Neeti Shukla on Automation Anywhere’s Responsible AI Strategy and AI Kiran Partnership

Hey everyone. Welcome back to our Techstrong TV coverage of Imagine, Automation Anywhere's annual user conference. This year, we're in Dallas, and happy to be here at the Omni Dallas Hotel.

My next guest is one of the co-founders of Automation Anywhere. Her name is Neeti Mehta Shukla. There you go.

I hope I got that right. You did. And as I've been saying all along, a lot of you who are not familiar with Automation Anywhere, you might think Automation Anywhere, this must be one of these companies trying to cash in on the AI gold rush, a Johnny-come-lately to the technology, and you couldn't be more wrong.

This is a company that's over 20 years old. They pioneered automation, BPA, APA, as we started calling it last year. And this woman was right there at the beginning.

She's still here today. And what's more, though, Neeti has some real, not concerns, but views on the right way we should move forward, and probably more in line with my views. So I'm looking forward to hearing from her.

Welcome. It's great to have you here, Neeti. Thank you so much for having me.

Very kind. I didn't mean to embarrass you or anything talking about your background, but I don't know your background as well as you do. Why don't you give them sort of the real story?

Absolutely. I think I'm an entrepreneur at heart. Started Automation Anywhere in 2003 with my other three co-founders.

And we've been in business ever since. So I'm also a mother of three children and a citizen of the world. So just my life has been a lot about technology and bringing technology for humans to do better, greater, and smarter things maybe.

And that hasn't changed. I love the work I do. I love it.

And as we sit here today, your title and role in Automation Anywhere is what? I'm Chief Impact Officer. Traditionally at Automation Anywhere, I led the marketing team for very many number of years.

That's a role I come from, or the department I come from, so to speak. But always been a strategist and an entrepreneur. Got into tech just because I happened to be living in Silicon Valley, and then found my niche, I guess.

And so as I led marketing, I did a lot of the CSR activities for the organization and building the culture of the organization. And I felt that I really wanted to make an impact at a different level and be very conscious about how Automation Anywhere shows up in impact. And so we started the impact office about four years ago now, and I lead it.

I love it. If you don't mind, I want to turn to the keynote that you gave here today, and it was around what you call responsible AI, and I know there's a lot of people who are going to say that's an oxymoron, right? It's not responsible, but it could be, and I think I've been around the block a few times, right?

And I think that's one of the great things about AI is the promise of what it could bring equality wise, responsibility wise, educationally. It's probably one of the greatest educational tools, perhaps, that we've ever come up with. But that's my view on it.

Let's start with your view. When you talk about responsible AI, what are you saying? So, I think responsible AI means different things, as you mentioned to different people.

One aspect of it, and a very big aspect of Automation Anywhere, is, of course, how we build these products and how we enable our customers to use these products. And I think both are important. So, there are tenets of a responsible AI from accuracy and privacy, security, accountability, transparency, and many others.

And that has to be core from how you build from the ground up. It can't be an afterthought. And I think that's important for people to realize because we're moving at the speed of light, of course, and so many new products and services are coming out of these technologies.

But having that consciousness, to ingrain it as you build it, as you design it, as you morph it, is important. The other aspect of responsibility, of course, not necessarily just from an AI perspective or a product perspective, is the other topic of my keynote this morning, which was reskilling. And the idea is that we bear responsibility to reskill the workforce, to reskill different parts of the world, minorities and women and regions that have been left behind traditionally or have not had the opportunity.

So there's a responsibility from that angle as well. And, to me, they're both important, and they're both without which, I think... Let me say that again.

They're both important, but more importantly, I think if we get either of those wrong, we will actually leave the world worse off than we found it, and nobody wants to do that. I couldn't have said it better myself. Also as a parent, and also you get to a certain age, you mentor a lot of people, and I mentor a lot of people, and I do worry about this with AI because unfortunately for so many folks, it's how many heads can I cut?

How much cost can I take out of the business? How can I make more profits? And we're all entrepreneurs.

There's nothing wrong with making more profits. But there's the right way and wrong ways of doing things. And I think we do have to think, especially with this technology, of what is the legacy?

Yeah. what's it going to make for the world? We may not be here, but what's it going to make for the world?

But we live in the day-to-day, as you know, too, right? And I don't begrudge people doing what they need to do for their businesses. Let's talk about 14% of our audience are C-levels, 52% are managers.

For these people out there who are grappling with this, how do I introduce AI responsibly? How do I do it, not just to cut heads, but to increase the productivity of my people, to make them better employees? Right.

What's your advice? So, if you look at any industrial revolution of the past, the transition through the revolution must have been really hard. There are so many jobs or professions that will slowly morph out sometimes.

