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Welcome to the EY Think Ecosystem podcast, a series exploring the intersection of technology collaboration and innovation. In each episode, we orchestrate insights, stories and perspectives from across the EY Partner Ecosystem, our client base and leadership team, to address the important issues and challenges of today.

Thierry van Herwijnen  

Hello, and welcome to the EY Think Ecosystem podcast. I'm your host Thierry van Herwijnen. I'm the Global Head of Sales for our Intelligent Automation Alliances here at EY. In this episode, we will be taking a close look at intelligent automation and exploring how it can act as the connective tissue within high-performing organization ecosystems, enabling and accelerating transformation. Also known as intelligent process automation, IA is a fast-evolving combination of artificial intelligence and robotic process automation, which promises to release significant value within organizations. IA not only automates manual repetitive tasks. It can also help organizations succeed in the race to recruit and retain precious talent, enable companies to get closer to their clients and generate a rich data insight capable of triggering organization-wide transformation. This podcast is about ecosystems that organizations find themselves part of today, and the challenges they face. Market-leading IA can help organizations navigate across multiple such ecosystems at speed, develop new capabilities and succeed faster with less investment. You're in good hands today with three esteemed thought leaders to take us through the challenges and opportunities associated with this fascinating topic. But before I introduce them, please remember conversations during EY podcasts should not be relied upon as accounting, tax, legal, investment, nor other professional advice. Listeners must consult their own advisors.

Joining us now from the UK, England, is Simon Constance, EY Global Head for IA Alliances. Welcome to the podcast Simon.

Simon Constance  

Thanks very much, Thierry. Looking forward to the conversation.

van Herwijnen  

Next, we have Sean Adee from UiPath, who's based in Florida. UiPath has driven the evolution of intelligent automation for nearly two decades. So, I really can't wait to hear your insights. Welcome Sean.

Sean Adee  

Right. Thanks, Thierry. Thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to the session as well.

van Herwijnen  

And last, but definitely not least joining us from the UK as well, is Ade McCormack, Global Thought Leader on Leadership, Disruption and Transformational Matters. Thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule, Ade.

Ade McCormack  

Thank you, Thierry. I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

van Herwijnen  

Great. Well, thank you all three for joining us. So today we're going to talk about intelligent automation, artificial intelligence. So, Ade let's start with the first question to you. In many respects, COVID may be considered the unofficial closing ceremony for the industrial era. What should leaders be caring about as we enter a new era?

McCormack  

Well, I mean, that's a great question to kick off with. In many respects, prior to COVID we had what you might call, to some extent, synthetic certainty. The last 300 years if you like, it's all been about creating a predictable environment to run essentially a factory model. COVID is a biological tsunami, digital is another. And of course, we've got political, economic, social, we've got the war for innovation, the war for natural resources, the war for talent, and even the space race, all of these macro environmental forces are conflating and compounding to essentially make the world unknowable. What I'm seeing is that many leaders are actually reverting back to 2019 as a kind of comfort blanket. But the reality is, is that we're leaving the so-called finite game, where the rules are well defined. And it's easy to identify who is winning into what is the infinite game. And in the infinite game, there's only one rule, and that is to stay in the game. And in this increasingly unknowable world that we're moving into, we have to say goodbye to the factory model, its process orientation and move to something more innovation oriented, because we're going to be facing increasingly novel situations. So, technology is very, very important but people are very important too, and the integration of both, so to speak, is I would say the goal.

van Herwijnen  

So, what you're saying Ade right, is organizations are on this transformational journey, right, and how do you see the role of IA and AI playing in that journey? Like, how can leaders embrace those technologies and accelerate that journey?

McCormack  

Well, in many respects, at its simplest level, IA simply frees up people from doing tedious work and thereby releases cognition that can be applied to more innovative endeavors. And of course, IA can also drive out cost, but it's potential to turn an inert factory model into a living organism that consumes data, that makes sense of the data. And then decides how to execute is where we need to get to. Essentially organizations in the post-industrial era need to be living organisms. And in my view IA provides us with a living nervous system, if you like, to navigate this savanna, so to speak. We're entering what you might call a post strategy world. You know, in the past, we would plan ahead a year, three years, etc., etc. But any fighter pilot that plans his or her maneuvers, and the sequence of them before going up in the air won't win many dogfights. As philosopher Mike Tyson once pointed out, the plan goes out the window after the first punch. So, we're in a world now where survival and situational awareness trumps strategic planning, and I think IA is absolutely perfect to enable that.

