William Kerr is the D’Arbeloff Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he is a co-director of Harvard’s Managing the Future of Work project and faculty chair of the Launching New Ventures program for executive education. Recently, he has interviewed Daniel Dines, co-founder and CEO of robotic process automation giant UiPath, to find out how far up the white-collar value chain automation is pushing, and what the optimal mix of human and machine intelligence is. During their conversation, Daniel answered the following questions:
- What’s your current geographic balance—Europe, U.S., and outside?
- Can you paint for us a bit of the overall technology landscape, and where are you most actively working?
- When you go into this more advanced space [low code/no-code type environment], how much does the end user of this need to be a programming expert or be able to work with those types of technologies directly?
- How do you think about automation and its impact on jobs?
- As you think about contingent workforce, contract workers, gig workers, you have a very porous organization. And so how do you keep that ecosystem aligned? How do you incentivize it, encourage it?
- In 10 years’ time, where will RPA be? And what will Computer Vision be doing? And how do you see it sort of transforming our workplace further?
- What are the next few tasks or things that currently humans are doing it, but you look at it and say we could do better?
As for the secret sauce of UiPath technologies mentioned in the title, Daniel Dines said it is the combination of API automation, user interface automation, and Computer Vision that are packed in a low-code/no-code automated workflow designer. That makes it extremely easy for to build automation that scales, and very fast.
