Andreas Welsch: 0:21

Today, we'll talk about how generative AI enables next level process automation. And who better to talk about it than someone who's actively working on that? Jeremy Gilliland. Hey, Jeremy, thank you so much for joining.

Jeremy Gilliland: 0:32

Hey, I'm doing well. I'm glad to be here. Thank you so much for the invite.

Andreas Welsch: 0:36

Wonderful. Hey, why don't you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, who you are and what you do?

Jeremy Gilliland: 0:41

Yeah, no, thank you. My name is Jeremy Gilliland and currently I am the automation platform team manager for Southern Glaciers Wine and Spirits. I've been working in the intelligent automation space for over a decade now, helped multiple organizations and consulting practices grow their programs. Prior to that, I spent over a decade in the military. I was working in their space first as an enlisted soldier and then eventually as an officer. I definitely have a passion for technology, starting all the way back when I was in high school, working with Cisco 1 and 2, as a fan of this show, Andreas, I have to say, I've been watching for a long time, and I'm so thankful for this opportunity. I can't wait to dive in.

Andreas Welsch: 1:19

Awesome. It's great to have you on. Thank you for making the time, and I know you Actually, just come back from a pretty big industry event last week, right?

Jeremy Gilliland: 1:28

Yeah, it was a UiPath marquee event here in the States called Forward TechEd Day. I had an opportunity to give a speech there, if you will, a presentation about this same topic, as well as a hands on demo of using some of this generative technology that they're trying to roll out. Very interesting, loved the collaboration, had a chance to speak with a lot of other experts in the field. And it's incredible how quick this space is moving.

Andreas Welsch: 1:53

Wonderful. I'm glad we get just the right person for this conversation and with the latest information too. Hey folks for those of you who are just joining the stream, please drop a comment in the chat where you're joining us from. I'm always curious to see how global our audience is. And also don't forget to get the AI Leadership Handbook on AIleadershiphandbook. com. So you can check it out. Learn how you can turn technology hype into outcome. It's actually based on this podcast and livestream. And more than 60 leaders have shared.

Jeremy Gilliland: 2:23

It got me, too. I got the book. It's already working. It's already working.

Andreas Welsch: 2:27

Awesome. Fantastic. That's awesome. Now, what do you say? Should we play a little game to kick things off?

Jeremy Gilliland: 2:35

That's part of the reason I wanted to join. Hit me with it.

Andreas Welsch: 2:37

This game is called In Your Own Words, and, it's all about coming up with the first thing that comes to mind, and why, in your own words. You have about 60 seconds for your answer to make it a little more interesting, keeping an eye on the clock here. And for those of you watching us live as well, please put your answer in the chat too, curious to see what you come up with. Are you ready for What's the BUZZ?

Jeremy Gilliland: 3:03

Yes, I'm ready.

Andreas Welsch: 3:04

If AI were a sports car, what would it be? 60 seconds on the clock.

Jeremy Gilliland: 3:10

Oh, man, that's a good one. I haven't seen this one. I would say if I were a sports car, I'm going to have to go with future state, right? And yeah, This might sound a little awkward because of its size, but why don't we go with a Porsche Macan? I think that, yeah, because if you're thinking about sports car, it's not something that's traditional, right? Even though you could put it up against a supercar, and if you have a Macan turbo, it's definitely going to hit those high speeds. But also there's enough room to bring yourselves and others, right? So it's a sleeper, it looks like something you'd be taking your kids to soccer in, but it has every bit of technology that you'd expect. Yeah, and plus on top of it it has that extra go, which you wouldn't anticipate. So I'd have to say that from being on the spot, and I didn't get this question ahead of time, so I'm going to stick with that, the Porsche Macan.

