The Potental of Automation with Adi Kuruganti – Imagine Orlando 2025

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel from Techstrong. We're here today at the beautiful Conrad Resort in Orlando, Florida for the Automation Anywhere Imagine Conference. It's been an amazing two days.

You know, there's so much going on in this area. You may or may not know Automation Anywhere. They've been a leader in, in, uh, B-P-A-R-P-A for years and years and years.

Um, but the world's changing and, and, and so is Automation Anywhere. And, uh, we're gonna talk about that. I'd like to introduce you to Audi Ganti, right.

Chief Product Officer, CPO at Automation Anywhere. Audi, thank you so much for joining us today, and it's great to have you here. Thanks For having me, Alan.

So I mentioned you're Chief Product Officer. Mm-hmm. But I always like to give at the audience a a sense of your journey.

Yes. Right. How did you come to be the Chief Product Officer here?

So, Alan, I joined Automation Anywhere about little under four years ago, and I joined as Chief Product Officer. So as part of that product, technology community, um, those are my areas of responsibility beyond, uh, everything else that goes in a, you know, in a startup in a company our size that's growing so fast. Um, so I've been here about three and a half odd years Before that, I was at Salesforce for 15 years.

Um, joined back when it was one big cloud or one product line. Uh, SFA, uh, I've seen it through this various growth, uh, transitions and spikes and, uh, kinda the major growth areas to join when it was, you know, sub 500 million left in 2021 when it was around 27, 20 8 billion. So, saw that a growth curve always in products, um, was in different product lines.

Really at the core. I love building, launching, growing product lines. Like that's my DNA.

Um, and that was, uh, you know, Ryan ran 1,000,000,005 business, um, in, at the end of my tenure at Salesforce, and decided I wanted to be in the automation market. That's why I joined the leader, which is where I am Mission Anywhere. So Audi, you know, to me that's a really interesting, uh, history coming from Salesforce to Automation Anywhere.

'cause these are two companies that are kind of leading the, the path forward in terms of agentic, agentic ai and using agents. Salesforce has of course, made a huge pivot That's right. To, to this agent based thing.

I, I have to ask you, four years ago, you're looking at coming to Automation Anywhere for automation, and of course automation is, you know, in the tech world, is always considered a good thing, right? Yeah. Um, did you have any inkling at that point that, uh, the agentic piece of this would be such a, I mean, such a, a, a watershed event?

No. To be, uh, very indeed. Right.

Uh, four years ago, no. Uh, but I always knew the automation market was right, really ripe for disruption. Mm-hmm.

Um, yes. We're, you know, a market maker for RPA robotic Process automation, and there are other sub-markets out there, but there's no, like the, the technology had evolved, but with AI and the kind of the broader market moves that's happening across various sections, I did feel that automation, that's one of the reasons I joined Automation Anywhere, was a market was gonna explode. And this was something that was clear to me even in 2021 when I was, you know, looking at, I spoke to Mihir and team about joining Automation Anywhere.

Uh, because all of, you know, every business needs automation. Absolutely. Um, as much as you might say that, you know, operational efficiency is, you know, especially now actually operational efficiency is even more important, but even more so growth.

How do you drive growth by investing the business? And that's where automation comes in. Um, we are always been in ai, uh, frankly, even RPA and kind of BPA, there's always been a lot of ai, more AI ml, um, but definitely this entire market of agents and gen AI before that, it's completely disrupted.

Absolutely. To me, I think if it, as you know, they were selling automobiles before Henry Ford. Mm-hmm.

But the whole concept of the assembly line and the little automation, and, and so what, you know, it made a very different Yes. For a very different car market automobile market. Now, we've talked around the edges about Automation Anywhere and, and you know, their history, they were a leader in RPA, they've been a leader in, they're still a leader and still a leader, leader in RPA.

Exactly. Yeah. Um, but when, when, as you, as Chief Product Officer, when did you, you know, go to your peers at the exec team and say, well, have you gone to your peers, I guess is a better question and say, Hey, we, we have got to go all in on AG agentic, or maybe not go all in on AgTech.

Yeah. So, um, we've had, so there's a timeline to this. Mm-hmm.

We were the first into Gen ai. Uh, in fact, we started working with OpenAI and some other companies before chat, GPT, and it's primarily to drive more automation use cases around doc, specifically around docking processing. Mm-hmm.

Um, and because we found a way where we could, for example, uh, process unstructured documents, so this was like back in 2022 before all the craze of chat GPT and, you know, the, the explosion. Uh, and for the next six to eight months, and this is post strategy G pt, we investors started investing more and more in that area because we saw amazing results. Uh, and now our, one of our fastest growing products is document automation.

You know, three x growth, uh, 65% of our documents, our process using generative ai, you know? Wow. And we are talking about single digits last year and now 65%.

