Automation Anywhere CEO Mihir Shukla at Semafor World Economy

Pleasure to be here.

That's right.

That was maybe 15 years ago.

I think we find ourselves at the center of all AI conversations, especially in enterprise AI. I think the conversation at large is divided into infrastructure and frontier models, and the second space is how to apply all of this technology in the enterprise. I think as of last month, the market size of how to apply this technology in enterprise is projected to be much larger. Not a surprise because there is a trillion-dollar opportunity there, and we have been doing this for a while. We were one of the first in AI and automation in the space. Today we run about 420 million AI agents on the planet in 90 countries. Nearly half of Global 2000 are our customers. So we had a lead coming into it. The timing was right, and we find ourselves at the center of all the conversations.

Yes. So we had a view, as I said, we had a front-row seat into seeing how the world is evolving. And so my colleague and I wrote a book called 'Five-Year Century.' It's coming out in a couple of weeks because we'll see the change that normally you see in 100 years in the next five years, and what does that mean. I've read in the books how the second industrial revolution happened, but I didn't feel what it meant to be there. Now we get to feel what it feels like if you were at that time, and maybe at a significantly faster rate. I think the way we are organized in our companies will change. How work gets done will change. I think this is a unique opportunity in human civilization where every 150 years we as a civilization decide what work should be. Farming was work for 70% of the people; for many of us, it's a hobby now. Similarly, what we call work today will transform, and it's an interesting time in history.

I'll say that on two sides. I think first, in the first generation of deployments, it will have a significantly positive effect on the economy because if you look at our economy today, there are so many people who make money out of managing errors. There are all kinds of errors in the system. Large companies have large ticketing systems and there are 1.2 million tickets. All those tickets are fundamentally errors. And then you have an order management system. There are hundreds of millions of dollars worth of orders stuck because that's an error. We recently heard about cyber risk. These are all the errors in the system. And what these AI tools are especially great at is removing those errors. For example, we can deal with about 80% of all tickets autonomously without any human in the loop within a second. Imagine 80% of that work just disappears. Now the good part about that is that creating more errors is not the best economic activity. So you want to get rid of errors across the board. In that process, you will see a huge bump in productivity. So that's the right way for the macroeconomy to operate. I think in terms of the impact on the labor market, I developed a more balanced point of view after talking to lots of leaders and union leaders. I think this disruption will be perceived in two completely different ways, and they both are right. I think there are people who say this is not the best world we live in. We can imagine a better world. We can imagine better healthcare, better retail, better everything. They are super excited because this is the tool of a lifetime to make everything better. We have a customer who automated a process with AI and saved 4,000 lives. Now, we should be appalled that you have an administrative process that cost 4,000 lives. So, on one hand, those people when you talk to, they're super excited. This is unbelievable. There is another group of people who say, 'Look, I've worked very hard in my life and I need the world to fit me.' And there are times in all of our lives where that is true, maybe for a small period of time, but we want the world to fit us, and that would be challenging for them because the world cannot stop. It has to keep moving forward, otherwise there are sovereign risks. So countries don't have a choice but to continue on this path. Like globalization, I think we could learn from it. But the most important part, where it works for some and doesn't work for others, I think what can we do better this time so that it works for more people? And I think that's an important conversation to have.