Constance  

What you're saying feels so relevant to me just running our own business here working with our clients. Where does agility fit into all of this, because that's a word I'm hearing used an awful lot right now?

McCormack  

Well, agility, in my view, agility is A an overused term. And B, it's kind of what you do when the bear has already attacked you. So, the next level up is to be anticipatory. So, you look out for the bear, you're studying the horizon to see if the bear's coming. But then you get bitten by a snake. So that's not good enough. So, we need to move towards a kind of attentive organization that can see what's coming, and doesn't actually know what it's looking for, but somehow or other senses what's coming. And that's more about being adaptive. It's more about reorienting the organization based around the reality of your environment.

Constance  

I think we'll be talking about agility quite a bit as we have this conversation. So good to continue your thoughts.

van Herwijnen  

So, Sean, it sounds like automation has been there for many years, right? Some people say it has been there for at least like the last 15-20 years, right? So, can you maybe give us a very brief summary of what the market looks like today, and how IA has evolved from a straightforward driver of cost efficiency to be a generator of insights?

Adee  

It's a really good question. Because if you look at the market, and I'm going to talk about the market, maybe over the last five years, so as we were talking RPA was really brought in as really a cost leverage tool. So, people could reduce costs and repetitive tasks in the back office, you know, AP processing, invoice processing those types of highly repetitive core business processes, but I wouldn't call them, you know, highly advanced or strategic to the operations. So, they are really looking at really cost savings. As that happened, you really look at the market and the underlying technologies that drive automation. And I'll use the term automation more broadly than RPA, they've really moved to a broader platform place where they're bringing in things around machine learning, AI, they're bringing in intelligent document processing, all of these additional technologies that really drive to a much higher value type of a capability or solution. And so, what we're seeing, you know, clients across the world doing now is looking at intelligent automation as a core component of how they transact and execute their business strategy. Now, that continues to grow as the underlying technologies evolve, and become, frankly, significantly more powerful. And so, as we look at the marketplace, and I think, you know, we've kind of talked about this whole, you know, Gen one, to Gen two to Gen three, automation, as we move to the second and third generations of automation to become much more human capable, if you will. And so as opposed to just executing rules-based repetitive tasks, they have the opportunity to learn and evolve and improve, so they can take on an ever-increasing portion of activities that people would have been doing that had, you know, moderate decision making, if you will, but still help to free up those people to do things that are of higher and deeper value around interaction with customers, etc. So, the market, it's really evolving quickly as the technology evolves. And people are really taking advantage now of these new capabilities and really making intelligent automation more of a core part of their business strategy as opposed to, you know, really just kind of a cost-leverage opportunity in the back office. 

Constance  

I was just thinking, Sean, you know, as I listen to that, it's a powerful vision and it feels you know, could feel a little bit out there. But it was really brought home to me, I'm sitting here in front of my laptop, and I can see the little UiPath desktop icon that we've rolled out to over 200,000 people now in our organization. And that's sitting there, across the world today in almost every country, 120 odd countries we operate in, helping people do boring stuff, like raise invoices, putting new clients’ details into multiple systems. And it's just sitting there today at massive scale. And as much as the vision can sound quite grand, it just strikes me there's such a practical reality now, for so many organizations to have that assistance to human beings in their jobs in a way that we didn't have before, that bit of kit working with all our ERP systems, and all our other home-built systems that we have in EY.

van Herwijnen  

Well, it's going to be really interesting to see, right, when we really starting to put AI as part of that in Gen three, right, and see, like, all the organizations are adopting that. When we started this podcast, you took around that digital transformation journey. What do you think is the value we can unlock when we actually start putting like AI at the core of the business basically?