So just crazy kind of growth there. But really last 18 months. So we are first on Gen ai.

Then we started thinking about, okay, how do we tune this or focus this or automation outcomes, because most of the Gen AI see out there a general purpose, you know, summarize an email or, you know, do something else. Write a blog article. Write a blog article.

For us, our customers are asking, well, how does this apply to me in my automation, uh, use cases, whether it is accounts payable or whether it might, whatever it might be. So our focus is, okay, what are the investments we should be making to use Gen AI and then AI agents, but tune it and focus it on process automation? And so that was kind of something we went all in, I'd say about 18 months ago.

Um, we as a product and technology team, we've been working really closely with not only the hyperscalers, the AWS and Microsoft gcps of the world, but also startups who've been coming up and up and coming, like ai, NATO companies. So we've been kind of ahead of the market in that sense and getting access to early technology in before it's available the market. Uh, so long story short, I would say is we, were we kind of very much all in into what we call agent process automation, which is kind of our version of agent ai.

Uh, and Mihir and the broad exec team, frankly, the company is all in too. Um, it wasn't overnight, but, but I think the last 18 months we've shown we are first to market with a PA first to market with agents. We launched it nearly a year ago before agents are cool.

Now that's obviously everybody's talking about it. Uh, and obviously we'll talk more about some of the new announcements, but I think the first more advantage has really helped us. Absolutely.

Well, yeah. You were starting from a position of strength. Yes.

Right. I I just wanna make clear, a PA is a gen process automation, and that's, that's kind of the new term here that we're using for this. I will tell you, I'm not as an expert on automation, obviously, as you are, but I've always looked, especially at RPA and said, it's great, but I always felt there was another shooter drop.

You know what I mean? That something like an AI agent would really just ignite this. Um, you know, I, I remember my first kind of exposure to RPA, I met someone in a startup group.

I think I was a judge at a pitch event or something. Yeah. And, and they had an RPA document mm-hmm.

Basically system that was really cool. But it, I just felt it needed the agent to really make it more independent. Yeah.

More, uh, expensive. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

And, and now when you look at this, it, it, I mean, certainly it's, it, it's just as you said, when you go from single digits to 65% one year Yeah, that's Right. With the top line growing at three x. So it's, everything's growing.

It's not three X and I mean, you don't see that, right? This is like, when cloud came out, we didn't see this kind of growth. This is the kind of growth we saw when maybe the internet first point commercial, right?

Yeah. We truly believe this, the phase phase we're in, and I think this is not only in automation, but broadly in the market. This entire agent tech, um, gen ai, uh, push is like cloud or even like, probably like the internet.

I think it's bigger than cloud. It's more like the Internet bigger. Yes.

Uh, and so it's gonna make come complete not only disrupt markets, but you're gonna have the next Googles and Facebooks and absolutely AWS is the world from this coming out 10 years from now. And so we wanna be very focused on This. I agree with, you know, I, I try to tell people that I've been in technology for 35 years, a long time, and I've seen a lot of stuff come and go and come again.

Um, there are some things that as a technology person get me excited the cloud, right? But explaining to my mother-in-law what the cloud is, all she knows is her pictures were stored up there. Right.

Then there are some things that just change civilization, the internet, the cell phone, right. These things. It, it's not just my geeky friends.

Right? Yeah. It's, and, and that's to me what, what we're dealing with here with something like, you know, agenda a PA and, and agents.

So, ADI, if you don't mind, I'd like to maybe pivot a little bit now and, and talk about the Imagine Conference here. It's been two days chock full of product announcements, partner success stories, customers success stories, learning. Mm-hmm.

You know, I think people are still, uh, wrapping their, their hands are, their arms are out. Object process automation. Once it what?

It's more than just a name change. Yeah. Right?

What, what really does it entail? If you wouldn't mind, for all of our audience out here who weren't able to come Yeah. Weren't here.

Tell us what we missed. Give them a recap, let make sure we, we, you know, let them know what, what's, what happened here. Yeah.

So it's been an amazing, what, two and a half days. We still got, uh, the rest of today. Um, we, I I was kind of big on three, three main things.

First, we talked about the amazing momentum we're seeing with Agent Tick process automation. This is something we launched last year as a category. It's really a new category, an expansive category.

Um, and we had our O'Donnelly, uh, we had KPMG. Um, we had Washington Post some major customers talking about how they're using agent process automation and really driving incredible operational efficiency, but organizational change and business change within their, you know, large enterprises. Uh, and across, you know, manufacturing and ACH about, um, uh, uh, different industries essentially.

So that's one big thing. And, uh, across, uh, even the sessions, you, we had a lot of customers talking about, you know, the business benefits and the gains they're seeing with HT Cross automation. The second big announcement was set of new innovations, and that, as the Chief Product Officer I'm really excited about first is around the process reasoning engine.

