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welcome we're so happy to have you um my name is Suzanne Shaw I'm the community programs manager here at automation anywhere I'll be hosting um the session initially um would love for everyone to give us a quick introduction in the chat so as our participants are joining if you don't mind giving us um your name your title your organization and where you're located um Preston welcome from Toledo glad to have you um good morning Dave so happy to have you guys we'll just let everyone do um their brief introductions and then we'll get started here in just a minute Adam real quick do you want to do a sound check yeah oh got you okay awesome sorry about that welcome back glad to see you great Leah we have Iowa Delaware Massachusetts Netherlands Toledo got a couple from Ohio Denver all over but a global audience it's always really fun um I'm gonna go ahead and do my a quick introduction as again everyone who's joining um give us a few just blurbs of where you where you work what your title is and where you live um would be great and um I'll go ahead and start my section so um first of all welcome to the last session of our first annual Pathfinder Community um camp in our generative AI showcase we're really excited to have you all here and it's always great to see familiar names and have the opportunity to have new community members joining the events as I mentioned before my name is Suzanne Shaw and I have the privilege of being the community programs manager here at automation anywhere a little bit about the Pathfinder community so a common definition for Pathfinder is one who discovers a way especially one that explores untraversed regions to Mark out a new route you are automation anywhere Global community of leaders um our Pathfinders and the community team is here to be one of your partners in automation acceleration and success um we'll be doing this annually this is our mid-year Community Symposium um really intended to help Propel you all to the end of your year Mission success and marks the next chapter of Our Community Partnership um the automation Pathfinder program is your flight map um getting you ready for your automation Mission success developed with over 20 years of first-hand automation expertise across thousands of use cases each mission is calibrated to serve as your blueprint for Best Practices to achieve scalable growth measurable valuable and sorry measurable value and long-term sustainability don't miss out on the action for those of you who have joined our previous sessions this week we've had a ton of really great resources great conversations and we're really excited to propel into the rest of the year with the tools and resources we've provided as part of our daily flight plans um I will be linking a few different a few resources as well as events in the chat don't miss out on our Bot game season 4 which is an aeai Edition and we're really excited to get started with two days um session on automation pipeline I'm going to pass the hosting um baton over to you Mark Mark goodair take it away awesome thank you so much Suzanne and uh and welcome everyone uh super excited about this session I like uh all things Pathfinder and uh but if I had to to pick a favorite this might be one of them I think um ultimately it's it's uh if all the automation program is a vehicle the fuel for it is ideas so really we're talking about the ideas or opportunities to automate um so pretty excited about that just by way of a quick introduction uh my name is Mark goodaire and I've been with automation anywhere a little over four years I spent the first approximately three years in Professional Services um I may have worked with with some of you on the line um so I worked in a number of different uh geographies uh helping customers with with different challenges including scale and just a little over a year ago I took over uh in this new role where I'm leading our internal automation program so uh that may or may not be surprising uh to you but we absolutely drink our own champagne within automation anywhere we have our own automation program and I need that Center of Excellence uh which which is cool because it means I can absolutely relate to the journey that that all of you are are taking and I'm super excited today because I'm joined with uh two new friends uh Tim and Adam I'm gonna let them uh introduce themselves uh quickly so uh Tim uh if you want to give a quick introduction uh to yourself and the exciting automation program that you have at the Venetian uh yeah thanks Mark uh so my name is Tim long I lead the digital and data services team at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas um our primary focus is basically using technology emerging technology to streamline business and using data to make Better Business decisions um part of that I was with Dupont which is a large chemical manufacturer we were working in their digital transformation uh Department uh we were focusing on RPA machine learning uh hololens ai ai VR AR that kind of stuff and then prior to that I was with BlackRock um doing data and analytics for their business strategy department but also we got in the RPA so that's where I first got into the field awesome that's great thank you and welcome Tim thanks so much for being here for this uh this conversation yeah and and we've got Adam as well from Boston Scientific Adam do you want to give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself yeah so Adam fabrow I manage the HR technology team here at Boston Scientific I've been here since 2019. I came to stand up the Ia team here for our HR department but prior to that I was also working at Dell EMC as a RPA developer for since around 2015 so been with a for a little bit now fantastic oh very very cool thank you both for uh for joining us and and it's neat very different Industries and I know that there's some similarities but also some key differences in kind of the journey you guys are taking with automation so super excited about this conversation thanks for joining us okay so so let's get into to some of the questions uh first question uh is is as we talked about ultimately this comes down to automation ideas we don't have uh automation ideas if we don't identify those opportunities we can't execute on it and and deliver automation so first question is where do you Source your automation