Presented by Women Who Code Dallas / Fort Worth Speaker: Cynthia Libby Hosted by: Melissa Conrad Moderated by: Emily Ritter and Brittney Conwright
Topic: How Can Robots (RPA) Help You and Your Career?
About the Talk: We've all had tasks where we had to do the same steps over and over again. For example, transferring data between systems that aren't integrated. Boredom quickly sets in and we start making mistakes. We'd love to figure out a way to make those tasks quicker - or better yet go away completely. Cut/paste and macros help - but only go so far. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) does this and quite a bit more. Not with little flying robots but with smart software.
This session will give you an understanding of RPA and what it can do, both as a tool to make your repetitive tasks easier and as a possible career opportunity.
About the Speaker: Cynthia Libby is a Technical Account Manager at UiPath. She enjoys mentoring RPA developers to produce automations that help their employees be more productive and energized. She has over 35 years of experience working with all types of Software Automation.
Connect with Her: LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cynthialibby/ ___
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Okay. Welcome to how Can Robots RPA help you in your career? With Cynthia Libby presented by women who Code Digital and the Dallas Fort Worth Network. Cynthia is a technical account manager at UI Path. She enjoys mentoring RPA developers to produce automations that help their employees be more productive and energized. She has over 35 years of experience working with all types of software automation. Thank you, Melissa. You're welcome. All right, let me get started here. We swap this. Hold on. I think I've never done this before in my life, but I have, I swear. Let me go ahead and change this real quick and we'll try that again. There we go. All right, can you guys see the presentation? And now it's glory. Yes, it looks great. Okay, good. All right, so I'm here to talk to you about how RPA and robots can help you in your career. And I thought a coffee cup was great because I think most of us are kind of addicts when it comes to coffee, right? So that seemed like a good thing to put in there to start. And here's what we're going to be talking about today. And we're kind of, as we're going through talking about what is RPA and who is UI Path, what the job market is like, how it can work for you and how you can learn it. And as we're going through this, please, if you have any questions, post them in the chat. No worries about interrupting. All right, so who am I? So I've worked in basically every area of software, starting with a high school internship in 1980, where I worked at a little company that did Dr Pepper bottling Reports. So that's where they talked about how many bottles of Dr Pepper and stuff were sold. And it was a really fun job. But the thing that I hated was I had to look up bottler numbers and then write them on a sheet of paper. It was very boring, and I didn't like it. So I decided I don't want to do those repetitive tests anymore and start automating as many things as I could and doing that with a lot of different tools. Even before RPA, I did automated testing before I came here. So if you're an automated tester now, it's a lot of the same skills, and you probably would really like RPA as well. And I used to travel quite a bit, which I really love doing, but that meant I couldn't attend a lot of events in person. So this is nice that we get to see each other virtually. And I work for you iPad, which is an RPA software company. All right. This is just my safe harbor. My company asked me to put this up just to say that anything I say is just me talking, and I'm not promising you guys anything. All right, so why robotic process automation? And we're going to talk a lot about where we're going to see pictures of little bots running around. But there's really no physical bots. These are all software bots. And the point is, your bot emulates what you would do as a person. So if you were going to do a set of tasks, the bot would do the same set of tasks. And so it really just is supposed to be like your little helper. So that's why we try to think of the bot as our little helper. Now, one of the reasons we have so many things to automate is because as system people have gotten more and more applications, they've got SAP, they've got Oracle, they've got Salesforce, et cetera, all these different types of applications. And every time they add a new application or let's say somebody decides to write an application for your company, those systems don't always talk to each other like they should. And since they don't talk to each other, then you have to actually enter data twice. And a lot of times they call it a swivel chair because you work on one system and you get that data and then you come over and you work on the other system. So you're copying and pasting back and forth and it's quite annoying. So we're tired of this. As you can see, that guy looks pretty tired of doing the copying and pasting and typing in data over and over. That's not what you really expected to do with your life is some mundane work that a bot could do for you. So what's RPA really kind of doing? So if you think about it, it's a little bot again, it's a virtual software bot that can read the screen that you're on, get all the data off of it. It can think and decide what to do with that data and then interact with all the applications and data. So you can see where there's like a glass pane between the bot and all the systems you're working with. And I like to think about the little bot as being kind of like an intern. So if I brought an intern on and I was teaching them how to do a task, I would give them a set of guidelines and here's where your data is and here's how you do the things. And I would expect that if the Internet ever had a problem, they would come to me and say, I've got a question. How does this work? Right? So that's what we want our bots to do too. They do the things they understand and they don't go outside the confines of what we told them to do. I've had a lot of people get very concerned that the bot is going to turn all terminator on them and take over the world and that this will not happen. They're not that smart. I would love it if they're smarter than they were, but they're only as smart as we make them. And that's where we are today. And so just to give you some ideas of some of the things we can do, we can log into applications, move files and folders around. One of the things that people really like doing is grabbing all those emails and pulling all the attachments out of them and putting them someplace. So if you're getting a bunch of invoices attached to emails, you can take all those attachments and file them someplace. And the bot can actually take all those emails and do something with them, right? So it can do things for you that you wouldn't do. And this link right here, look at that robot go. I