独占インタビュー：Automation Anywhere による boost.ai 買収の狙い

All right, Anka Kathari and Jerry Haywood, welcome to the podcast, my friends. Thank you so much for joining me. How are we doing? Great, thank you, Nick. Thanks for having us, Cain. Ah, no problem. Thank you for joining me. I appreciate your guys' schedule must be absolutely crazy right now after the big announcement recently. So firstly, both congratulations. Very, very good announcement. Very interesting. Very exciting. obviously for you guys and your companies but also I think for the for the rest of the industry as well uh how are you feeling about it Joey let's start with you how are you feeling about things at the minute then excited yeah really good thank you Cain thanks for the congratulations I think um Anchor summarized it in a town hall we had um a few hours after the announcement around CX has changed forever and um I I think reception by the employees reception by our customers um by AAs, employees and customers that we've done town halls with over the last couple of days

has been received really well. So I think a very exciting future for both organizations. Nice. Ankur, what about you? Still, I can imagine, you know, when these sort of things happen, there's a lot of press coverage, there's a lot of excitement, there's a lot of stuff going on. How are you feeling? Super excited. Super excited from just the possibilities of what we can do. As Jerry said, I do believe the CX industry has completely changed on when we bring these two technologies together, what it can do for customers, and what it can do from just the future of how you can kind of scale customer experience. I'm like super excited about this. Nice. I think that, you know, we've seen kind of, I mean, acquisitions do happen fairly frequently. But from Bruce's perspective, Jerry, you know, Bruce has been working incredibly hard over the last few years. I've got to know Boost pretty well myself over the last few years, and I've seen Boost go from, you know, a kind of Danish or Nordic, rather, startup.

Henry will kill me for that. Nordic startup to being literally like one of the global enterprise conversationally high powerhouses. There was kind of two potential paths forward for Boost. One is you keep scaling, you keep growing, you keep going at it. The other is that you find a partner and you kind of build something together. Why is now the right time for Boost to join forces with automation anyway? Yeah, that's a great question. I think you're right. There's probably more than just those two options. It depends how you look at both of those options. I think for us, we know we still have one of the best platforms in the world. And it's a fairly crowded market, as you are well aware. but I still look at the technology we've got, where we've been going with it and recognize the amazing work the team have been doing. We have one of the best platforms in the world. The question is how do we get it to as many organizations as possible and how do we deepen the value

that we provide the customers that we're working with today and of that potential other organization and I think where you, we're not a perfect organization, there are gaps and I think where we see our gaps an organization like Automation Anywhere starts to fill rapidly and I think the biggest bit it starts to fill is that speed to value for new organizations and existing customers that we work with, the depth of value. So I think our goal when we're engaging with customers is driving, A, an amazing customer experience, but B, driving high levels of automation where they want to drive high levels of automation. and to do that properly you also need great access to systems processes that exist within these organizations and automation anywhere really bring that and accelerate that forward to a really deep stack so right from customer conversation through to final outcome of that conversation it leaves the question with that organization which is by design which ones do

they want to automate and which ones don't they because now everything could be so i think really exciting interesting and anka from your perspective what does boost ai give automation anywhere that you didn't have previously why is this such a good fit i think the boost brings so much more uh that we wanted and and kind of which allows us to change the the way the work gets executed in enterprise, we started our journey by falling in love on how to change the nature of work itself. That's the problem we fell in love with. Now, when you look at that, Boost brings so much more. It brings in best-in-class conversational AI, voice AI technology. Voice is one way everyone interacts with an enterprise, customers, employee base, different people. So that one technology itself is extremely mature that Goose brings best in class.

So that is one. Deep understanding of front office from contact centers, customer service desk, how people interact with them, the learnings, the millions of conversations and their learnings and executing that in a complex environment like regulated industries. So when you bring that together with what automation anywhere already has, you can change the nature of work itself. From conversation to final outcome. And that really excites us because in the world of AI, how the nature of work changes requires you to bring different elements together. And boost is that front end element that we were looking for. and not just that technology but their experience to deliver, years of experience to deliver superior customer experience to their customer in the most complex environment, that learning, that expertise also adds to our expertise.