ideas from what are your sources for automation ideas I'm going to go to Tim on this first and I think uh we probably also have a pool so that all of you that are attending can also answer this question so Tim where do you get your idea automation ideas from yeah um for me um I know there's you know there's different opinions some people like the crowdsource go from the bottom up some people like to work with the executive team and and go top down um my sweet spot is right in the middle right so we have a digital Champion advocacy program where we designate people from different functions that aren't so high up that they don't really understand the day-to-day pain points of the team but they're high enough up where they can actually affect change so that that's really where that's really the the group of people that I like to focus on so we meet we meet once a month uh we talk about different innovation ideas um and then we have a steering committee um we review our backlog prioritize um and kind of go from there very cool very cool so somewhere as you said you know two different approaches might be kind of top down and bottom up you guys are kind of in the middle going towards kind of middle management is that pretty safe to say to try and find those ideas yeah I would I would say middle management but definitely somebody who understands the data today right I know you know there's some more sophisticated ways of doing it I rely on my business partners I know um some people are getting into more automated process Discovery I haven't gotten there yet but I hope to in the future oh that that's that's awesome I'm keeping an eye on the pool here but meanwhile Adam do you want to do you want to give a quick comment on that same question where do you guys get your automation ideas from yeah so we do a lot just strictly from the business so we're a Federated models so all of HR development is done with inside of our team so we rely on the smes with inside of the HR function to submit their different ideas and it's going out similar to what Tim does teaching people what RPA can do or what automation can do so that they can start thinking and getting think you're spinning on ideas so that they could submit through a formal intake process very cool very cool I think we've uh we've probably got some pool results um Suzanne is it possible for us to to see that I'm interested in for the attendees where they're getting their uh their ideas from if we're able to share that that would be really interesting yeah so I am sharing um but the so the the attendees can see it but we had about 25 of people are using some form of technology to document and 75 as of now or not really interesting that's that's awesome thanks Suzanne so so that's interesting I think um last time I don't know how many of you would have attended imagine but one thing that this is one point that kind of surprised me and I found really interesting uh when we looked at the different customers that were showcasing their automation programs last year at imagine um we really did have some organizations that were were at uh they were basically different ends of the spectrum I remember one organization had lots of success scaling everything was was really top down so they got in the boardroom and said hey what are all of our key Enterprise uh cross-functional processes let's automate them and they had lots of success and then another organization did basically none of that it was completely kind of crowds first so they they put up a portal and said hey we need ideas and then they they collected from those so that's another another important point I think that there isn't necessarily any one right answer I don't know if you and Tim and Adam would agree with that there could be different approaches to getting those ideas yeah yeah there's definitely different ways of doing it sorry Mark I'm going to go ahead and actually launch the second poll question on where the primary source of automation ideas are coming from from the group and then you can kind of reference back to that as well that's that's fantastic um on that last full question I know Tim Tim you mentioned you haven't used too much technology uh in that area Adam have you used any technology things like process Discovery in terms of finding ideas not yet we haven't so we do a lot with uh the service center so a lot of our prioritization or how we target automations is based off of volumes that the service center is producing because we obviously pay per transaction and if we're targeting the highest level transactions then we're gonna hit the biggest numbers with that so that's how we do a lot of our prioritization awesome yeah we uh within automation anywhere anywhere within our program we do a a couple quarters ago was the first time that we actually used process Discovery our process Discovery product so um we actually used it uh in in and around our our kind of Business Development our xdr area um so we deployed process Discovery to seven or eight different roles globally of of individuals that were at least in theory doing the same kind of work um and it was a really really interesting exercise for us again another example of kind of tricking our own champagne we wanted to want to try it and see how it worked ourselves um the analysis was really interesting I mean within a couple days of starting to record the data we immediately identified a kind of anomaly it was like of the eight people you know what is happening in this specific geography something you know the behavior seemed very different so there were discussions after that about you know things like process standardization they really didn't have directly anything to do with with automation it was just some kind of process standardization uh and then we ultimately came up with some automation opportunities as well so we had some sex success with uh with process Discovery and and definitely worth investigating for those of you that are there attending did you have any pushback from the business when you're looking at process Discovery whether it's the big brother looking over your shoulder monitoring what you're doing or can you talk a little bit of that absolutely uh that's a great point so um you know that was after our acquisition of of uh Fortress IQ that product what that team had just joined us uh fortunately they had a lot of Industry experience in this specific