think there's a link for that one. But I want to show you a slightly different video because I thought you guys would like to have one that's not on the Internet. So can you guys see my screen here with this little guy? Yes. Okay, awesome. Okay, this is showing you a little called Bots or automation. And I'm going to start this here. Did you guys see the guy's voice? No problem. Good, I'll talk to it then. Okay, good. So what's going to happen is it's going to go through Excel mainframe and salesforce and Word, et cetera. It's going to use this Excel spreadsheet as the input data. So it grabs all the data, opens up the terminal. Terminal is like an IBM mainframe, which nobody wants to have to work with anymore, right? Then it grabs that data and puts into salesforce. And this is all expense report data. So we're going to grab all that expense report data, create a little Word document with the template, and then push all that out to a PDF file and then attach it to an email and send it out. Okay. Then it comes right back here and it goes over to SAP, gets some information out of SAP, and then it takes that SAP information, it takes it back to Excel. So this is all my input data. This is going to open up all of my applications. This is my IBM one salesforce. And then this is what SAP looks like. You can see where these are really very different applications, but that's not a problem. So even though this is a very classic old school 132 70, this is a new web one. And this is kind of, again, about 40 years old, this is my Word template getting filled out. And I've always loved Word templates, so this makes me happy that we're using that. Now we're going to go to the second person to see what's going on. It's looking for the person in salesforce, and they're not finding them. So the bot's going to automatically create the person in salesforce. So if there are small little hiccups that we've told the bot what to do when they get it, can fix it. I think you might have seen in the corner of my screen where you see this getting emails and it updated my spreadsheet with all the extra data that it needs. And the funniest part about this is always just watching the people. Yeah, my hands were up the whole time, right. I always have to say I wasn't touching it at all but I really love doing this. This is a lot of fun for me. So I think if you're the kind of person that likes doing things where you can see action happening, it's a lot of fun. Okay, so again this is going to fit our automation sit on top of all these different applications and hopefully your path has made it simple enough to be able to interact with them. Now I've talked about the fact that there are other ones. There's Blue Prism, there's Automation anywhere. Microsoft is working on some RPA technology so all of those have similar ideas. We're going to do all these interactions for you so you don't have to. Now you might be wondering what kind of processes are we going to do? And so this is our RPA process selection where we talk about when someone comes to us and they say, hey, I would like to work on I have this task I do every day and I really want you to automate it for me. Can you do it for me? Right. And we go through a list of criteria. So one of the things we really want is first off it's got to be highly manual and very repetitive. It has to be rules based so it can't be just like, well sometimes I want it to do this and sometimes I want it to that. And there's no reason why it's more like a cook that follows a recipe to the tea versus a professional chef that just kind of wings it, right? This is not a professional chef. This is the basic guy. So we're going to go through here and do all these. We're going to evaluate to see if it's good. Will it save us some money? Will it actually make them some money? Will it make our customers happier? So sometimes what happens is our customers get upset because they're not hearing from us quickly enough or we're not answering their questions quickly enough. This will help with that. Sometimes it's also legal things. So maybe we have to make sure that we do some audit and compliance work by a certain deadline or it's going to cost us money in fines if we don't do it. So those are kind of reasons we might do it in automation and then we got to prioritize. So how are we going to order? How do we align the work? So if we have all these really great ideas for automations how do we determine which ones they are? Our center of Excellence have been trained on how to do this and we give them some tools too but how to actually do it so to be honest, a lot of people just put that in a spreadsheet and they kind of organize their ideas that way. But we also have a tool for that, of course. And so here, this is one of the things that just always makes me think about is when I was in college I spent all weekend in the computer lab working on a program to generate this report, right. It was just like a one page report and I showed my sister who was a psychology major and she goes, you spent all weekend on this? And I go, yeah. She goes, Well I would have typed it for you. You didn't have to do that, right? Because she was thinking it was a one time only. You type it up once, it's a report. Right, but it was a report that was supposed to be generated every day. So that's where we talk about the fact that if it's doing it once, yeah, I should have had my sister type it. That would have been amazing for me. But if I have to do it every day, pretty soon she's going to get tired of being asking her to type my reports for me. So that's kind of where if you think of it that way, how you pick things. Now who is your iPad? That's the company that I work for. And again, the Gartner is kind of a famous ratings place and they talked about how we're ranked up here pretty high. There's a leader for the second year and remains a top vendor for ability to execute. What that really for me means is that we're actually able to actually make things happen for you. We don't just actually provide tools that don't really get the job done. But what's interesting here is if you're looking for different RPA vendors, you can see a bunch of different ones. And I will be honest, this Microsoft is probably moving up in the last two years because they've been putting a lot of time and effort on the Microsoft RPA. So the power platforms, I think someone put the chat that's going to be moving up as well. So different types of robots, we have different ways of working. So first off is what you do today, which is 100% human. You're brainstorming with your team, you're looking for some ideas, that's all human interaction that needs to stay human, right? Then we can have some things where we work together. That's where you have a little bot that's running on your machine and you can start it whenever you want it to or maybe it's running all the time. For example, we have a lot of client service representatives that someone calls and asks a question and they can say just a second and they will type in information to the