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Automation Anywhere Launches AARI, its Digital Assistant for Work

Automation Anywhere Launches AARI at Innovation Day 2020
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In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast – Women in Tech – Interview Series, I’m joined by Ritu Kapoor, from Automation Anywhere. In our conversation today we’re going to cover some exciting news coming out of Automation Anywhere’s Innovation Day event, which was held today — the launch of Automation Anywhere’s AARI, the first digital assistant for work.

Ritu is the head of product strategy at Automation Anywhere, and she focuses on front office automation solutions — RPA, AI and machine learning technology to increase the pace of automation in the front office, back office and any office to help organizations lower operating costs and become more productive. She also heads up competitive and market intelligence for the company, which means if you’re playing in the RPA and automation space, she knows what you’re doing.

In our conversation, we explored RPA adoption and how it continues to transcend other technologies, especially now when organizations are speeding up all parts of their digital transformation efforts. We also talked about the state of women in tech, some of the inroads we’ve made and seen, as well as the challenges ahead.

Automation Anywhere Launches AARI, its Digital Assistant for Work — Designed to Help Spur Digital Transformation and Scale Automation Initiatives

Our conversation then turned to perhaps one of the most exciting announcements to come out of Automation Anywhere’s Innovation Day — the announcement about AARI, the Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface, its digital assistant for work. Here are the highlights:

  • Ritu walked us through AARI’s AI-powered automation technology, which was designed to help organizations quickly and easily connect various business processes and empower employees to work alongside automation technology (in a bot-to-human interface) in a seamless fashion.
  • The challenges today’s organizations report as it relates to adopting or considering the adoption of automation solutions, which include:

o Scale. Only 15% of companies using RPA have scaled past 50 bots
o Building business resiliencies is a key challenge/area of focus, and organizations are often not sure of the role automation solutions can play here
o Culture around innovation, specifically as it relates to RPA, doesn’t exist
o Ability to maintain QC over standards, compliance, while still empowering citizen devs

  • How the adoption of AI-powered technology like AARI can play a role in both speeding digital transformation as well as in building business resiliency.
  • The key differentiators of Automation Anywhere’s AARI from other automation technology on the market today.
  • Some use case examples of how AARI can make employees more productive in the workplace.
  • An overview of AARI can help organizations as a whole manage bots and applications by aligning how employees work and making accessing the technology easily by embedding it in browsers, desktops, mobile, and apps that employees use every day (for example, Salesforce).

Automation Anywhere’s AARI Functionality and Key Differentiators

Ritu and I talk in depth about the AARI functionality and how it differs from other solutions on the market. We also discussed some use case examples of how AARI can help an organization manage bots and applications, including the ability to align how employees typically work by embedding the solution in browsers, desktop, mobile, and apps that employees use every day (like Salesforce). Ease of use not only makes collaboration a breeze, it also impacts and speeds internal adoption, which is generally a barrier to scaling.

In closing our conversation, Ritu described the Automation Anywhere AARI solution in just five simple words:

Empowerment
Scale
Automation for Everyone
Cloud
Intelligence

I like it. Empowering all parts of the organization to be a part of digital transformation initiatives by using technology like AI-powered RPA, tackling the challenge of scale, leveraging cloud and intelligence, and making automation something that touches all parts of an organization and benefits employees and customers in equally beneficial ways.

Watch the video interview here:

 

Grab the audio version of the podcast here: 

AARI is available worldwide, with pricing starting at $35/mo/user. For more information on AARI, visit  Automation Anywhere here. Be sure to find Ritu Kapoor on LinkedIn and connect while you’re at it.

Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice.

Other insights from Futurum Research:

How Automation, AI, and are Driving Martech Against Market Challenges

Automation Anywhere and the Future of RPA

Transcript:

Shelly Kramer: Hello and welcome to this episode of the Futurum Tech webcast. I’m your host, Shelly Kramer and this interview is part of my Women in Tech interview series. I’m joined today by Ritu Kapoor, from Automation Anywhere. In our conversation today, we’re going to cover some exciting news that’s coming out of Automation Anywhere’s Innovation Day, which was held on Wednesday, October 7th. But before we get to that, Ritu and I are going to cover some interesting trends on women in technology and just some other things that are happening that we think that you’ll be interested in.