area so they were able to kind of help us um and I think the question that you're asking Adam I kind of wrap up in in the expression change management so we did spend some time uh thinking about those concerns and and taking the time to to to Really describe why we're doing it I think some organizations and some employees um in other organizations have implemented things like productivity tools uh that have made some people nervous uh what we did was actually actually we worked with our legal team and and some other folks and and actually documented some things like policies uh in and around this that we could communicate to the whole Workforce and again really the intent was to say this is why we're doing it um very clearly why are we doing it we're doing it because we drink our own champagne we want to identify those efficiencies we want to identify automation opportunities and we want all of us to be to be able to be more effective in our work so so we we put out some communication around that um to be honest in our experience most of the concerns uh kind of faded away once they understand understood why we were doing it and then it was in kind of all of our best interest um but we did we didn't take that for granted we did take the time to craft some communication and make sure that we were all kind of aligned on on what we were doing and why we were doing it and we also share the outcome with them at the end of it it wasn't like we just disappeared uh we came back and said hey guys you know thanks for your support of the program here were our findings what do you guys think which I think is important awesome great question so poll results it's interesting if you guys can see it interesting looks like about 75 percent of the respondents said that the ideas were kind of bottom up from employees uh I think the next biggest one was process Discovery um and then automation road maps that's another another um interesting one um looks like eight percent were using automation roadmaps which to me are kind of kind of like that top-down approach really really interesting there's a there is a question about process Discovery and um some you know security and sensitive data do you want to address that at all sure I guess the one thing I'd say is uh you're not alone uh we were in the same again we had exactly the same concerns uh you know so for example depending on what we were recording uh there might be some sensitive data there um so in our case for example are we dealing with financial data or data in the HR area sensitive financial data things like that customer data we have the same concerns so so a couple of things first of all and I think this is a good principle we didn't start out with them with automating a process that had the most sensitive data so so we specifically just again just to get our feet wet we started off with a process that didn't have those those kind of uh data sensitivities uh number one number two uh we really really again experimented with the product and made sure we had good experience to understand all the capabilities around that um our our process Discovery product is pretty slick in terms of its ability to do things like redact sensitive data um so we spent the time to to configure that um we even you know this is another common question we even did things like configure the platform to say what did we not want to record so I'll give you an example maybe in your Workforce um people sometimes do something personal on their laptop they uh do some personal email or they do some personal web banking and things like that we had that discussion and we said look again we are not trying to record data that we don't want to be recording so we excluded that stuff we said we said something like hey everyone if you're going to do that use this browser and we're not recording it and that's what we did you know if you're going to do the personal stuff during this period uh that kind of stuff use Edge but we're going to record Chrome we did something like that um really really good question so I'd say the product the product has pretty strong capabilities from a security and and things like redaction of sensitive data standpoint and we took some additional steps just to say we're going to be really really crisp and clear about what we're recording and what we are absolutely not recording nobody's trying to make your personal web banking uh more efficient so we didn't even report that yet yeah and just to add what you said Mark um most products uh do give the employee the chance to review their submissions before they send it so it really is at their control it's not a very big brother tool um right no frail for sure I mean our product uh there's a big pause but if somebody wants to first of all they know when it's recording and there's a big pause button if somebody really really did did uh want to do it but um you know again with with communication with making all this stuff clear I think a lot of the concerns go away because they know that we actually are thinking about it we're being we're just being transparent which I just you know that's a good A good rule in general I think there's also the aspect of of your infosec team right the the employees is one thing your infosec team getting them comfortable is a completely different kind of conversation a hundred percent so so we had to bring them and our we actually had our whole legal team they were they were along for the ride as well that's a really good point having that that partnership so Beyond getting ideas uh you know one of the things that can happen when we ask for ideas is you know we have to be careful what you ask for you might get it sometimes we end up with a flood of ideas now what um and typically uh we all have some kind of resource constraints so so this is a kind of different question I'm going to throw at you Adam which is um when you get lots of those automation opportunities or ideas how do you really put your finger on the best ideas the one the ones that you actually want to execute and maybe automate you know as quickly as possible from that big pool of ideas how do you identify the best ones yeah a lot of times it's looking at the ROI but there's also times where there's that lowing fruit where you know if you T-shirt size it there's not going to be a lot of effort in terms of development and it'll be a quick win for the team to maybe