Robotic process automation

But we don't need to like if your rating engine is working great, it's just the annoying part is typing it into it.

you don't rip out the whole rating engine, you just automate the data entry part of it, right? And so, and of course, you know, the concept of RPA has been around for a long time, but a lot of that previous generations of that technology relied on your team, you know, mainly having to kind of code up every single piece.

And if you change one button, it completely breaks the whole automation.

This is a different way of doing it, much more agentic, much more, you know, just honestly much smarter, right? In terms of like, you can describe your workflow, it'll create the whole thing.

Replacing something is just so difficult.

And if you can achieve, again, what I talked about, those metrics, like cutting down your turnaround time from hours to minutes without replacing your systems, that's generally where we've seen a lot of folks be more excited about it.

So with the newer technology, how do you, because RPA is kind of deterministic, so how do you ensure, you know, consistency with the newer technologies, a lot of which are kind of more probabilistic in nature?

Yeah, and it comes down to a couple things.

which gets back to what Bain said, which is the companies that were really successful, it was a CEO level, board level discussion around where the company was going, where Gretzky's puck was going to be, and how they were going to fundamentally change their business to go after making sure that they created competitive advantage for themselves.

It was not, as many companies are attempting to do, using AI as if it's something like RPA on steroids to, as we would say here in North Carolina, create some very expensive lipstick on some very ugly pigs.

Instead, it's about breaking down business systems and reimagining them with the kinds of capabilities that are necessary to be able to create that competitive advantage in the future.

And I think this is probably a great time to just mention another story that I think is Jermaine which is the CEO of Coca-Cola recently announced that he was retiring early and he cited his reasoning being that he did not believe as the CEO of that organization he had the insights the expertise as we might say the chops to be able to lead that company into the future and then he went on to say he clearly understood how they would use agentic capabilities to improve some of the things that they did operationally to create flavored soda water.

We'll call this the top-down sort of AI implementation.

But until that's done, we're trying to do bottom-up AI implementation where I look at AI as it's the equivalent of giving every employee their own RPA, their own robotic process automation, but instead of having to go do the setup there or whatever.

You just talk to a chat bot and you build a skill or whatever to do this.

But there are limitations around that.

So for me, that was a big unlock, because it's also what's underneath most things that we operate.

And we still take RPA, which is kind of boring for most people, but it's what's automating everything behind the scenes.

And I know agents are taking the, the glamour away from RPA, but you wanna get something done that's consistent and reliable, it's still my go-to for all automation.

All right.

Again, not sexy, not glamorous, and I know people talk about all sorts of amazing things, but foundational tech that's working behind the scenes, that most people have no idea is running the world.

It's the power behind the power.

Mm-hmm.

Databases, machine learning models, and RPA.

ERP and CRM systems standardize the process.

Cloud and APIs connect them and RPA allowed organizations to automate the repetitive work across those systems.

Now with Gen AI agents and tool using systems, we are reaching another inflection point.

Intelligence can increasingly operate inside the workflow itself.

You can't be everywhere at once, right? Agents, another thing.

If I've already got RPA, I don't know if I'm going to see a 10X improvement from an agent over RPA.

Maybe I only see 2X, maybe I only see 20%.

If it's an area I've never automated before, it's quite possible I'm going to see a really big impact from an AI agent, right? I've never automated these 18 processes.