bot and the bot will go out and look for things, the information they need about you and return it back to the rep so that's kind of an interactive bot working with the human. Then the hybrid ones are where we kind of go a little step further. We're set up a bot and a human, but we also have another bot way in the background doing tasks all the time. So that's our big workhorse. So it's in the background, it's checking SQL databases, it's doing lots of queries, running all sorts of stuff that you don't want to wait for. It'll do that all in the background and then it'll come back and tell you when it's done, right? So if you kick something off, like, I want to delete a bunch of stuff, I want to delete customer data, it would actually do that for you after going through a course, some checks and balances and fully unattended. Those are the ones I kind of like a lot because it just goes in the background and runs while you're not even there. So one of my clients was a big financial services company and every day one of the guys had to be at work before six to query all this data from all these different sources and generate reports and then make sure everybody had them in their inboxes at 06:00 A.m.. So we automated that process to do all that query for him. So it all kind of worked and generated the reports and he didn't have to come to work at an ungodly hour anymore. So that makes me happy to make people happy like that, right? And then this is kind of a couple of different ways we could get involved. You could do citizen developers, which are basically people that write their own little automation for themselves. So back in the day, a lot of people would write macros in their Excel spreadsheets, right, that would do some calculations or manipulate data for them in a way that made them happy, right? And then maybe they would actually share that with their groups. So in this analogy, a self user is one that you just create something that works for you, does what you want it to do, and then our power users are the ones that try to make things that will work for lots of people. So it doesn't work just for them, it works for their whole group. And then down here we have our RPA developers. They actually work through that pipeline of suggestions and ideas that people have talked about and they actually build the automation. So if you're an RPA developer, it's not quite like regular coding. We do VB and C sharp under the covers, but it's mostly very basic drag and drop type stuff. It's really nice. That's what we work on. And then it goes out to our center of Excellence and eventually up to our users. Any questions so far? No? Okay, awesome. All right, this is the tool that I use every day. This is the iPad studio. And you can see where there's a little drag and drop interface and you can put in what you want to do and reorganize things. And on the right, you add more data if you want to. So this is the drag and drop one. We also have a view that is like a Visio diagram, but I don't use that view because I am way too picky about everything lining up. I would spend all day lining things up. So I don't use that for you. I always use this view that's a little straight, more straightforward, so that's for our professional users. And then we have our Studio X. And I didn't think this was a good idea when they first started, but it's been really amazing. This makes it so just your average person can say, hey, I want to look at every email I have and I want to do a couple of things to it and send it back out. And it's really straightforward, handles a lot of the stuff that you would have to figure out yourself. It does it for you. So this is what people that don't want to be a programmer would work with. We have had some people that started with this and then said, hey, you know what, we're kind of ready to update and we want to start working with APIs and doing more complicated code. Then they would switch from the Studio X to studio. And then Orchestrator is kind of like an orchestra leader, basically. It runs all those back end processes, all those unattended bots. It has some cool graphics if you want some dashboards so you can see what's going on. You can see what processes are being run, how they're being run, if there's any errors that you need to be watching out for. What I have seen is I've seen some people that have one person that just works a normal eight to five job watching Orchestrator and making sure things are working. But I've also seen some where it was like a NASA control center where there's like people 24/7 with huge video screens watching all their bots running, which is a lot, but they were doing a lot of very crucial business critical things. They had to watch them all the time. And here we just talk about different places we run. So if you want, you can do the old on premises. You can run using your computer, your real computer. You can use your private cloud that you've set up yourself, a public cloud, so Amazon or AWS. And then you can also just ditch all of that and use automation cloud, which makes it so you don't have to have any hardware or any infrastructure whatsoever. So I don't like hardware, so this is always my choice. No hardware, but that's how that works. Okay, I want to talk a little bit about the job market. Of course, this is really just hypothetical, right? But just to give you an idea with the coconut 19 what we saw, especially 2020, a lot of people were pushing to say, hey, we need to do some things that we can actually do remote work. One of my clients had to go through before times to work remotely. You had to apply for remote work, they had to do something in work day. They had a bunch of different things, different steps they had to go through, right? Well, suddenly it went from having one person a month ask for that to 100 people a day basically asking for remote work. So they made a bot that would go and do all those steps for them so it would enable everyone to be a remote workforce. So that's trying to do something very quickly and just talking about trying to accelerate our digitalization. We don't want to have a lot of paper sitting around, we want to be able to read all that data if it's all possible. And this is talking about how we're going to do where new jobs are going to be coming from. And I like the numbers because it says 85 million will be decreased, but we're going to be increasing by 97 million. So that's what I'm hoping. We have 12 million jobs wise. And up at the top, the one in red is what you basically will be talking about, the process automation specialist. And those are people that understand how processes work. And a process would be something like an order to cash process, where you go from taking an order from a client to checking the inventory, to making a shipping request to invoicing, and then making sure that you've received the cash properly and checking all those boxes in between. So that would be an end to end process that we might automate. So these are the things we're hoping to do, like data