Ritu is the head of product strategy at Automation Anywhere and she focuses on front office automation, RPA, AI and machine learning technology that businesses use to help increase the pace of automation in the front office, in the back office, in any office basically to help organizations lower costs, become more productive, deliver better on the customer experience end of things. And lastly, Ritu also heads up competitive intelligence, competitive and market intelligence for Automation Anywhere. If you’re playing in the automation space in any way, she knows you and she knows what you’re doing, which actually makes me like you even more, Ritu. Welcome. It’s great to have you.

Ritu Kapoor: Good to be here, Shelly.

Shelly Kramer: Before we start talking about innovation day, I wanted to touch a little bit, you and I’ve had a bunch of conversations so we’re both women in technology, we’re both working moms, raising kids and juggling lots of business challenges and some challenges that a global pandemic throws our way, which is kind of interesting. But specific to women in technology, we are making some inroads. I think we’re seeing some change, I think. But let’s talk a little bit, tell me a little bit about what you see happening in the technology space as it relates to women in general and women and diversity and what are your observations?

Ritu Kapoor: Shelly, I think I was saying earlier, I’m not the only woman in the room anymore and I love that. I love to see other women. I love to be able to interact with women because our perspectives are so different from everybody else in that room, quote unquote men. And to be able to bring that in and have somebody to back you up, it’s just such a good feeling and so different from when I first started in this space. I think the most important piece at this point is to really give women a seat at that table. And I’m seeing that slowly come to life here.

We just need to quicken this up, just like digital transformation, it needs to happen now. You need to be brought in to conversations. We need to be brought into places where decisions are being made, like RGB so aptly said.

Our perspective needs to be part of it because 50% of your customers are women. Even if you look purely from a business perspective, you’re selling to women as much as you’re selling to men. And when you don’t get a woman’s perspective, you’re missing a very large part of the audience. And we absolutely cannot do that.

Shelly Kramer: And especially when you talk about, for instance, your role as head of product strategy, I’ll step back and say from my viewpoint, okay, I built a career as a marketing brand strategist so I understand marketing and I understand marketing in messaging and the other hat that I wear is I’m a tech analyst. And so we might be doing some original research and one of our male analysts might’ve been leading that research and maybe developing the questions and maybe doing the final analysis. But a lot of times I find that is I, I was going to say interject myself. And that’s not probably the best phrase, but as I, I’m one of the owners of the company so I’m one of the last sets of eyes that see something before it goes out the door to a client. And when I’m looking at analysis sometimes I think, you know what? This is from a male point of view.

And we bring our own experiences and our own perspectives to the table. But what’s really important in terms of everything having to do with an organization. For instance, your product development, your product strategy, your go to market strategy, your marketing messaging.

You have to be able to account for the fact that as you said, 50% of your audience is female. And so bringing a female perspective in, doing original research, doing analysis, doing product research, doing product development. I think that not including women at the table doesn’t make any sense.

Ritu Kapoor: Absolutely doesn’t. And what’s important for everyone to understand is women can’t do this alone. 50% is women and 50% is men. We all have to as society, agree and move forward in the direction where I’m not going to have this meeting if it’s going to be an all male audience and California passed a law, if you just saw in this week where they’re requiring women to be on boards. And it’s sad that they have to do that today, but it’s important because we just weren’t getting there.

For example, Automation Anywhere has two women on the board. Extremely accomplished and I know they bring that sense of that empathy and a different perspective as Mihir, always says, “the female perspective,” to all the decisions that we make. And we need to start there. We need to start at the board, we need to start at CEO levels and then bring it down. Because if I have someone to look up to like that, I know what my path is versus my path can’t just stop at being a manager or a senior manager or director, senior director. It has to go all way up to that board.

Shelly Kramer: Right. Absolutely. You and I spoke about this earlier, not only as senior executives who happen to be women, do we have a responsibility to, one of the reasons I launched this series, this Women in Tech series is that I spend my time operating in a largely male dominated space. And I wanted to be able to, I wanted to work with the brands that we work with and say, “Let me highlight women. Let me lift these women up. Let me bring them to the fore.” And I think that as senior executives, we have a responsibility to reach out that hand and to help one another. But the really important part of this is that we also need our male counterparts to be part of that equation.

And I know that the culture that you have, that Mihir has created at Automation Anywhere is female-centric. Co-founder of the company is Neeti and she’s amazing. And so I think that that’s the message here. It’s not that women are more important or anything else, it’s that we really need to work together and partner together as we continue to make inroads in all of the things that we do. And women bring a lot to the table in every way. I am thrilled to have you here as part of my show and we are very much beating the same drum, so that’s awesome.

