Peter White on Automation Anywhere’s Product Releases for the Autonomous Enterprise

Hey everyone, welcome back to Techstrong TV as we kick off our coverage of this year's Automation Anywhere Imagine Conference. It's being held in the Omni Dallas Hotel. We're in Dallas, Texas, and let me introduce you to our first guest for this year's coverage.

I want to say hello to Peter White. Peter, welcome to Techstrong TV. It's great to have you on here.

Yeah, Alan, thanks for having me. It's great to be here with you. So Peter, you're Chief Product Officer, CPO- Yep ...

here at Automation Anywhere. But, and I know... Well, I'm not going to steal your lines.

Why don't you share with our audience a little bit maybe about your journey and how you came to be CPO here? Yeah, sure. So I've been at Automation Anywhere about going on four years now.

Really? I became CPO last year after really helping spend about three years building up our AI product portfolio. And, obviously I joined the month before ChatGPT came out, so- Really?

things started moving really fast in the end of 2022 there. And I think as a company, you look at our portfolio today versus when I started, it's totally different. I would imagine.

Greatly expanded. Prior to that, I was at Salesforce for a long time, which was also a role that I focused on AI. I was building all of our Einstein AI for our service cloud business- Sure ...

which was customer support, chatbots back then, pre-gen AI chatbots, the ones that annoyed everyone. And a lot of- Wait, are you saying the new ones don't annoy everyone? I think they're less annoying.

They're getting better. They're getting less annoying, so they're moving in the right direction. But yeah, so building AI products for the last 10 plus years, and definitely couldn't be more excited to be in the space, especially with everything that's happening and where we're positioned in the market.

It's a good time. It's an exciting time, for sure. You know it's interesting, and I think it's a good segue into what I wanted to ask you is, a lot of our audience may not be familiar with Automation Anywhere.

" Well, the fact of the matter is, Automation Anywhere was doing automation way before anyone, we were talking about AI or ChatGPT or agentics or any of this stuff. Realize you've only been here now, as you said, about four years, but give people a sense of Automation Anywhere and it's not a Johnny come lately at the AI gold rush, right? This is a company that has long held, has long, deep roots- Yeah ...

in automation and so forth. Yeah. Over 20 years- Really?

of roots in building automation. And I like the, I've heard this from others, too, AI is automation, basically. Mm-hmm.

The outcome for a business is to automate much of their work and obviously improve a lot of those processes. But I think, we've been doing that, as you said, for a long time for our customers. And even before the latest wave of generative AI and now agents, we were bringing machine learning into our processes.

We were doing things like process orchestration. And so the traditional sort of automation in the maybe task deterministic sense of the word, had already changed a lot before ChatGPT came along- For sure ... and generative AI blew up.

And I think what that means from a customer perspective is we were solving some of their biggest challenges. Mm-hmm. End-to-end processes that they wanted to automate.

And now we have an amazing tool set with the latest capabilities with AI models to do even more there. And I think it's positioned us really well, as I said kind of in my introduction, I think as the whole industry and technology in general wakes up to this opportunity, I think it positions us really well to apply this and make it actually productive at producing critical business outcomes for our customer. I agree with you 100%.

" In the case of Automation Anywhere, it wasn't luck per se, but you guys are so perfectly positioned that when the whole rise of the AI stuff and the agentics and all of this, it came right into your wheelhouse, right? Yep. And, so that made it an easy thing.

So, and when you say our product line has drastically morphed over the last couple of years as a result, well, of course it is because we moved from that traditional automation to truly now agentic- Mm-hmm ... and before that, of course, generative. One could describe that move as the move from automation to autonomous systems, right?

Right. And I think that to me, that's the missing link between automation we used to do versus the kind of automations we're doing now with AI- Mm-hmm ... is it's more autonomous.

Mm-hmm. What's your, you're a chief product officer. I just talk about this stuff.

What's your take on that? Yeah, I think that is a key shift, and there's different elevations of that autonomy and different degrees of autonomy that are relevant there. I think in general, if you take the very kind of original, let's say, definition of automation- Mm-hmm ...

it was deterministic. Yes. It would follow a specific path.

But now with these autonomous systems and autonomous capabilities, there are things that we weren't automating before because they were simply too variable, too complex. And maybe you could think of how you might automate it, but there's a thousand different permutations of that. How are you going to automate that?

Now you bring autonomy into that part of the problem, and that allows you to have this intelligence that can adapt to those scenarios. And there's lots of great examples of that from what our customers are doing. We're hearing that this week, or at least two days here in Dallas, that so many customers have started to bring this into places of their business they didn't even think they could automate in the past.