Andreas Welsch: 3:57

I love that. A great answer, especially the part about bringing more people along and bringing your family. Family long, I think is super critical and super key. Now moving on from sports cars to the other kind of technology that we'll talk about, AI. I think for the last two years, if we look at the industry, generative AI has been getting all the attention after RPA has matured and after it's proven its value in the tool belt. And vendors have been super quick to pivot towards AI and GenAI, and we've always done AI, these claims that we saw early on and that we're still seeing, but I'm wondering in what ways does generative AI actually expand traditional robotic process automation?

Jeremy Gilliland: 4:41

That's a good question, and I think that the answer evolves, but if you take someone from myself as an example who's been doing this for about a decade, automation's always been around, whether it's macros before we used the platform tools, but I remember there used to be criteria, right? There were clear cut. If your process involves making a voice call out, that's not an RPA initiative, right? Or if it has to work inside of a Citrix environment where you can't access the tools, right? That was another reason we would disqualify it. But I'd almost Take it a step further and say that the combination of these two is The ability to leverage RPA in all of those use cases, right? You couldn't have made a phone call with RPA software Historically, but now with generative AI you have something where you have to respond to a customer You're able to create the messaging and have a robot call your customer and have a human like interaction a human like touch points and you're able to combine that technology with And I think that capability definitely gives it the functionality to expand. And then in this case, you're not looking for overlap. You're not trying to make one tool do something that it's not. One group I'm a part of that comes up quite consistently is a term called fit for purpose, right? Fit for purpose. And I think if you take that into mind, when you're thinking about where it is, generative AI, Enable RPA. You can think of it in sort of those terms. If there's something that RPA can't do, guarantee you we're at a stage now where generative AI combined with RPA can do that kind of stuff.

Andreas Welsch: 6:15

You said it's fit for purpose. And I think the exciting part that I am seeing is that it goes beyond just mere automation of repetitive things, right? First of all, it was a lot rule based and we added AI and you could bring in your documents and more unstructured data. Where are you seeing it going next? And what does that combination mean for IT and automation leaders?

Jeremy Gilliland: 6:38

Very good point. So I think the combination for IT and automation leaders, you almost have to draw a line in the sand, right? And from that perspective, I think you have the group of incumbents. Right? And that's anybody from a CIO, CTO, Chief Digital Officer, whoever is in these positions now. And then the people who aspire to be in those roles in the future because your objectives will be different. And so what that combination means right now, I think that if you draw a line in the sand, what it means for your organization is speed to market value is going to be phenomenal. That's going to be a key driver. And what I mean by that is that when historically it had taken days and months or weeks to build solutions, you're going to see people to bring online proofs of concept or pilots, not just automation, but generative AI in combination with automation in hours and days, right? And so being able to manage that kind of workflow is very important, right? And I think that if you're an incumbent and you're sitting in these roles, Then trying to get your house in order is probably the biggest priority right now. There's a lot of noise, right? Not everybody has an opportunity to earn a degree in this space. So if you have a lot of information coming at you, it's important that you realize that we're at this monumental shift and the combination of both automation and generative intelligence is going to be a combination that clearly refaces what businesses look like. You're not going to be able to get there today. I think that's a bridge too big to jump, but what you need to do, and I think you've been mentioning it with some of your guests, is being able to identify true value and target that value and pilots to make sure that you're delivering value that's connected to board objectives, that's connected to your larger strategy. And then from there, if you can find ways to try to use these technologies to shape what you're doing. What your business looks like tomorrow, then you're getting a step up. But I think that will be the next group. If you're able to get your house in order and make sure that you've done pilots to identify value from there, I think that this technology really have a big benefit.

Andreas Welsch: 8:43

I really like how you're framing this, and especially coming back to, business value. Maybe if I look at one of the responses here in the chat, I see Enes is saying RPA is dead. I think that's a very very polarizing point, and I would love to pick up on that and get your perspective. Because I see on one hand, there are traditional RPA vendors that are adding AI in, and more AI are now talking about it. Agentic AI is the next evolution of their technology capabilities. And on the other hand, you have the AI labs like Anthropic and their computer use beta that they just showed, I think, last week as well. What are you seeing? What are you thinking? Are you seeing RPA vendors move up? Are you seeing traditional AI labs moving down? Will we still need both? Will it be one that wins over the other? Is it too early to say?