And essentially the way I think about the process reasoning Engine, it's kind of a secret sauce. It's, um, our unique IP that helps us drive differentiated process automation outcomes in the world agents, because you have general purpose agents. Our focus is on driving process automation outcomes.

And the way we do that is, you know, we have our own unique models built, are tuned on, you know, hundreds of millions of automation runs on our platform. We have customer specific context, which enables personalization for specific customers, because, you know, customer manufacturing is gonna be very different process for financial services. It needs to be the tuned towards them.

Uh, and then these more, uh, goal-oriented self-reflective agents, kind of cognitively agents that can, for example, um, pro, you know, look at unstructured content like a product catalog and make decisions on what's the right product, uh, replacement for a specific customer contract. So there are different use cases, obviously. Uh, and so that entire process, reasoning engine ability to then, um, access and, and way expansive enterprise tool set.

So we're an automation company. Customers use us to build RPA bots, APIs, process documents, build AI agents, bunch of different things. We also announced, so the pre was a big part of it.

And, and underlying pre is also having an open ecosystem, open platforms. We announced partnerships of the AWS, uh, they were on stage as was Google Cloud, uh, part where we're, um, you know, par partnering with Google Cloud, for example, on the A two A protocol. Uh, we've been partnering with philanthropic on the model context protocol.

So really having, kind of really focusing as an automation vendor on an, an open platform and open ecosystem, that's critical. So that's all part of the process reasoning engine. We are the first and the only automation vendor to have that.

And we believe that's critical for any company to drive, differentiate process, automate outcomes. The second big announcement was general availability of our agent tech orchestration engine. So we truly believe one of the core beliefs around a PA is it's a combination of deterministic and cog and cognitive.

If cognitive is driven by the process reasoning engine agent tech, our agent orchestration engine is a major, uh, investment in our deterministic processes. The ability to basically run long running mission critical processes with the right governance and operational, uh, visibility. So that's gone ga um, with, with this summer.

And the third big announcement we made is, again, in partnership with AWS, uh, around human agent collaboration. So one of the things that in this world of agents, what's completely changing is how you and I engage with agents. It's not gonna be the same forms and traditional user interfaces.

It's not gonna be those apps, you know, where, you know, like a, frankly a Salesforce or a ServiceNow, any of those. It's gonna be these more collaboration experiences, conversational experiences, but where you get work done, it's not a chitchatting experience. Right.

Um, and so how do you translate user intent into process action, but again, personalized to that user, personalized to the employee, and personalized to the customer. And that's what we announced with our partnership with Amazon Queue, um, which is kind of under the umbrella of human. Yeah, No, it's something we've covered a lot.

That's right. You know, it's funny you mentioned Salesforce in ServiceNow. One of the things we've seen is both of those companies, they don't want to just give you their agents.

They want to be their agent orchestrator. Yeah. You are the first, this is the first time I've heard someone refer to it as an agent orchestration system, but in my mind, that's always what was needed, sort of the Kubernetes is containers.

You need an orchestrator for, for your agents. And, but they may not call it that, but that's really where the race is, right? Everybody wants to, because we're gonna have a multitude of agents.

We'll have an agent that interacts between you and I, between a process and I, between, you know, we're all gonna have a, a fleet of agents, whether they're ephemeral agents that are kind of single Yes. And disappear. And I spin another one up next time, or persistent agent or however terminology you want to use, these agents are gonna need to be managed.

Yep. Do you see that as a key part of the Automation Anywhere value? Yes.

Is managing this, this whole, this agent Army, if you will. Yeah. The, the short answer is de a definite yes.

Mm-hmm. That's along with the process reasoning engine, which is kind of the secret sauce for all agentic behavior. Mm-hmm.

The orchestration of these agents is critical. And we expect customers to build agents on our platform, on AWS, on GCP, on a Microsoft Azure, on Salesforce, on ServiceNow, on open source platforms and anything, because frankly, you're gonna build agents for different purposes or different different platforms. And that's good.

That's great. Uh, but how do you orchestrate those agents and how do you also orchestrate both, uh, agents and deterministic workflows? Because when extracting a document, you don't necessarily need an agent or you're calling SAP, you don't need an agent for that.

You can just use an API to, it's Really well there, there's, there's no man's, that's a funny word to use for it. No man's land, but there's this gray area. Yeah.

Let's say better between what's an API call and what's an n Annuals find a lot of, um, um, a little bit confusion in in the market Yeah. Is where everything is being called an agent. Uh, the way I see it is a cognitive task is an agent.

And an agent can call a set of tools like an API, an RPA bot and other things to do. Its work. But that's ultimate goal is you want to do something which is probabilistic.

