Neeti Mehta Shukla is the Co-Founder of robotic process automation company Automation Anywhere and the 2023 winner of the Robert Stable Medal, Bond University's top alumni award. An abridged version of this interview appears in Edition 32 of the Arch magazine.
What inspired you to launch Automation Anywhere and what was the initial business problem you wanted to solve?
Having worked in many technology-dependent industries, my husband and I would often talk about the inefficiencies that limited a company’s ability to innovate and grow. Organisations were bogged down by data, hundreds of applications and processes that worked in silos — and employees were shackled by the manual busywork required to deal with bottlenecks and incompatible systems.
Mihir (CEO, Automation Anywhere) had the idea to build easy and accessible automation that would free business people from their repetitive and mundane tasks to concentrate more on knowledge and value-added work. This “gift of time” sparks more creativity, innovation and progress for their organisations and enables everyone to do more.
We created Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software, a new category that frees up working people’s resources, like time, money, effort and brain power — so they can invest those resources in higher-level activities like learning, being creative, solving complex problems, spending more time interacting with customers or developing their businesses. RPA, which uses Artificial Intelligence, allows organisations to automate their processes across all applications, anywhere at a fraction of the cost and time of other traditional automation technologies.
How has RPA technology transformed business and people's lives, and what are some real-world examples of its impact?
As well as increasing productivity and driving growth, RPA bots empower people to do more high value work that is more fulfilling and that only humans can do. It’s also accessible, easy to learn and use — as well as intelligent — and applicable to any industry anywhere. Here are two examples of our RPA at work.
* We helped UK’s National Health Service (NHS), whose 1.7 million staff serve 67+ million patients, come up with unparalleled and extraordinary responses to COVID. We started in 2020 by building an accurate, 24x7 reliable ‘Oxygen Bot’ in just 12 hours, that monitors oxygen flow, has saved hundreds of patient lives, and gives more than 1500 hours a year back to nurses and front office staff at Northampton General Hospital. The NHS believes by this year, its hundreds of subsequent automations across dozens of clinical and non-clinical departments will repurpose one million hours of time annually. We are also openly sharing a joint blueprint for large healthcare organisations worldwide to use automation to transform patient care.
* The fifth-largest US bank was facing a major acquisition and at the same time, a talent crisis, brought on by the pandemic. Its remaining 60,000 employees were burned out, spending 70 percent of their time on busywork. By embedding our latest automation into their core applications, the bank freed employees to focus 70 percent more of their time on high value human activities, leaving the low value tasks to the bots — and completed its acquisition in a record 11 months.
In addition to being the Co-Founder of Automation Anywhere, you recently became Social Impact Officer. Why did you take on that role? And can you tell me about the company’s objectives in this area?
Over the last 19 years I have seen the difference our technology has made to people and companies in so many industries, from banking and finance to healthcare and retail. I believed that an area where this technology would be most impactful is in the non-profit space because when they do better, all of society does better. I wanted to help NGOs make the best use of their resources, volunteers and staff time. If by taking away repetitive tasks, every NGO could save time and costs and make compliance easy, then they could do so much more for our society. Here is an example which made this dream a reality:
Millions of displaced people inside Ukraine are relying on small local NGOs for humanitarian assistance. NGO Step with Hope’s 100 volunteers were overwhelmed taking manual notes during urgent phone calls and too busy to spend the time required for equally crucial in-person interactions—and still others couldn’t get through for phone help. In its first 10 weeks of operating, the ‘Telegram for Humanity’ bot we built answered 17,500 aid requests from 14,000-plus Ukrainians. Managing up to 400 percent more aid requests, the bot improved, expedited, and scaled the NGO’s processes, giving a projected 500 hours of time back to volunteers for direct person-to-person assistance.
We also focus on reskilling to make secure and well-paying tech jobs of the future are more accessible and inclusive to those with little opportunity, enabling them to bridge the wealth gap created by tech. We work with social organisations, universities and learning institutions who can bring this digital learning to bridge the jobs gap. We have trained women, ethnic minorities, economically challenged communities, folks with disabilities and we are lucky enough to witness their subsequent achievements first-hand.
Can you discuss the role of diversity and inclusion in the business world, and why it's important?
Diversity of thought is extremely important to me as a company founder. I try to hire people who think differently than I do. I ask my colleagues to challenge my thinking through honest, intellectual dialogue. I feel a diverse executive team can determine the best of solutions for customers, partners, and employees. The more diverse and inclusive your employee base, the greater your performance as a company is. Recent numbers show that ethnically diverse organisations are 36 percent more likely to outperform companies that are less diverse, and for gender diverse companies the percentage is 25 percent more likely.