Today, we’re going to talk about RPA adoption and how it kind of continues to transcend other technologies. And actually it’s, when I talk about automation, I don’t generally tend to talk just about RPA. I think that automation space as a whole is incredibly important and robotic process automation is important and the role that intelligent automation plays is also important. But especially today, the thing about living through a global pandemic that we are far from through, is that what businesses have realized is that they really need to rapidly embrace digital transformation. And one of the key elements of that, at least I believe one of the key elements of that, is understanding the role that automation can play within the organization. And really how that is an important part of the equation when it comes to digital transformation. That leads me to perhaps what I think is one of the most important announcements coming out of Automation Anywhere’s innovation day and that’s the announcement of AARI, the Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface. Let’s talk about that.

Considering, it’s funny when I first spoke with your team about AARI, one of the comparisons was to Siri and Alexa. And the reality of it is, many of us are very comfortable with digital assistants being part of our lives. We use Siri on our phones, I have a connected car that I’m constantly asking to do things for me or I have an Alexa in my kitchen. We’re used to digital assistants and I think that we, as a whole, generally seem to understand the value proposition of an easy to use bot to human interface that makes things easier. But in this case, AARI is about, AI powered automation technology that connects AARI and what makes this announcement from Automation Anywhere so exciting.

Ritu Kapoor: Let me actually address what you talked about earlier, where it’s so similar to digital assistants. Think about this, Shelly. Think about why you find that interaction so seamless between you and Alexa or between you and your car. It’s because there’s a person’s voice. And in Alexa’s case a woman’s voice on the other end, that’s really just telling you what you need to know. You don’t know what’s happening in the background. You don’t know if there’s a bot running or what exactly this bot is doing. There’s no complexity in your interaction with Alexa or Siri. You ask Alexa what’s four times eight because my son does it all the time he knows it can do his homework, which is sad. Yeah, parenting fail, but he can do it because it’s so simple. And with AARI, we’re trying to bring that same ease of interaction to RPA.

To give you a more kind of a business example, if you have a customer success agent that wants automation to take over after he completes a customer call, or just to manage say, the communication with the customer, AARI can handle that for him. Or if you want a bot to be able to manage any post production work after you and I are done with this call, a bot can take care of that for you. And the way for you to initiate the bot is, ask AARI. If an employee wants to be able to manage an escalation, for example, across multiple teams, Mr. X, Mrs. Y, pretty much anyone, AARI will coordinate and manage that for you as well.

What AARI is really doing is running the right automation in the process at the right point, bringing people in only when needed and only when the guidance is needed, not having to sit on the machine and babysitting it so to speak. And that’s really the magic. Where people come together with automation to really drive value. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve here, that digital transformation that can come only when the two can work together, people and bots.

Shelly Kramer: Right. And I think sometimes people, when we talk about bots and when we talk about RPA or automation of any kind, I think that there’s a misunderstanding that bots replace humans across the board and all the jobs will be gone. And really, that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re really talking about the perfect marriage, if you will, of humans and robotics. And I think that makes, it creates a beautiful proposition. I think it’s great for businesses.

Let’s talk a little bit about RPA in the marketplace today. As I mentioned before, from our work in the digital transformation space and I focus a lot in the automation space. I know that scale is an incredible challenge. And what I see happening is that with any kind of technology, not just automation technology, is that companies decide we’re going to do this and so we make a decision and we integrate some technology and then we have a series of challenges along the way and some of the challenges are scaling it, some of the challenges are adoption, some of the challenges are kind of even creating the right kind of culture. But I would like to talk with you a little bit or get your insights rather, on what you see as the biggest challenge that organizations face, organizations who have adopted some kind of automation, robotic process automation or who want to adopt it, what do you see that their biggest challenges are?

Ritu Kapoor: I think the biggest challenge is scale. And we hear that constantly from our teams, from customers that are looking to make this to scale really fast and looking for a blueprint in order to do that. In fact, only about 15% of companies have scaled past 50 bots. And like we just spoke, true digital transformation can only be achieved when humans and bots work together in order to automate close to 50% of our most critical processes. Think about this, how many processes do you absolutely need to run at any given point, regardless of what’s happening in the world? If there’s an earthquake, if there’s something like COVID, those are your critical processes. If you not to get to a point where you’ve automated 50% of that, that’s where we start with scale. In order to do that you can’t really just depend on IT. You can’t just depend on developers. You have to be able to empower business users.

