Navigating the Nexus of AI and Automation: UiPath's Groundbreaking Integration with Google Cloud

Discover how UiPath is revolutionizing enterprise automation by harnessing the might of Google Cloud's AI in an electrifying conversation with Edward from UiPath. As we unpack the synergies of this powerhouse partnership, you'll learn how the integration is not just streamlining operations but also pioneering new frontiers in business efficiency. Edward gives us the inside scoop on accessing UiPath through Google Cloud Marketplace, the seamless fusion with GSuite, and the pivotal role of data security and compliance in this technological evolution.

Join us as we navigate the future with Edward, where AI's unpredictable advancements meet the meticulous planning of UiPath and Google Cloud's joint roadmap. The dialogue is more than just an exploration of technology; it's a glimpse into the transformative impact on various industries. From the meticulous care in safeguarding data to the bold strides in AI, tune in to grasp how these combined forces are sculpting an unprecedented era of enterprise automation and AI strategy.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:03

Hey everybody, we are live from Google Cloud Next with UiPath, a key Google Cloud partner and innovator. Edward, how are you?

Speaker 2 0:13

I'm really good yeah, great to be here with you, Evan. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 0:16

Well, I wish I could be there in person, but I'm going to live vicariously through you and the team at UiPath. First of all, how's it going? Looks like a tremendous event.

Speaker 2 0:27

It's going amazingly. Yeah, I mean it's a huge event. I think there's like 30,000 people. It's been great to connect with our customers here and hear about the latest advances in the Google Cloud platform. Yeah, it's been exciting.

Speaker 1 0:40

So much news for the week and, before we dive into all that maybe elaborate on the relationship between UiPath and Google Cloud and the nature of the partnership.

Speaker 2 0:50

Yeah, I mean. Well, I think you know, just for starters, you know a lot of the UiPath customers are using Google Cloud and Google Cloud also has amazing kind of AI capabilities. So I think you know the main nature of our relationship is making it easier for our mutual customers to leverage both platforms to their fullest. So UiPath is available on the Google Cloud Marketplace so you can just access it straight from there, making it very efficient and quick and easy. We have Vertex AI connectors in the UiPath studio so you can instantly access all of Google Cloud's AI offerings. In the automation platform. You can deploy and manage UiPath on your Google Cloud infrastructure, which is super important for protecting security and privacy and leveraging your investments in that space. And then we have connectors and integrations to the whole G Suite offering. So if you're using Google email, google Calendar, all of that kind of productivity, we can seamlessly integrate to that to drive automation. So a whole bunch of ways in which we support our customers.

Speaker 1 2:09

Wow, that's super exciting. What a value add. And how do you think about future development on Google Cloud? Do you sort of align roadmaps? I know there's a lot of learning and education happening there at the moment with partners like UiPath. How far in advance do you sort of plan roadmap and features and deployment functionality et cetera?

Speaker 2 2:33

Yeah, I mean, it's a really good working relationship. And yeah, we talk about our respective roadmaps and how they can reinforce each other, our respective roadmaps, and how they can, you know, reinforce each other. You know, I think the progress of AI is very hard to predict for anyone, you know.

Speaker 2 2:50

I don't think anyone on Earth has line of sight to where AI is going to be in 18 months. Really, we all know where we want it to go. We're all pushing to go as fast as possible, but where we'll actually be is very hard to predict.

Speaker 1 3:04

Yeah, absolutely so. A big part of UiPath's work in the enterprise is ensuring data security and integrity and compliance with customers. I imagine that was a big topic is a big topic this week.

Speaker 2 3:19

Yeah, definitely, and I think you know also with our own announcements. I mean, uipath has the trust layer, the LLM trust layer, the LLM gateway, the ability for our customers to kind of control, manage, audit, filter all of the calls to LLMs in the platform. And Google Cloud's also made a number of kind of announcements. Also, I think you know the ability to run and deploy UiPath in our customers' Google Cloud environment is also very critical for some organizations which have, you know, invested in bringing in Google Cloud into their organization. There's a huge amount of kind of work, you know it's not just a technical problem, it's a policy, it's procedures, it's, you know, getting all the accreditations. You've gone through all of that effort with Google Cloud. The fact that you could run UiPath on your Google Cloud platform is a real game changer for some organizations.

Speaker 1 4:14

It is a game changer and it seems like the partnership is really empowering enterprises to scale their not just their automation, but their AI strategies, and big seems to be the name of the game now, in terms of the models and the scale of the opportunity. What sort of industries do you think will be most changed or enhanced through AI, together with Google?

Speaker 2 4:44

Well, I mean, I think no industry will be unchanged. And this sounds like, I mean I still think, we're in really early days, right, this Gemini, you know, was only recently kind of released the Gemini 1.5 model family, you know, gpt4 only came out I don't know what, 18, 12, you know, 16 months ago, something along that time scale. Um, these are really early days. And I think you know we have this new capability. It unlocks a whole bunch of automation use cases, a whole bunch of new ways to run processes and orchestrate work. I think the constraining factor really is our imagination. How do we? I think, increasingly everything will be possible. The question is, what do we actually want? And so I think just deploying this technology and kind of reimagining how we want our processes, our customer engagement, our you know, all of the core processes in our business to operate is a constraining factor.

Speaker 1 5:59

Well, it's an exciting prospect. You must be meeting so many customers there. Do you have any favorite case studies or stories of businesses benefiting from this partnership? I mean, I imagine there are some you can't talk about, but you must see lots of opportunity out there.

