Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. You're listening to Bloomberg
Speaker 1: Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: For RBC Capital Markets among the analysts that raised its
Speaker 2: price target on UiPath following recent earnings. In one note
Speaker 2: from RBC, they said the company is set to continue
Speaker 2: recent trends like new netnew annual recurring revenue also known
Speaker 2: as NNAARR for those keeping track. They also cited stabilization
Speaker 2: and improved profitability despite debate around its role in an
Speaker 2: increasingly edgentic automation world. That is something we're going to
Speaker 2: dig into with our next guest.
Speaker 1: We got Ashim Gufto with us CFO and COEO of
Speaker 1: the nine point four billion dollar market cap company. UiPath
Speaker 1: shares up close to forty percent so far this year.
Speaker 1: Twelve percent of the float is shorted. Also with us
Speaker 1: here in the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Studio. Nina Trappman, Bloomberg News
Speaker 1: senior editor. She writes the CFO Briefing newsletter. You should
Speaker 1: subscribe to it at Bloomberg dot com slash CFO Briefing.
Speaker 1: Ashe I'm good to have you on the program. An
Speaker 1: application software company robotics automation software. Remind everybody and introduce
Speaker 1: people who don't know exactly where you play in the industry.
Speaker 1: Who are your customers and where do you fit?
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. For those who
Speaker 3: don't know UiPath. UiPath is an AI powered platform that
Speaker 3: helps businesses and enterprises transform their enterprise processes and organizations
Speaker 3: to yield productivity and ROLI. We do so by emulating
Speaker 3: what humans do through both deterministic rules based automation and
Speaker 3: agentic automation, using agents and AI to automate a lot
Speaker 3: of those tasks. You know, we own more than half
Speaker 3: of the Fortune five hundred companies in the world. We
Speaker 3: have ten thousand, eight hundred customers that span industries from
Speaker 3: financial services to healthcare to the US federal government, and
Speaker 3: we opt in overall over one hundred countries. The reason
Speaker 3: for that breath is because we are very relevant to
Speaker 3: what every enterprise of almost any scale does in terms
Speaker 3: of taking away mundane work to yield for a more
Speaker 3: productive workforce.
Speaker 2: So wait, so do me a favor just because I'm
Speaker 2: stupid and it's Friday, so tell me give me. I'm okay,
Speaker 2: I'm really okay with it. Give me just in thirty
Speaker 2: seconds a quick example of a company that you work
Speaker 2: with and what you do for them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so Carol Voya Financial. Just as an example, is
Speaker 3: a large scale bank in the in the in the
Speaker 3: United States. We're working with them to automate their everything
Speaker 3: from HR operations such as employee onboarding to financial processes.
Speaker 3: If you step back and look at almost any any
Speaker 3: enterprise that's there, think about something as mundane is procured
Speaker 3: to pay, where you're receiving invoices, entering them into systems,
Speaker 3: then moving that data that you're entering into systems, doing reconciliations.
Speaker 3: That work can be done by software and does not
Speaker 3: need to be done by for the hours that people
Speaker 3: are putting into it. You take something like that as
Speaker 3: a simple example. But then you can go and you
Speaker 3: look at a Fortune ten healthcare company that we work with.
Speaker 3: All of their claims processing gets touched by our software,
Speaker 3: entering data, analyzing and understanding data and with a gentic
Speaker 3: providing reasoning to allow for decisions to be made. Those
Speaker 3: are two examples.
Speaker 4: Just wondering actume in your finance organization, are you using
Speaker 4: it there too?
Speaker 3: Huge? You know when you look at UiPath. UiPath is
Speaker 3: scaled from almost zero revenue in twenty seventeen to over
Speaker 3: one point eight billion dollars of arr to where we
Speaker 3: are today within our finance department, but across our enterprises,
Speaker 3: we employ our own software, so we have not had
Speaker 3: to add people net net to our company, and many
Speaker 3: years we've been able to achieve that scale both geographically
Speaker 3: as well as as well as from a revenue perspective
Speaker 3: using automation, and that's not unique to us. That is
Speaker 3: something that a lot of our customers benefit.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we all set up a stream a little
Speaker 2: bit straight. Because there is so much of a narrative
Speaker 2: and conversation going around AI and what it's going to
Speaker 2: do to labor market, it sounds like you haven't had
Speaker 2: to hire people. Reality check, are a lot of companies
Speaker 2: going to be able to not hire people or even
Speaker 2: let people go because of what AI or jetic AI
Speaker 2: is going to be able to do for them?
Speaker 3: Yeah, let me make let me make a small nuance here.
