Micah Smith on Automation Anywhere Training, AI Agents and the AI Automation Engineer Role

Hi, everyone. We're back here at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2026. When I found out I was coming here, the first person I put on my list was this gentleman right here, Micah Smith.

Micah and I had a great conversation last year. And Micah, what I remember about our conversation last year is that when we put it on LinkedIn, we had so many people commenting, and it really was an ignition starter, a kick starter for a lot of conversations. That's great.

Micah, I'm not going to do a good job of introducing you. You could introduce yourself better than I can. Sure.

Absolutely. Tell people a little bit about yourself and what you do here at Automation Anywhere. Yeah.

So my name is Micah Smith. I lead all of the developer relations, training, and community here at Automation Anywhere. Absolutely.

And a community it is, right? For sure. We've got a really big community, and I think that's something that a lot of people don't necessarily think about when they're making a software purchase.

Yes, you're buying it for all the software and the capabilities and the AI things, but at the same time, what do you have from a community, a support, and a training perspective to be able to enact those things that you want to be able to achieve with any software purchase? Absolutely. Micah, if you don't mind, I want to talk about this concept first, and I've said it in a few of our interviews today.

Automation Anywhere is not one of these companies that jumped on the AI bandwagon to go raise money or something and Johnny-come-lately to automation. Right? They've been a worldwide leader in automation for 20-something years.

That's right. In many ways. They're one of the fathers or founders of the whole BPA movement.

But yet, like so many other things, AI is putting pressure and it's almost compressing and pulling and pushing BPA. Not just BPA, but automation in general. It's almost like if it ain't AI, it don't mean a thing, right?

And they say, "Why do I need BPA? " You're talking to more people than anyone here in the community and everything else. What are you hearing about that?

I think it's a really common misconception. People think that they need to migrate from automation or RPA to AI agents. And I think if you're going to be in the agentic process automation space, you got to get good at improv.

" Right? Mm-hmm. It's not just automations, it's not just agents, it's not just intelligent automations, it's not just orchestrated business processes, it's not just human in the loop.

It's all of those things coming together. And I think what a lot of people miss in that is they think that, "Well, I'll just have some AI agents. " That's not how this works.

Right? Goal-based agents are great for those probabilistic situations that you find in a workflow, but you still need the deterministic automations and the bread and butter to be able to go forward with your program being able to drive outcomes for your organization. I think the other thing I would say is that when we see people start to move to agentic process automation and embracing agents and automation and process orchestration together, it really starts to open up the aperture of the value that they're able to deliver for their organization.

A lot of automation programs talk about hours saved. Right? They talk about the money they're giving back to the organization.

But when you start to look at blending agents and automations orchestrated to an end-to-end business process, you're looking at things well beyond that. How is our program impacting revenue? How is our program impacting IT?

Right? Are we able to not purchase software that we would've had to purchase otherwise because we can now build a lot of that capability? Are we not having to buy seat licenses that we previously had to have?

So I think of it in a couple of ways. There's the technology part, and there's also the value in it. I agree 100% with that.

I don't know if it's human nature in general or it's just us in the tech industry with shiny trinket syndrome. What are you hearing from the community? Is this affecting their outlook on AI?

Are they haters? You know what I mean? What's the story?

I think the way that I've seen the community embrace it is they want to be in the forefront of this because rarely are the people who are in the forefront of this technology evolution being the ones who are being replaced. Mm-hmm. Right?

And so I look at it in two ways. I think that people who are traditional business users, working business functions in the organization, need to start to be a little bit more technical. They need to start thinking of what we can actually do with AI, what's real and what's not.

And for technical users, people who are developers, they need to start thinking more like a business person to understand, how is it that what I'm doing is driving value for my organization? It's not just tech for tech's sake. It's, what problems am I legitimately solving?

And so when both of those things come together, that's where we're looking at what I would call an AI automation engineer. It's someone who understands both the business impact, the business processes, how this aligns to our core objectives as an organization, and also the technology that enables this. And so I think that's kind of that sweet spot right between.

So we've released a brand-new certification that we're calling our AI Automation Engineer Certification that's designed to do just that. It's enabling people to understand the business processes, understand where an agent fits, where an automation fits, where an orchestrated process needs to be, as well as how to build all of these things and string it all together with evals and testing so that you're ready for a sound production deployment. AI automation engineer.

That's right. AIAE. That's the acronym.

Okay. Yeah. And I realize training is part of your domain.

Yeah. What's involved in getting this certification? So right now, we have made all of the training available for free, and we're enabling people to take it on demand.

We'll be running a training camp later this year, where we're going to be going through it with a global cohort of people. Good. We're going to start sometime mid this summer, and we're going to say, "Hey, everyone sign up on this date.

" We'll keep repeating that over and over until we do the capstone build, and then people will be able to submit their agents that they will submit for evaluation, as well as take their test. I love it. Yeah.

I love it. I was talking to Neti earlier, and one of the things- Niti. Niti, excuse me.

Yeah. One of the things Niti said is that we've got to do something about upskilling these people, reskilling these people, and this is exactly the kind of thing that could help someone as they transition in this kind of choppy waters that we're going through right now. Absolutely.

I believe that there's a place for people in the world of AI, and I think it's really... I can't stick my head in the sand and just expect all of this is going to go away. We've already opened up Pandora's box.

Yeah. Those are the people who are... They're the ones who will lose their jobs because they're sticking their head in the sand.

Yeah. Literally. That can't be the answer.

So we're looking at how we can train as many people as possible and really give them hope and a path forward for how their career can shape. And we partner closely with Niti and a lot of nonprofit organizations and social impact organizations across the globe to reskill individuals from all kinds of backgrounds. It's more than reskill, too.

I was talking to your CEO, brilliant guy, and he said something that really resonated with me. In the autonomous enterprise, these autonomy, you want to call them agents and AI, but everything we're doing around automation should result in workers being 3X more productive. Not 10% more, not 15% more, 3X more productive.

And I'm the CEO of Tectra, I live this on a smaller scale perhaps, but to me, that really resonates. I'm not looking to cut headcount. I want to get more out of the people we have.

I think our people can do more. I think this is an empowering technology, and even if I only got two and a half X, I'd be tickled pink about it. I think that's the attitude we have to have going forward here.

" I love that, and I think the way that I look at it is it's not the big that will eat the small, it's the fast that will eat the slow. Yeah. And so regardless of size, it could be your organization, it could be our organization, somewhere in between, it's those who will be willing to adapt and adopt this technology as quickly as possible, they're going to find the greatest success.

I love it. Michael, we're almost out of time because we're trying to squeeze stuff in here before we head out. For people who want to get involved in the community, maybe look, free training is never a bad thing.

That's right. Where can we send them? Where can we get them going?

com. From there, you can find our university, you can find our community, you can find our community program resources. So if you're running an automation program, and you want to be able to do that at scale, we've got resources there.

We also have our agentic quest there, which is a gamified process of learning, something that we think is really important, as well as our Agentic App Store. Lots of pre-built agents and AI assets that you can download to accelerate your time to value in delivering agentic solutions. I love it.

Michael, it's so great seeing you again, man. Good to see you, Joe. Keep up.

You know what? No moss grows under your feet, man. You're always moving, doing something.

com. We've got, I think, one more interview today here, and then we'll wrap up our coverage of Imagine 2026. You're watching Tectra TV.