Summary: Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Uber, Facebook, and Spotify already use UiPath software Daniel Dines is the founder and CEO of UiPath, one of the biggest automation companies around. UiPath sells software automation or what consultants call “robotic process automation,” or RPA, so they can sound fancy and charge higher fees. RPA is actually very simple to understand. Let’s say you have something in your business that relies on older software to do some repetitive task like entering billing information or moving data from one system to another. Now, the intuitive way most of us would think about making all that more efficient would be to upgrade or replace that old software with something with more capabilities. But, as we’ve all learned by now, new software often causes more problems than it solves; there are compatibility issues, stability issues, and the general chaos of rolling it out and making sure it all works. UiPath and other software automation companies have a different approach: just hire another computer to use software for you. Seriously. UiPath uses computer vision to look at what’s on a screen, and then it uses a virtual mouse and keyboard to click around and do things in apps like Excel and Salesforce. The automations can be mundane, like generating lists of people to contact from public records, or intensely complicated: UiPath can actually monitor how different software is used throughout a company and suggest automations. Huge companies like Uber, Facebook, Spotify, and Google all use UiPath. Last year, I talked a lot about the social consequences of automation with New York Times reporter Kevin Roose — he’d just published a book on automation and the workforce. But I was really excited to talk to Daniel about it directly and hear his perspective on competition in particular, especially because UiPath has had a pretty up and down year. The company went public almost exactly a year ago in one of the biggest software IPOs ever. Since then, the stock has taken a nosedive. (It IPO’d at $74.84 a share, but at the time I’m recording this, it’s just $16.34.) I wanted to ask Daniel how UiPath was built for this moment, how mainstream he thinks automation like this can be, and how he’s thinking about big competitors like Microsoft and Salesforce. Of course, we also talked about those social impacts. Daniel had some pretty interesting responses to those questions. He thinks giving boring work to robots instead of people makes the people much happier and might keep them from looking for new work. Daniel tells the story of a company seeing upwards of 40 percent attrition. They eventually turned to UiPath to give their people a lighter workload — to hopefully make them like their existing job more and keep them from quitting. We often worry about automation taking jobs away, but it’s interesting to hear Daniel talk about how automation might help companies retain their employees. Daniel Dines, founder and CEO of UiPath. Here we go. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Daniel Dines is the founder and CEO of UiPath. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you so much for having me, Nilay. I have been excited to talk to you for a long time. Robotic process automation is one of my favorite subjects, and you are the guy to talk about it with. It is almost exactly the one-year anniversary of UiPath going public as one of the biggest US software IPOs in history, at $1.3 billion last April. I think it’s important to dig into software automation, which has the potential to reshape how everyone works. I want to talk to you about what the last year has been like, and where UiPath as a company goes from here as the market reacts to automation existing. I think one of the big challenges for UiPath — and for everyone else — is that robots are going to become a class of users right alongside people. Let’s start at