specialists, AI, machine learning people. These people are going to be having some interesting jobs. And I will tell you just in a few years I've been doing this, that the data scientist piece has become more and more doable by your average person. So when we first started this, you had to have a PhD type of person to get this stuff. And now I can do some machine learning stuff and I have just some basic python skills. I'm not a data scientist, but I can do a lot of cool stuff. So I like that. Making it easier for people to do interesting things. All right, and then we want to make sure that we're getting well paying jobs and that they're actually available out there. And if you look for RPA, you're going to see a bunch of different jobs. And again, a lot of things can be work from home if they want us to be able to interact with people. When I was a consultant, I flew every week to talk to my clients, but now I don't anymore. But that's what they used to do I think people have changed what they need, right, quite a bit. So as an RPA person, what I have as my job is part of my job is heads down development, where I'm just working on what I'm coding on. And part of it is also talking to people that are going to be using the tool, using the bot, say, what are you working? How is it supposed to work? And getting a lot of requirements from them. So there's a lot of jobs in between that you can actually fit into. And this is a little bit different. I like this slide even though it's a little bit redundant on the other ones. But I like the immersion skills, the fact that we're going to start working on analytical thinking and innovation, even though I can't say it. And then the critical thinking and creative stuff. I love the creativity. I think that's what I would like to see people doing more of, instead of looking at bottle of numbers and writing on a piece of paper. Okay, here are some of it. So when I first started this five or so years ago, there was pretty much RPA developer. That was it. Now we've got the citizen developers that are developing their own things, people that are actually using the bots, so actually having that little assistant that they talk to like a chat bot. We've got business analysts that have been trained to really talk to people and understand what they really need. And if you've ever worked with a really good business analyst, you know how valuable those people are. They make your life so much easier. If they could talk to people and really understand what they do in their daily basis. If there are four people doing the same job, but they all do it slightly differently, a good business analyst can kind of say, oh, even though you did it differently, you came up with the same result and I can kind of streamline that process to what really has to be done, right? If you're good at that type of thing, you're not even programming, you're just understanding how things work. The solution architects, I think it's hysterical because we have actual architect picture. But you're not building things physically. You're just basically deciding the best way to do something. So if I said my requirements where I have to have a million transactions a day, they go, okay, well we're going to have to really think about how we're going to be able to do that given the space time continuum, how we can actually get that to work. So that's what that solution architect would do. The infrastructure engineers are the hardware guy. I so love them because I don't love hardware. So they're going to actually make sure that all my systems are working. If I deploy two robots that are on two machines and then I need to scale up to 100 machines, a good infrastructure person is going to make sure that that's flawless, that it just spreads out to 100 machines. They're not going in and checking every single one of those machines. It just automatically happens. Right. All right. And so that could be Azure AWS. It could be local anywhere that you're going to be working on it. And of course, we always need people that can train us how to do the job, how to do the project management, because the tool is run. Our Pay projects are a little different than a normal project for a couple of different reasons. And so you need to be able to understand some of the blockers that we end up having that needs to be resolved. So a good manager is worth his weight and gold. And then the consultants, like I used to do, where I fly in and help you out and then fly out. So that's what a good consultant does, sets you up for success. Okay, so we talked about what that could do for you as a career, as a job, and I want to talk to you a little bit about what you could use RPA for today for yourself. So one thing I did, my aunt ran a bookstore and she wrote book reviews for her local paper. And I thought it would be kind of cool to see everything she'd ever written for the newspaper. So I wrote a Bot that would go through the archive and find everything they had her name with it and download all those pages of JPEG. The automation part I've got done. What I'm going to do with those JPEGs, I'm not sure. Right. Print them out, make a book, I don't know, but I have them. And you might think, well, how long would that have taken? And I'll be honest, it might be even if I had done it manually versus not. But there were 70 of them, so 70 of them is a lot, really, if you think about it, to get that to work. And then this other one I thought was funny. My manager wanted us to track our time spent with our customers. So our team, of course, immediately figured out how we could automate that because nobody wants to do a time card. So we switched it out and figured out how to if you look at our calendar meetings and emails, the calendar invites, we can tell exactly how much time we spent. And then our emails, you can say it probably took me about an hour and a half per email to do each one of these things. And it does pre populate our time card system. But I did Goof one time and forgot to proofread it, and it said I worked like 20 hours a day. So you still have to check the work. And one other thing, melissa was talking about some of the volunteer work. This would be a great place to do some volunteer work. For places that get a lot of information coming in and they got to collate all the information and do something with it. You could use RPA for that type of stuff for a nonprofit. And now next, how can I learn RPA? First off, I'm not sure about other companies, but I do know that provides your iPad Studio Community Edition that you can download, you can use. Most of the things we use are web interface. The Studio I showed you is only for Windows at this point. But everything you need to learn and explore RPA is available for free. So you can get started immediately. There are some restrictions, like for example, when we're scanning documents, we wouldn't let you scan a million documents on the free software because that means that you're probably using it for your business and that's violating the free standard, right? If