Hyper Intelligent Automation Strategy Redefining Businesses in A Post-Pandemic World

Praveen: Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Zinnov Podcast on Hyper Intelligent Automation. I am Praveen Bhadada, Managing Partner, and your host for today. In this podcast series, we will bring to you, insights and conversations from industry leaders and automation gurus on how the Hyper Intelligent Automation landscape is transforming as a function of new-age technologies and the constantly evolving global business environment. We will spark conversations that will give you a real picture of how the transformational leaders of today envision the future of automation.

For this episode, I have a very special guest with me today, Harel Tayeb. He is a visionary leader, a serial entrepreneur, and most recently, an investor and advisor for start-ups and VCs. He is currently the CEO of Kryon Systems, an AI-powered full-cycle automation solution provider that delivers process discovery, advanced analytics, RPA, and several other integral automation components all rolled up in a single platform. Welcome to the Zinnov Podcast, Harel. Great to have you with us.

Harel: Thank you, Praveen, it’s a pleasure to be with you.

Praveen: Perfect, thank you. So, without further ado, allow me to ask you some specifically curated questions that will help us gauge your view of the market. Automation has clearly become the top enterprise priority in the last 12 months. And COVID seems to have accelerated the adoption to a certain extent as well. Now, in one of your recent interviews, Harel, you mentioned that we are probably clear of the pandemic and it will be the time for businesses to scale up and automate to a crucial extent. As we enter the post-pandemic reality, how do you see the role of automation evolve in the modern workplace?

Harel: So that is a very interesting question Praveen, and I think that today’s situation in the market is forcing every company to think differently. So, in a way, many things have been happening during this COVID and we now understand that work can be done from anywhere, and the realization that eventually machines or any activity that needs to be done, will move to be done automatically. That is something we’ve been seeing every day now, over the last few months. But I think that the most exciting thing about RPA, automation, and the enterprise market in regard to COVID is that the discussion has now moved from a tactical discussion, you know, department by department implementation, into a much more strategic point of view.

We are dealing now with one of the largest banks in the world and when they approached Kryon, they said, we have had automation for many years, but we are stuck. And we think that the approach that we try to implement within the organization over the last few years is not correct. We need to think differently. So, the discussion moved from let’s have another department, let’s have another RPA POC running everywhere, to let’s have a strategic discussion from a bank point of view and decide what should be the workspace environment strategy for the organization. Should we or could we build automation that will have the minimal TCO or total cost of ownership with the highest ROI for the business? What will be the impact on our employees? What will be the impact on our organization?

I believe that post-pandemic, each one of us will have this personal assistant on our machine. These days, companies are focusing on the product and not just on the solution, the complete solution – they speak about attended automation and unattended automation. So, think that you will have a personal assistant on your machine that can see what you’re doing at every moment, and besides helping you become much more productive, it will help you offload processes from your day-to-day job to the virtual machines behind the scene. A year from now, maybe a few months from post-pandemic, we will see that the interfaces within the organization would be changed. We will come to communicate with robots, we will communicate with our personal assistant, which is another robot on my machine, and many robots behind the scenes and that’s, you know, a meaningful change that we see now within these large organizations that used to implement RPA, because it was a buzzword in the market, or because it was in hype for many enterprises. Now, they think differently. They need to find the right solution that can reduce the TCO and can provide the maximum ROI for the business for the long term.

Praveen: Great. Thank you, Harel, for that overview. I just had a follow-on question on this one. If you look at enterprises prioritizing automation, and if you think of the three typical business outcomes that enterprises care about, which is either growing the revenues or the top line, or deriving operational efficiencies, which is the bottom line, and parallelly, think of innovation as a core paradigm as they come out of the pandemic situation, right. So if you think of these three priorities, and if you think of automation as a key lever – in your experience, where will automation create the maximum opportunities, and which industries are set to leverage the advantage of automation in the post-pandemic scenario?

Harel: I would say that any revolution in the market started from the enterprise market. Usually, you know, the low hanging fruits – in banking, financial services, telcos, large organizations, with a lot of regulations, eventually, it’s not something that they can avoid in any way. They need to handle the regulations, they need to handle super sensitive and important processes behind the scenes, they need to make sure that their employees are much more efficient, you know, either if it’s customer success or customer service, or any employee within the organization. So, I believe, again, that what we will see post-pandemic, will be a combination – the hybrid automation will scale up faster. And, you know, I would say that the main challenge to take your organization to the next level, is the ability to have hybrid automation implemented for each and every one within the organization. So, for each employee, you will have this attended automation embedded within their clients and you will have many unattended automation behind the scenes. So, in order to enable this digital transformation, the change in the market, you need to have a tool, a technology that can help you to scale up your organization.

We’ve been approached by one of the largest telcos in the market, to help them scale up their organization. And, sometimes in this discussion, I ask a dummy question, I say, ‘Okay, you are doing automation for the last two, three years. What is preventing you today from scaling? Why can’t you just take your organization and have 1000s of robots behind the scenes, attended robots, or what’s available for your customers?’ And the answer usually is that they run very fast towards automation. They choose one platform, two platforms, sometimes even more than that, but no one today can help them to understand what the actual needs are within the organization. So how can they make the organization understand, which processes need to be automated, which processes will have the most ROI for the business?

Or, you know, they said to me, ‘You know, there are many RPA vendors in the market, many of them trying to promote either communities or academies, trying to provide a lot of professional services, but, you know, it’s more of the same. Eventually, I need to have someone that will help me identify, to build this automation. We saw a lot of scalability from the RPA vendors on the number of customers, but we didn’t see enough scalability within the organization within the enterprise market.’ And that’s the main challenge. In order to solve this challenge, it’s not by having 1000s of Professional Services that do not scale up or you know, promoting your community to build an ecosystem of developers – you need to provide something bigger than what the customer needs. That’s one of the reasons why we at Kryon deliver this full-cycle automation. The process discovery, the ability to identify, to map the organization, to provide you with a backlog for automation, and then the implementation, which is connected to this discovery capability – that is key to reducing the TCO to the minimum that you can provide and get an ROI for your business. And that’s my point of view.