McCormack  

Well, I mean, I love what Sean has said, and my take on it is that we're creating augmented humans, in effect. We're allowing more of their cognitive potential to be used on value-creating ideas and endeavors. So, you might say that it's humans plus artificial intelligence, so to speak. And the beauty of the artificial intelligence is that it's living, it's like a living process that senses what's going on out there. So, if you like AI, at the very least, heightens our senses as to what's going on, recognizing weak signals, perhaps in very small datasets. But AI also has a role to play in respect of the decision making that follows the sensing. So really, I think where we're moving towards is almost like an arms race of artificial cognition and natural cognition. The war for talent, I think, will be joined by the war for, if you like, artificial talent.

van Herwijnen  

When we did the introduction, right, we made a pretty bold statement, right? Which obviously, sitting here on the ecosystem podcasts, right? So basically, what we said is, we describe IA as the connective tissue for high-performance ecosystems, right? It's a pretty bold claim. So, Simon, what is your definition of the ecosystem in this context? And what kind of ecosystem partners are we talking about? And what role do they actually play within a company? What are your views on that? 

Constance  

So, I think this is where it really comes together in a very practical sense, Thierry. When we're talking about an ecosystem, in this context, I'm thinking about all the different partners that our organizations work with. You know, so over the last two or three years, if I think about my clients in the healthcare sector in different parts of the world, they've been working with new partners, voluntary sector organizations to mobilize vaccine rollout programs, or caring initiatives for vulnerable community members who may need supplies. They've been working with statistical agencies that they've never worked with before. They've been working with pharmaceutical bodies in a more direct way than they ever have before. There's been a need to bring together different partners to work with their organizations, you know, and you could apply that across multiple sectors. I think we would all recognize that, you know, being in consumer products, connecting with influencers in a way that we have seen a rise of over the last sort of five, six years, as a marketing channel. You know, we all have these new partners that we're working with, going beyond the more traditional structures like joint ventures, which are hard enough in their own right, so you have all these dynamic partnerships to manage, that make our businesses and organizations successful and open up new opportunities. But often, so often, the challenge in bringing them together and getting the best out of them is the IT, is knowing what's going on, and communicating what's going on. Where am I in a process, you know, if I need you as my partner to do the next step, where am I in that step if you don't know where I am, because we're running two different IT systems or one of us may not have a big IT system to use. That's a really fundamental problem that makes the potential of these ecosystems we're all trying to build today really start to break down. And so I think that's where intelligent automation in its truest sense, so the end-to-end automation of value change using tools from chatbots through to AI to support decisioning, maybe recommending actions to contact center agents or people working with customers or internal regulatory processes through to attended automation on the desktop that we've talked about where we're using a robot running on your laptop to do a calculation or something, or pull up some data into a spreadsheet while you're doing something else, right the way through to these big offline processing centers that have bots running almost 24 hours a day at huge scale. Certainly, at EY we have 1000s of those running in various centers around the world now for us. But when we're thinking about that kind of toolset, it gives us the ability to engage with those partners, because we can bridge datasets that aren't aligned, we can bring them together, we can use data manipulation tools to create alignment with them to bring a view of the world together and use dashboarding tools to present that. We can trigger actions, send messages to each other, we can create workflows, across organizational boundaries, all using the kinds of tools that I've just described. And so suddenly, the challenge of getting the ecosystem and all those partners to work together becomes so much more manageable. And I think the really important point of that is it does it with pace. And I think that's where I was starting to think about agility when I listen to Ade, because you only have to think about the healthcare situation I described. No one had 12 months to build us build an interconnected set of IT platforms. But what we had to do was move with real pace. And so, using tools that are taking us a matter of weeks to develop, and deploy suddenly becomes really powerful, because at the heart of our organizations sit big ERP systems, big CRM systems, hugely successful, hugely powerful tools in their own right. But where the ecosystem where those partners connect to touch points, that's where you need agility. That's where you need nimbleness. And I think intelligent automation gives us something that we haven't had, without that.

van Herwijnen  

No that's great Simon. Sean any insights from your side? So, I know you talk to clients on a daily basis. And I think you literally just stepped off the plane after a conversation. So how are clients from UiPath, leveraging the platform to actually become part of that ecosystem and enable that ecosystem around them?