you want to do it for work, you're supposed to pay for it. And there's a link here which I think they're going to put in the chat, how to download it and get everything set up. And you might think, why is UiPath doing this? And one of the things we do is, first off, we want everyone to learn the tool and it makes it so more people know the tool, which helps us with sales. But also we're constantly updating. All of our new software immediately goes to the Community Edition. So everyone that signs up for the Community Edition is a beta tester for us, right? So if they find a bug or have any issues or have any suggestions, they feedback back to us and we reply. So it's a really great system. And then they also have these free learning courses, which these are all the different products that we actually have. And feel sorry for me because I have to know all these products. But there's training for every single one of these. Lots of really good training. The same guy with an English accent does all the courses so you can get really familiar with his accent. I'm assuming he exists and is not a robot, but I haven't met him yet. So lot of free training here. And then as you're going into the academy or you iPad academy, you can see where it's divided by roles. So it actually will say if you're going to be a solution architect, these are the types of classes you need to take. Right? RPA developers are going to have the heaviest workload. The RPA Developer Foundation is 40 hours worth of training. That's a lot. But the solution architects could be some of the other jobs are a little less, including the coe leaders and champions. They're just coming in here to understand basically what the tool is capable of and how best to use it in their organization. So that's a little easier task to do. And if you don't want to use your iPad training or you want to supplement it. YouTube has just so many different courses that you can look at. Andrews Jensen is a really good YouTuber. I like his classes a lot. LinkedIn Learning has some generic RPA classes plus some that are tool specific. And then for example, if you wanted to dive into something kind of a deep hair topic, you can do your path with Azure DevOps, how you can actually do a CI CD pipeline and push your automations out nicely. But basically we have a lot of people out there using the tool and posting to YouTube and posting to our community, but also just out there in the world. So if you looked for a problem, someone's out there help trying to help you solve it. And if you took all those classes and you got really good at it, you could actually take this test to be a certified professional. So you know how it is. You have certifications are it helps in some ways to be able to say, I've done this and I passed this test. It's no guarantee that you're going to be the most proficient person ever, but you've done something so it's a nice thing to have on your tool belt. And this just talks about how many hours it would take and what the experience would be like to get each level of certification. We have the associate level and we have the advanced training. I know I did take the Blue Prism certification five years ago and it was a similar concept. They want you to learn the tool really well and then be able to take a test well enough to be able to say, you know, the product. So I think most of our tools, most of the RPA tools expect you to get certified at some point. And if you're going to school, these are some of the schools that we have found in working with as a partner so that they actually use RPA as some of their classes in their classes for teaching business analysts or developers how to use RPA. Just a ton of places. So that's kind of cool. So you would actually graduate with some very technical, practical knowledge. Okay, and I'm getting ready to wrap it up. Hopefully it's not been too fast or too slow. This is kind of what I wish I had known. I stole some of this from another person. So I thought, oh, I like to slide this concept of having what I wish I had known. First off, be diligent with your work and personal life balance. I know people tell you all the time, but if your family needs you, your family needs you. And that should always not be, don't apologize for that. That's just the way it should be. It's never equal balance. My family can tell you sometimes they were a little lower than work and sometimes they're a little higher than work, but you try and then make sure you value your skills. So you may think you've been doing some volunteer work that taught you something that doesn't really count. No, everything counts. Everything you've ever done counts. When I was in school, I took a word processing class because I was tired of taking business classes from my minor. To be honest, I wanted to graduate, so I took it end up that was the first thing I did at my job out of college, was teaching secretaries how to use word processing. That was just a part of my job. But it was a huge thing to actually have that experience. And in this environment, don't panic if you get laid off. Just make sure you don't jump just to do something, because if you go too low, it takes a long time to recover. And then I put this picture in here because this is a Vax machine. This is a micro, which, if you can imagine, this is about 4ft tall, and this is a printer. So what we called micro back in the day was not micro. I devoted a lot of my career to this type of machine and eventually had to let it go. And just so you know, no matter how great the software or the company you're working with, know that you're going to have to adapt over your career to something different. Here's my LinkedIn profile. Please contact me if you want to stay in touch. And my big thing is always keep backups, because it's not a good thing to have no backups. And then these are the links, and I think that they've been posting in the chat. Right. Okay. And this is awesome. Melissa actually QAED one of my links that didn't work for her, and I was like, Yay, it's nice to have a QA. Someone always backing you up and checking things out for you. Okay, and that's it for me. Thank you so much. We can now open it up for questions. You could either unmute yourself and ask a question or share it in the chat. And I'll help you read it. I'll read it out loud. Cynthia, I have a question. So if someone was looking for a career change, do you think their first steps are to dive into the links that you have suggested and just kind of learning the software? Yes, because about a year ago, we have kind of an internship type program, only not it's a full hire, but the associate's program. We had a couple of people that were real estate people or were other people, and they had other careers. One lady was very into. She worked at a retirement community and had a lot of medical expertise from that. And she took the course. She did a boot camp on programming in general, and then she learned our tool as well. And that was really like a big in the background. Experience in another field