And why is now the right time for that, Ankur? There are a few things that has happened. I think some people have, timing-wise, if you think broader narrative, people are not questioning AI. They all are asking for return. How do I get outsized return from my AI deployment? So that's one trend that's happening. And the second trend that's happening is, if you look at it, voice, AI, voice is how people are, the technology has grown so much, where it has become very natural. It has become empathetic. It has become logical. It has become a very natural way to interact. People have accepted that. So when these two things have happened, when you combine these two, when you bring Boost's technology of conversational AI, which right now people have accepted that this is the way people will interact and they are okay with it, and connect that to entire Automation Anywhere's ability to orchestrate and automate work across an enterprise,

across the systems, across the people, across the team, You can now completely change the nature in which a customer engages with us. These two big trends have just happened. So, I mean, they've been there for the last few months or a year. So, for me, look, I think business is like comedy. It's all about timing. The timing feels right where the market is ready to bring this thing together. And we are good at one part, boost is great at another part, and that's what we plan to combine. Brilliant. And, Jerry, from Boost's perspective, obviously, as Anka said there, Boost has got real deep experience in the contact center, customer service-based use cases, highly regulated industries, pretty complex use cases. Voice is not easy to do either. How much of your customer base and the clients that are using Boost, you know when you think about going from that front end interaction to the full end-to-end

process where do you sort of see kind of like the business readiness for that kind of transformation being do you think businesses are ready for that level of end-to-end full-on end-to-end automation are you seeing examples and evidence of that yeah i think i think we've got great examples of that i think um there are organizations organizations that you're going to hear from at boost camp next week, which we'll plug when we go through this. Absolutely. Where they're up on stage talking about 60%, 70% of all customer contacts being automated. And I think there's a brand choice here, which is around, does the brand want to automate everything or are there certain things that they do want humans to be engaging on? I think the point here is giving them the optionality of making that choice rather than having to make that choice because they don't have a platform that can actually automate the capabilities that they need. And I think this acquisition brings together two organizations that allows organizations to have that option,

irrespective of where and how they want to engage. I think also Anka mentioned something I think is important around that option isn't just depth of engagement from a system integration and system process perspective, but also from a modality perspective. we've been very focused on voice and digital, but who knows with AI agents, is there a different modality that we might need to then all of a sudden shift on and have a platform that's flexible enough to be able to do that? And I think you're seeing a little spike, interestingly, on email, which was the system that was going to die a few years ago. And immediately something like this acquisition now builds out that capability for us to ensure that that's a modality that we can also offer out on. So I think optionality for our customers to choose how they want to engage from a modality perspective, but also the depth at which they want to engage and whether they want to automate that dialogue or not, or they might want a human to be able to engage with it. Interesting.

What about you, Anka, in terms of Automation Anywhere customers? So Jerry's seeing it from one perspective, which is the kind of like customer angle through to the back. You're seeing it from the sort of like back office process automation perspective and seeing opportunities to identify how you marry that up with the front end. Are you seeing, how kind of ready and mature do you see your clients being to be able to step into that full end-to-end kind of AI-first workflow? Yeah, I mean, our customers, they want to deploy AI and kind of get outsized, change their operating model, like get real return, not just a few use cases and a few million dollars saved. The way we look at it is that this allows us to change the nature of work. With Boost technology, business has very simple rules. I mean, you work with your customers, you help your customers, you kind of take care of your employees and their needs, and then you run business operations. These are some fundamentals of every enterprise.

What we can do is we can connect all three with Boost and Automation. I'll give you an example. The way people interact with a business, we can now with Boost, we can understand it through different channels, right? The way customers or employees understand. So the way any work gets triggered is if you talk to, you know, a customer triggers something by talking or employees trigger something or some events trigger something. So you can engage with customers and employees. Then you can understand their intent with Boost technology, with our years of working on understanding processes, with another company that we had acquired a few quarters ago, I swear that they're understanding what employee operations operate. So when we bring all that understanding together, we can understand all these interactions. Then you can reason with it which are reasoning models We have half a billion automations running on our platform for years and that learning allows us to reason understand the reasoning the reasoning modeling we can apply

And then, obviously, you can orchestrate the work with our technology and perform the last action and do that all in a governed, secured way, from conversation to final outcome. You can connect all these dots. And then that allows us to create and kind of create offerings like an autonomous customer operations. Then you combine Boost with Automation Anywhere. An autonomous employee operations. Then you combine some advantages that Boost brings with Isera and Automation Anywhere. And autonomous business operations, which are mission critical business processes. So our vision is to bring all these three lines of autonomous solutions on one single platform. And between boost and automation, we have all these pieces that we can put it together to drive work autonomously in every department. Nice. I was going to ask you about AI Sierra. I had Moodoo on the podcast quite a while ago now, actually, a number of years ago.