Praveen: Thank you. So just extending the idea of embedded automation a little further, Harel. What do you think is happening in the world of AI? How real is AI-powered automation? And what is your sense of enterprise readiness to be able to leverage AI in the context of automation and derive the business outcome that they’re looking to derive?

Harel: So Praveen, there are two different elements of AI. So one element of AI is the way that RPA solution uses AI to create more value for customers. The second aspect is how can RPA vendors provide access to AI capabilities to the citizen developers behind the scenes. So now, let’s drill down and discuss the use of AI for the RPA environment. And the main value of AI is to take a lot of data, a lot of information, and be able to predict, be able to use this data and identify the insights, the relevant insights to show more value. So at Kryon, as you probably know, we have five patents granted on computer vision and AR. So, we gather a lot of information from the process discovery capabilities from our computer vision algorithm. And we use the AI engine to take these large or big data and then identify processes for automation, identify processes that have already been implemented but need to be optimized. In order to do that for, not on one, five, ten, or even 100 customers, but to do that for 1000s of clients in real-time, in parallel, that’s something that only strong AI capability can deliver.

We announced a few months ago the Kryon real-time process discovery or real-time automation. We spoke before about post-COVID or what will be the enterprise market, what will be the impact on the enterprise market. So I believe that the only way you can take your organization from generation one, pre-COVID, and move your organization to post-COVID generation two of workspace environment. The only way to do that is by enabling your organization to take a huge leap forward, which is possible by having real-time automation. And real-time automation means that your employees will have this process discovery embedded within their clients, their computers, on each machine within the organization, gather a lot of data, use the strongest AI in the market in order to identify, to make their activities, their processes, identify the most optimized process automation. And you can do that only if you are using the most sophisticated but also simple and valuable AI capabilities.

And I am happy to share that within Kryon, we have a super strong team of AI experts and the ability to deliver process discovery in real-time, automation in real-time. We used to say at Kryon that we are leading the market. We are creating a game-changer in this market every year. Today, whenever you need to take a process for an idea to implementation in production, it takes weeks, sometimes months. Kryon’s objective is to help our customers to do that within days. And the only way to do that within days is by enabling real-time automation, real-time process discovery, and RPA. And I believe that in 2021, this capability will change the RPA market share, as we see that today.

Praveen: Perfect. Harel, I think you talked a lot about the innovation that you’re bringing in and the attempts you’re making to stay ahead of the curve with respect to the market competition. How about the customer side of the story? Earlier in your discussion, you talked about the total cost of ownership. How is that evolving for the customer? What are the pitfalls that customers should avoid to make sure that the cost of automation is contained? What are some of the best practices you can share in that space with our listeners here?

Harel: That’s a very good question. Because, the attempt of any company large or small, to go through, you know, to look for the solution under the light is something that needs to be changed. Imagine, that for any organization, there are about 20 or 30% of processes which are the low hanging fruits, any RPA vendor in the market will be able to approach any customer, any bank, finance services, insurance, telcos, hospitality, and then share with them the idea. We will take these 50, maybe even 100 processes, and automate them, and these are the low hanging fruits. But if you think about the total cost of ownership, that needs to be invested to identify, map, and build automation, not just for this 20%, we believe that the full cycle automation can reduce the TCO by up to 80%. And that from a strategic point of view, you need to think about the 100% of processes that are available within your organization and need to be changed. That is organizational transformation. You need to map your organization and you need to understand what the impact on the long-term processes within the organization will be. How can you take your organization and build a pipeline, an automation pipeline for your organization to become the most efficient in the market, to become the most valuable for your customers, to be available for your customers. Because anything that can be done, is done behind the scenes, is done by robots. How can you help your employees to be more efficient? And the way to do that, again, is by enabling hybrid automation, the discovery capabilities, and the ability to have a full set of automation available for your customers, available for you as an enterprise.

Praveen: Great, thank you, Harel. One of the last questions in this segment – what is that one piece of advice that you would like to give to your competitors going after the same opportunity?

Harel: I believe that good competition is something that will do good for the entire market. These days when we see a lot of M&A activities, we hear a lot of discussions about IPOs coming. Also, we can understand, and the entire market can see the need in this market. If you know, whenever Microsoft or any other company acquires an RPA vendor, it means that there is a huge need in the market. So, my advice to you guys, is that you’re more than welcome to follow Kryon and take another step in this race to change the entire workspace environment for enterprises, SMEs, and SMBs in the future. And remain honest to yourself, so, try to be whatever you’ve been a few years ago. Don’t change because of IPO needs, M&A needs. Put your customers in, as your North star and make sure that you are building a solution that will help them to become more successful, more powerful, and more valuable for themselves.

Praveen: Well, Harel, it was a real pleasure having you here with us and thank you for the extremely interesting insights that you shared with us today. We covered several critical aspects that will define the next wave of growth and evolution of automation, we believe. The emerging trends, the platform positioning, some bit of competitive landscape, all the enterprise adoption trends that you talked about, and so on. Right. So, thank you so much for your time and we look forward to learning more and unfolding more as the industry progresses to the next normal. And as part of our ongoing effort to unravel the mystery surrounding this automation space, we will certainly be back soon with many more such engaging conversations with some of the future leaders of automation. So, thank you, everyone, for joining in. And stay tuned for what is next to come on this platform. Thank you once again.

Harel: Thank you, Praveen, it was my pleasure.