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Podcast - Masters of Automation

Masters of Automation – a podcast series hosted by Alp Uguray that tells stories of creative entrepreneurs and technologists who change the future of work through automation and artificial intelligence.

 

 

The automation ecosystem evolves daily with new startups forming and technologies building. Hear directly from the true masters of automation, their stories of how they built startups to innovate, new technology and products to progress, services, and offerings to deliver, and finally, apply automation for good.

EPISODES

Joy Mountford is an internationally recognized leader in design, particularly human-computer interface, user experience, and interaction design.

 

She has built and led the world-class design and innovation teams at Apple, Ford Motors, Akamai, Yahoo, and Interval Research. She has designed interfaces for various systems including airplane cockpits, computers, the web, consumer electronics, musical instruments, and toys. She is an inventor on over 28 key patents granted in multimedia and human-computer interaction.

 

She created the International University Design Expo, which has touched the lives of thousands of design students for more than 20 years. She has given invited presentations at the top conferences in the field including ACM SIGCHI, IDCA, EG, and TED. She received the Women in Leadership Award in 2019 and received the SIGCHI Life-Time Practice Award and was elected to the CHI Academy in 2012.

 


 

George Roth is an entrepreneur, advisor, and technologist who built a start-up in 1999 that focuses on Intelligent Document Processing and data extraction. George was born in Romania, also the home of UiPath. Up until 2018, they were working on a system that extracts data from unstructured documents using AI and NLP.

 

People started to take notice, so in May 2018 UiPath acquired the technology.

 

He studied at the first specialized high school for computer programming until he moved to the US in 1991. George dedicated his many years to researching and developing Semantic Technologies, NLP, and AI applications in unstructured content processing. After working as a Software Architect for many years, in 1999, together with his Co-Founders, he started Recognos Inc. where he helped build the platform’s AI engine. In April 2018, the platform was acquired by UiPath to create UiPath’s Document Understanding capability. At UiPath, after leading the technology alliances program for many years, he is now taken a lead role as an Evangelist for UiPath. He has seen the technology partners of UiPath, who similarly also build intelligent document processing solutions and beyond.

 


 

 

Rob Enslin joins UiPath most recently from Google Cloud, where he served as President of Global Customer Operations. In that role, he led global field operations, tripling the size of the sales organization and driving Google Cloud’s growth at scale.

 

Enslin also spent 27 years at SAP in various leadership roles across sales and operations. In his final role with SAP, Enslin served as President, Cloud Business Group, and Executive Board Member, where he led the development and delivery of SAP’s entire portfolio of cloud applications and services, including SAP Concur, SAP Ariba, SAP Customer Experience, SAPSuccessFactors, and the Qualtrics business. He developed and managed SAP’s entire cloud product portfolio, led the field revenue and enablement efforts across multiple geographies, and oversaw core functions, including professional services, ecosystem, channel, and solutions.

 

 

Todd Schiller is the co-founder and CEO of PixieBrix, a company empowering everyone to customize their web and desktop applications for their use. With their low code platform, you can add a new button that triggers the automation, makes an API call, or change the UI for the UX your employees and customers need.

 

Before founding PixieBrix, he built knowledge management and business analytics tools for the world’s most significant hedge funds and consumer companies. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.

 

PixieBrix takes its place in the Masters of Automation because they allow a new way to get work done. Their capability is not helping the UI of the apps that interact with humans but can also manipulate the UI of the websites that RPA robots interact. For example, if a button changes location too many times or user input is unextractable, use PixieBrix to modify the page for automation. The opportunity here for process automation and enabling any user to increase their productivity is limitless, whether that applies to human-in-the-loop or end-to-end processing.

 


 

Prof.dr.ir. Wil van der Aalst is the Chief Scientist of Celonis and a full professor at RWTH Aachen University, leading the Process and Data Science (PADS) group. He coined the field of Process Mining, and his research interests include Process Mining, business process and workflow management, process modeling, and analysis.

 

As the professor noted in this episode, not many people and companies, including SAP and IBM, believed at the time what this technology could accomplish. They were surprised but did not implement it. There were skeptics and resistance to change. Many enterprises go back to old ways of doing things because it is easier.

 

His students in his Process Mining courses branched out and built the Process Mining companies you see around the world, including; ProcessGold, Celonis, and PAFNow. As the academic field of study transitioned into product companies that aim to sell and bring this unique technology to enterprises around the world, Process Mining became a vital ingredient of the digital transformation initiatives. Now, set your clocks to 2022 and watch the news — SAP acquires Signavio, Microsoft acquires Minit, UiPath acquires ProcessGold, and Appian acquired LanaLabs.

 

The acquisitions are a great testament to the customer’s ask to not focus only on the diagnostics but target execution and actions. By combining the rest of the platforms’ automation, execution, and process management capabilities, the enterprises aim to improve their business performance.

 

 

Ian has witnessed firsthand the inception, evolution, and growth of RPA and Intelligent Automation and the advancement of the Future of Work technologies like OCR, ML, Process Intelligence, and Low-Code/No-Code.

 

He is an entrepreneur, author, advisor, investor, and influencer in intelligent automation and the future of the work technologies space. As an entrepreneur, he raised funding rounds and went through acquisitions that led him to take the role of Chief Marketing Officer at Sykes Inc.

 

His thought leadership is training thousands of people to get started with process automation, reducing the barriers of entry to the space while advancing the understanding of it. As part of Ian’s initiative to focus on the future of work, he has developed courses on RPA, Intelligent Automation, and Process Intelligence. He is also co-author of the first book to explore Intelligent Automation.

 

 

Param Kahlon, the Chief Product Officer at UiPath, has been shaping the roadmap of platforms and the products for many years, previously at Microsoft and SAP before joining UiPath.

 

Now he shapes the adoption of the future of work technologies like RPA, Process Mining, Test Automation, Analytics, AI, and beyond. The work we do and the processes we interact with during our daily jobs now change based on the work that Param and his team and colleagues at UiPath do. He is a true master of automation.

 


 

 

ALP UGURAY, CREATOR & HOST

Alp Uguray is a technologist and advisor with 3x UiPath (MVP) Most Valuable Professional Award and is a globally recognized expert on intelligent automation, AI (artificial intelligence), RPA, process mining, and enterprise digital transformation.

 

Previously, Alp founded an early-stage AI startup that focuses on the impact of crowd sentiment in news sources and social media on the financial performance of products, companies, and services. After that, Alp joined one of the first RPA and Intelligent Automation pure-play startup consulting companies named Symphony Ventures as their 6th US employee, where he witnessed the RPA industry along with the startup, grow from zero to one and beyond to multiple series of rounds and finally IPOs. Alp led multiple Intelligent Automation, RPA, and digital transformation projects as Solution Architect, Transformation Lead, and Solutions Expert for Fortune 100 companies. He has expertise in automation, digital transformation, product management & design, and process mining.  Alp is currently a mentor at FoundersBoost, funded by TechStars, and a contributor at TechCrunch+.