How do you sort of see those two companies in terms of boost, AI Sierra, and automation anywhere? You kind of described the AI Sierra there being more like the employee-facing type of work. Is that how you see them all sitting together when you can share with them about that? Yeah, I think so. Look, every company keeps on working on technologies, but what are they passionate about? They try to solve some problem, right? When I looked at ISERA, ISERA was very passionate about what I call employee operations, IT, HR, procurement, things like that. So that's where they spend all their energy and build the best-in-class technology, the learning, anthology, understanding, and all that. When I look at Boost, while some pieces of technology are common, but they are passionate about front office, customer experience, customer service, contact center. So it just brings two different elements together. And Automation Universe Heritage was all about business operations that we were passionate about. So if you think about it, along and all three companies had AI and intelligence and reasoning and learnings that we had kind of wrapped around.

So when you put that together, it allowed us to create three different lines of businesses and from what we are planning to do. And then bring those technologies together in the whole sequence of work getting executed from conversation to outcome. Nice. and how do you see things so Jerry you know obviously we've seen recently I suppose probably what you would consider Boost's closest comparable perhaps in Cognigy being acquired by Nice so now it's kind of Nice Cognigy but also generally it seems that I don't know I'd be interested to get your thoughts on this it seems to me like there is a kind of convergence happening where the CCAS providers are acquiring AI companies in the case of Nice and Cognigy, and there's been plenty more before that. And then the CRM providers are acquiring AI companies like Salesforce and Fin. Then you've got the CPaaS providers, like the Vonages of the world,

and so they're all acquiring AI companies. Then you have companies like Aicera kind of making those type of moves to acquire these AI companies. it feels to me a little bit like the centre of gravity is now centring on AI, and all of those systems that tend to underpin a business are all moving in a similar direction as far as they all understand that AI is going to essentially be the operating system of the business, and they're all trying to get themselves into a place where they have this kind of AI layer. and my sort of thoughts is that if I sort of play this out it seems to me that all of them different types of companies over time turn into almost like an agentic orchestration or an agentic business operating system type of platform. I don't know if you would kind of concur with that. Do you still see the way the market's evolving? Do you still see there being CRM providers, CCAS providers, this, that and the other? Or do you think we're all sort of converging on this

agentic operating system type of platform that's essentially going to run the business for us. I'm going to let Anka address this one first and then I'll have a follow-on specifically to some of those acquisitions. But Anka, you kick off. I do think it is all this CCaaS, CRM, those are just different system of record. From our standpoint, it is about orchestrating work across the enterprise. We have been passionate about creating an autonomous enterprise. If you look at a lot of these different players, their narrative is going towards creating an agentic business or an agentic enterprise, call it different things. For me, that is where it is going. Because if you think from a customer standpoint, they are talking about, from my perspective, the customers now are not just saying all these hundreds of systems and I'll have to understand. They are trying to say that with all these AI innovations that are coming, how am I going to fundamentally change my operating model?

How am I going to operate differently? Not just a few use cases here or some systems here. So if you think from the business standpoint, that has fundamentally changed. And different people are coming from different lenses. we were always about understanding and orchestrating work between AI agents, system, people, robots all that. So we are looking at it from a we don't have any legacy from a legacy system of records or seat license to protect. We have a way our world looks like we believe and work with every system and orchestrate work against. We don't have a religion or front office or a back office or this system or only that department. So that kind of brings a unique perspective from our end. But to your question, if you ask me, yes, that convergence is happening. Different people are looking at it from different lengths. And that's amazing for a customer base because from a customer base, now finally, we are not talking about our, some of the system of records are not talking about their towers.