Speaker 2 6:20

Yeah, I mean I'm prepared for that question. But yeah, I mean it's great to see so many mutual customers. I think on stage yesterday we saw HCA referenced in the keynote yesterday, which is a great customer of UiPaths as well keynote yesterday, which is a great customer of UiPaths as well, doing huge amounts of work with document understanding and the rest of our automation suite. I can't once you put me on the spot. There were so many different names, but HCA is a great example.

Speaker 1 6:51

Well, so many examples. I don't want you to have to pick your favorite child or anything. So, yes, all your customers are doing amazing work. What about you? Talk about your role, edward, at UiPath as head of AI strategy. That sounds like the most fun job in the company. Talk to us about your mission, your team's mission, within UiPath.

Speaker 2 7:15

Yeah, so my background is actually in ai research. So I started off in mathematics and then theoretical neuroscience, so studying you know how brains work, with kind of mathematical techniques. That led me to get into ai. Um, I founded an ai startup which uipath acquired, and I I now sit in the ai research team. So I'm surrounded by all the ai engineers, all their ai research scientists, uh in ui path who are building and training and developing the next generation of models, uh, that will power the ui path platform. So I sit in that team of research scientists, um, and I kind of straddle their world, the research world, and the needs of our customers. So I spend half our time talking to customers and partners and half our time I think the thing that I'm most excited by is, you know and we saw it with the gemini announcements is large language.

Speaker 2 8:12

Models are no longer just for language, no longer just for text. They're multi-modal, so they're going to process all types of data, so video, audio, images, and you know, and our role at UiPath is, how can we bring that raw capability to the world of work? And, if you think about it, pretty much everyone who has an office job just needs a screen, some headphones, a laptop, you know, a keyboard and a mouse. Right, those are the four. Those are the modalities at which you provide value. You, you, you. You get paid to do your work, and so I'm very excited by multimodal, large language models, for one of a better phrase, multimodal llms, but adapted and modified to be really good in enterprise work settings.

Speaker 2 9:08

And that adaptation, that specialization to the world of work. It's a really non-trivial problem, um, but it's a really uh, it's. It's the key to unlocking this from being a kind of somewhat useful personal productivity tool where you can ask a little question maybe ask a little like coding question, or get help writing a function or writing a sql query to being something that can actually do work for you. You know, almost like having a kind of everyone having their own personal kind of set of employees reporting into them that can do work for them and give them tasks. You can, you know, kind of collaborate and orchestrate work so you can be, you know, orders of magnitude more productive and effective.

Speaker 1 9:54

Yeah, that's a great point and, speaking of that, I'm a big user of Google Cloud's productivity tools and UiPath Studio for various marketing automation MarTech use cases, and it looks like a lot of these are coming together in interesting ways, really empowering individuals and teams, and that's a big deal, right? I mean productivity enhancement is. It looks amazing. What do you see on the horizon there?

Speaker 2 10:21

Yeah, I think.

Speaker 2 10:21

I mean, I think that's an interesting point just in, you know, in your own personal kind of example you gave, there is, I'm firm believer you can see this huge proliferation of these amazing AI features or capabilities embedded across all these different kind of tools that we all use every day.

Speaker 2 10:39

But the key to really unlocking value is about joining those things up right, orchestrating it. And you know, I think if you look at how all work has been done for like the last 50 years, it's been a combination of software and people, right, software and people and some elaborate kind of sequence of uh software and people and some elaborate kind of sequence of uh tasks and events. The future is obviously traditional software, people and ais you know, ai agents or whatever you want to call that. And I think, um, our vision at uipath is how can you optimally orchestrate those three kind of modalities, those three ways of doing stuff, to get the best results? You know, so I think you know, the future of the future I envisage for you, evan, is you can, you know, have wonderful creative thoughts about how you envisage your business improving or your work improving, but then actually implementing that, delivering it will be done by a combination of software, ai and automation.

Speaker 1 11:42

Well, that's amazing. As a small business owner, I feel like I already have a team of about six, given the tools I use from UiPath and Google Gemini today. So I can only imagine the multiplier, the effect there as these integrations come together. Uh, so, guys, final note, what's the buzz like on the ground? It looks like one of the biggest buzziest tech events of the year so far must be a lot of excitement within the community yeah, I mean, I think um, I mean I, I mean can you, can the crescendo get any louder?

Speaker 1 12:17

I feel, around AI.

Speaker 2 12:19

I mean, I always think it's like overhyped and underhyped AI, so maybe I'll just leave it there. But I quite like the Google Vids announcement. It's a bit easy to very, you know, it's kind of you know, easily curate videos through textual commands and kind of visual assets. That was one thing that I thought was pretty cool. But yeah, the whole AI space is pumping right now.

Speaker 1 12:44

That's so exciting to participate in and to observe, so you have another day or two left there. What's next? Anything else coming up for you personally on the road? Any other events on your radar?

Speaker 2 12:59

We're holding a great kind of research event in London in a couple of weeks. Let's invite some of the best. You know London we have a big research team in London.

Speaker 1 13:07

You do.

Speaker 2 13:08

And London's one of the kind of best locations for AI talent in the world. Really, I just think I think he's all of Microsoft just announced they're opening up a further investment in AI Research Lab in London, and so we're hosting a great event there for hardcore AI research scientists. I'm really looking forward to that.

Speaker 1 13:31

I'll have to have a touch base there and you can overwhelm us with some deep tech, ai lingo yeah, deep tech, ai lingo yeah, deep tech. Four or five letter acronyms all that good stuff, but thanks so much for taking the time out of your schedule here just to chat, and the insights are much appreciated. Enjoy the rest of the show. Edward, amazing Evan, thank you so much for having me. Thank you, and you know, follow UiPath on social media. They put out some amazing and useful content and insights, so check them out at Google Cloud Next. Thanks everyone, please do Thank you.