Sometimes regionally, it may change balances of where certain things are done and where certain things were produced. And just in general, it was not easy to live through a revolution of any kind. And so, this technological revolution that we are seeing is likewise hard to transition through.

But just like the other industrial revolutions, it brought so much more productivity, so much better health, so many better systems, and the world at large was better off than it was before. Whether we could travel further, whether we could live longer, whether we could eat better, whether we could understand other humans better, all of them brought a certain level of progress, and so will this. Now, if you keep that goal in mind, and you understand that the transition is going to be hard, there's no two ways about it, any transition, any change is hard, the responsibility we can bring to the table and be more conscious of, as citizens of the world, as corporations of the world, as just people everywhere, is that, let's help each other transition through this.

So, reskilling is one of those mandates. Yes. Upskilling and reskilling, just bringing the new university students that are coming out of college currently, just being empathetic, sympathetic, and understanding of what they're going through, and helping them through this transition is important.

And I think that we can do better than the previous industrial revolutions, just because history has taught us so much. If we do that right, and we do believe that the end goal is we'll be better off as a society, then it's worth it. If I can say that because of the AI revolution, more people will have access to education, or there will be better health systems, or telehealth systems that will touch rural folks a lot more than they do currently, or give products and services, financial products and services to a larger number of people than ever before.

And yes, that comes with cost cutting, productivity increases, efficiency increases, that is required for businesses to do so that they can innovate around it. So, I think for me, it is about, look, the end goal is going to be good. I think we're going to be better off as a society.

Let us help each other through this transition. Do it responsibly, do it with intent, and we'll all be better off, and hopefully leave the world better than we found it. Amen.

I was a history major, political science history major in college. I think of the Industrial Revolution, and I think of, it was sort of the Gilded Age, as we call it, right? Right.

And there's a lot of parallels to today. You had a relatively small cadre of men who controlled... You had Rockefeller controlling oil- Carnegie ...

and Carnegie on steel- That's right ... P. Morgan on banking- Banking, yep ...

and Vanderbilts on railroads and shipping. And it took government action to put in rules and break up the trust and break up the monopolies, and as a result of that, that's why we got things like Social Security and so much of the safety net kind of stuff. But until we got there, it wasn't pretty.

Right? Early in the Industrial Revolution, you had children working untold hours, women being burned in factory fire. We've all went to school.

We know. And to me, that's almost, though great things were accomplished, not the example I want to emulate. That's fair.

Now, the revolution that I did personally live through was the dot com. Mm-hmm. And I started a company, I sold the company, helped take another company public, and to me, that's the kind of outcome I want.

Right? Where all of a sudden, a lot of wealth was created. Mm-hmm.

Untold wealth was created. Untold jobs were created. Yes, some people had to get retrained.

Factories, you can't really blame the dot com for what happened with factories moving offshore and so forth. That's more of a globalization issue. But it brought such good to the world.

Talk about education. We didn't have Google. I had an encyclopedia that I used to have to write.

Yeah. Can we emulate that in terms of our AI adoption, or is this so radically moreThat we can. So I think two parts to it.

I take your point about the industrial revolutions of the past. If, again, look at the end product. Right.

The transition was really bad, but the end product is we had infrastructure like never before. Yes. The end product is we had finances like never before, and that brought innovation, that brought products and services to America, but also to the world.

Yes. History also teaches us what not to do again, and that's not let people die in fires in factories and other things, right? Mm-hmm.

So to me, I look at it as, okay, what are the good points or the positivity and the understanding of progress that we are able to take from those revolutions and understand that? That's number one. And then two, yes, the dot-com revolution did bring wealth, but it brought wealth, I think, a little bit disproportionately in the world.

And that's okay. That was also part of progress. But this revolution, I think, is multifold, the dot-com revolution.

Just the sheer volume of what it will touch. Yeah. The industries it will touch, the products and services that it will touch, the processes it will touch, in our case, is just so much more than the dot-com era.

Now, yes, it wouldn't have been possible without the dot-com era, don't get me wrong. But this is at an unprecedented scale. I think the World Economic Forum said something like 92 million jobs will be morphed out, and about 170 million new jobs will be created.

Now, that level of scale, we have never seen before. No. Because the world never had that kind of population before in the previous industrial revolutions, and the dot-com didn't touch it at this level.

No. So just given the scale and given the opportunity, both, I think we have to rethink how we are going to do it, how consciously we're going to do it, who's going to be involved, and it will take everybody to do their part for it to succeed. So I don't want to get political.

We could talk off camera about it if you want, but in my heart, I feel that this is such an issue. You say everyone has to get involved. That has to include the governments.