Yeah. They are talking about work getting orchestrated across the board. and that value is being given to customers through outcomes, as opposed to you need this system to succeed. These are just scaffolding you need, and you don't have to grow. As you grow, you don't have to keep paying that SaaS tax. That's the big change that happens. Yeah, I think automation anyway is in a really good space there as well, because you're not coming at it from the point of view of having the baggage of a CRM or the baggage of a CCAS. you already have that position that these other companies are trying to get to but they obviously have their current business to protect whereas it's almost like you're like a blossoming flower in the middle of it all like we don't really care about the CRM we don't care about the CCAS all that kind of stuff we're where it all happens and all that stuff fundamentally is just data that sits off the back of it and that's where work is right if you think about it I just give you one simple example that I'm very excited about when I bring when we bring boost and automation anyway together

when a customer calls they want a great experience a good conversation is how it starts with but that's not how they want an outcome if I call if my credit card is lost I'll call to get that credit card kind of replaced and stop any fraud from happening I want that outcome now that outcome starts with a great conversation but then it involves going through multiple systems doing many many different part of the processes and getting all that done seamlessly so that if I am as a caller anxious it gets done within like 90 seconds in a very seamless fashion and doesn't bother me. That requires orchestrating work across. Now if you think from a lot of companies they may have a great conversation and they may trigger a workflow or they may call someone else or may do simple action but business is about bringing all these complex layer together. So the way I look at this is that this allows us to not just improve customer service but almost actually create an autonomous customer operations which involves doing all the work.

So those things require multi-system, it will involve a fraud system, a banking system, them a notification system which are across things so across different silos so that really changes the game from my standpoint very sorry you were saying something no i i'm going to echo a very similar point i in the design of boost over the last number of years we've consciously tried to be model agnostic whether that's speech to text model whether that's generative model LLM model, whether that's CCAS platform. And I think this acquisition continues that extension across agnostic around CRMs, agnostic around different back-end banking platforms or other similar industry platforms. So you have an extremely strong core, as you say, that allows organizations, irrespective of what that estate looks like today, to now operate it in a much more effective way. the other bit that I think is really interesting

through this is and we may come on to this a little bit later it's worth talking about now the shift of power inside an organisation has changed in the last two years three years I think two years ago actually it was around even maybe a little bit more three years ago predominantly marketing, customer operations chief customer officer held a lot of the power inside an organization. And IT was losing power to some extent. And with AI becoming more and more mainstream, IT have really started to get a stronghold across broadly an organization. So if I'm a CRM lead buying a genetic platform or I'm a CCAS platform buying a conversational platform, I'm still only talking to half the organization and that half is the one that's no longer really holding on to power anymore. The power really starting to stick with IT.

So I think the unconscious result of an acquisition like this, and Anka, you may say it's conscious, is the half that really talks to the customer on the operations side of the conversation and the half that talks to IT have come together. And actually now you have really high relevance and weight with the powerhouse now around AI, which is predominantly the IT organization, and the other powerhouse, which is the one that's driving and retaining customers, which is the customer operation. And you have a platform that really brings those two conversations together. So I think that's really a strong result of this acquisition. That's really interesting. I think you're right there in terms of the technology teams and the IT teams because of maybe it's either the accessibility of AI or maybe because it's just the rise of AI, it makes it easier for technology teams to sort of get hold of. But it seems very much the case that, you know, in a lot of conversations that we have on the podcast, a lot of those conversations have gone from being, you know,

customer experience-led to being technology-led. And the whole idea of companies these days, you know, you have the digital native companies that are like, for example, I don't know, Uber or Monzo, that on the face of it, it's a taxi service and a bank. But really, when they talk about themselves, they'll probably call themselves technology companies. And AI is almost the kind of catalyst now that enables almost every business, if you follow Anka's kind of analogy of the autonomous operating model for businesses. AI is essentially the enabling factor that allows a business to be that way, to be autonomous and to be kind of highly effective and efficient, but also to be a native sort of technology company if you like in inverted commas So it almost like businesses are now having the technology to be able to really transform themselves But I think the dilemma I kind of see is where does that sit? You kind of had a really good sort of analogy or observation of bringing the customer side to the IT side, but some organizations still have this team over there and that team over there and this team over there.

