Mihir Shukla Explains at Davos Why Work Itself Is About to Be Redefined

Thanks for having me. I'm Mihir Shukla, CEO, chairman, Automation Anywhere. For a quick context, we are based in Silicon Valley, an enterprise AI company leading in automation. We have about 6,000 customers in 90 countries in many industries, more than half of the global 2,000 are our customers. We run 420 million digital workers or co-workers on our platform. So it's a sizable AI infrastructure that we run. And our focus is on autonomous enterprise. So 18 months ago we introduced a market-leading offering on how to run businesses in an autonomous way. Autonomous IT, autonomous supply chain, and autonomous enterprises. So a little bit about us.

Are we going straight to the bubble? Look, the AI market is where the AOL of the internet days were, right? Where 173 ISPs were trying getting the infrastructure right and we often get super excited about infrastructure but in reality, infrastructure is as necessary as it is, it does not capture value. The value is always captured on applications that come on top of it and then Google and Amazon and many other companies came and the trillion-dollar companies captured the value. I think we are super excited right now about infrastructure. And that's how normally it happens. 100 people bet on 100 things and not all 100 will succeed. But it is creating a necessary condition for the real wave. If you think this is exciting, you haven't seen anything yet because a 10x wave will come when the AI value capture happens across industries and people reimagine how work happens. Because if you think about in human history, every software changes how you work. So that's not new. What is new is every 100 or 150 years we as a civilization change the definition of what work should be. If many of us have a small garden in our backyard, that's a hobby for us. It used to be work many hundred years ago. So this definition of what work is is about to change and that is the real wave. This is just the beginning.

I think if you walk on Promenade, you will see AI maybe 100 times. So it's quite a noisy space and I think everybody's coming from their viewpoint because it's redefining work and in that, many people are talking about AI being an assistant. Now in a large scheme of things that is true because if you put 100 AI tools in a room, nothing will happen. The human is in charge and AI is a tool that we will all leverage. But thinking of AI just as an assistant just doing things better, faster, cheaper, this technology is far more powerful than that. It is, you have an ability to reimagine the workflow to imagine up to 80% of the work happening autonomously. And you know, different people come from a different angle. If you are a system of record company, you're trying to preserve your seat-based licensing model then charge more for AI. If I was a public company, I would be forced to do the same. The reality is you don't need sometimes 80% of the seat-based license model. And so this ability to reimagine your IT spend, how you operate is a truly transformative moment. And so I think this is a leadership moment where leaders need to step back and say in a world where you could do anything and many things are possible, what should we do? And stopping and thinking of five big things that would transform your business, create a competitive differentiation. And so that's the path most leaders need to take.