We want to make India the automation epicenter: Raghunath Subramanian, UiPath

After a recent series-D funding of USD 568 million, UiPath stands at a post-money valuation of USD 7 billion. It is set to become the dominant player when it comes to robotic process automation (RPA) technology.

The recent funding round has made UiPath one of the fastest growing and highest-valued AI enterprise software companies globally. At a media event held in Bengaluru recently, UiPath’s pesident and CEO (India), Raghunath Subramanian spoke on the culture that made the company successful. He also shed some light on the company’s vision for the years ahead.

What stands out in UiPath India CEO’s vision is the emphasis on democratization of RPA and making it available for everybody, and not only for developers. 

“When we started our journey, we thought that if we had to grow as an organization, we had to focus on the democratization of RPA technology. As a result, we started focusing on building the community,” says Subramanian. 

The journey started with the on-boarding of thousands of developers in India and worldwide. With its tools, UiPath started automating routine tasks of people, something it calls as ‘Citizen Developers’.

“We started something known as Citizen Developers. Citizen Developers means you don’t have to rely on programmers and IT teams to build automation. End users can start automating a lot of daily tasks. We feel citizen developers are the true epitome of change that is going to come,” highlights Subramanian. 

RPA – the ideal match for artificial intelligence

With AI being infused, automation covers more and more tasks as unstructured data can be processed easily. 

In the coming years, according to Subramanian, RPA is critical to make AI successful. He believes that RPA backed artificial intelligence can make unstructured data useful for extracting valuable insights to help train AI models. In that context, RPA becomes the ideal match for all AI workflows.

“We believe that RPA is a logical supply chain for AI to be successful. You need RPA for AI to be successful because there are tons and tons of machines generating unprecedented levels of data and something has to connect all of that and take it back to AI models. And that is exactly what enterprise RPA is doing for you,” explains Subramanian.

UiPath wants to make RPA education free for all

One of the most important emphasis of UiPath is to reach out to millions of students in India and give them free education on RPA. Known as the Academic Alliance, this initiative of UiPath is an innovative approach in enhancing the RPA resources for a country like India. 

Globally, almost 1 million students will be trained by 2022. Out of this 1 million, the company has set a target to train half a million students from India alone. To achieve the same, it is tying up with multiple universities across India.

“We thought that if we had to be successful, the critical element we have to focus on are students. We have something known as UiPath Academy which is totally democratized and free. Anybody can go and learn right from the basics and it is one of the most sought after certification today as far as new age technologies are concerned,” Subramanian explains. 

One bot per student is UiPath’s another important initiative that will transform the landscape, as far as learning RPA is concerned. Subramanian says that this will be remarkable for the adoption of RPA as students get exposure to automation technology from an early stage and not when they finish their education at a higher level. 

Making India as the automation epicenter

From UiPath’s perspective, as far as talent in process automation is concerned, India can play the most strategic role. Subramanian says India will surpass US to take the top spot in RPA talent, given the rate at which India is witnessing RPA growth with new jobs created every day.

“We want India to be at a strategic level because we feel the country can be at the top of the tier across the globe as far as RPA talent is concerned. This covers product engineering talent, RPA talent, process expertise, solution architects, ML/AI experts. We have all this talent available in India for our initiatives, and particularly in the startup community,” adds Subramanian.