So where do you envisage kind of like the best place for AI to sit in order to enable this vision that you're kind of trying to work towards? I think it has to be diffused across board. I mean, the AI, think like Internet, right? Internet, when it came, people started building websites, and that's what they did. Actually, it changed the entire business models. Like, smart everyone's figured that out over a period of time. AI is 10 times that. Like right now, while we are making great use cases, good usage, good stories in business, fundamentally it is changing operating model, which means AI will become central to how you interact with your customers, how you interact with your teammates, how you run operations. They will be centered across that. And IT plays a huge role in how it gets deployed. What are the guardrails? How do you do it securely? But every department, every functions will have to kind of figure that out on how to use that.

Because finally, it is about changing that experience. Finally, it is about changing your business model. Finally, it is about saying that, can I create an autonomous customer operations where my customers interact with me and the work gets done across systems and across department boundaries where people are brought in when they are needed. But other than that, it happens seamlessly. That changes an operating model. That kind of an operation operates at a 3x to 5x more advantage than traditional operations. So what that would do is it would bring everything from just a banking standpoint. You have your contact center or customer service head. You have your IT head. And let's say you're doing retail banking. You have a retail banking head, business head, who wants to change the way he or she wants to approach their client. Three of them have to collaborate to create that seamless experience. An AI becomes that way superfluous.

It goes across all three. IT plays a huge role in telling that what we can or what we can't do in an organization because you have to put guardrails, you have to do it in a secure way, so on and so forth. But the business and the functional experts will have to step up to kind of drive that value for their stakeholders, their customers and their teammates. Nice. Jerry, you alluded to Boost Camp earlier on. I think by the time this goes out, I'm going to aim to try and get it out essentially ahead of Boost Camp. So Boost Camp will be coming probably this week for those tuning in. Boost Camp obviously is Boost's flagship annual event. all of your customers and prospects are going to be there, some of which actually might be kind of both Automation Anywhere customers and Boost customers, a lot of which obviously are Boost customers. What do you envisage for those Boost customers that are going to be there over the next, say, like 12 months or so? What do you envisage would be the most significant change, advancement, difference, if you like,

in what they will be doing in 12 months' time versus today? Great question. and I'll proceed this with the acquisition hasn't yet closed. So we're both pointing in the same direction and making a little bit of a forethought about why this acquisition happened in the first place and where we want to take the organisations. But I think... All being well. All being well. I think some of the things that I spoke about earlier, so I think one thing that we're going to see in the next 12 months is, and we're seeing it now through almost everything that we read is the massive scaling of personal agents across, or personal AI agents across the field of work. And I think many of the people that are in the room for Boost Camp, we've got it as part of our agenda. We actually launched A2A nearly a year ago. So it's a platform that's been ready for this coming. But I think there's a challenge for everyone in that room,

which is what does the future of customer engagement look like? And I think we're all making a little bit of a guess in where we think it's going to go. And how do we have the systems, platforms, processes, and autonomy in place to be able to cope with that when it happens? And I predict that with a little bit of a, if I look at what I've done in the last two or three weeks, from a personal agent perspective, I've probably had 100 conversations a day with a number of the platforms. And what I'm able to achieve is phenomenal. if I'm replicating that across citizens around the world the influx of things that we might have let go before we don't let go of anymore because we've got someone to actually do it for us that might be a five pound credit on an airline it might be a delay on the train whereas before fine I'll let it go now I've got someone chasing every day until I get that um reclaim and I think what will I, if I look forward 12 months and look back,

