Awesome

So for those of you who don't know Graham, I'll do a really quick intro and then he can talk more about his background as well. Graham, welcome to the session today. Graham is the Chief Product Officer for UiPath. He'll talk more about that in a minute or two. And Graham, we're really happy to have you on today. This has been a little while in the planning and getting you on is the thing I think that, you know, we're really clear that UI path has evolved significantly and it would be really great if you could just provide some sort of background to you, you know, where you come from, sort of what led you to UiPath. And then for this particular purpose, I'd also like to kind of get a feel for how you've seen the UiPath product strategy and offerings involved in the last 20 or so months since you've been with the company. And ultimately sort of what defines its differentiated value proposition in what feels like a pretty crowded market, and makes it compelling for customers. Yeah,

absolutely. Well, thank you both very much for being on the show. As you said, it's been a long time in coming. Dave, I feel like it's only been, it's amazing. You said it was 20 months since I've been here at UiPath. That's true coming up on two years, but it feels like just yesterday that we've got a chance to see each other for the first time. So yeah, just a little bit about my background. I spent 20 years of my career at Microsoft. So I started out in Dynamics, where I got to meet and work with Satya Nadella really closely, learned a lot from him. And then we both went over to Bing, where I spent actually the majority of my career. So 10 years in various different parts of Bing, working on everything from the front end to the back end, algorithms and marketplace algorithms design. My background, you asked where I came from. I came from the, Coast actually originally, and I studied auction theory of all things. I wrote my thesis on simulations for auction theory. So like how the heck did I end up in RPA? But yeah, working in Bing, I got to sort of apply a lot of that background to try and understand, you know, human intent and try to bring them the most relevant results and trying to help build great solutions that involve AI and machine learning. I was able to apply that in a variety of incubation projects, trying to bring new products to market. One of the new products that I got a chance to launch about eight years ago was Microsoft Teams. For my last stint at Microsoft, I was the leader of the product team for Microsoft Teams from nothing to over 300 million users. And as you mentioned, Dave, about two years ago, when I saw the swarm of new activity around neural networks and generative AI coming to bear again, it became really clear that where I could really get excited again about getting back and jumping back into AI was the sort of the nexus of where the deterministic rules-based RPA world was combining with the more probabilistic world of generative AI. And that has been born out really clearly, both with UiPath as well as the rest of the industry, where we're trying to solve new types of problems, new types of scenarios, more interesting unstructured types of tasks, more complex tasks, and even autonomous sort of agentic AI, which is sort of the new bleeding edge, where I see the industry fast, on a really fast trajectory to go tackle. So I think we're really at an inflection point with this technology. We're still in the early innings. And you know, in the Gartner hype cycle, we might be coming down off of that hype cycle to where people are really trying to learn some hard lessons about how best to apply AI and automation together to get real results. And so I'm super excited to be leading the product team here at UiPath. As part of my role, I own the vision, the strategy, and the roadmap for the product, as well as how we do things like partner with other companies like Microsoft, partner with companies like SAP, partner with many other critical infrastructure that we use to deliver those best results for our customers together. And ultimately, you know, fulfill UiPath's vision to try to help accelerate human achievement in a very direct way. Oh, awesome. And so I guess just before I hand off to Francis,

in the last 20 months or so, if I go back around that amount of time, and you I've had a broad portfolio of products and capabilities, but many of them were fairly standalone. standalone other things. And so in the last 20 years, 20 months or so,

how has

that changed? Yeah,

so when I joined two years ago, you're absolutely right. It is just as true then it is now that we're seeing the convergence of many of the different components to what I view is really required for an end-to automation platform to be successful. And that includes the traditional UI automation through RPA, but also API automation, document understanding, natural language processing, some of the newest around communications mining that we had purchased and acquired as a company a little while before. And you're right, we needed to sort of bring those experiences together so that a developer or an admin or an analyst could get a better sort of end-to view over what was possible to do with that automation. And what was possible for an administrator to make it feel more coherent so that they had a single pane of glass to try to manage those experiences together. So we're still on that journey to bring those together to create a more unified developer experience, a more unified administrative experience, and a better way to sort of think end-to processes as orchestrated by the UiPath platform in a way that you can really drive total business transformation or even AI-driven transformation on some of the newest innovations that I'm

sure we'll get a chance to talk about. Cool. Austin, I know had a couple of questions.

Yeah, just a sort of a bit of background. So Graham, you know, you got 20 months into this and I feel like I've got like 40 years. So more than even David exaggerated there.

But I should ask you some questions, Francis, about to help us out here, huh? That's

what we do. So yes, my door is always open, Grant, for that. But the definition of RPA has got a bit hickily-diggity, I think, over the last few decades as well. What started off, predominantly, was UI automation. Traditionally, I think Gartner originally would term the phrase screen scraping, which went beyond mainframe screens into the Windows environment. But automating an as-is process, you know, some of our listeners might say, well, hold on, why have we got RPA and low code? You know, this is a low code, no code podcast, and it's the low down on low code. And, you know, I liken this is that, you know, over the years we've seen a lot of visual development environments. You're at Microsoft. We've seen a lot of those powerful drag and drop tools become automation tools in the sense that people can build their own things. over automating tasks, you know, the tasks that workers would do sitting at their desktop, whether they done automated at the desktop or the move to a server, but ultimately as is processed. Whereas low, low code, no code typically is reimagining that process and saying what should that process be? And in fact, many of the RPA vendors, mine included was swallowed up by some of the bigger, broader, intelligent automation, hyper automation, or what's got me now called Boat. Those platform providers recognize exactly what you're saying, which is the need to bring these technologies together and RPA will be a part of that. UOCARFA is coming out from a different direction and hasn't been swallowed up and is actually able to support its own growth and strategy. It's very strong in the RPA space. That goes about saying you've done a phenomenal job. I know Dan's back at the helm as well, so we're going to see a lot of great things go on there. But if the UI path involved being to be, you talk about end-to processes, but there's end-to of as-is, and there's end-to of what should be. You know A lot of these processes, you talk about the auction era, I think your legacy is very auctionable, right?