Mm-hmm. And now they're doing it successfully. They're changing the processes.

They're seeing the results. And so it's been a big shift. Yeah.

And these are in production? Yes. Absolutely.

Yep. Do you think the fact that they were doing automation beforehand made it an easier transition versus companies that are just coming in cold into this, per se? Yes.

I think, and there's two parts to that. One is they had the processes in place. As an organization, they were already thinking the right way.

They had built the mechanisms internally to take a part of the business, understand how to break that down, potentially redesign the process, and then go automate it. And so now, a lot of those same processes can be used for agentic workflows or autonomous workflows they want to build. And then the second part of it is having the technology infrastructure in place.

Because, as I mentioned, the goal is not to make everything driven autonomously by an LM in that sense. It's a blend of the deterministic pieces with the agentic autonomous pieces, and then orchestrating that all together. And that's how customers are seeing the value.

And that's how they're getting, frankly, the accuracy that's required. Because with the models, it's great for creating a POC, getting maybe 70% accuracy, but that doesn't cut it for- No ... a finance process or a customer process.

I was just going to say that the CFO doesn't want to know about what they're spending. They want to know exactly what- Yeah. Exactly.

And you want to pay your vendors the correct amount. Right. Not almost.

Not upset your customers. You want to solve their cases. And that's where you need that orchestration.

And you need to blend the best of deterministic, the best of adaptive or agentic, and get to the outcome, which is delivering this end-to-end process and delivering the business benefits of doing it faster, doing it better, doing it cheaper, whatever that particular process that you're automating is, that's what you're going for. Love it. Look, I don't want to turn this into a product pitch per se, but you are the chief product officer.

Several announcements already here during Imagine around new products. Yeah. And I'd be negligent if I didn't ask you to share with our audience a little bit about them.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the biggest announcement, I'm biased, but that I was excited about yesterday is what Mihir talked about around Enterprise Claw. Yes.

And Enterprise Claw is a new category of agent, I would say. And this gets back to the degrees of autonomy I was mentioning. This is the most autonomous on that scale.

And I think as the models have improved, we've been able to build agents that can do even more autonomous work, have even more kind of flexibility around solving problems. But this is key. What was popularized through this with OpenClaw, which came out at Venmo last year and got a lot of traction as an open source project, wasn't even anywhere close to be ready for an enterprise team.

No. It has security holes. It has governance holes.

It has orchestration problems. There's a lot of stuff in that. Yeah.

So we've been on our own little agentic experiment over at Techstrong, and everything you're mentioning, and then some. Yeah. Right.

It'll work for two days, and then the third day it just decided to just... It is what it is. I think one of the interesting thing with the Enterprise Claw that you're talking, the announcement was your partners with that, right?

Yeah. These are some leading companies. Yeah, absolutely.

I think, while the potential is huge for this, getting it right, getting that security right, orchestrating it in a workflow, making sure it's safe for the business, that requires a collaborative approach. Yes. Because we know that our customers have complex environments.

And so having Cisco helping with the security and networking defense side of it, having Okta managing agent identity- Identity ... 5, that is, plus our orchestration, plus our control and security around these agents, that is the combination that's going to make this possible for businesses, and I think accelerate the time to get these into production with customers. I think also it sets a mark, right?

Automation Anywhere is at least bringing full circle. You're not a Johnny-come-lately to automation. You're not a Johnny-come-lately to the market.

It's a 20-plus-year-old company. Mm-hmm. Everybody is running to theSomeone's selling picks and shovels to the OpenClau goldmine.

But the fact of the matter is, you look at OpenAI, and they've got Peter Sternberger, the guy- Mm-hmm ... who started the OpenClau. He's working there.

He's going to continue building- Mm-hmm ... this functionality that we started there. Jensen, at the NVIDIA conference, basically put the full weight of NVIDIA behind- Mm-hmm ...

Clau as the agentic model they're building around. Those are two pretty big endorsements. Yeah.

You've got two great security companies. Cisco is more than a security company, obviously, but really a really powerful security- Yeah ... offering, and Okta.

Yeah. Right? The king of identity in that.

So you combine those with Automation Anywhere, well, now you got something. Mm-hmm. Now you got something this should be enterprise grade.

I'm not as nervous as I was. Yeah. I trust it more.

I think and that word trust is, I think, one of the biggest issues we're seeing- Yeah ... in AI. Yeah, we've got all these agents.

Yeah, it could do all these things. Do I trust it to really be autonomous? Yeah.