save a couple head count or a couple hours worth of work so if you can squeak those in while you're developing something else a bigger process and obviously that's all the better but a lot of times it's really just looking at pure Roi and what value is going to bring to the team awesome kind of bang for the buck how much how much are we gonna get for the effort Tim what about you any any thoughts on that topic no I actually agree with Adam um they're the the low hanging fruit's not something I typically attack right off the bat um well let me rephrase that it's not something I typically attack now right off the bat is something I attack because I want to build trust so I want to do something easy and deliver quickly um but as you get into those home runs where it's a medium low complexity process big huge returns I typically like to do those small lone hanging fruit when my developers have down time right right you use that capacity when they're when they're in between Sprints or whatever it is n't a roadblock yeah uh if somebody's got a blocker yeah that's gotcha that makes makes lots of sense I think um I think you know herein lies the challenge I think that that's one of the important things here is uh to your point Adam if we want to identify Roi is how good are we at that discipline of assessing the effort and then assessing the value uh right so so you know that's a topic in and of itself we may have time in this session to get a little bit into that but uh you know if we can't articulate the value it's really tough to know what's going to come out the other end if we put in whatever effort um yeah no very very good the other thing that we've noticed and I'm interested to know uh from all of our all the participants today and from you Adam and Tim are there any other criteria that are coming in when you're identifying the best ideas uh for example um you guys have probably heard of this new thing called generative AI I'm guessing I'm guessing I'm guessing you guys have heard something about that something about this chat gbt thing and all of these different solutions a lot of conversation about that uh that's something that's that's starting starting to impact I mean in a positive way but that's impacting our own automation program so for example in addition to what you mentioned Adam you know we're always looking at that lens of effort um effort and risk uh against the value we're getting but now another criteria is kind of uh are there opportunities to Showcase those capabilities as well obviously we hope that there's some additional value to come with the other end but it's like is there some inherent value just to The Innovation just the fact that we we really do need to get some some real experience of these kind of Technologies um Adam or Tim any any quick thoughts on that is that something that's starting to come in uh I am a huge experimenter uh I love doing pocs I'm I'm constantly trying to add new tools to my tool belt um I any chance I get to do a proof of concept on a new technology I do it um you got to keep the lights on you got to run your department you got to run your your function but it's important to stay ahead of the Curve and and test those new technologies and see how it can impact the business absolutely however you have yeah it's actually interesting you brought this up this week we actually had a meeting in our Marlborough office where CHR chro came up to us at lunch and she was asking about chat GPT and how it's going to impact our world in the future and she's been using it herself so it's definitely going to be things that we have to look at from like a proof of concept perspective like Tim was just chatting through something that you have to look for but obviously the main goal is to keep the lights on get through the automation back book that you have currently but also at the same time how can we look at leveraging other Technologies at the same time absolutely absolutely and then no it's an interesting topic the other thing I'd say is um when I look at something like generative AI one of the ways that I look at it is it should be an accelerator for me and it should be you know to your point Adam it should have good Roi in other words I'm looking at like how can we look how can we use generative AI in a way that hey that's a lot less effort it's giving me a lot instead of writing a bunch of custom code in python or you know in a bot it's giving me something that's that's uh that's cheap in other words it's it's got a safety amount of value with relatively you know easy use um you know we've got functionality bill right in the product so you can easily consume uh chat GPT for example um so I think that that's important right if it shouldn't be adding a bunch of overhead that the exciting part about it is the value should come with without a bunch of effort that makes sense foreign but one of the biggest one of the things I'm most excited for um is just its ability to enable average business users to build their own automation right so like just just speaking in natural language uh um to say your your RPA Bots and say like hey go process this invoice for me and they go do it right or they like you know build this automation that does this this and this and then it builds the code right up for you I think there's huge opportunity to to just enable the business to self-service at a hundred percent absolutely and and yeah we're going through the same thing and while just like we do with the automated with an automation program while we also mitigate the risk right so just like we just talked about with process Discovery the same kind of questions come up in terms of you know making sure that we've got the right guard rails and data sensitivity and the right policies and things like that in place but yeah absolutely I mean there's so much fire and excitement about it um it's awesome um we just launched another Pool I don't know if Tim and Adam if you can see the results there if everyone can see those um so this question was about what factors specifically you use to consider you know what what automations to build uh really really interesting so 89 no big surprise there that's kind of the ROI bid about how much value are we going to get going to get um interested to see second place was complexity effort that's kind of the arrow completes the ROI equation and 58 I guess that was the third potential