helps if you can also say, and I was able to learn either a development boot camp or RPA. I think we have a question in the chat. It might be a similar answer where Mary has asked, is this something you could do with no skill set? Yeah, I think so. It's kind of weird because I used to do training for automated testing quite a bit, and I was often surprised at how horrible some developers were at learning a new tool, right, and just could not get it, and how many people that were not supposed to be developers that picked up on it and just ran and did amazing jobs. Right. So I don't ever judge you based on what you did before, because if you've never seen this before, you may be amazing at it. Right? And so that's why I kind of like the fact that you can test this out and see if you like it. For me, it's so much fun watching these things run and seeing them work properly and the highs that's all working great, and then when it fails, going, oh my gosh, how do I fix this? And then debugging it's like a little puzzle. And for me, it's a lot of fun, but I know a lot of people hate it, absolutely hate it. But that's okay. So you can figure it out if you'd like it or not. Cindy, I have a question for you. In your time working as an RPA consultant, when you're called in to work on a project, how far along in the RPA journey are those companies at that time? Is there a common problem set that you're dealing with? A lot of times they're brand new. It's kind of interesting because sometimes we walk in and the department has never heard of us and didn't know we were showing up. Right. Someone bought the tool for them and we're like, Hi, yeah, this is going to be great. Other times they've been researching it, they've dipped their toes in a little bit, they've kind of understood what is going on. But it's like any tool, it helps have someone come in and give you some structure, some best practices, how things are working. So if they've been in there, most times it's pretty new. They're fairly new, but we also come in sometimes and just do when they've been working for a while and they're not seeing the results they wanted. Right. So there's an ROI that they should be getting and if they're not getting it or their people aren't accepting the tools, what's going on, we can come in and help fix that too. I have a question in the chat. How long, realistically, does it take to learn this? I would say in two weeks. It's like 40 hours. So 40 hours of set of time doing the hands on coursework where you actually creating things and testing them out. At that point, you should have a really good idea if you like it, and if you're good at it. If you just hate it after 40 hours of trying it, then you probably don't want to. But doing your own stuff and I think you've seen like, I did a bunch of stuff. You can do any kind of bot you want. It doesn't have to be smart at all. It could just be something you think is interesting. And if you do it for yourself and then if you really love it, then that should be enough to at least get you started. You'll never stop learning. If you're a consultant, you always get something new. So I'll go into one client and they're using SharePoint and only Microsoft products. And then my next client is Oracle. And their products they're using in a mainframe. I mean, everybody is using something completely different. So if you stayed at one company, you may never have to learn much more. But if you're a consultant, especially, you're learning all the time. The brain is always working, which is great for me. Does anyone have any more questions? I have one more. Have you ever been surprised by the type of project someone is planning on tackling? And if so, like story time, what you got? Okay, so one of my epic failures, and it haunts me, is they were getting COVID forms, right? And they were getting a bunch of them in and they were changing the form every two weeks. The layout of the form changed every two weeks, right? And so I'm trying to digitize them and get the data off of it and some of them were scanned badly and everything else. And so I was like, okay, we can do this. This is no problem. But because of the variation, if I need someone, they call it Human in the Loop, where I'm going to send you the data and you're going to see the form here and the data here and you're going to tell me what's right and what's wrong, right? So if Emily came in as a meal, right, you would say, oh, you're missing a Y and you'd fix it, right? Well, one of my clients said the client said, no, we don't want to do that. We will not manually verify anything. And it was like, well then, yeah, sorry you've wasted all the time we've spent on this project. So, yeah, a lot of it's just understanding that. The other one was I was surprised because when we started the process, they said that they were going to have hundreds of transactions a week. And then when we got right to production, we had tested it, it was all ready to go. And they go, you know what, we only get like one a month again, why do we do this? I love that terminology, human in the Loop. I haven't heard that before, but I feel like that applies to other places and software, especially as we're working with other teams and looking for other ways we can automate streamline, increase our contribution margin, having that human in the loop that really understands. Yeah, you go from 80% to 100%, right? Yeah. It's really important. That's what's nice about the bots is they can fit kind of in that way where they can do all their little work and then they can spit out just the ones they don't like. I'm not feeling comfortable with these guys. And then pick it up again. Right. I like the fact that you can do a lot of mixture with that. That's great. Thank you. We have another question in the chat. Okay, so this is something of an industry standard and is known and popular. How does someone talk about this? And Mary would like to build automated bots. Yeah, so it's basically if you say RPA or robotic process automation, that's common terminology and they know what you're talking about and so yeah, you should just go to the link and download. Well, I would say you iPad because I know it's all free to start. And then they're going to walk you through how to do everything you need to do. Give you some sample application to work from once you've done that. I did Blue Prism and then I did automation anywhere a little bit and then I did you bypass and then back to Blue Prism. So back and forth. And the tools are, they pretty much are very similar. They're done a different way but they're all very similar. So yeah, once you've got one tool down, you're fine. Is that the question? You think she has a couple more questions? Do you start the conversation with I build automated bots? Do some of these companies already have their internal automations and does the UiPath make it better? Yeah, so some of the internal automations, what we see is sometimes people have well, one of the places I went to was a lot of spreadsheets with macros built in. Right. So