Mihir Shukla on Automation Anywhere’s Enterprise Claw and the Autonomous Enterprise

Hi, everyone. Welcome back here to our coverage of Automation Anywhere Imagine in Dallas this year, 2026. I don't know if you'll recognize this gentleman, but he is the CEO of Automation Anywhere, Mihir Shukla.

That's right. Mihir, first of all, thank you for coming back on. As I said when I first walked in, I hope it won't be another year till I get to talk to you.

For our audience who maybe haven't heard of or they're not familiar with Automation Anywhere, how would you describe the company to them? So we are an enterprise AI and automation company, a software company, and we look at world differently. We look at the world for, of course, what it is now, but what it could be if you reimagined it with power of AI and automation.

And we think that there is such an immense potential. And with over 5,000 customers, today, we run 450 million AI agents and automations on the planet for some of the largest companies and many regulated industries. So we have a better vantage point to understand what is possible, what is not, what is real, where the biggest impact is.

" Yeah. And when people hear that, they don't believe it at first, because in eight weeks, 200 million, that's not possible. But that's the power of AI and the platform that we have built.

It is so amazing. We were recently named one of the seven wonders of AI, because the capability that we built over years, it surprises us, to be honest, that what is possible now, and we wanted to bring it to the customers. Absolutely.

So Mihir, I mentioned last year I doubted you. So now I'm here. Tell me the big picture.

We've seen agentics become real. We've seen the whole world, not just our tech industry- Right ... but the world shifting- Yeah ...

towards this. We've got big shifts. I live in a bubble where everyone talks about AI.

But I'll tell you, we were talking about my trip to Europe. I was listening to people speak foreign languages that I didn't understand what they were saying. " Yeah.

"OpenAI," right? No matter what language they speak- Yeah ... they still say that.

Yeah. What is this big shift? You're seeing it, I'm sure, from where you sit as well.

Yeah. How would you describe it? I think we finally have a technology that works for people in their natural language and natural way we talk, and that is transformative.

So the AI is not an IT project, an another incremental technology. It is how companies should run. Mm-hmm.

But what we find is that most organizations, while they have a general sense of how powerful this technology is, they are struggling to define their enterprise AI strategy. They can try, for example, we all have tried Copilots because we think that's a quick return, and it is good for personal productivity, but it doesn't completely transform your enterprise landscape. You can use system of record applications, and there are agents, they have domain-specific capabilities.

But each of them wants to hold on to their tower- Absolutely ... and they want to bring everything under their tower, and they aren't in a business of reimagining your entire business. And they have their current revenue model that they're attached to.

So each of these ideas, and there are startups, and there are amazing startups, but startups, they don't have enterprise governance- No ... and security. Think about CEOs and boards, and everybody's pushing them to produce outcome.

But if you're a CIO or a security- CSO ... CSO, you have to run this in a governance and secure way, otherwise it doesn't scale. The pilots will never go to production.

So because of all of these things, a collection of Copilots and AI agents here and there and some startups, that's not an enterprise AI strategy. No. We believe that your enterprise AI strategy should be the autonomous enterprise.

And what does an autonomous enterprise mean? So autonomous enterprise must have these three characteristics. A, you have to be able to automate up to 80% of what you do today.

80%. 80%, either fully autonomous or AI assisted. So you're not doing 5% thing here and 3% here.

It has to reimagine how this organization operates. The second piece is because the power of AI is that it will orchestrate work across application, you don't have to get tied up in your software seat license model, and you can significantly reduce it, but most importantly, decouple your growth from software seat licensing. See, the way today we work, Alan, is anytime my company grows, there are these toll booths, I call them, when I have to pay every SaaS company something as I grow.

The SaaS model. Right, it is a SaaS model, right? Absolutely, yeah.

But that's a SaaS tax. Yeah. It's kind of a toll booth.

But what if it wasn't that, and instead we were more outcome based? So I think we offer a solution where you could take sometimes 30%, sometimes 60% of your SaaS tax out because our agents drive outcome, and you never have to worry about the SaaS system behind it. That's amazing.

And the third one, autonomous enterprise does not mean no people. On the contrary, people have to be 3X more productive. Now, this is important.

If it's at 10% more productive, that's yet another IT project that you've been running. Right. It has to be three times more productive.

Three times it. Yes. And how do you do that?

And so we offer, of course, softwares, nine predefined solutions. Our platform is called Agentic Process Automation Platform. Okay.

And you can customize it to implement hundreds of solutions. These nine solutions that we bring, autonomous IT, autonomous finance, autonomous support, and many others, they transform how those organizations operate. And I encourage people to take a look and hear it from other customers who have done it.

Seeing is believing. " And unless that customer was saying it, you won't believe it? Wait, wait.

I- Yeah? I got to be honest with you. Yeah.

And I've learned not to doubt you. Yeah. Let me just rehash so our audience gets it.

Number one, we've got a 3X employees. Yeah. We've heard, we've got 10X-ing it.

And I tell my own employees this, "This is not meant to take your job. " You're the first person I've heard who've put a number on it. Yeah.

3X. Yes. I love it.

Yeah. Secondly, 80% of our processes should be automated. Yeah.

Whether it's agentic or BPA or- Yeah ... ABA, 80% needs to be automated. And I don't think you could get there without a 3X- Yeah ...

increase. But one feeds the other. It's like a virtuous cycle.

Yeah. The third thing. Is to decouple yourself from the SaaS- Well, decouple from the SaaS.

SaaS tax. And this is something people have said, the SaaS apocalypse. Yeah.

It's holding us back. Yeah. It is.