business value um that that's that's one I always look at and I I in my experience sometimes it's we forget about that one um I don't know if you guys have had the same experience but we've had lots of situations where uh in kind of in the in the spirit of agile we're trying to get something into production that provides some immediate benefit but the the road map the potential for it may be way bigger you know we're gonna roll this out automation out to 15 people but we know there's another 100 waiting on it um so that's why that piece of immediate value versus potential I think is important is that something you guys consider as well kind of the future or potential value yeah for us we a lot of the stuff that we automate is us first then we push out Global our biggest population is in the us but we have a huge population in Ireland like 8 000 employees in Ireland and around the globe as well so a lot of times what we do is start US based and then push it out Global or if we can align globally before we even automate it in the US and obviously we'll look towards that too I too many any thoughts on that one same thing me not so much and let me tell you why so uh the Venetian used to be part of a global company um unfortunately this the tech Stacks at each of the company were very different so it was hard to replicate uh processes across regions and different properties we have seen some opportunity where we can reuse the same code across functions but it's very rare and we're a fixed property so it's not like you know we're getting into this business and we're going to see a lot of Demand on this side so you know you know we're confined within four walls our volumes are buying we only have so many rooms so it's not really something that I consider too much that's okay interesting um let's talk a little bit about the concept of uh of delivery channels um and that might be an expression that not not everybody uses but when I when I mean delivery Channel essentially I mean uh who's actually going to deliver the automation so examples of delivery channels might be um you might have some you might call it something different but you might have some kind of let's call it a center of excellence or Coe you might have that kind of structure um you might have some capability that's in a Federated model in terms of in the business units citizen developers you may work with Partners uh within automation anywhere we we have all those channels happening so I'm interested um Tim and Adam maybe we'll start with with Adam first do you have a variety of different channels in place and if so how do you make that decision in terms of you know who's going to deliver one automation or is this Federated so the functional teams have their own so HR has their own Coe Finance has their own Coes and projects are prioritized based off what their needs are so in our Coe 90 of the automations are created by developers sitting with inside of Ria Coe inside of HR but there's also times where we have automations that are low hanging fruit where we can have someone that sits with inside of the HR function and is more of a technical resource that can jump in and do like a stretch assignment on projects similar to what I would call a citizen developer where they have some technical capabilities not a lot of experience in the RPA but want to learn it so we'll have them jump on a project so that they can understand how to use the technology as well oh that's super interesting so it sounds like kind of a case-by-case basis based on a number of factors including what would you say like availability you know capability of the resource yeah bandwidth is a big thing right what they call a citizen development light it's like the free version of Citizen development right right gotcha all right thanks Adam you have different delivery channels in place is that is that something you guys have in place and if so how do you make that decision uh now well kind of right so we're a central icoe so my team serves the entire organization um we do have offshore developers um that we can kick over work to um we are looking at getting into citizen development but we're we're we're we're just tipping our toe into the water so I have one person who specializes in QA automation getting trained up on automation anywhere um and that's going to be our first test subject of Citizen development and we're also waiting to migrate to a360 before we do that because I don't want people building code in version 11 when that's going to go well they migrated right yeah no that's that's very cool you know we we've been ourselves on an interesting journey and uh I guess the the simple way I I do that is we're always looking at kind of what the capabilities of that Channel versus the automation maybe that sounds simple but each of our delivery channels we've got different capabilities so for example um we've got even within our citizen developers we've got some that are you know they could join the Coe tomorrow they're very very capable and then we've got others that are quite new so you know uh complexity obviously would be a key factor there in terms of of where we would assign certain work um and I'd say risk is another one um again like we were just talking about all these when you get into sensitivities around data and pii and things like that um some of that stuff we keep closer to the to the Coe again just because of the the sensitivities and the the not great things that can go wrong around some of those initiatives sometimes we keep those closer to the Coe um and then kind of to your point Adam we're always trying to keep it as close to where the action is from a Federated standpoint Point uh you know who where is the expertise on the process where the expert the expertise on those systems tends to be closer to the business units that are actually dealing yeah really interesting thank you for that um we've talked a little bit about this but um prioritization so if you've got 10 use cases that you all think are appropriate for one of those delivery channels you've got um what are some factors that come in into play in terms of prioritization I think you know one thing we talked about was overall Roi anything else that comes in in terms of you know why you pick one use case over another Adam do you want to start with that one yeah during covid it was an interesting time we kind of scrapped the whole Roi