that's a little bit of an automation but it's not really end to end automation. So we kind of add around it or we replace some of those macros with the automation. So sometimes people already have it and they just want to add people. And if you were just getting started, I would highly recommend getting on with a group that could actually mentor you through this. My first Blue Prison project, I didn't know the tool hardly at all and I was by myself in Canada so it was a lot. So to save your sanity, if you could be like a junior person on a project would be nice and then you can take off from there. There's another one question. I think that's it. Does anyone else have any more questions? I think that's it. Did you still want to do the product demo or would you like me to continue recording or would you like me to stop the recording? You can continue recording. I think hopefully the demo goes well. All right, so can you guys see the thing that says your iPad Studio at the top? Yes. Okay. So here are some different things I've done. So this is the one I talked about where it actually goes through the newspaper site. It will take me just a second to bring this up. Again, not expecting that you guys are going to understand everything we're talking about. It's just kind of an idea of how it looks. Okay, so if I go to the project, you can see all the files associated with the project. This is my main one. I can open it here, or I can just click open main workflow. Okay. And so what this is doing here is you can see just get visually how it looks. I'm going to open up this URL, and then I'm going to type something into this field. And what's nice about this is it actually shows you a picture. So when I created this item, it took a picture of it. Right. And then this is what I'm going to type in there. So that's variable. So if you're a technical person, we can use any kind of variables we want. There we go. So, for example, this would be my variable. It's a string. This is my default value. This is a little sloppy coding because this was personal, right? So don't judge me too much. So that's that. And here's, here I'm going to type in my date range. And again, I was just sloppy, and I just typed in the date range that I wanted. You could do some date math. If I was going to do a bunch of these, I would put it into a spreadsheet or database or something that would pull in all the data. So it's going to type in those two things. It's going to click this button. Now where we have fun is and let me go ahead and start debugging this. So it's opening up Chrome and going to this page and typing in what I wanted to type in. Okay, you can see it started blinking because it got to my breakpoint here. All right. So one of the things you can see and I'll go ahead and stop here. When we're looking at these items, the part that gets tricky, it depends on how someone wrote this web page. If they wrote this web page with everything named, well, I can find things very simply. If they didn't, it can be a little bit tricky. So here I'm going to open up just a little tool here. And this is kind of the puzzle thing. And so sometimes when I'm working with people, they want it to be like, does it always do this? And it's like, well, it's not always. It always does this. You have to kind of go through this is the web page. This is the tree all the way getting down to the button that I was looking for. And then we call them selectors. This is how I'm going to find that item on the page. So the picture you see is just for humans. It has nothing to do with the bot. The bot doesn't use that picture. But we're going to use this little selector to say, how am I going to find it? Now, this one actually had really good names, so it has a good ID and it has a good a, a name so I can find it that way. Sometimes we have to get creative and sometimes we have to say, find me the object on the page that's next to this one that's named well or that's next to this picture or something like that. So that's where it gets to be a little bit of fun to try and figure out how things work. And if I hit highlight here, it should highlight it. And that's where my typing would go. I'm going to go through here, clicking the button. And then this is where we're going to go through. And once we've done the search results, we're going to loop through all of those results. And to do that, we're going to click this show more results. And so I probably should let this go a little bit further, but let me go ahead and just do it. If I hit Search, this is kind of an interesting page because normally what we have is we have a Next Page button, but this one didn't have a Next Page button. So what we do is we're going to keep hitting Show More Results and it's going to keep adding more pages. So I'm just looping through until that little Show More Results button no longer shows. Okay? And when it no longer shows, then I'm going to grab all the data off of here and then start going through it. You can see where it's different than regular programming because you're actually interacting with somebody else's application and having to figure out how they did it and how to fix going around it. And you'll notice if you're a developer, this is a try catch block around this because I know that eventually when I try to click this button, it's going to throw an error because it can't click it because there are no more results to show. So we got try catches. If it happens and there's an exception, I can come in here and I can actually say I'm done this page. All right, so let me back this up. I'm going to close the web page and then I'm just going to run this. This is going to run probably too long, but I just want you guys to get a feeling for what it looks like, to type in the name and the date and does the search. And this is the part where it's going through and it's going to keep hitting show more results, show more results, until it can't anymore. And when it pauses, that's because we're giving a little bit of time to see if that button will show up if we wait long enough. And so that's what we're waiting for, is to see if it's going to show up. And when we finally go, okay, it's not going to show up, then we're going to get all that data and we put it into a data table, which is like an Excel spreadsheet. You've got columns and rows of data that you want to look at. And once we have that data in a data table, we can actually loop through it and click on every single one of them. Okay, so it's loading the first one, and that's my aunt there. It's going to load the first page and it's going to save it as a JPEG, and it's going to go to the next page, and it's just keep doing that over and over and over. And we have a bug. Okay, I'd like to say that it's on purpose, but I did not. Basically what's saying is it's got a problem with that page. And this is the kind of thing that as we're playing with these, we realize that sometimes the pages load at different speeds. So when I was testing this a billion times, it always worked at the same speed, and