most?

Here are two questions that sound like a single one :) Having worked with international teams across the world, like Asia and Europe, what were some observable behaviors that stood out to you about how work is done? And As the future of work is constantly changing with automation and digitalization, now looking back, how would the different cultural backgrounds impact the adoption of digital technologies?

Our community's many entrepreneurs, technologists, and builders create robots, solutions, and products. What would be your one piece of advice for them to keep them motivated and keep going on what they do to be relentless?

As we are inventing the future of work, we are introducing new concepts like telehealth, where patients can speak to doctors over virtual spaces, building remote offices that leverage the global workforce, real-time orchestration that allows delivering vaccines across the US on time, call center agents are faster and deliver better customer experiences, and removing mundane work like reading an invoice. Automation is all around us and expanding into many spaces. In your perspective, where still is untapped?

Todd Schiller is the co-founder and CEO of PixieBrix, a company empowering everyone to customize their web and desktop applications for their use. With their low code platform, you can add a new button that triggers the automation, makes an API call, or change the UI for the UX your employees and customers need.

In today's episode, it was my absolute pleasure and honor to host — the one and only — the Godfather of Process Mining. Prof.dr.ir. Wil van der Aalst is the Chief Scientist of Celonis and a full professor at RWTH Aachen University, leading the Process and Data Science (PADS) group. He coined the field of Process Mining, and his research interests include Process Mining, business process and workflow management, process modeling, and analysis. I took his course Process Mining: Data Science in Action in Coursera from the Eindhoven University of Technology a few years ago, which ignited my passion in the field.

As the professor noted in this episode, not many people and companies, including SAP and IBM, believed at the time what this technology could accomplish. They were surprised but did not implement it. There were skeptics and resistance to change. Many enterprises go back to old ways of doing things because it is easier. They denied the transformation that Process Mining could bring to them.

His students in his Process Mining courses branched out and built the Process Mining companies you see worldwide, including; ProcessGold, Celonis, and PAFNow. As the academic field of study transitioned into product companies that aim to sell and bring this unique technology to enterprises worldwide, Process Mining became a vital ingredient of the digital transformation initiatives.

Now, set your clocks to 2022 and watch the news — SAP acquires Signavio, Microsoft acquires Minit, UiPath acquired ProcessGold, and Appian acquired LanaLabs.

The acquisitions are a great testament to the customer’s ask to not focus only on the diagnostics but target execution and actions. By combining the rest of the platforms’ automation, execution, and process management capabilities, enterprises aim to improve their business performance.

Our guest does not need an introduction or marking — The professor is the undisputed Godfather of Process Mining.