Shelly Kramer: Well, and it’s also part of a business strategy. How do we scale this? And that has to be part of the plan. When you were talking, I was thinking about the most simple analogy here and I think about this all the time. Do you ever, for instance, my iPhone, I’m running the new operating system, iOS 14, and there’s a bunch of new functionality in there that really adding to the existing functionality of things I could be doing with my device that I never made time to learn. And I never made time to learn because when is there extra time? But the problem is, this is just my device in my hand and so it takes me extra time to do things with that device and to accomplish things I want to accomplish as a human being who’s living and working and raising a family and doing all the things that I do, because I don’t know how to scale, how to use my device.

And so it seems like, oh, that’s just a small thing. There’s a whole bunch, I don’t know how to use on my phone as well. But when you extrapolate that out across an enterprise and you take that same situation that I don’t know more than, I’m lucky if I know 50% of the functionality that my device would allow me to do. But when you extrapolate that out and you do the math and you see what that looks like for the organization as a whole in terms of efficiency, productivity, knowledge base, all of that sort of thing, so many people are doing the same dumb things I’m doing in terms of reinventing the wheel with my device, that I don’t quite know how to use. When you put your CFO hat on or you put your CEO hat on and you put your business strategist hat on, you start thinking about that across an enterprise, that equates to a lot of inefficiency and it really equates to a lot of money, I think. And that’s really, that’s what makes automation something that’s so important, I think for businesses to be thinking about.

Ritu Kapoor: Exactly. And when you can get to this kind of scale, what you can really solve is business resiliency. It’s that key focus in today’s environment. For the same reason as above, unless we can take a large number of critical processes and automate them, enable people to work together with technology, we can’t really be resilient against a situation like today. Think about contact center processes, sales, operations, finance, HR, all of these are very critical to the functioning of the company and unfortunately today, most of them are manual.

Shelly Kramer: Right. Well and I think that what we have learned as a whole globally, as a result of navigating a global pandemic is that business resiliency is not just nice to have. When entire organizations have to pivot literally on a dime and move from in person operations to, for instance, contact center agents working from home or financial institution employees serving customers from home and all of the things that they need to do in order to be able to affect. And those are just two examples. There’s hundreds of examples out there, but I think that that has really shown us collectively, it certainly has shown business leaders and boards that business resiliency needs to be at the very top of every strategic plan, because we’ve learned, we’ve been baptized by fire here. We don’t have time to figure this out. We have to figure this out right now.

Speaking of business resiliency, so we’ve shifted, as I said, this is a business mission critical objective. Let’s talk about how speeding digital transformation in general and adopting AI powered automation technology like AARI, how does this play a role in building business resiliency?

Ritu Kapoor: Again, like you said, think about shifting on a dime. Think about your manual processes that, let me actually start with an example. You had the contact center worker sit in his office on his laptop as part of a shift and was taking customer calls routed through an IVR. If he had a question, he walked over to his manager, he asked them a question. He came back and he managed this sort of like on a semi-automated manual process, but he made it work. And then one fine day, he had to take his laptop and leave. And in many countries you’d be surprised, Shelly, there wasn’t a laptop to take. It belonged to the company and when they went home, they didn’t have anything to do. Imagine three people in a shift sharing a laptop, who gets to take it home?

At that point, that really brought into perspective how manual we really are and how much we really depend on going into the office. True business resiliency is if you remove people from the equation completely, can the business survive for a little bit, till we are able to bring it up and running? Now, we’re not trying to get to a 100% of this. That’s not possible. You and I know that. But can the business be resilient against a shutdown thing till we can get people back into the process? And we’re nowhere close to that. RPA is such a great tool to be able to provide that built in business resiliency without really completely changing your infrastructure, without changing everything, or spending just a lot of money on rip and replacing just the technology that you currently have. RPA works on the UI level. That means it’s a simple fix. It’s something that organizations absolutely should bring in today so that if something like this ever happens, they’re ready. And that’s so important right now.

Shelly Kramer: Well, and the reality of it is that we don’t really know what’s ahead. What we have today is we have the benefit of the experience that we’ve just all lived. We’re still living through. But really what we started seeing happening at least here in the US was in March. And in March, everything sort of went to hell in a hand basket and that’s when people shifted from going into an office to working from home. And we have some situations now where people are going back to an office or they’re working in shifts. But we don’t really know what’s ahead. And I think that’s probably one of the biggest learning experiences that we have had in the last number of months is that we don’t know what’s ahead.

