Mihir Shukla, CEO Of Automation Anywhere: Creating Digital Coworkers For Every Employee – Forbes

Mihir Shukla, CEO at Automation Anywhere

Automation Anywhere provides a cloud automation platform to automate end-to-end business processes. The company has over 2,400 employees worldwide and is a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. I spoke with founder and CEO Mihir Shukla about his vision for automation, the current state of the industry, and how his leadership has evolved since founding the company in 2003.

Karen Walker: When you founded this company almost 20 years ago, everything was so different in terms of automation. What was your vision then?

Mihir Shukla: Twenty years ago, in a different role, I traveled to many parts of the world. I saw millions of people sitting in cubicles, and a considerable part of their jobs was very mechanical - copying and pasting from one screen to another. I said to myself, We werent put on the planet to do this. This is not a human thing to do. It is very robotic.

Im very passionate about unleashing human potential. Ive always believed that talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. My vision at that time was to unleash human potential by allowing every company to build a digital workforce with a digital coworker for every employee.

Walker: There is a great demand today for the workforce to do more and more. But even with an increased focus on profitability for many companies, we do need to be more effective about how we provide meaningful jobs for our workforce.

Shukla: That's right. We must rethink how we use people and where to use automation.

Walker: I know that part of what you've set out to do is around workforce transformation. Can you give some examples of how that has occurred through automation?

Shukla: Take a bank where you have knowledge workers in every retail branch and in the back office and mid-office in various functions. One such bank asked us, How do we transform this 180-year-old bank into a digitally operating bank where every worker has a digital coworker? When you walk into this bank's branch and you want to open an account, the employee is not going to take all the information, type in every field and make sure it's been typed correctly.

They're going to press a few buttons. And the bots will do most of the work for them. That allows the employees to be more engaged with the customer and to understand their needs better. This now happens across hundreds of processes for this bank. They operate with about 30,000 knowledge workers, all enabled with a digital coworker. It has completely changed the culture of the bank.

Walker: Better for the employee, better for the customer, and better for the company overall. I know that the buzzword in automation in the last few years has been robotic process automation (RPA). Could you talk about the trends in RPA and the state of the RPA market today?

Shukla: RPA is how this trend started. Today, it has gone much further to what we call an intelligent automation platform. The platform now allows you to discover processes using artificial intelligence automatically. It enables you to digitize documents and make sense of records. The resulting data gives you amazing insights about how your work is developing and where it could be improved.

In the last two years, the trends in this area have grown significantly. For example, 90% of business leaders tell us that they're using automation to help address the staffing shortages.

Even with the way economy is today, where budgets are tight, 77% of the companies have decided to increase their funding for automation. So, they may be cutting elsewhere, but they're using automation to be more efficient.

The other trend is the growth of the cloud in automation. Ninety-two percent of the customers that we speak to say they have a cloud-first approach to automation.

People realized that it is more seamless to scale and utilize hybrid work models on a cloud. Weve seen a 700% increase in our cloud operations.

Walker: For leaders who want to adopt intelligent automation, where do they start?

Shukla: The first thing I would tell them is to realize this is not a nice to have -this is a must have for every organization today.

It is always a partnership between business and IT, and it takes leadership. Once you decide that there is no other choice but to adopt automation, then the question becomes how to bring everybody along. Where do you stack, and how do you scale?

To bring everyone along, we must top-down mandate the adoption of automation- first strategies. Then, we must educate employees using our communities and learning programs.

I would mention one more thing. The world has changed today, and employees are now taking a job based on which company will allow them to work with automation.

Many employees, especially those who are young, want careers not just jobs. They will often pick a position if it allows them to work with automation and creates a fulfilling career path. Employees know that when you work with automation or create automation for yourself, you get paid better.

Walker: You've been the CEO now at Automation Anywhere for almost 20 years. How and why have you personally developed your skills during those 20 years?

Shukla: I would say that it starts with curiosity. I'm a software engineer by education, but I was curious about hundreds of other functions. I wanted to understand how the world operates.

Along the journey, I acquired the skills to articulate a compelling vision, allowing people to see what a good change looks like and why this change is better. Then, the skills led to inspiring people, creating systems, processes, and centers to channel human energy towards that better picture.

Walker: The tagline for my consulting business is up and to the right because that's the spot on the two-by-two matrix where we always want to be, as you know, from your experience as a magic quadrant company. Did you have a moment where you knew you were moving in that direction?

Shukla: I never wanted to be a CEO. I always thought about what impact I wanted to create, what change I wanted to bring, and what values I wanted to represent. Somewhere on that journey, different job titles emerged, eventually leading to CEO.

If you're adding value to the world and to your customers, amazing things happen.

In my role, I visit many customers, and walk the floors of their operations. During the first few years, I would invariably ask every employee of a customer, Now that you use automation, would you ever go back?

Their eyes would light up and they said, Never, ever. When you see that light in their eyes, you know that as a leader, you don't have a choice. Every enduring change has that quality.

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Mihir Shukla, CEO Of Automation Anywhere: Creating Digital Coworkers For Every Employee - Forbes