The proximity to these customers enables more intimate face-to-face interactions and helps UiPath establish deeper relationships with existing and prospective customers and partners. This intimacy is not restricted to NYC, UiPath now has operations in 34 countries as it realized that local knowledge and relationships are invaluable to effective growth. The result? UiPath’s revenues are very evenly split between the Americas at 37 percent, Europe at 34 percent and Asia at 29 percent; this even spread is extremely unusual in the business that is essentially only four years old.

Lastly, New York attracts top-tier tech (specifically developer) talent due to its large population and nearby schools. Since its move, UiPath has been continually amazed by the tech talent NYC has to offer. So much so that since moving into a new building on Park Avenue in the summer of 2018, headcount has doubled, and the company had to make additional space in Brooklyn.

What’s “new” about RPA is that benefits are generated for employees and businesses alike. For example, State Auto, a super-regional insurance holding company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, uses RPA for back-office tasks. Auditors at State Auto go through thousands of policies to determine recommendations for changing rates. Policies that don’t need to be audited still have to be documented, which requires performing routine data-entry with two separate and unconnected systems, selecting codes and making drop-down selections. With robots in place, this activity happens rapidly and error-free, releasing individuals from time-consuming, and mind-numbing, tasks. The use of UiPath’s RPA solution at State Auto has netted a productivity benefit of over 65,000 hours of labour saved. These hours were not reflected in job cuts, but instead as a pure value-add that has allowed for unprecedented growth.

RPA is also improving job satisfaction, driving productivity and enhancing customer service. One CEO of a UiPath customer in Ireland said: “since we put in automation, the mood music of our organization has changed. We have happier employees and we now measure our service in terms of compliments rather than complaints.” This has nothing to do with technology; what we’re seeing is a fundamental culture change.

RPA was initially seen as a way of avoiding the wait for IT to provide the connections at a system-to-system level (through APIs) that had traditionally been the preserve of the IT teams. By operating through the user interface (UI), RPA could provide the same or better benefits much more quickly and much cheaper. It was therefore considered a potential threat to the CIO and was pejoratively described variously as a “dirty fix” or “sticking plaster solution.” That situation has now, thankfully, been superseded by the realization that RPA is just as applicable in the IT department for password resets, ITSM and BPM/ERP integrations, as it is for their colleagues in business operations.

UiPath’s technology partners have recognized this: Oracle for instance, is using RPA, not APIs, to connect to the plethora of differing systems that link into their platform: it is cheaper, faster and more robust given the continually changing application landscape. Think about it, if both systems have a UI, RPA can act as the bridge.

RPA can also help enhance customer communication by controlling a contact schedule, triggering reminders when it is time for employees to follow up with customers or manage a complaint. Beyond that, RPA can also send automated messages to customers to allow for faster replies.

This is why UiPath has seen the balance between unattended robots (which work on the activities that no one wants to do) and attended robots (which help humans to do – and improve – the work that they want to do) is changing. In 2018, the percentage ratio was 64:36 in favor of unattended; today it stands at 46:54 in favor of the attended robots.