Speaker 3: We've hired people just in the places that provide higher
Speaker 3: return in terms of revenue or higher pieces of innovation.
Speaker 3: So in our minds, companies should be hiring and people
Speaker 3: will continuing to work, but it's going to be working
Speaker 3: in higher skilled areas and areas that have a higher
Speaker 3: return to the whether that is working interactively with customers,
Speaker 3: or whether that is on pace for designing the next
Speaker 3: fee of innovation to bring to the market over the
Speaker 3: next couple of years. So this isn't about hiring less.
Speaker 3: It's about hiring where you want to and all of
Speaker 3: that translates to ROI.
Speaker 4: A sheem just wondering. We've seen a lot of concerns
Speaker 4: in recent weeks, specifically in November among investors around AI
Speaker 4: and whether what we're currently seeing is leading us into
Speaker 4: a bubble at some point. If you look at your
Speaker 4: bookings for next year, like, what does that look like?
Speaker 4: What's the feedback that you're getting from clients if they're
Speaker 4: thinking about their spending plans for next year. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Look, I think what our customers feel is they feel
Speaker 3: a variable macroeconomic environment. I think like all of us do.
Speaker 3: And you know a lot of times what we all
Speaker 3: discuss in our various forums, whether that's formal or informal.
Speaker 3: What I can tell you is what's encouraging is customers
Speaker 3: want to see spend the key area is they're not
Speaker 3: going to spend unless they see ROI. So as we're
Speaker 3: looking at our demand funnel, we launched our agentic platform,
Speaker 3: bringing agents in AI infused automations to enterprises earlier this year.
Speaker 3: You know, if you go back to maybe twenty sixteen,
Speaker 3: twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, there were innovation funds that you
Speaker 3: could go and say, hey, let me go and spend
Speaker 3: two million dollars in just experiment. I think experimental funds
Speaker 3: are moving down, but the funds that but there's a
Speaker 3: lot of funds available that for projects and areas that
Speaker 3: yield ROI. So once we launched our platform, the demand
Speaker 3: for proof of concepts and pilots. Really we're super encouraged
Speaker 3: by even in the first five to six months, more
Speaker 3: than seven hundred of our ten thy eight hundred customers.
Speaker 3: They are these companies are going and building agents on
Speaker 3: our platform and figuring out where are the highest ROI areas.
Speaker 3: So there's a lot of activity and I think funding
Speaker 3: will follow activity so long as that there is ROI
Speaker 3: that is there. And that's what gives us a lot
Speaker 3: of confidence and optimism as we look into the years
Speaker 3: ahead for upas.
Speaker 1: Actually very briefly, very interested in the work that you
Speaker 1: do for governments in the US and around the world.
Speaker 1: How do you characterize that work, like what do you
Speaker 1: do for them? And also how big of a business
Speaker 1: is that for UiPath.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the public sector is DOLE. It's greater than
Speaker 3: ten percent of our revenue base just globally. You know,
Speaker 3: that was as of two years ago. We haven't disclosed
Speaker 3: figures since then, but it's you know, I would imagine
Speaker 3: it's in a similar vein here. I can represent that
Speaker 3: when you look at the US government, it's everything from
Speaker 3: you know, from areas of agencies that are in high
Speaker 3: paper network. They use our software to actually scan, read,
Speaker 3: and extract data so they can process things fast. There
Speaker 3: are there are partners that we work with with the
Speaker 3: government that are taking papers that are sitting in caves
Speaker 3: and in parking lots, trailers and trailers of them and
Speaker 3: digitizing them as a part of their digit transformation. Getting
Speaker 3: audit compliance across the government, which involves retrieving documents and
Speaker 3: processing different areas for auditors and business teams. That is
Speaker 3: a key area that we can look at, but we're
Speaker 3: across every agency that is there. What it'd say is
Speaker 3: we've gotten super close to the government over these last years.
Speaker 3: We continue to have a great relationship with them, and
Speaker 3: just like enterprises, what's encouraging is they're looking for high ROI,
Speaker 3: high impact transformative areas to deploy our software.
Speaker 2: All right, well, super interesting and I hope you'll stay
Speaker 2: in touch so we can continue this conversation. Ashima Gupta,
Speaker 2: CFO and COO of UiPath joining us from AFAR and
Speaker 2: of course right here in studio. Nina Trttman, Bloomberg News
Speaker 2: Senior Editor. She writes the CFO Briefing newsletter, which you
Speaker 2: can subscribe to at Bloomberg dot com slash CFO Briefing.
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Speaker 2: she will.
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