How do we plan around that sense of uncertainty? And how do we make sure our people have all the tools that they need to serve our customers, to do their jobs, to keep our companies running and to keep everything efficient? And I think that we’re getting there. We haven’t solved all of those problems, but we’re getting there. And that’s why I think the announcement around AARI is so exciting and it’s certainly timely. Speaking of AARI, why do you think that AARI is different than the other automation technology that’s on the market today?

Ritu Kapoor: There’s lots of messages in the market and we’ve talked about that earlier as well. AARI is the only technology that we have that really provides you that path. That path to be able to get to digital transformation by bringing in or increasing the number of consumers in the market. And today with AARI and RPA, from Automation Anywhere, that’s the only cloud native solution in the market. If you’re the customer that wants to deploy in the cloud, Automation Anywhere is really the only solution you should consider. And I’m saying this in a completely non-biased factual way, because we are the only solution that’s cloud native. We have the lowest TCO and AARI just like in 2019, can be deployed both on the cloud, on premise or in hybrid environments with the same code base. You’d be surprised, Shelly, how many vendors we have out there that have a different product in the cloud and a different product on premise.

Shelly Kramer: Wow.

Ritu Kapoor: And if you think about a regular enterprise, there’s going to be many departments that don’t want the cloud product and many departments that are ready to move yesterday. You have to have the same product in both places and we’re the only leading vendor that has that today. Yeah, go ahead.

Shelly Kramer: No, I didn’t know that. I think that to me is an incredibly important value proposition, especially because organizations are in such different places in terms of their own transformations. Some people are on prem, hybrid, fully cloud so being able to have a solution that works across all of those, I think is incredibly important.

Ritu Kapoor: Exactly. And we’re also the first and still the only truly integrated intelligent automation vendor. We have attended, we have unattended, we have intelligent document processing that is so popular today and a big differentiator for us. We have process discovery, we have bot store, and now we have AARI. Really your one stop shop, but you don’t have to worry about multiple vendors and dealing with integrations and kind of doing things in a piecemeal basis. We provide you the complete platform that you can use to get started.

Shelly Kramer: Awesome.

Ritu Kapoor: Yeah. And the most important reason honestly, is customer success. Right from what customers large and small to all the analysts, our customer success team and our support team is always called out. If you look at the analyst reports, if you look at some of the peer review sites, the thing that’s most apparent besides our cloud native architecture is our support teams. They handhold customers, they have blueprints for success. They get them from start scale to transform and everyone calls that out. And we’re very proud of that department.

Shelly Kramer: I think that’s incredibly important and one of the things that my team and I talk about a lot as it relates to digital transformation is that it’s not, let’s make a decision to buy a piece of technology and we’re guaranteed success. That support, that service, that training, that handholding, that being there as a trusted vendor partner makes an incredible difference. And that’s how you have adoption. If you buy a technology solution that your people don’t use, you’ve spent a lot of money on nothing. And so I think that that, I always look for the service and the support component of any technology purchase, because I think it’s so incredibly important. I’m glad that you called that out. I think that’s great. Give me, let’s talk about in someone’s daily life, give me an example of how someone would access and use AARI.

Ritu Kapoor: Many different ways. We talked about business, but RPA was really born with the vision that if we can increase the number of consumers in the organization that use RPA, that’s where we can achieve digital transformation and AARI today is that way. Think about things you do every day. Reporting from multiple systems, you have customer data in three different systems and every time you want to find something about say Automation Anywhere, you’re looking in three different systems, you’re looking in your email, there could be something in a Gmail somewhere and you have to do that manually.

Shelly Kramer: It’s exhausting, it’s exhausting.

Ritu Kapoor: It is. And you don’t think about customer success agents where it’s not three or four applications. It’s 15 at the same time, while you’re putting the customer on hold. It is a problem. And what AARI does is in very simple, easy to use interfaces, interfaces that you can change to look however you want, whether it’s on your device, whether it’s in your applications, you can get all of this data together. Every piece of data that you need in order to answer a customer call could be on that interface. And again, this could be something for just one user, users like you and I, or it could be for a company that uses 15 different applications. You can use it to find out which urgent emails from Outlook that you haven’t answered today and you absolutely needed to. It’ll tell you that. You can ask it to send a text to your husband to go pick up your daughter. That could be simpler one. You can ask it to do whatever you want.