model and moved more towards bandwidth support because we're finding that either people are out sick with covet or whatever the situation was we would try to free up capacity to those full-time employees by creating automation so sometimes we'd push something ahead of something with higher value on an Roi perspective just so that we could help support the business right Tim uh thoughts about about that one anything else you know that's an interesting point anything else outside of Roi that would that would help in terms of uh how you prioritize one use case over another yeah so I mean with with this particular position we're really close to the guess right so uh typically in our steering committees um we present these ideas to the VP the one of the VPS right and at the end of the day their decision how they want to prioritize is we're a service organization but we do tend to prioritize even if it's not a great Labor savings if there is if there's if there's guest Improvement opportunities there like say we TR we do track like our our feedback from our guests and if we see areas where we're getting bad scores and we can build an automation to try to improve those scores we will go and attack that area over something else that we might maybe save a little bit more labor uh because you know the number one focus is on the customer is on the guest now that that's that's an interesting point too Tim so it's it's kind of back to this uh we haven't discussed this too much but the different value drivers right it's not just about productivity but what are the other types of business value we might get like you just mentioned a big one you know things like a customer sat and and I think and one of the things you get into there is I don't know if you guys have this experience but in some cases you know it's clear that it's an important automation even if it's not necessarily easy to quantify the benefit so I'm gonna throw something like um there's a risk that needs to be mitigated yeah we put lots of smart people together and it may be tough to qualify but like we you know everyone looks at each other and says we got to handle this it's related to compliance or regulatory or or are participating in the market you know we want to be first in this area yeah nobody nobody can give a number to it but it just floated to the top uh how about you know the CEO wants it tomorrow you know maybe he knows something we don't know so can you guys resonate with that as well yeah so when we were when I was in uh the financial side of things uh you know operation exceptions were a big deal right because um if we would make an op error um we would have to pay our customers a certain amount of money like in the millions to to correct that out uh so risk reduction in that job was our primary focus gotcha no that's that's a great example it's a great example um uh we we consider like our Coe we consider ourselves customer zero uh so so you know we we get early releases of our product because we want to make sure that folks like you Tim and Adam uh don't go through through pain that's unnecessary so we won't experience it and and so one of the criteria for us again is is things like emerging technology emerging product you know product functionality so for example when things like I already came to the product we wanted to be the first out of the gate to experience that you know what what are the what's that experience like in terms of doing that embedded automation our automation co-pilot we wanted to be right out of the gate so we've had situations where uh you know do something using that functionality was a good enough criteria to kind of float uh higher than other things that might that might have better numbers from an Roi standpoint just you know we did the same thing with generative AI we wanted to pretty much immediately use that package that we added to the product and make sure that we had something out there for generative AI um no that's it's it's interesting Mark you actively provide feedback to your product team when you expect like when you play with these new uh functions 100 we uh and Tim you know again this is kind of opening the curtain on us internally but um in the in my some of my past roles I'd say we didn't always have a real strong Bridge there but I would say in in this group in our Center of Excellence uh we're in constant touch with them and that can be things like for sure it could be things like uh you know we found a product bug if something like that occurs it can be things like that but it's also it's more it's not just about kind of qaing the functionality it's also about um the actual experience you know is it helping us deliver better automation faster what's the actual experience like uh we have lots of discussions about about things like um is this is it is it clear is the user experience optimized is the developer experience optimized because again just like you guys are we're doing that uh you know all day every day so we provide that feedback as well so great yeah yeah I think I think I I agree I think that that's important um one piece of I don't know if you guys have used this functionality Tim I don't think you're you're at automation 360 yet but um an example of that would be we provided feedback a while back around uh things like code reviews being a bit of a labor-some process and so we worked with the product team and if you see automation 360 these days it's got static code analysis baked in and there's a good roadmap for it as well so that instead of manually going through line by line and saying you know that's not our naming convention for the variables or you're missing error handling uh the product just says you know you've got seven issues in this code that's that's an example of something where we really collaborated closely with product and I I personally have been thrilled to see that come into the product awesome Tim I want to go to you on on this question um the whole management of the pipeline um we've got we've got uh different ways that we can do that even from a technology standpoint and you know even for the participants on the line right now there might be different systems that people are using can you let us know a little bit about how you manage it from a technology standpoint how do you manage your automation pipeline sure let me actually Share my video uh and kind of show you what we do great