Jeremy Gilliland: 9:40

Yeah, I think that from my perspective, we've got to hit the pause button on the right there. I think that we've got to the decision hasn't been made. But what I will say is, When it comes to the generative component trying to do what RPA does I think that's going to be a tough pill to swallow, right? I feel like if you have organizations where their chief information security officer already doesn't know maybe how to manage or support generative AI, then asking it to do even more than what it's doing, including RPA stuff might be a big ask. And if you just look at historically, where did RPA It's the long tail of automation, so it's what didn't get developed. It's the features that got left off. It's the functionality that the business didn't get when they asked for some of this to be built. So I, the, that will always be there, right? Because you're bound by time resources and the money that you have and the quickest thing to chop are the features of functionality. So there's always going to be more stuff to automate. But is RPA dead? I don't think that there was any scenario when I questioned people leading up to the presentation I gave and forward. I asked every single person I interviewed, I said, is RPA dead? It's the first thing I asked them and zero people believe that. And that's whether they were automation practitioners or AI practitioners making some of these models. I think that the world is going to be different, right? It's not going to be just RPA and UiPath and even other people who are doing AI trying to do automation is. is the proof that this space is alive and well. I think they're fighting for market share. You, as you well know, it's hard to take AI and bring it to a business and run it long term if you're not generating value. They know they can generate value doing what automation does because we've already proved that as you mentioned in the first question, right? So I believe that, RPA is alive and well. It won't look like what it did historically and it won't look like what it does today. It's going to be a mash up of this, but there'll be plenty of stuff for, practitioners to work on.

Andreas Welsch: 11:42

I think that's very comforting and very assuring to, to, to those who are strong in the intelligent automation space and, seeing where, this goes now from, what you've seen at forward and, what you're seeing others do in, the industry, why, do we even need both technologies together and how do they benefit from the integration with one another?

Jeremy Gilliland: 12:05

So I'll go in on this is I touched on it my last point, right? And I think that you take it from a CISO perspective, right? If you're not familiar with CISO, chief information security officer, right? Though, how what we know about how these generative models create responses is, limited in scope, right? It takes a lot of compute to be able to decipher how it got to a response, even though we know the architecture. And if you put that in perspective with what's going on with automation, as an example of UiPath's orchestration, I think Gartner put out Boat or something, right? There are different models on how we're going to manage this. I don't think that there needs to be individual COEs that kind of run this, right? You need to take all of your technology we talked about, Reducing tech stack, right? And I think that this is going to give leaders a phenomenal capability to minimize their, technology. But what automation does, and we've been proving this out for years, is it gives you traceability, reproducibility, and capability to be able to manage other technologies, not just But if you put in AI how do you get from that model? That's not just being a productivity assistant in Microsoft PowerPoint or word, but actually something that every employee uses, there needs to be a vector, right? There needs to be a mode to transmit the capabilities to the employee. And then on the back end. From a technology perspective, you want to understand metrics and utilization. And then also from security, as I started off with, you want to be able to track and have traceability there. And automation already has something that's well managed and well developed to be able to accomplish that means. So even if the automation. need, if you will, reduces because of what generative AI can do. I think that there's a big question on how do we manage it? How do we deploy it? How do we maintain traceability on who's using it and what they're asking? I think that automation is that perfect layer that it gives you the trust and confidence to be able to deploy those solutions at scale, which I'm not really seeing anything out there today. And maybe I haven't seen anything yet that really gives you a streamlined way to, to manage all of that orchestration.

