JD Durkin: Mihir Shukla, chairman and CEO at Automation Anywhere here. Nice to see you here today. Talk to me about the two big AI acquisitions that you’ve made recently. What are they, and how do they fit into your broader strategy?
Mihir Shukla: We are excited by the last two acquisitions. As you said, the last one was Boost.ai. We really have a vision for the future that all enterprises would be an autonomous enterprise, where they would operate very differently than how businesses operate today. We think in the future, for all businesses, about 50 to 80% of the work that we do will have a certain degree of autonomy, either fully autonomous or with a human in the loop. We think your SaaS spend should go down by 30%, and we think people would be three times more productive. So a very different operating model. And to realize that vision, we have a great offering, and we acquired, as you mentioned, two large AI companies to augment that vision.
JD Durkin: Boost.ai, more specifically, specializes in conversational artificial intelligence. Talk to me a bit more about what Boost.ai actually does, and what do you think most makes it different?
Mihir Shukla: What is unique about Boost is that it already has hundreds of customers. About 70% of the customers are from regulated industries, and regulated industries have a very high bar for conversational AI. There are more complex workflows. There is a high degree of governance, and you can’t get it wrong. And so that is where Boost shines. It has achieved a level of natural language conversational capability in regulated industries that is unmatched.
And their customers can often go live within six weeks, so very fast ROI. So they’ve been experiencing significant growth, and glad to be part of Automation Anywhere now. I should mention that we have entered into the agreement, and it is waiting for customary regulatory approvals, and we expect that to happen in the next couple of months.
JD Durkin: Here, AI spending is enormous. Businesses are facing incredible pressure right now to show that all of this massive CapEx spending they’re doing on artificial intelligence can actually lead to measurable, deliverable results. Who do you see that’s actually seeing a return, from where you’re positioned?
Mihir Shukla: I think the question you’re asking is the heart of it. I think the biggest challenge facing our industry is, are we going to meet the... against the AI spend? Are we going to get the return? And that is the primary problem Automation Anywhere is aiming to solve. So across our 5,000-plus customers, 50% of the Fortune 500, 40% of the Global 2000, we have many AI transformation projects underway. They are primarily focused on generating ROI.
And one of the unique things that we have that is unmatched is that we have over half a billion AI agents and automations running today. So we are able to accurately predict where the hotspots of the return are. So today, we offer our customers a live report based on the data, where in their industry, in a specific function, they could see the biggest return, and you can stack rank it.
For viewers who are watching, we are rolling out a tool very soon on our website called Agent Jumpstart. And anybody can go there, put in some information about their company, and the model will give them a very good stack-rank view of where the real returns would be and how much they would be.
JD Durkin: And we’ll talk again soon, folks.