Adee  

You know, Thierry, it's a really good question. You know, UiPath, now we have north of 10,000 clients and customers around the world. And they're really using the platform, you know, the automation platform in a number of ways. You know, Simon and Ade talked about agility. The challenge with ecosystems has always been ecosystems didn't typically work well with other ecosystems. Whether you're a Microsoft ecosystem, or an SAP ecosystem, an IBM ecosystem, or an ecosystem within an ecosystem. What we're really looking at in automation is a capability now, to bring those ecosystems together more easily, quickly and flexibly. If you think about it from a business perspective, your business often changes faster than your technology can deliver to the business. So, you may have a need for some significant changes to core business processes. But you're in the midst of an SAP deployment, or you're in the midst of a large Oracle ERP deployment or some other large enterprise stack deployment. And the reality is, it's often very challenging to be able to fulfill some of those business process needs through the technology. Because you're in the midst of a change, or it's just a, it's an incredibly long-term static environment, what we look at an automation being able to do is to incredibly accelerate that. So, we get rid of a lot of the, I use the word excuse of not doing something because it takes too long, or it's going to be replaced anyway in the near future. So if we've got the ability to provide quick business value by being able to provide interconnection between client ecosystem, and a provider ecosystem, for example, and we can do these types of projects, in a matter of days and weeks, as opposed to months and years, the ability then to provide both interim and long lasting durable capabilities is now different than it may have been in the past with some of these new technology stacks that we have in the automation space. So, we really look at this as a very powerful capability to allow people to interconnect and communicate and do it quickly at the speed that the business now requires. So, the ability to take automation to provide richer experiences, integrations, etc., is incredibly powerful. And I think we're still early in this, this is only becoming more capable. So, you know, it's exciting to see what's going to happen, but our you know, our customers, and a number of these are very significant joint clients that we have with EY, are really looking at taking this and adding an automation capability as being a true core part of their overall technology ecosystem. And I think that's where it's changing. We're moving from this being a side tool to a major component in delivering whatever the technology capabilities that the organization needs.

van Herwijnen  

Simon, we talked around how IA enables business growth while also driving customer advocacy. Are there any claims we didn't touch on yet, Simon? Any benefits we didn't discuss yet?

Constance  

Oh, look, you know, in our own business and the work we do with our clients, I think intelligent automation's potential, as we've all been describing, has never been more relevant beyond what we've said, so far. I can't think of a single organization that you read about, or we touch in our day-to-day lives that isn't short of talent at the moment. Human beings are in scarce supply, for sure. Now, you know, we could spend many podcasts debating the views of economists and labor market economists about where those people have gone, but they're not there. And, you know, even as we look at a potential slowdown in the world economy, and maybe worse, you know, there's no signs that that's going to abate quickly. So, when labor is missing from the workforce, but yet businesses are trying to grow, something has got to step into the gap. And automation is a fantastic tool for that. So much of the work we do, and yes they're big, complex transformation projects, and they work at pace, and they're very agile in their delivery. But at heart, they're quite simple. They're looking to say, right, what are the things that need to get done more quickly, more effectively, more efficiently, with better outcomes in this value chain, right? Are we using the existing technology we've got, for example, our ERP or CRM systems, are we using it to its potential? And then is this something that we shouldn't be doing that we should get rid of, you know, let's stop doing things that have just got in the way over the years, or where we've got 50 different ways of doing the same task. And then let's use all of those tools at our disposal, an intelligent automation kit, to streamline them. Where we had long training programs for customer contact agents, let's use AI platforms make the next best decision based on an analysis of the customer data or the customer behavior, across multiple contract options we might have, for example, if we're a utility or telecommunications business, let's use the AI to take that. So rather than have to drag people off the floor, spend hours training them to hope they get to the heady heights of our best agents, let's use the technology to do that. And let's let our agents interact with customers and be great humans, which is what people need when they contact us. And so, I think just in terms of dealing with demand in the workforce there's a huge, huge opportunity. I think the other opportunity is new channels to market. We're seeing now that in consumer products business, and even in the public sector, people operate on channels that get beyond traditional ways we've engaged customers, you know, through contact centers or static websites, you know. So much activity now happens on social media platforms. So much information about customer activity sits out there. It's actually by using Intelligent Automation as part of a broader digital strategy can we create new ways of engaging customers. I've seen static web communities that the companies have built to engage their customers around luxury products, or you know, sort of high value products, aspirational products, just turning to far more engaging platforms when intelligent automation has been used to bring in interesting insights to that community, from all sorts of sources. Present them with data from within the organization about things like product development activity or production activity, is giving a new flavor to that. So, I think, you know, just replacing the labor shortages we all have today, creating new channels to market, new channels for engaging customers. I think the potential is huge. And, you know, organizations are really only just beginning to grasp that opportunity.