Andreas Welsch: 14:20

Now, there are two questions that come to mind with that. One is, you talked about business value earlier. What does it mean in concrete terms, right? We love to throw around this, phrase or this term of, it needs to create value, but what does it actually mean when you look at something like intelligent automation or even intelligent automation with AI, with agents that the next level Stuff that they were talking about. What does value look like?

Jeremy Gilliland: 14:48

Excellent question, right? And this is going to be Business specific, right? It has to be tied to whatever your business is, right? For instance, my organization, very strategically, on a certain timeframe, we come up with a 10 year goal or a 10 year objective. Where do you want to be in 5 years or 10 years? And more or less, when you cascade that, that objective down, you have to meet certain metrics or create certain value in order to achieve that objective. And so when it comes to generating value, that will be different to your organization. But what I promise you it's not, is it's something that's not generating value for your organization. If you're not deploying this tool, in a way that's helping you get to where you want to be in 2030, then that's a clear demonstration of it not being valuable. And that doesn't mean it doesn't generate some type of value. It's just not the value that's going to turn the key on your organization and help you get where you want to go. Yeah, we already talked about copilots. We know about assistants, right? They're all there, but is that going to be the transformational value that helps you get where you wanted to go? Probably not. So that's hopefully I gave you a good snapshot on how you can define value in your organization.

Andreas Welsch: 15:56

Thanks for sharing that. I think that that makes it more concrete. And again the call to action to align your. AI and automation strategy with your business strategy and don't do it in isolation the usual things that we talk about, don't chase the shiny object and so on. But I'm also wondering if there's more AI, more gen AI, more agentic AI, whatever you want to call that the next evolution being embedded into RPA. What's your perspective on increasing robustness and resilience on one hand. I see that we might be introducing additional failure points, right? If we don't know if it's right all the time, every time. Maybe not. But on the other hand, if we know that the underlying applications and UI, it changes as well from time to time, and your bots break, do you feel it increases resilience, or do you feel it introduces more, failure points at this point? And again, looking at the crystal ball, I don't know if anybody has the right answer, but I'm curious what you're seeing.

Jeremy Gilliland: 16:58

I, from what I'm, from what I'm hearing and what I'm seeing in application and a lot, some of this is still theory, right? As you mentioned, it's not something that is universal across different industries. But I think that not only, we've talked about generative AI and the value that it create, in isolation. But as you mentioned when, they're combined, what does it, what do we get out of that? And I think that. Actually, instead of having broken bot syndrome, which I if anybody's been working in this space you know exactly what I mean, no matter how good your program is, you need governance and you need some of those guardrails, even just automation. And these tools are pretty much drag and drop nowadays. So I don't think that paradigm shifts. If anything, it's more important to have that support mechanism for generative AI. But what I do think, and oddly enough, when you combined it, that generative AI fixes some of AI's biggest issues like broken, broken bot syndrome. I've already seen some in preview, not quite general release capabilities to where selector fixes adjustments on the back ends. And if you and, you're being from SAP, you're quite familiar, I'm sure with jewel and where they're headed with this, I see a world where our automations are talking to other automations that have gen AI capabilities, where these things are fixed on the fly, right now. We have to be careful, right? Because if you're talking about a selector that was supposed to cancel a payment, fixing it now, making a payment, right? We might have some risks. But I think all in all, obviously, that's again, back to guardrails and testing and making sure that it's doing what it's supposed to do. But I see this as an overhaul enhancement once we get the guardrails in place to be able to support both programs. Automation will enhance generative AI deployments. Generative AI will enhance the value that your automation programs bring, in my perspective.

