In advance of the mid-April AI for Mission Impact event, at which UiPath and top leaders in government will look at how their organizations are using AI and automation to drive mission impact, OS AI sat down with Todd Schroeder, VP, Public Sector at UiPath to discuss the current moment in time for AI, the automation component and release of knowledge, and the company’s Business Automation Platform that has proven to be a game-changer for GovCon delivering to its customers.
Understanding the Moment in Time for AI
Looking back 20 years, there was a common experience that enterprise portfolios were becoming complex. The Clinger Cohen Act created an impetus for the organization of that technology to eliminate duplication and address data security and privacy concerns. Then came the cloud era and everything the industry had been working to manage started from square one in some respects.
“A few years ago, it became clear we had suddenly inherited an exponential number of cloud technologies, platforms, systems, applications, and digital front doors,” said Schroeder. “Because things were easier to acquire and develop, we ended up with way too much. If I put myself into the shoes of a government worker, I have far too many bookmarks to manage because there is a digital door for everything.”
Dynamics and people and power structures often dictated platform, bypassing a simplified user experience and creating an experience on top of an experience, further complicating workflow and process management.
“This is the moment in time for automation, integration and AI, to put the user back in the center of it all. It’s a time to move away from those technologies that leaned on data gravity and take the opportunity to be more responsible, interoperable and flexible,” Schroeder said.
The Automation Component
Of course, the reality is that everyone, wherever they are, works under a process. For government work, a highly regulated process, automation is critical in managing the routine so that the people component can really unlock their cerebral potential to focus on the higher-level vision, mission, and innovation.
“Automation can integrate the new and old, legacy systems and the policy and governance rules to make any process more intelligent. Imagine AI bringing a task forward because it understands the human perspective, the juncture of the process that needs human intervention. Imagine getting content from 5 or 100 systems at a time so the user can make an informed decision but did not have to do all that legwork themselves,” Schroeder said.
With automation adding both execution and a level of intelligence that follows the process steps and vets the sources of data, the government employee has context to approve a next step, decline, or seek more clarification.
Release of Knowledge
Government employees are society’s most critical knowledge workers, often steeped in decades of policy and with deep understanding of how programs are delivered today. Automation technology offers the opportunity to free up the knowledge that exists in data and documents and books to make it more resilient and flexible and provide the opportunity for these knowledge workers to shift to programmatic improvement for societal systems.
“It allows us the opportunity to move past the complexity that technology has created. Automation frees this workforce to deliver outcomes. It shifts them back into making programmatic impact because doing the work is radically simplified,” Schroeder said. “If automation can give us back 50 percent of our time so that we can focus on the mission, it is the only wholesale way of restructuring the work for this critical industry. It represents a revolutionary shift in better positioning government agencies to deliver better on its mission and its responsibilities for the future.”
While investment in technology within both public and private sector has increased by leaps and bounds, productivity has not. Instead, we have been mired in rework, in reconfiguring ways we had been doing things instead of looking ahead and focusing on transformation. Ideally every employee should have a digital assistant to extend their knowledge, allow them to work more quickly and accurately, give them time back, and change their daily experience at their jobs.
“We haven’t yet brought the gains, the working environments, or the culture to attract a new workforce to government. The knowledge is retiring, we don’t have the numbers of new workers to replace that knowledge loss, or the productivity increase to support what is needed now, let alone for the future,” Schroeder said.”
UiPath’s Business Automation Platform
“Our business automation platform is a set of integrated mission-focused automation and AI capabilities. Improving mission outcomes, when there are literally hundreds of technologies, teams and processes involved, can be a huge obstacle,” Schroeder said. “Informing how to improve an outcome, enhance the workforce with optimal productivity, and deliver measurable experience outcomes is the mission imperative that the UiPath platform unlocks.””
Delivering empirical evidence and insight into how work is done, across systems, business units and teams, the platform helps inform, test various scenarios, and drive the automation that will be the most effective. “It’s little understood that most IT tickets are driven by IT departments who didn’t have a way to test the decisions being made. The ability to have multiple feasible options and to test them in an automated way with multiple experience layers to interpret and inform instills confidence as you seek to rollout changes and to make improvements,” Schroeder said.
“Resilience is something we talk about, but what we’re about is providing the full capabilities for any executive to watch and actually run their organization digitally and to bring insightful recommendations to optimize it. AI-powered automation can help manage any environment and act as the heartbeat of the organization, factoring in the workers that use it and the outcomes they are striving for,” he added.
Pointing back to the prior discussion about the role that data gravity plays, Schroeder says the goal is to leave the data where it is, but orchestrate a more optimal, contextually informed experience for the user to they can move past their bookmark menu.
Partner View
What UiPath brings to the partner equation is an ability to help understand what is difficult to comprehend within organizations and their technology ecosystems. “We are all trying to help our customer be the best version of themselves and ready themselves for the requirements society has for them, and the next era too,” Schroeder said. “Too often companies are mired in the weeds to be able to do what they really want – transform. As a full-fledged automation and AI company, we help partners solve the last mile when nothing else has worked.”
Schroeder concluded, “While the current moment in time may still be riddled with policy and fear of the unknown, I am inspired to see more customers understanding the imperative and moving forward. Hundreds of thousands of government employees just in the past few months have adopted AI-powered digital assistants because the workforce and executives realize it’s not a system problem and it’s not a type of worker; it’s everyone that could use a boost from automation.”
The bottom-up capability—when workers have the right tools to build things that are important to getting their work done and automate the mundane—lends to employees choosing their relationship with their organization.
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