I think many of the organizations today need to be really thinking about the foundations they're sowing for what the future of customer engagement truly looks like. How do they cope with that and ensure that they're not betting on a platform that locks them down in a certain way, whether that be specifically on voice or specifically on email or specifically on digital, but really giving them the options to have the fluidity across all. Same from a model perspective. we've seen over the last two years the shift in what is the leading model in the world and i think anthropics probably held it for the longest which is about six months in the last six months who knows what that next 12 months might look like so ensuring a platform is able to cope with that as well so if i'm one of those customers i want to be making a choice today to stick with a platform that's giving them the optionality and the foundations for what i think is a very very big change in CX over the coming 12 months. I think that what you were suggesting there in terms of you don't want a voice platform or this platform

that's one of the things that I think we've seen since the advent of generative AI is like specific specialist platforms essentially positioned on a capability that is so fragile in terms of being able to replicate or change in terms of market demand. You mentioned there that email was a dead channel and now it's going somewhere. voice at the moment actually is having a bit of a resurgence but all of a sudden agent to agent communication, maybe that's not on the voice channel maybe that's in a different protocol so all of a sudden voice goes down so I think the hedging your bets around a specific channel I completely agree is not a good place to be and I think what you described there in terms of this kind of like, you know, orchestration layer, you don't want to be locked into a model you don't want the prices are going to be like one, you don't want the performances are going to be like two, you might want to use different things for different things, I think that totally makes sense and also the future may well be, for all we know, we don't know, but the rise of personal agents is pretty huge. The future might be actually, Ankur, you were talking about like

where does work get triggered? One potential future is that personal agents are triggering an increasing amount of work to the point where it may well be, I don't know what the time limit you would put on that, but it could be a non-significant amount of activity happening just between autonomous agents. It's a future. It's not even a future. that's a certainty in my way. Where personal agents or different agents will, it's there to make our lives easier. As Jerry said, that there are certain, sometimes you just let go of a 50 pound refund, but then now you have a personal agent that can keep asking for it. So if the interactions are happening, not just by humans, but by agents, on the other end, you'll need that interactions to be managed by agents in a seamless way across channel, from voice, email, chat, text, whatever, right? So you need both that because the future we have to be ready for is this multi-model way of interactions. And now if the agents are doing that interaction,

it can happen every 15 minutes with an expectation to orchestrate work. So companies who will build for that, that in my view will kind of take the pole position and will win because when people were just talking to people, we focused on the right things like the experience and the conversations. But when this kind of a multidimensional world happens, and it is happening, if I would say, Jerry just said that he's used the personal agents a lot in the last one week, that acceleration will change the expectation from just having a great conversation to kind of triggering work. And that, to me, is the world that we are bringing it together. And sometimes we underestimate how these things happen, how fast it can happen. And I am bullish that this will be hopefully a much bigger reality by the next year Boost Camp happens. To add on to that, Cain, and you spend a lot of time in this industry with customers as well as organizations like ourselves,

I think the role or the responsibility of organizations like ourselves and others in the industry is I do think that the faster technology accelerates, the higher the demand on organizations to adapt rapidly to be able to keep up with those changes in technology. But our role is a little bit twofold. One is really making sure we've got a platform that lets them feel comfortable keeping up with that technology. or ensuring that we're able to stretch ourselves whilst trying to bring them on that journey. And I think we've definitely seen that across our customer base. You have some that will adopt it extremely quickly and have deployed genetic capabilities, customer-facing at very large scale, high levels of automation, but you still have some organizations which are at the other end of that picture. And our role, I think, in society is really helping these organizations provide the service to their customers

whilst pulling them along on the journey that your consumers are going to want to engage in this way in the future. And we're that organization in the middle, which is like Mr. Stretch, trying to pull them on a bit of that journey. Yeah, which I think you have to do as well because otherwise, you know, our best interest, I think, collectively in this industry, as like insiders in this industry, our best interest is we've got to help businesses be successful for their customers. and you've got to then move in that direction to help them do that. And I think that everyone's seen stories where businesses have failed to do that. I would probably hesitate to guess how many customers boost have won from other platforms like, you know, whoever, we don't need to name names, but like platforms who haven't managed to keep up with, in the first instance, generative AI. And so that is absolutely crucial and I can totally see that. I want to be respectful of your guys' time. I know we're kind of coming up on it, but I wanted to ask you guys one question around, you know, not necessarily related to the potential acquisition, but maybe more concerned with like either your observations of the market, your observations of how enterprises are adopting, the challenges that you see enterprises having, the trends that you're seeing around like either personal agents or otherwise.