Andreas Welsch: 18:48

Awesome. And from what I'm envisioning also, building on this is at some point, your agents will hit a roadblock when there's no API when they're, yes, they can take a screenshot off of the screen that they're seeing. Anticipate what should I be entering there, but most likely at some point that is not going to be 100%, so you need some robust and proven technology that can automate the repeatable steps in that process. Meaning something like Robotic Process Automation. By the way, I see Vinicius posting in the chat, I don't think RPA is dead. So good, another supporter. And rather, things are evolving. I think that mirrors what you shared as well. So now we have more tools to integrate with our bots and more opportunities to improve processes. for sharing that, by the way. That's wonderful. Now, Building on the things you've shared so far, yes, there are two capabilities, they benefit from integrating with one another. They will need one another definitely in the foreseeable future. What do you recommend AI leaders, automation leaders, to do? need to be aware of right now and need to be doing. What's the the one, two, three things that are really top of mind to either ride this wave or stay ahead of it or, I'm really curious what, do you see in your role there?

Jeremy Gilliland: 20:17

I think that one thing that I would really recommend is understanding that we're certain we're currently in a timeline or a timeframe where a term called technical lag is incredibly prevalent. So if you're not familiar with the term technical lag, it's basically this concept where all of our technologies and the tools we use to create them are evolving at such a rapid pace. That's humankind and our brains, right? We can't quite keep up and we can't quite envision how to fully maximize the potential of all these tools. We're just fumbling around. And if you take that into perspective, and you combine that with the fact that AI itself is a not a GPT, yes, but a general purpose technology that's going to have fundamental impact. You can imagine the impact that electricity had. On society and the impact that the Internet had on businesses and you mash those together in a Hadron Collider. That's what generative AI is. And I think that we're just scratching the surface. So one be aware that there's this concept called technology lag, and we aren't quite aware of what we can do. But I promise you that you can see this as an example with the adoption of automation programs. I've helped organizations save over 200 million in the last decade, and I still meet multiple organizations and even some of those that don't scale the program throughout the organization. So there's huge amounts of missed value. So I think if you understand that we're in the situation where there's all sorts of tools that can do pretty much everything, then being very strategic and how you pick those tools is going to be paramount. Money doesn't grow on trees, right? So if you miss swing and you bet big on some just generative AI solution alone or only automation, you will quickly find yourself a year or two behind trying to recoup those, the value from those projects and then invest it back in this. So definitely be aware of that term and try to understand what's the best value you can get around the tools that you have in the space.

Andreas Welsch: 22:21

Now, if you also combine the technology lag with the technology depth. Did you know? I'm wondering if that also becomes a technology drag because it gets more difficult to innovate if even your foundation has some catching up to do.

Jeremy Gilliland: 22:38

You gave me ideas for a book. Don't don't, tell me too much, Andreas.

Andreas Welsch: 22:43

Hey we're, getting close to the end of the show and I was wondering if you can summarize the key three takeaways for our audience today.

Jeremy Gilliland: 22:48

Yeah, absolutely. So from my perspective, I think that the three major takeaways from this conversation if you had to summarize it or distill it is one that in the future state RPA need each other, right? The marriage needs to be harmonious. And if you do that, I think that the people will, there'll be bigger wins than trying to leverage these technologies in isolation and your management will also 2X. I think the second takeaway is, that not only will this. Technology transform how we do business. I believe that this technology will have a fundamental transformation on just business models in general. So while you try to, as I mentioned, get your house in order to be able to leverage these technologies, consider. What ways you can reshape your business with these technologies because they'll be that transformative. And lastly, recognize that there's a technology lag out there, and there's all sorts of tech that you have. A lot of them can do the same thing. But if you can minimize your tech stack and have an automation platform, plus a technology like generative AI that buffers and supports all of the blank spaces that the automation program You run currently doesn't do, I think between those three points, you'll definitely be well on your way to getting where you need to be as long as you take those and you read Andres book and put those together, then you'll definitely be where you need to be.

Andreas Welsch: 24:11

Awesome. Jeremy, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your experience with us. And to those in the audience for learning with us, it's always exciting to see the different perspectives and also, again, from a global audience, what we're seeing around the globe.

Jeremy Gilliland: 24:27

Great. Thank you so much for having me, Andreas. I appreciate it.

Andreas Welsch: 24:30

Perfect.