There are many things that you don't need a probabilistic, it's just, you know, you wanna call, uh, a Salesforce api, I an S-A-P-A-P-I or a legacy system, you need to, you know, uh, use RPA bot to access it. You don't need an agent for that. So, but what we are focusing on, how do you orchestrate a process?

And a process is gonna have deterministic steps, it's gonna have cognitive steps, and that's great. And you can have some of those cognitive steps like agents built on our platform, some built on other platforms, and we wanna own that orchestration layer. And like you said, the management layer.

So how do you drive real type observability on how agents are operating? Are they actually responding as you expect them to respond? 'cause again, they're probabilistic.

So even 95% success rate may not be good enough. It has to be 99 and more for certain mission critical processes. So having the orchestration layer and the observability layer is all part of our agentic orchestration system.

I love it. And, and I You're a hundred percent right. Make no mistake, the company that was orchestrating and managing these agents is in the catbird seat, right.

In the power seat to, as this whole thing starts tolo unfold. We kind of stopped though, but let's go back to imagine. So that was two big Announcements.

So those are the two big announcements. And the third I would, uh, say is some major announcements with AWS. I already talked about some of the product announcements.

Yes. With Q with with q, uh, also with Bedrock and some of the other, uh, investments there, but also with Google Cloud around, uh, partnerships on various products, but also on the agent to Asian protocol. Uh, I won't say March, but in Google's IO event, they're gonna announce some joint, uh, investments actually happening, uh, next week.

So Excellent. There'll be announcements there. So it's customer innovation and some key strategic partnerships.

I love it. And, and it's interesting. You, you've got Google, Microsoft, and AWS integrations here.

Yes. As one should if you wanna play in that cloud space. Right.

Um, ADI let me ask you to look in your crystal ball now. So this look, this has turned the RPA industry on its head. Mm-hmm.

Two years from now. Two years, 12 months to 24 months. How does this manifest itself?

So one, the one caveat I would put in is, um, this entire agentic AI market is moving so fast. I mean, two years ago, no, there was no concept agents. No.

Now we only talk about agents. Um, so I would put that caveat with this market every three to four, it's just turning on its head. Right.

Um, and I'm gonna put a crystal ball, like I gotta kind of guarantee that question. Uh, but what I will say is I do expect, um, we've talked about some of the key, um, elements here, right? Agent orchestration agents being the probabilistic agents being, um, um, you know, you can orchestrate but also control ahora of agents across different platforms.

I do see there, there's gonna be a big focus on how do you stitch together these various agents for specific solutions? How do you deliver value to the customer? Because right now it's still very much a technology doc.

Mm-hmm. Versus, okay, what are the at scale deployments that can be out there? We already had some customers at the RDS in the of the world talk about how they're deploying it at scale.

I think we need to go, today we have about 1500 live deployments. I expect that to go into the many, many thousands, if not 10 thousands. And that's what I think the next two years, the the maturity curve Yeah.

Is gonna be important because ultimately, at least what we are in is how do we use agents for mission critical operations? And for agents to be used in mission critical operations, it needs to mature, It has to be mission critical. Yes.

It has to, uh, it can, they can't be higher rates, and there needs to be the right observability of the pieces. So our focus, and I think where the market is also gonna focus on a, across like our partners, the A W S's gcps of the world, is how do we together partner to ensure our biggest, all our customers can, um, roll out and kind of scale out these agent tech solutions and workflows at scale across all their business operations, and see the impact on revenue, on operational efficiency, um, as well as on lower risk. Because those are the three pieces, right?

Revenue, cost risk on those three elements, we gotta see the impact of agents. And that's where I think the maturity curve is gonna happen for the next two, next two years. But while we, while that happens, I think there's gonna be a lot of innovation going on in the market.

We are just getting started on things like model context, protocol, agent to agent, uh, kind of, uh, protocols. Like how do different agents interact with each other? 'cause you, we all talked about how different vendors are gonna have different agents, so how do they talk to each other?

That technology, we are just getting started. So I think there's gonna be a huge surge on innovation and commute, surge on innovation. But I think what the market will demand is, well, how do I scale this out with my company and actually show business benefit?

And that's gonna be our focus. Excellent. Heidi, we're about outta time.

I wish we could talk more, but we will, because what, look, my feeling is we're at the beginning of the beginning of this story, not even the end of the beginning. Mm-hmm. So I look forward to continuing this conversation in the weeks and months ahead.

But congratulations on a fantastic imagine event here. Thanks for coming on Textron and, uh, Textron TV and continued success. Alan, thanks for having me.

Appreciate it. My pleasure. All right.

We will have more imagine coverage here from the O Automation Anywhere Conference in Orlando. Stay tuned.