how do I do that oh share screen I think we've got a an open poll on that topic as well for what tools or technology we uh that folks use to manage their pipeline uh can you see my main screen is it coming through yes yes we can yep yeah so I I so we try to work as agile as possible um you know it's it's hard to deliver Boston thin slices um so we're more more wagile but I I found success with some of the more agile project management tools like uh jira and devops uh so so for me um we create user stories that that basically represent projects right like these are yours or stories um they have descriptions Roi um some value metrics um some other reporting metrics right so this this makes it really easy for me to do my um management reporting and then I basically can bake that into a dashboard you can see like what's in my pipeline what's in development what's been completed um we used to just base the the program on repeatable hours so that's why there's a focus here but we've kind of evolved to see uh other benefits that we can see like use cases by department and then uh down here is is kind of something that's relevant like so you know once we once we do the initial intake and I and I have a session with the the teams to um basically just go over the process see if it's a good candidate and they I'll add it to my backlog right and then I'll I'll give it a confidence level um and a PDD status right like finalized not started uh so I can tell in my backlog how much how many hours I have there and and my confidence uh you can see I I have a majority of low confidence in my backlog right now but but that's okay um and then then the magic of this really really gets down to the Sprints right so these user stories get attached to tasks as well as enhancements and bugs and my team can work in one environment and see everything from a reporting standpoint but then we can also I can also manage my Dev team inside this tool very cool Tim so can you comment a little bit more about the the concept of of uh confidence uh so so what would be an example of a low confidence scenario and then kind of how do you handle those use cases is there some way you how do you boost your confidence uh well I mean the low confidence would be a highly complex automation that involves like human Intuition or right or just a tremendous amount of of effort relative to the value it provides usually though usually those just sit in my backlogs um yeah I wish I had a better way to you know those those processes typically involve process free engineering and that's a very labor-intensive process uh to do that that's super helpful and thanks for kind of bringing back the curtain and showing us how you manage that within the Venetian that's really interesting Tim thanks Adam any any comments on that in terms of how you guys handle this from a what technology would you use yeah similar so we use a form for intake and then it goes into a jira backlog and then you move in sprints okay no that's really interesting so if you look at the poll results interesting so the winner is other which is which is fascinating uh for those of you that are on the on the chat love to know what the other is love to know what options there are here um 34 using Excel um I think Excel is here to stay I think it seems to be a pretty reliable technology on the planet uh so other seems to be leading followed by Excel spreadsheets and then and then jira and it looks like we've got um Coe manager which is our product uh also coming up there um we just uh recently started using Coe manager for our internal program um and and one of the nice things about Coe manager is it actually it's integrated with our product which means you can tie back uh kind of plan versus actual savings and and value that's that's one of the pieces we're most excited about because it actually ties to the control room so we can say we expected this much value because this automation was going to run 100 times a month it actually ran 90 times a month or actually ran 150 times a month so we can kind of do that that analysis um so yeah we've been using cue manager but for those in the chat love to know what what the other is yeah there's quite a few from SharePoint which somebody I think it was Hans that said is glorified version of excel right oh no it's yeah um and then aha moving to Ado um custom power apps is also on there uh Azure devops and smartsheets very interesting very so it was a pretty diverse um tool set well that's really really interesting um before we I know what time time is getting short but one last poll that we did that I thought was interesting um if you guys can see the the question number five this one I thought was was also interesting so um uh who who was involved in actually assessing the ideas I think this is interesting so uh eighty percent of the time we involved the requester of the idea that's interesting so 20 20 of the respondent of the the respondents here don't involve the requester that's interesting um it looks like 69 involving some kind of process SME we call those processes um a little less than half the time Cub representative that may be for organizations that actually that don't have uh or operate as uh and then 20 other again interested in the chat uh who else is involved in the actual assessment is it some layer of management or Executives who else is involved in in assessing the ideas um Tim and Adam any any thoughts on that on that that uh pool for question five does that resonate with with your experience in terms of who you involve for us it's the samis who are generally the the requester so it's a little bit of both for that one gotcha Tim similar for you or what do you think well unfortunately uh I'm heavily involved in that process as well as we usually bring in the um the SMA and then also the the digital Champion that works with that department so those are these are the three people we we bring into those conversations and my developers I I typically like to involve them as well in case there's something that they see that I don't gotcha gotcha yeah we we internally have kind of run the gamut of different scenarios here it's like like all these things it's such a delicate balance it's like the more people involved in it um you get into this Democratic process you know you know just trying to find people's calendar availability if there's four or five people to assess an