Are there any areas in those things where perhaps you might have a differing opinion to each other? Are we all on the same page? So far we have been on the same page, but the value of bringing a different team and connecting is that different people are solving different problems which means we dedicated our time to solve a problem of autonomous work Boost team has dedicated the time to kind of get best conversational AI to change the CX industry. So as we work together, I'm counting on differences, and that's what will make us stronger. I'm counting on different opinions coming together, as long as we all are in the same direction to make the to change the way the operating model of our customers kind of completely changes and and and it allows them to scale to that next level i am counting on those differences where we'll bring those differences together we we will debate with our customers in the middle

keeping them in the middle and then we'll disagree and commit we will bring different opinions and the best ideas will move forward and then we always go to make sure that our customers are successful. So that learning is a big part of acquisition. You want to acquire companies who have a different view, who have a new expertise that you're bringing into your house and you count on that differences. I'm looking for that. I disagree with everything you said. do you know what something that's a surprise I think I've just put three bullet points to talk to tied to this I think one is we came into the generative world with a view that you're going to have a range of organisations from those that want to be 100% autonomous to those that are very or much more risk averse and we need to find the right hybrid model within the platform to be able to find that balance for any organization.

They choose the level of deterministic and the level of probabilistic throughout that customer lifecycle. The interesting thing is Automation Anywhere have done exactly the same from an agentic process automation perspective. That balance between autonomous versus deterministic and ensuring that organizations can choose the two. So an area where I would have perceived there to be differences, I'm actually very surprised that the way we think about it is exactly the same. um two areas where i think there will be differences and i'm anticipating um because we we um are right at the beginning of this we talk to very different people and or have historically talked to very different people talking to the more technical organization versus talking talking to the cx organization is a different form of messaging it's a different language and i think that there's a lot for us both to learn in that because the future success of the organization is these two teams coming together so we have to find a common

language between ourselves and help them find a common language between themselves um and then the the thing that i have noticed and i think this is a big um advantage for customers of the joint organization in the future um most of if not nearly all of the tech organization for boost are predominantly in europe on european working hours um anchor have a heavy or Automation Anywhere, sorry, with Ankara, heavy presence on the west coast of the U.S. and also a heavy presence in India. Norway is exactly in the middle. So 12 hours to the west coast of the U.S. and 12 hours to India. So you've got a 24-hour working of innovation and traction that I think I hadn't anticipated. It works great. We have customers all around the world in 90 countries. It works great for our customers. but Cain if you ask me what keeps you up I'll say time zones yeah absolutely the good part about this for you is that you'll get to spend a lot of time in Sivango

which is beautiful I'm looking for absolutely very very very final word very quickly one question for each of you based on this vision based on you know this direction which I think is a brilliant vision in terms of you know joining up the trigger for the work, the front end, the customer interaction part with where the work actually gets done. In both of your opinions, what do you think, based on your collective customers, what do you think that stands those enterprises in good stead? So what are they getting right? What are they perfectly set up for? And what are some of the things that you think they might need to either change or challenges they might need to overcome in order to fully benefit from this offer? Maybe we'll start with you, Anka. I think, as I said, the timing is right. They are set up for the organization wants to interact with customers, employees in different ways through voice, chat, all that. And then the technology has reached where it feels natural.

It feels empathetic, logical. People have accepted that. So it feels natural. And then they want the AI to perform the work. They want AI to deliver the outcomes. So connecting the conversations to outcome, they are ready for. Now, what that does for them is it changes their business model. It changes from customers, contact centers to think customer operations. So those are the changes they love to do and they love to execute. The two other things that, in my view, that they have to get ready for is one we connected, that in a world where personal agents kind of starts interacting with you, As an individual, I want my problem to be solved. If that doesn't require me to pick up a phone and talk to someone, but my personal agent does it, I'm happy. So that world is coming that they have to design their world for, of that agent talking to your system.