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) goes mainstream, we are at a crucial moment in history, when the role of diversity and inclusion is even more important. People who build, train and work alongside bots run a high risk of transferring their own unconscious biases (like favouring a certain religion or race) into automation that may then generate flawed, unfair or even dangerous ‘information’. However if we train the bots with right intent and vast amounts of data, we can reduce this bias and leapfrog over the time it would have taken society to reduce some of these biases organically. The good news is that AI can help better organise and analyse data, so biases are more easily identified and eliminated before the bot is used across this new crop of products and services.
What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders, particularly women?
The landscape of entrepreneurship is always a series of peaks and valleys. It comes with turbulence, upheaval and a lot of satisfaction. It requires a lot of hard work and patience. I see entrepreneurs as optimists, curious and driven to explore and break the status quo.
Business leadership and entrepreneurship are two different skill sets. We need entrepreneurs who fall in love with trying to solve the problem and always keep looking for a better solution set. We need business leaders to build the solution set and make it more economical and business-viable. It’s important to nurture both kinds of leadership in a business culture.
When advising women executives, I can only share my own experience to say that for many years I fought to make peace with the chaos of work and family life. I loved them both and realised over time that I had to make peace with this feeling of juggling too many things at once — and that the chaos was here to stay. Once I did, the chaos became something I dealt with instead of fighting it and that, I could handle.
Have you had time to reflect on how you created a multibillion-dollar company from your spare bedroom?
Time flies when you are having fun! Over the last 20 years many times I have found myself thinking through this roller-coaster journey but haven’t had time for true reflection. It’s probably going to be my planned activity for retirement.
You and your fellow co-founder Mihir were guests at Davos this year. What was that experience like?
We felt so honoured to represent Automation Anywhere at Davos as a ‘unicorn partner’, who would lend insight into labour productivity, AI and the future of work. At Davos, we were able to see critical global challenges through a very different lens of society, governments and populations as a whole. Meeting so many people who are changing the world for the better and considering how we will contribute to that was also a fantastic experience. We left transformed.
I found it very exciting that the World Economic Forum has put a huge effort into the reskilling revolution because we have a significant role to play in that space. The Davos theme this year was `Cooperation in a Fragmented World’ and reskilling requires that on a global scale. I have shared my detailed thoughts (https://www.automationanywhere.com/company/blog/rpa-thought-leadership/heart-reskilling-revolution) on this.
As someone with extensive experience in robotic process automation spanning decades, what would you say to people who may be worried about their jobs amidst growing public awareness of AI language models like ChatGPT?
The World Economic Forum predicts that technology will radically transform 1.1 billion jobs and that half of the world’s workers (1.6 billion) need reskilling. One entity or one government could never solve this massive challenge alone. Every single team, company, industry, country and region has to work together so we are better off and not worse off as a society.
We actually believe that 95 percent of the people on the planet will work with AI in the future. It is simply about doing more. Increasing productivity of humans will help us make progress as a society. History has shown us that when we progress, some jobs will go away but progress also creates more jobs and more wealth.
Progress and evolution always come with change, and it is critical how you manage that change. History has also taught us that if we bring people worldwide who believe something is the right thing to do, decide to concentrate their effort towards a clearly-stated shared goal and leave no one behind, we will succeed. It’s the only way.
I believe that AI has a huge upside if we do it right. Just in the last five years, more new jobs than we ever imagined have come to light and AI is bringing forth a whole new wave of entrepreneurship. As human beings, we can, must, and will need to learn and grow.
How has your education at Bond University influenced your career and success with Automation Anywhere?
I loved my time at Bond! I loved meeting so many new people from so many different countries, learned so much from them and made so many friends for life. Even my professors were from so many different countries and backgrounds and the small class sizes really allowed me to make personal connections and learn so much more. The sheer exposure to all these new ways of thinking, understanding and learning opened my mind. I loved every subject I studied — from Consumer Behaviour to Economics and from Ethics to Law.
I studied Entrepreneurship, Controllership and Finance. I remember each and every one of my professors and I hope they know what a difference they have made to me. As a member of the Entrepreneurship Club, I was part of a team that represented the university and Australia at the NASDAQ Entrepreneurship competition in the US. I also started my first business here: Bond Uni-branded floppy disk (yes, they were a thing!) holders that were pretty popular. The Bond University experience evolved many skills that were inside of me that I didn’t even know were there to begin with.
What are your fondest memories from your time at Bond?
I came to Bond University when I was 17 years old, from India. Bond Uni was my beautiful “home away from home,” where every day was an adventure, whether it was taking a campus stroll, running to submit a report due at 5pm, eating with friends, taking the bus to Broadbeach or Surfers or hanging out at Don’s on Thursday nights! So many memories that I remember with such fondness and so many friends that to this day I hold close to my heart!