idea it can be a challenge but um so so we've kind of been honing this over time but uh we we now involve we didn't always do this but we involved the what we call the application custodian or the application owner so for example if we use workday uh for example for for HR and finance if we're gonna automate something in workday we we pull in some representative from that team which in our case is on the I.T side kind of an I.T application owner um and the reason we pull them in is frankly a couple times we automated things that then the application order came back and said uh that's native functionality so so nobody in the Coe knew that I'm not a work day expert my team worked and they didn't know that but we had that happen a couple times so now we pull them in early in the curve and that doesn't mean just because there's a native way of doing the application that doesn't mean there's an automation opportunity but we at least want to know that going in so we can kind of measure the trade-off um so that's that's one uh person that we brought in and we used to also not have as much emphasis on the process SME we used to we started off working more or less exclusively with the requester and then we ran into the the issues that can come with that sometimes the requester doesn't have the same uh overall understanding of the of the process so we had situations where somebody might request something and maybe there's 99 other people in a similar function we really need somebody that's got the overall process for you to say oh no we don't need to automate that in this way because we've got some additional you know process changes coming that you don't know about and that they bring in that additional Dimension so and we ourselves have been kind of holding that to make sure that we we get the right stakeholders involved without slowing down the process to a point that's that's not workable so is not negatively impacting the systems Downstream that your automations are working in too because like you said we're not the experts in the systems that you're creating automations in so how would we know if we're gonna negatively impact something Downstream totally yeah exactly uh that application is going to be upgraded in a month oh you know thanks for letting us know we're about to start developing so exactly well that's awesome Tim any other thoughts on that on that topic on that final poll no I was going to say yeah I totally agree uh the application owner is the first call I make when I get a process that I'm about to do and there have been plenty of times that they say that's just native functionality and I say okay that's a win for me I don't have to do any work and I'm taking credit for that so it is definitely it's definitely a great idea to involve them as well even the vendor right sometimes the vendor might have that in their pipeline um I've had those situations where we had to wait a week for something that would have took us a month to build absolutely absolutely no that that's awesome um just doing quick time check I think um I I personally I have really really enjoyed the conversation I think we're coming to that time um Tim and Adam thank you so much for joining me today any any final thoughts on this topic before we sign off all good Mark I do have one question and I know this is kind of crossing over from previous conversations but I think it's I do think it's still relevant as especially as we're trying to build you know Pipeline and evaluation of automation but Leah asks how do you assess the individual capabilities when utilizing citizen developer you kind of touched on it a little bit but any of do any of you have any additional kind of insight knowing when and how you involve them it's a great question to Tim or Adam any thoughts so for us we typically Target those people who are either really good in Excel that have experience doing like vlookups or pivot table and such inside of the HRM which are few and far between but those are the ones that we'll Target but from an automation perspective when we do the analysis or the original intake that's where we'll assess how much level of effort there will be on the developer side and that's where we will Peg it as something that will be a low-hanging fruit or this is going to be extremely difficult to automate cool Tim it sounds like an assessment of a capability of your citizen developers is that something you guys it's something I'm just getting into I mean first first step is I may come get I get I make them get developer certified I like that they I like I like folks that have a technical background especially when I'm starting out and I want to give them a process that if their bot breaks it has zero impact to the business so that's where we start um and I also give them full Reign to to work with my professional developers to help them because that's the only way that you know they're going to improve is is learning from somebody who knows it better than them awesome awesome Suzanne hopefully that helped thank you Timo great um well gentlemen thank you all for participating and thanks for the attendees for your engagement and for um being here with us today we're really excited um to have wrapped up our first week of the Pathfinder Community camp and excited to see um all of the fun AI theme submissions so um to wrap things up I'm gonna just share a few quick little um announcements that are coming up first thing is that imagine is coming back um scheduled for September in Austin we would love for you all to join us if you are able to um there's a put QR code here we're giving 50 off as an early bird special so if that's something you're interested we'd love to have you join us and that's going to be September 19th and 20th again that's in Austin Texas um then the last item of business just to just touch bases again we've talked about it on the call today and it's you know all over in the tech world is um Ai and how automation is integrating with that so we're we're hoping to provide some really great tools and resources moving forward in addition on June 1st we're actually having an entire generative AI event would love for you all to join check out more information on the website um and look forward to working with you all thanks again for joining we're grateful for your engagement and look forward to seeing you all again you guys have a great weekend thank you thank you