All people can talk to your system through different ways. So that is one world they have to. And the second is that I think it's a little bit, I would say, what we are thinking that the only way of interaction is through customer service, support, contact center. What we are looking at is that you will embed conversations in everywhere. You'll embed a conversation in every system, in different apps, in different ways, because people may want that one conversation to trigger something to get something done. You don't have to always go through a customer service desk or a contact center. That's A mode, which is a very, very important mode. But people will embed conversations to outcome loops into every application. That world is not far out there because you would want to be in-app experience or in that system that you are using in a television, for example,

or if you are using any home appliance, you can just connect that conversation to solve that. You don't have to pick up and call another, calling one number is one way to do it or email is another, but through that system you can do that. So that world, those are the possibilities that can happen. Technology exists now, not just to create a conversation, but to deliver outcome from anywhere, by anyone. and people who will, the customers who can reimagine that and drive that value will change their business and their operating model. So that's what I'm super excited about. Nice. Conversations to outcome loop. I love that phrase. I might borrow that with full credit. Rope. What do you think, Jerry? What are Boost and Automation Anywhere customers getting right today that sets them up for success? And what are some of the things that they're going to have to consider to fully benefit from this future we're talking about? I am going to go simple, actually. I think we see lots of customers start on this journey because and the journey of broadly adopting AI for CX without a clear understanding of why they're going on that journey.

They kind of know that there's lots of people going on that journey. And I think number one is with organizations that we see be phenomenally successful is do they have a clear vision of what they're looking to achieve and why? Like why are they going on this journey in the first place? Secondly, an ownership on their side of the outcomes as well as the ownership on our side of the outcomes. So there needs to be a, because you also see a, we need 70% automation and it's all yours. I go for it, otherwise we have the right to cancel the contract. And I think the organization that know that there's a joint responsibility here for achieving that, i.e. access to information and depth of integrations into different platforms, et cetera, et cetera, where we sit within an IVR, has a massive impact on the outcomes. Three would be a very clear understanding of their own capabilities and their own capability gaps, especially from people and resource-wise. So this isn't something that I think an organization should entirely outsource.

There is real value in them understanding what we're doing, how we're doing it. So it's something that they can really run and drive themselves moving forward. And I think just to jump on Anka's last point, you can do this in a silo. But actually, for us, the entire customer lifecycle, step one might be support. but there's lots of other touch points that customer might have throughout their life cycle that this can play a really strong role for. So think of it more holistically rather than just trying to address one thing in one area. Brilliant. Brilliant. Guys, this has been absolutely fantastic. I think that the vision here is brilliant. David, on your side, Jerry messaged me kind of over the course of the announcement and stuff, and he said, what do you actually think about this, honestly? and I said, for me, it is the perfect story because, you know, the biggest limitation and the biggest bottleneck on the conversational AI side has always been connecting with systems,

connecting with data and marrying that stuff up to something that actually works, which is why 99% of all generative AI applications we've seen over the last kind of two or three years have all been retrieval augmented generation. There's some value in that, but it doesn't actually do anything, you know? So you have to get the interaction or that trigger into the business to change something. Otherwise, it's never going to happen. And the second challenge for businesses is that they're built on a lot of legacy infrastructure and a lot of kind of like technical debt that prevents them from doing some of this stuff that they might want to do. And I think when you've got a company like Automation Anywhere, who quite frankly doesn't really care about that legacy infrastructure and technical debt because there's a load of different ways you can circumnavigate that, get around that, or build better than that. You marry those two things together, and I genuinely think it is absolutely spot on in terms of the two companies, what you both offer, where you both are in the market, and what the offering could be when you both come together.

And I do genuinely think there is a world in which CCAS becomes plumbing behind the scenes that you don't really need. I think that CRMs are just databases that sit behind the scenes, and again, you don't really need that. CPaaS is again just plumbing connectivity. Legacy business systems are ultimately just systems of record with some workflows in them which AI can replicate in an absolute heartbeat. And when you strip away all that, what are you left with? You're left with the customer interaction, you're left with the AI orchestration, and you're left with the integration and orchestration between all that data behind the scenes. And if you're the company that sits in that position, you're the company ultimately that a business can use to run their entire business. And I think that's the future for me. very well said I'm just going to take that and put it on our website so does it brilliant thank you thank you both very much really appreciate it and I'll see you next week Gerry I don't know if there's any spoilers involved I don't want to do a spoiler I don't know if Anka's going to be there or not I'm going to be there I'll see you next week

brilliant thank you very much I'll look forward to that nice one appreciate your time gents really excited congratulations thanks for having us again appreciate it thank you all tuning in. We'll see you soon. Bye.