I was fine, but in this particular case, it wasn't. So we'd have to actually go in here and figure out how to code around that error to make it so it would actually click correctly. Now, if I ran this again, the odds are really good this would work the next time. But if you're a diligent person, you're going to actually fix this to say, okay, if it doesn't work, I need to do something like this. Retry I have over here to say, if it doesn't work, try again. So that's what this is doing. So you can see where it's not as difficult as having to type in code most of the time. We have a couple of little tiny things, like this one here. All right, so this is probably where you're going to see some things that if you were basically taking something out of my data table, making a string and then splitting it on the question mark anyway, this is just a little bit of code. This, you actually type in code, but everything else is just a lot of drag and drops and work on the properties on the side. And if you do source control, we can interface with all different kinds of source controls. We tried really hard to get people to be more diligent about checking in their code, doing code reviews, doing pull requests. Just like real developers, right? Anyone want to see anything else? Cynthia? We have a couple of questions in the chat Mary asked. So this is something like a web scraper or better or more precise, right? Yes. So you can tell exactly what you want to do. And this one's working against a web page. I have another one. Let me open up my other one. And then Brittany has asked, would this be considered low code? Yes, definitely low code. Thank you. I always forget to say that low code, because you don't have to be intense development. When we get we get the parts where we're calling APIs, or we can do it a little invoke code section where we can write a little bit of BB or C sharp or something like that and actually write a section of code like that. But it's not often that you have to, and if so, we can help you with that. So this one right here is interactive. It's going to do an Office 365 application. So we're actually going to come grab our data. And so when we're connecting to Office 365, there's a bunch of different ways to do it. You can do it with the interactive token. If you guys are used to as you're in Office 365, you understand there's a lot of different ways you can connect depending on how they have your environment set up. And this just makes it pretty simple for this part. And then you pass in some data that, you know, like your tenant ID, your secret, et cetera. And then this is the send mail where I can just put in the list of people I want to send the mail to, what the subject is. And I was lazy and I didn't put anything in here, but you can actually put attached files as well. This was just a mock up for here. Cynthia, you said VB and C sharp. Does it use? Python also? It doesn't yet. I say yes. I don't know if they're going to plan to do Python or not. And you know what? That's a really good question. I have never tried to do an invoke code of Python. It just has those two right there. It is Vbnet and Csharp. But what you can do is you can actually run so you can invoke PowerShell. So you could do PowerShell that would do your Python and come back. You could run another application. There are lots of different ways to get around it. So one of the things, like, for example, when we first started doing FTP, we had your FTP from an application or from the command line, but then they eventually wrote us a little cool little FTP thing, which I don't have loaded, but it would actually check for things. For example, this one does a download file. And what this does, this little thing has been awesome because it basically says, Monitor my downloads folder, and as soon as the file shows up, keep moving, right? Whereas otherwise we had to code all those steps for clicking all the buttons and waiting for it to show up. And it could be a long time where it could. Be a short time I haven't found anything I just couldn't do with the tool. Some things are really hard to do with the tool. Right? But you can always get something to happen. Maybe you shouldn't, but I do. We have a question. Does this work the same on a Mac? The studio doesn't work on a Mac yet. And what's so funny is a lot of people work at you. iPad have max and they're always complaining about it and so they're working on ways to make that better. Let me check real quick before I say anything. I'm going to log into the cloud. So the cloud is what you would get if you signed up. You can get your own little cloud instance. Another question is is this mostly because of the way Windows is set up? Yes, and because most of the applications that we're working against are Windows applications. So we do Citrix and SAP and Oracle and those types of things are huge. Right. There's not a lot of Mac applications that we have to work with, to be honest. Here it is good. So this is public. We have a studio which we're working to be a web based version of what I'm working on Windows. So at some point we might be able to do a project using the web and so it wouldn't care if you were on a Mac. We also have it where it'll spin up little VMs for you. So either a VM in your cloud or it could actually spin one up that UiPath just creates out of magic, right? Creates this magic VM, runs a little process and comes back. So even if you, even if you were mostly on a Mac, you could actually have a bot that worked for you and you wouldn't care. Again, not promising anything. Does this work on Linux? We do have some Linux bots that we're working on now that you can do so we can spin up and the studio doesn't work on Linux, but you can run things on Linux. And one of our big tools right now is people that didn't want to use this automation cloud. They can put this whole big thing on either their internal cloud or on hardware. And that's mostly Linux based. So that's some of the old skills I had to pull back out. I haven't had to use Linux commands for a very long time and had to use those again. So yeah, there's Linux at the company. If you wanted to play with Linux. Would it run on something like Raspberry Pi? No, almost definitely. Well, I say no, I've never done that. I should say that I hate to say no, because if you could do an emulator yeah, you could probably do it. You probably could. These are great questions. Does anybody ask any questions? You could add it in the chat or feel free to unmute yourself. When I was in grade school, one of my skills was supposed to be being able to find things. So I'm a Google person. No, this guy doesn't know. That's not a dissident, but you can always look, if it's going to show up, it'll show up. So as soon as it's available yeah, somebody actually did they actually emulated? Yeah. This is why I never say no. Okay, so we should probably quit the demo before anything breaks because you know how demos go. Any other questions? I think that's it. I can stop the recording. I can sign up. I'm sorry.