AI at Work
I attended UiPath Forward VI and rather than give a recap of sessions and the whole conference I wanted to just share a couple of interesting insights I walked away with:
There are still a lot of customers just getting started
UiPath conference and I don’t recall hearing the letters “RPA” at all. Anyplace you might have heard the word “RPA” you would hear “Automation” instead.
If I had a dollar for every time someone said “AI” I would be rich. The whole theme was AI and Automation working for your business (or in your business, or on your business)
It’s a good, clean message - and it was pervasive. I could tell you how they think about AI for automation, and for process and task mining, and for document understanding, and for communications mining, and for test automation. But I want to focus in this post on user experience.
AI-Driven User Experience
The key thing I noticed was user experience. UiPath’s presentations and product releases and previews were a clear expression of something relatively new: using AI to improve user experience.
Traditionally you’d try to design an “intuitive interface” to make it easier. You could try to package expert functionality behind a gear icon or other “expert” screens. You tried to keep the main flow simple. You try to reduce the cognitive load.
UiPath is trying to use AI to achieve the same ends. AI to help identify which things you want to understand in your document. AI to generate manual test descriptions from a set of requirements. AI to generate test code templates when you want to automate those tests. All to make test automation easier to produce - not because the UI in and of itself is easier to understand - but because it is doing more of the work for you. (Incidentally you can now watch some of the sessions online, and let me know if you see what I saw!)
Maybe this Ai-driven experience shouldn’t be a surprise. We don’t have to look any further than Google and Apple and their phone cameras. When you use your iPhone you don’t have to set all the details of the exposure and use advanced photo editing to take a picture. You can simply let layers of AI-driven processing blend multiple exposures into one “best” image.
I won’t win any awards for my photography - but if I did - it would be because of an AI-assisted user experience.
Now that I’m looking for it, I expect I’m going to see a lot more examples in the enterprise software space, and I’m sure it is going to impact what we do at BP3.
Austin Technology Council presents: The Austin C-Suite Summit!
I’d be remiss, as the board chair of the ATC CEO and C-Suite Summit, if I didn’t give it a promotional mention here. The CEO and C-Suite summit is sponsored by Opportunity Austin and BP3, among others. ATC is an important and historical organization in Austin, connecting members of the tech ecosystem for more than 30 years now. When ATC started, we were trying to get Tech on the map in Austin - and build it into an ecosystem that could drive the economy. Mission accomplished!
The next mission is for ATC to reconnect the diaspora of Tech in Austin - emphasis on community in our tech ecosystem. Our tech executives and companies need to reconnect with each other, and with the rest of Austin, whether that is the arts, music, volunteering, education, housing, transportation, or up skilling. Proud of the work our members do in many of these areas already!
At the Summit, we’ll have three panels:
Austin Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow - an all-star panel of key tech ecosystem players in Austin over the last 30 years!
Building inclusive employment practices - facilitated by our partners Austin Women in Technology.
Cultivating connected cultures - again with an all star panel of leaders with great company cultures, remote, hybrid, or AI-powered!
Don’t worry, it wouldn’t be an ATC event if we didn’t have great networking opportunities and informal discussions. Register and join us for the event on November 6th, 12-6pm.
One more thing…
Sandy Kemsley’s excellent blog “Column 2” recently covered the BPM conference in Europe. The entire series of articles is worth reading in my opinion. Let me call attention to two:
A summary of a Pfizer presentation on clinical trials processes. We implemented clinical trials processes for Lilly quite a few years ago and a lot of the issues and remedies resonated with what I recall from that program. Getting the process right for clinical trials can save lives, improve outcomes, and speed the approval of life saving or improving medicines.
An RPA forum. where a really interesting part of the discussion was whether RPA is causing process knowledge loss!
RPA has a lot of measurable benefits – efficiency, compliance, quality – but what about the “dark side” of RPA? Can it make organizations lose knowledge and control over their processes because people have been taken out of the loop? RPA is often quite brittle, and when (not if) it stops working, it’s possible that organizational amnesia has set in: no one remembers how the process works well enough to do it manually.
This is a real - or potential - issue with any kind of automation. I’ve worked with many clients for whom the true experts in how the business worked were the IT developers who wrote the software that ran the business - and the actual business team members had forgotten how many things really worked.
It is natural that this is also a challenge with RPA-style automation. And more so when this kind of automation isn’t done with the kind of rigor that a BP3 would bring to the table:
fully understanding the problem and the process
specifying the automation fully with a PDD
implementation with best practices and validation test cases
documenting the solution for posterity
Our software engineering and business process experience gives us a bit of an advantage in addressing these issues - we’re often brought in to fix implementations that didn’t go well the first time around, or were too brittle.
Regardless, I find it interesting to see academic rigor applied to business topics - and this was a good one. After reading Sandy’s blog this year I need to see if I can make the conference next year.
And another thing…
ACL Fest came to town recently - and the headlining Foo Fighters came as well. They performed two shows at ACL Fest, and they played a live taping for Austin City Limits (PBS). I made it back to Austin from UiPath just in time to make the show - and it didn’t disappoint. What a great band - individually amazingly skilled - and together the ultimate professional rock and roll band. There was a nice review in Austin Monthly for those interested.
A highlight of the taping was when Grohl introduced the band members to a medley of song snippets ranging from Beastie Boys and Nine Inch Nails to The Ramones and Devo—thoroughly enjoying each tribute. The rapid-fire set was sprinkled with deep cuts and hits that only slowed down when Grohl honored his late mother with “The Glass” and paused to dedicate “Aurora” to their recently deceased drummer, Taylor Hawkins, as it was his favorite Foos song to play.
The last time I saw them live, the highlight was having Gary Clark, Jr. join them for a few songs. It was amazing - and these pleasant surprises are why it is so much fun to see a great band in a venue that holds a few thousand instead of a few hundred thousand!
Scott Francis is CEO and Founder at BP3 — where we focus on process as the lens to drive business value: because if your business matters, your process matters.