It is a tax. Because what has happened is that if you look at a typical company, somewhere between 70% to a 90% of your IT budget goes- Is SaaS ... in keeping lights on, or keeping lights- No, absolutely ...

keeping lights on, which is important. Then you invest little bit in growth and little bit in transform. " And I said, "At that point-" It's radical.

"... you are my transformation engine. " I love that.

And who wouldn't want to do that? No. Well, that- Because now you are the powerhouse in an engine- Right.

That's what I'm supposed to be ... not a keeping lights on. I'm not a cost center.

Yeah. I'm a revenue generator. Yeah.

And we have an amazing CIO who got us from now, I think, 45% run cost. He has 5% more to find. So it's still a little with squeeze.

But I think keep going on that direction, and it is liberating for people. So what is the right model? " Yeah.

What's the right model for software usage then? So it has to be based on amount of work getting done, because that's the only measure we all get measured on, right? So look, no matter what your job is, there are only three outcomes, and we all one or other way affect one or more.

You either increase revenue, you manage or reduce cost, and you manage or reduce risk. Correct? That's it.

Right. That's what it comes down to. So what are we going to do that will make that impact?

Sometimes I hear about this idea of people doing pilots, and sometimes there are more pilots than airlines. But if, let's say, there is a 5% of people in your organization, and you did a pilot that would improve them by 5%, that is quarter of a percent in a large company sense. And did that benefit showed up in an outcome, or you had more time on water coolers, which you probably don't have anymore, but you get the idea.

I get it. Yeah. You got to figure out, is there an outcome?

Because without outcome, these things don't last too long. And so we encourage customers to just think about, what is the unit of work that you're doing, and reimagine how that unit happens. So, either unit of work is number of calls or number of tickets in IT service management or number of orders.

Everybody has their unit of work. And can you achieve that unit of work with up to 80%? Take an example.

In IT service management today, we offer a solution that on average, it will autonomously resolve 80% of all tickets. Now, that number is somewhere between 67 to 92. Okay.

67 is pretty good, too. I was just going to say. 67 is pretty good, too.

I would take 60. 67, right? Yeah.

But the 92. So let's say on average is 80. And you could autonomously resolve 80% of work.

That is just- One part of it ... and in eight weeks. So I say, you know what that is like?

Where do you get exponential return with 80% autonomous? There is a roulette table, and there is only one number on it. And you put all your chips on that.

And you win every time. Yeah. That's what it is.

That's what it looks like. Look, people listening to this out there say it can't be this simple. It can't.

Yeah. But that's the promise of this, where we're living in now, right? Because technology now finally speaks our language.

Yeah. Look, before doing any projects, you had to worry about if data is right. Turns out AI can manage even some unstructured data pretty well, right?

Very well. You didn't get everything organized first before you could start, back in the day. Now you could.

Now you can. It's amazing what we do. I got to tell you, my head is spinning around the cost of IT, too, though.

Yeah. Keeping the lights on. Yeah.

I'm going to go do this in my Buck company. I think it is liberating. I think, for the right IT leader, if you could be the engine behind it and not supporting it, that's the leader.

No, but I'm going to wind up doing an article on this. I'm going to call it the three rules. All right.

Your three rules. Yeah. That, I think, is the blueprint- Yeah ...

for the autonomous enterprise. That's right. And the reason why we call it autonomous enterprise is people are willing agentic business and agentic enterprise, but what we sometimes see is that we are just doing another 5, 10% improvements with it.

It's incremental. It's incremental. Yeah.

And this is not the time for incremental. No. This is not.

I tell people this is historic times right now. That's exactly. We're almost out of time.

If you wouldn't mind, this camera is on you here. Okay. You've shared amazing.

These three things, I think, and then the whole thing around IT is liberating to people. Let's say five years from now. Yeah.

If we're not retired, visiting islands or something, what's your vision of where we are five years from now? So me and my coauthor, Nancy, we recently wrote a book about... " Really?

It was released yesterday. We're excited. We're just told by our publisher that it's likely to make it to the national bestseller.

Good for you. So for first-time authors, this is exciting. But what we did is we saw that we had about 3 billion conversations on this topic between customers in 90 countries and union leaders and heads of state and IT leaders and just across the world, right?

People who were excited, people who were skeptic, people who were worried. And we said, what if we brought all of this and put it together in a way that everybody could find it an easy read and understand the positives and negatives about? And in that, we lay out that...

It's called a five-year century because we'll see the century worth of change in the- In five years ... five years. And so one more reason why this is not the time for incremental.

So that's 20x. That's right. Not even 3x.

This is not the time for incrementalism, right? Right. There are times for that, but this is not one of them.

And so we laid out what are our challenges, what are the possibilities, how does it look, lay out examples of companies who have led it, and stories of people saving 120 million in three weeks, and how did they make it happen, and the fact that it is possible. And it requires certain reskilling. What are the things we have to do it right?

And in that, we have given leaders playbook where we could offer something because of the 3 billion conversations. There are amazing people in the world, and we had- There are ... opportunity to bring all of that together.

We think it's an amazing opportunity. This was just released yesterday? It was just released yesterday.

It's available on Amazon? Yeah. And all the other places where you buy books.

Anywhere you buy a book. Yes. I had no idea.

I was asking. Now I got something to do. After you leave, I'm going on Amazon.

You never cease to amaze me. Never. What a refreshing conversation.

Thank you so much for your time. My pleasure. Thank you.

Always. Thank you, and you know what? A lot to be proud of.

It's a great company, and it just... Branch Rickey, a famous baseball GM, once said that luck is 80% perspiration- Yeah ... and 20% inspiration.

Yeah. Perseverance. It is.

Yeah. But you know what? You've built a great thing here.

Yeah. I have a great team, and it's a team sport, so. Absolutely.