It’s that interface between you and automation that makes it simple for you to communicate with your bots. And the best part is, that same interface can be used for your bots to communicate with you. If there is a problem and the bot can’t do what you asked it to do, it’ll just ask you. It’ll just bring you in and say, “Hey Shelly, can you give me guidance on this?” And as soon as you give the bot guidance, it goes on its way and it continues to do what it does. It doesn’t just stop. Here we are, automation and again, just to repeat, humans and bots working together for those amazing, successful processes that will really drive digital transformation.

Shelly Kramer: I’m sold, I need AARI myself. Before we started this recording, I had to stop and text my husband to remember to go pick up our daughter from school. It really is about helping you be your best self, in the most simple terms and do your best work. And it’s you know what? I love the thing about the point that you just made about asking AARI to do something and AARI not being able to, coming back and asking for clarification, because I feel like sometimes, you have a task and you send something out to the void and then somewhere along the line, something happens. You have a bad email address or something weird happens and you get so caught up in everything else that you’re doing that you forget. To be able to have that, it’s like a coworker. That’s the whole point. And I think that’s what makes this technology incredibly exciting. It’s that it really, as you said, it’s humans and technology working together and to deliver the very best results. I think that’s cool.

Ritu Kapoor: It is. And if we can all kind of align around that where it’s not just the bots. We can’t do anything with just the bots. And humans need help. And to bring this back to the Women in Tech discussion we had earlier, people claim that women are the best at multitasking, but the truth is might be very good at it, but it takes time away from our day to help manage all of these million things. To be able to give women a way for somebody else to multitask for them while they can concentrate on the task at hand and what they’re truly passionate about, that’s a game changer. That would almost bring us to that, an even playing field almost where here you go, let somebody else manage the scheduling.

Shelly Kramer: You know what? I think another thing that I see a lot when I talk to women within organizations who have taken on citizen developer roles and I’ve listened to some of these women talk and share that, I never thought that I’d be able to do something like this. I never thought that I’d be able to work with automation and program bots or build a bot. And I had this really ordinary average job in the back of the house or in the front of the house or wherever. And all of a sudden now, I’m not only able to do this, as a citizen developer, but I’m able to spearhead learning initiatives within our organization to teach other people how to do this.

And it really, so in many ways, and it’s not just AARI technology, but it’s just this kind of technology is transformational. And it’s transformational for the business. It’s transformational for the customer experience. And it’s transformational for your employees who find that all of a sudden they’re capable of things that they never dreamed they’d be able to do. And I think that that rescaling of the workplace is also a really important part of this equation.

Ritu Kapoor: Absolutely. And just the number of jobs digital transformation has brought into the enterprise completely contrary to what people think. Just the number of people that are in the strategy roles and in roles where they need to be able to manage how to initiate digital transformation within the organization is huge. There’s new digital transformation officers and automation C-level execs. It’s fantastic if people are taking you seriously.

Shelly Kramer: It really is. I’m really excited about it. If I had to ask you to use just a few words to sum up what AARI really delivers to organizations, as we wrap up our conversation here, Ritu, what would those words be?

Ritu Kapoor: Empowerment. It’s being able to empower everyday everyone anywhere to be able to participate in automation and to be able to figure out a way to automate their work flows. And using that to be able to scale, to be able to take automation and scale it across the enterprise. This really is automation for everybody and AARI is spearheading this initiative. And I’m so excited to see where we’ll be in the next six months, in fact, we should do a repeat of this to figure out how AARI will, I truly believe, take over the world.

Shelly Kramer: I love it. I think that’s great. Empowering all parts of an organization to be a part of digital transformation initiatives and using technology like a AI powered RPA, tackling the challenge of scale, leveraging cloud, however it is you want it leverage cloud. And intelligence and then making automation is something that touches all parts of an organization and that benefits everybody. As I just said, it benefits employees, it benefits customers and it benefits everybody. I think that really is it’s exciting. And you and I, we will definitely come back here in six months’ time and have a conversation again, Ritu, about where we were and what we’ve seen. And I very much look forward to that. If you’re game, I’m game.

Ritu Kapoor: Awesome.

Shelly Kramer: All right.

Ritu Kapoor: I had a good time, Shelly.

Shelly Kramer: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining me today.

Ritu Kapoor: Thank you.

Shelly Kramer: And thank you to our audience for hanging out with us and we will see you again soon.

Ritu Kapoor: All right. Go be great.

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Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years' experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging development, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly's coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”

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