And not just the US government or the Chinese government or the EU. This is going to take a worldwide consortium. Mm-hmm.

Because human nature is not going to change. People who want to make as much money as they can are going to make as much money as they can, to hell with the consequences. We need, the same way as I said in the Industrial Revolution of the Carnegies, you needed the government to break up the monopolies.

Not everyone's going to make it and be wealthy or anything like that, but everyone deserves a fair shot. That's the role of government, quasi-government, of organizations. We can't leave this up to individual enterprises is my point.

But the world we live in today is a little different, right? And we need these enterprises also to be responsible. I won't comment on the government aspect of it, only because I have never been in government, and I don't know what it takes.

No. But I do know that it will take each and every one of us, every institution, every company, every citizen of the world really, to be worried about this and to play a part in it, because otherwise, we will not reach the scale that we need to reach. Agreed.

I'd like you to talk to people out here who, frankly, are afraid. Yeah. They're nervous.

They have a lot of stress. They don't know, are they going to be in the next round of layoffs? I have friends who, at Cisco, they just did another round of layoffs.

We've all have friends. If you're in the tech industry- That's right ... we all have friends who've been laid off now.

What can you say to them to reassure them? You know the old saying, the operation was a success, but the patient died on the table? What can you say to them to help them get through this?

Look, I think we are living in very interesting times, to use a cliché. But I think, as I said, I think the end result, to me, and what I see is very, very positive. And so as people, all we can do to help ourselves at this point is to reskill, upskill ourselves.

Keep yourself relevant. Keep yourself relevant in the sense of what's happening in the world, what products and services, how technology's being used, what are the new possibilities that we are creating, and be part of that ecosystem in any which way you can. And yes, knowing that it's going to be a little transitionary, it's going to have a little pain associated with it.

There will be some jobs that are more riskier than the other jobs. And understanding, knowing that in itself is valuable because you can help yourself. You can get to that extra level.

And I think whether it's universities or social programs or corporates like Automation Anywhere, we're trying really hard to bring more people into that ecosystem, help retrain them, help reskill. And so, the opportunities are available. Yes, not as easily sometimes in certain regions, but people are trying to change that, and working on it.

So if you keep yourself relevant, I think the transition will be a little bit easier. Yep. Now I'd like to address a different audience.

Chief human, we used to call it human resources. Sometimes they call it chief people offices. But the folks who are responsible for hiring and layoffs and that at large companies where this is really affecting, what can they doLook, they're not miracle workers.

We're not asking them. But what can they do around responsible AI, around helping their people? What should the enterprises be doing?

So I would like to answer that again on two sides. One is the transition aspect, and we spoke about it. It's the reskilling, workforce development, making opportunity available to folks that are in your organization to upskill themselves or bring AI into the subject matters that they're already working on.

That's one aspect of it. The other aspect of it, I think, is for organizations to value the human values just a little bit more, because I think now it is even more possible than ever with AI. So understanding that you need human-centric design, that you have to understand that technology's only purpose is to human enablement.

Let me say that again. Technology's only purpose is human enablement. And if you understand that and internalize it within your organization, then everything else falls into place.

And like I said, I think the human resource departments of so many organizations hold the futures of all the workforce that they serve. And the upskilling, reskilling, understanding that performance, bringing humans at the helm into the AI systems as they had been designed internally, understanding where AI can really benefit even their own workforces is super important because it, again, keeps the workforce relevant and keeps the organization competitive and relevant, because otherwise, the organization will also fail, which you don't want. So I think human resources has a great part to play in this.

Sure. And done well, again, will enable that organization to thrive and stay competitive. Last question, because I appreciate you coming- Of course ...

in on time. And there are a lot of people who, the sky is falling, giving us worst case scenarios. You're addressing this real issue, but in a very optimistic way that, yes, there's going to be a rocky transition, but there's a promised land on the other side, right?

That's right. What gives you that confidence that it optimistically, this turns out well for all of us? Intrinsically because I put my faith in humans.

I think there are great leaders everywhere. I think there are great folks everywhere, subject matter experts or not. They want to do the right thing.

They care about the world. And I think, like you said, it's rocky. The transition is definitely rocky.

But the end result, and why people are working on these new technologies and trying to kind of figure out how far can we push this, is because they want to provide something better for the world. My favorite example, which is also a cliché, I think, is that humans weren't put on this Earth to transfer data between Excel and five other applications. We were built for better things.

I hope so. So if technology enables you to do that, and we think that we can serve the world better with the usage of those right technologies, again, in the right fashion, we'll all be better off, and I do believe that. " Yes.

Thank you so much for coming on. Likewise. Thank you so much.

And thank you for the great, just a great message. All right. We've got just a couple more, I think, interviews here today.

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