In October, Renzo Taal joined UiPath as Senior Vice President and Managing Director of EMEA. Prior to that he held several international roles at Salesforce, most recently as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Asia. Rocking Robots talked to him about his new role, his vision and the upcoming Reboot Work Festival.
Even before he joined Salesforce, Renzo Taal experienced the growing importance of robotic process automation (RPA): “I noticed an increasing number of companies using RPA and AI as part of their digital transformation journey. That intrigued me. RPA and AI are definitely going to change the way we work.”
“So, after seven years at an incredible company, I took the opportunity to join another incredible company, UiPath, a pioneer in its field, leading an incredible technology transformation in the market. UiPath technology, and particularly RPA and AI, is uniquely positioned to really drive digital transformation, which is a paradigm shift on how work will be delivered in future.”
Platform of choice
Taal’s main goal is building the company’s relationship with customers, to ensure the UiPath Automation Platform becomes the platform of choice for RPA and AI. “It’s about being part of their transformational journeys. Another goal is building our teams based on our values, which are: being humble, fast, immersed, and bold. An important part of our value system is to help our customers achieve the outcomes they are looking for.”
Digitalization of processes is key, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. “If your organization is not digitally transformed or does not have digital capabilities you have a problem. We see our customers using RPA and AI to accelerate and to innovate, and we basically make sure they can provide the best service for their customers or can automate mundane tasks even faster. All in order to achieve better outcomes such as customer service, efficiency or finance.”
Citizen developers
The mission of UiPath is to deliver ‘a robot for every person’. “For companies, this is an incredible opportunity to give time back, and be much more focused on outcomes by automating tasks. This enables people to be part of the digital economy. Equally important is the ability to achieve democratization of this technology, and to have citizen developers come up with all kinds of solutions on top of the UiPath Automation Platform.”
A recurring question for many people is still ‘will a robot take my job’? “That is a particularly important question. The digital economy is transforming the way we work, but it is actually creating new jobs; it is creating new opportunities, that means, jobs that didn’t exist before. What’s more, these robots take many of the mundane tasks and automate them, giving employees the time and opportunity to create more value within the company, and serve their customers better.”
Skills
The skills necessary for this transformation can be acquired via the UiPath Academy. “Everybody can learn the skills, be trained and qualified to build their own robots to automate processes. So automation will create more jobs. The question is not ‘are jobs going to disappear’, we need to focus on how we can empower people to be part of this new economy and train them to be part of the RPA and AI world. One of our goals is to bring automation to 1 billion citizen developers.”
These are all topics which will be addressed next week during the UiPath Reboot Work Festival. “We will look to the future of the fully automated enterprise, and we will provide new insights into our UiPath 20.10 release, our biggest release to date. Also, we will be showcasing our customers from around the world.”
Future
“We will discuss how we see the future of UiPath, RPA, and AI. One especially important message is that we don’t just do one technology, like process mining, we are a platform of choice for our customers. We do discovery, we build, we manage, we orchestrate the robots for our customers, we run the platform and we engage with applications in an end-to-end platform automation approach.”
The target audience is quite extensive, from citizen developers to executives who want to facilitate their transformational journeys. “Increasingly, automation and robotisation are part of the executive agenda. CxO’s are talking about automation and robotisation in the physical world as well as in the digital world.”
Engagement
He also uses robots himself: “I have robots helping me with onboarding people, for example. We use our own robots in different parts of the process, which is absolutely amazing.” But it is also about people: “From a personal perspective, it is pretty incredible how we have engaged as human beings over the past months. I believe we are living in a unique time. Technologies like RPA and AI can really have an impact. Companies are now changing faster because they realize what these technologies can bring, so they can give back time to their employees, and boost engagement.”