Because before I can let something be autonomous, I think there's a trust- Yeah ... involved. I got to believe there's governance.

I can't just turn the wheel over. I'm a control freak anyway, but- Yeah ... " Yeah.

Absolutely. There's certain things you're willing maybe to tolerate in your personal life. Oops, my OpenClau cleared my calendar or something.

But within a company, within an enterprise environment, you have to have that trust. You have to have the controls. You have to have all of that, or it's just a non-starter for the business.

Right. And that's the reality. At an enterprise level.

You're going to get some crazy folks who are willing to go in there, damn full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes. But you're right. I think at an enterprise level, if you want to succeed, you need the kind of window dressing, the kind of infrastructure that you guys have built into this.

I wanted to talk a little bit about agentic process automation. Yeah. Right?

Again, coming back to the beginning, RPA- Mm-hmm ... was something Automation Anywhere is a market leader of. Yep.

And now I was here last year. Well, I was at Imagine last year. We were in Orlando, though, I believe.

Right. Yeah. But APA was a big thing there.

Mm-hmm. Still a big thing? Still a big thing.

Yep, still a big thing. That's really a category that we established in the market. Mm-hmm.

And it's about, again, taking the best of deterministic process orchestration, as well as agents and autonomy, and bringing that together into an end-to-end solution. And I think the approach there is not everything's an agent. It's a blend.

And I think it's still very relevant and resonates a lot with our customers. I'm talking to tens of our customers already in the last day and a half, and this is the way they're thinking about it, too. It makes sense to them because they understand the requirements of their business, and we continue to evolve our platform, as with the announcements this year, to be really the leader in how you apply this for a company.

Great. Peter, we're running low on time. Yeah.

I'm going to skip a little bit- Yeah, sure ... and run over to kind of let's take a big picture- Mm-hmm ... industry direction.

Right? Automation Anywhere is a company people are going to look to for vision. Mm-hmm.

What are they doing? Mm-hmm. Right?

But the whole world, I was going to say the whole industry, the whole world is grappling with, well, how do we going to do this? What guardrails can we put in? Do we need legislation?

What does it mean for jobs? What does it mean, the data center build out in our environment? And there's so many repercussions of this.

Mm-hmm. Where do you see us going? If we were sitting here a year from now, two years from now, and you look back over the last year or two- Mm ...

how do you see it unfolding? Yeah. I think companies really will regret not moving today, not taking action today, getting started.

Mm-hmm. I think most companies are. But I think many companies could think bigger, too, about where they want to go and this concept of the autonomous enterprise.

And that doesn't mean there aren't people in that autonomous enterprise. Those people are three times more productive- Mm-hmm ... in this autonomous enterprise because they have these capabilities.

But that business is operating at an operational level that simply has not been possible in the past. And I think customers need to, and businesses need to, focus on that bigger picture, where they want to go, but also start acting today. And I think we're already seeing the results from our customers.

I think the technology will keep changing. Mm-hmm. One thing that in this environment is you can't get hung up on the model or the new agent that came out yesterday and let that slow your progress because there's just next week it's going to be the next model or the next capability.

Next month, there'll be another one. So while you might keep on top of those, you can start moving today, and there's a lot of technology that is ready for customers to launch, see results with right now, and I think they'll regret not doing that if they don't start. I can't agree more.

But I would put one caveat in. Mm-hmm. And that is, there are people out there who haven't even started, and some of them are saying, "Well, that's the message I've been waiting for.

" There's a subset of people, though, who say, "It's too late. Everyone's already doing it. " It's not too late yet.

No. But I think if we're sitting here a year or two from now, it was definitely too late. Yeah.

Right? So that would be my cautionary tale to executives out there is, no, you're not too late. This thing's still just kicking.

Yeah. But if you wait another year or two, well, then, yeah, caveat emptor, as they say, right? Yeah.

At your own peril. Peter, last thing, if you wouldn't mind looking into this camera here. Yeah.

What's the best way for people to stay up to on what Automation Anywhere is up to? Definitely follow us. You can keep tabs on us at LinkedIn.

You can join our Pathfinder community if you're more hands-on, you really want to get a lot of access to free content and great resources around how to build agentic process automation. com. Lots of great customer success stories, product information, ways to reach out to us.

So it's a great resource. And come to Imagine next year. Oh, yeah.

Of course. That's a good way, too. Peter White, Chief Product Officer of Automation Anywhere here on our TheTechStrongTV coverage.

We'll have more Imagine coverage coming at you shortly. We'll be right back.