van Herwijnen  

So til' now, I heard the three of you talk around three different generations of automation, right? Gen one, very focused on a traditional RPA, primarily focused on driving down cost. Generation two, more moving towards intelligent automation, hyper automation, very focused around, in addition to cost because cost continues to be important, but in addition to cost, focus very much on driving a conversation around how automation can enable revenue growth, how you can actually manage your talent and maybe manage your risk as well. And then Generation three, more around really putting artificial intelligence at the core of the business and really driving a conversation around insights basically, right? So maybe, Sean, why is it so important for organizations to understand where they are in their automation journey?

Adee  

You know, Thierry, I think it depends on what the company is trying to accomplish. You know, again, we have certain clients today that are coming in with a more mature view of what automation can do for them. You know, they may have gone to a Gartner conference, right, some of their senior level folks, and they've seen what the what the potential promises for intelligent automation is. But many are still, if you think about the ones that did start three, four, five, six years ago, often what's happened is those have become very, very limited tactical programs. And so, they're doing very traditional rules-based RPA, if you will, in some of those back-office processes, and they may never have seen the broader value. So, it's kind of like, you know, if you work in IT operations. People really kind of forget about it because it just kind of plugs along until there's something that drastically changes. And I think for organizations from a competitive perspective today, we think, you know, like we were talking about going to the web back 12, 13, 14 years ago. Frankly, the companies that did not execute a web strategy, in most cases are behind those that did. We think automation is moving in that same direction. So, we think it's critical for companies to understand within the organization where automation is, what it has the potential to do for them? And then how do I integrate an automation capability? I'm going to use the word strategy, but how do I make sure that I am supporting my business strategy or imperatives, using the best tools and capabilities available to me. We think automation is certainly one of those. And if they're not, the reality is they are probably under delivering on what they could be doing. And so, as companies step back and look at that, you know, as Simon was talking about the whole, the EY perspective, Gen one, Gen two, Gen three. If you're still stuck, early Gen one, your competitors are probably in Gen two moving to, and are going to move to Gen three, and you may be a buggy whip manufacturer at the turn of the 20th century, and the best buggy whip manufacturer on the planet still didn't survive, right? Because they didn't see the fundamental change. We think this is that impactful in the way companies do business, so this has to be something that is elevated, understood, and adopted and accepted more broadly.    

van Herwijnen  

Absolutely. Thank you, Sean. Just as we said, right, organizations are part of a wider ecosystem, right, whether they like it or not. So, I would love to get a reflection, all three of you on this, right? So how can IA help them to overcome the challenges they face? So, Ade, let's maybe start with a short reflection from your side?

McCormack  

Sure. I mean, I love the three generations so to speak. And I think as Simon said earlier, there's tremendous potential just getting people sort of into Gen two, so to speak. And in support of Sean's point, what's not to like about technology? Smarter, faster, cheaper, and so on. But at the end of the day, if your business model is, if you're if you're a Titanic, you're going to run into problems. And even if you could detect icebergs, you're no match for air travel. So, we've got to be thinking about how do we change, not just automating the plant, but coming up with new business models, and really thinking about our organization, as an intelligent organism. That intelligent organism is going to have a better chance of survival if it collaborates with other living organisms. And then this gives rise to an ecosystem, so to speak. The big challenge, I guess, is creating common standards that will allow organizations to genuinely amplify value through the ecosystem. And rather than just thinking in terms of supply chains, think in terms of highly adaptive demand chains. And in this respect, Intelligent Automation is the brain and the nervous system of the ecosystem.

Constance  

I mean, the other thing that I would pick up from what Ade's just said, is, I think what you're talking to Ade is a mindset shift as well, to really get the most out of this. And I think a mindset shift in two spaces. You know, one is the continuing ability to embrace innovation. So commercial and public sector organizations I've worked with, I find more and more people I'm coming into contact with who have the word innovation in their title. They're looking for a way of getting something done that's new and overcoming existing organizational barriers. So, there's something about that world, I think it's important. And I think as well, there's also quite a challenge to many of us, because this technology offers us a way of doing things differently and so much throughout my career, both, you know, working in large professional services organizations, and when I've had line roles in areas like supply chain or HR, human resources, often the answer has been 'no' to doing something innovative and different. Because the technology just hasn't been flexible. You know, to get two departments to work together more effectively, that haven't worked together in the past to do something new for a customer or a citizen, has often been just very difficult because they were using two different IT systems. And it became very difficult to get them to communicate or share work between each other. But now we've got the ability to do that. And I think so often we think of doing new things. But certainly, if I reflect on myself, we’re conditioned to think, no, you can't. Because in the past, it hasn't been possible. But you know what, I think there's a mindset shift we can all embrace, which is you know what, you probably can, there's probably very few reasons why you can't anymore with the kind of technology tools we're talking about. 

van Herwijnen  

Sean, what do you think? 

Adee  

It's a really good point. And as Simon was talking about that I was thinking we were talking about innovation. And well, we don't we don't think of ERPs as innovation but they're running the business. So maybe when we think about automation, automation if we're looking at a system model, it could almost be the innovation layer, if you will, because it allows us, it allows us to be a bit of a glue across a bunch of disparate environments, and allows us to do things, change things, provide system level innovation, to the business that we otherwise probably couldn't do. Right, and you know, you don't go out and on the fly change SAP. I think with automation, and using that as kind of an innovation technology, I think it might change the game a bit. And, you know, we see that along a lot of our customers, you know, Simon was talking about COVID, we didn't have months and months to respond to build new capabilities to deliver vaccines or contact tracing and all of that. The reality is, we built a lot of those capabilities on top of existing applications and data sources, incredibly quickly, which I don't think we could have done otherwise in a traditional environment. So, I like to think of this as maybe a bit of an innovation layer, if you will.

van Herwijnen  

Absolutely. That's a great thought from from all three of you. Thank you so much. So that brings us to the last question, which actually, Simon, I would like you to answer if possible. So, it's clearly a complex and fast-evolving landscape. Simon what advice do you have for CIOs, CFOs, other C suite members who are really looking to take their maybe first step into IA or actually start moving towards generation two or even generation three, what kind of advice do you have?

Constance  

I think it's safe to be bold, you know, is my overarching observation. We're not dealing here with the bleeding edge of technology anymore. Many, many organizations have been doing this at scale across geographic borders, across corporate borders, across their ecosystems. And this is a genuine C-suite issue because agility, getting the most from your ecosystem, new customer channels, new revenue streams, and more agile supply chains. Those are what people in C-suite roles talk to us as a firm, talk to me and you Thierry, and all of us on this call about when we work with them. And this is a key tool in making that all possible. So, I think it's time to be bold. And if people haven't taken the step, look, you know, embrace the opportunity and let's innovate together.

van Herwijnen  

No, absolutely. Thank you so much, Simon. Maybe two additional thoughts from my side if I may. I would say first of all, if you're the one running the COE, Centre of Excellence for automation, I think what I've learned throughout my client conversations and where I've seen, usually successful COEs, what I typically find is they're extremely well aligned to the overall business strategy basically, right. And that really tends to really make it fly. So that will be my piece of advice. So, thank you all three for this for this conversation. I really hope you enjoyed it.

Constance  

Likewise, Thierry, great to speak to you all look forward to continuing it.

McCormack  

Thank you, Thierry, really enjoyed the conversation.

Adee  

That was fantastic. Thanks for hosting Thierry, and Simon and Ade. It was a pleasure.

van Herwijnen  

Before we go. A quick note from the attorneys. The views of third parties set out in this podcast are not necessarily the views of the global EY organization or its member firms. And moreover, they should be seen in the context of the time in which they were made. I'm Thierry van Herwijnen and I hope you really enjoyed the show. I did. But please join us again for the next edition of the EY Think Ecosystem podcast.

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