Hi everyone. Welcome back here to our coverage of Automation Anywhere Imagine in Dallas this year 2026. I don't know if you'll recognize this gentleman, but he is the CEO of Automation Anywhere, Mihir Shukla. That's right. Mihir, first of all, thank you for coming back on. As I said when I first worked in, I hope it won't be another year till I get to talk to you. For our audience who maybe haven't heard of or they're not familiar with Automation Anywhere, how would you describe the company to them?
So we are an enterprise AI and automation company, a software company, and we look at the world differently. We look at the world for what of course what it is now but what it could be if you reimagined it with the power of AI and automation. And we think that there is such an immense potential. And with over 5,000 customers today, we run 450 million AI agents and automations on the planet for some of the largest companies and many regulated industries. So we have a better vantage point to understand what is possible, what is not, what is real, where the biggest impact is. And so we're now taking this to as many companies as possible and say, you know, you could be doing this and having a $200 million impact in 8 weeks.
Yeah. And when people hear that, they don't believe it at first because in 8 weeks 200 million, that's not possible. But that's the power of AI and the platform that we have built. It is so amazing. We were, you know, recently named one of the seven wonders of AI because the capability that we built over years, it surprises us to be honest. What is possible now, and we want to bring it to the customers.
Absolutely. So, Mihir, I mentioned last year I doubted you. So, now I'm here. Tell me the big picture. You know, we've seen Agentic become real. We've seen the whole world, not just our tech industry, but the world shifting towards this big shift. Are we... I tend to, you know, I live in a bubble where everyone talks about AI. But I'll tell you, we were talking about my trip to Europe. I was listening to people speak foreign languages that I didn't understand what they were saying. But inevitably every little group I hear someone say ChatGPT, OpenAI, right? No matter what language they speak they still say that. What is this big shift? You're seeing it I'm sure from where you sit as well. How would you describe it?
I think we finally have a technology that works for people in their natural language and natural way we talk, and that is transformative. So the AI is not an IT project and another incremental technology. It is how companies should run. But what we find is that most organizations, while they have a general sense of how powerful this technology is, they are struggling to define their enterprise AI strategy. They can try, for example, you know, we all have tried co-pilots because we think that's a quick return and it is good for personal productivity, but it doesn't completely transform your enterprise landscape. You can use system of record applications and there are agents, they have domain-specific capabilities, but you know each of them wants to hold on to their tower and they want to bring everything under their tower. And they aren't in the business of reimagining your entire business and they have their current revenue model that they are attached to. So each of these ideas, and there are startups and they're amazing startups, but startups don't have enterprise governance and security. Like think about CEOs and boards and everybody's pushing them to produce outcome. But if you're a CIO or a head of security, CSO, you have to run this in a governance and secure way, otherwise it doesn't scale. The pilots will never go to production. So because of all of these things, you know, a collection of co-pilots and AI agents here and there and some startups, that's not an enterprise AI strategy. No, we believe that your enterprise AI strategy should be the autonomous enterprise.
And what does an autonomous enterprise mean?
So autonomous enterprise must have these three characteristics. A, you have to be able to automate up to 80% of what you do today.
80%. Either fully autonomous or AI-assisted. So you're not doing 5% thing here and 3%. It has to reimagine how this organization operates. The second piece is because the power of AI is that it will orchestrate work across applications. You don't have to get tied up in your software seat license model and you can significantly reduce it, but most importantly decouple your growth from software seat licenses. See the way today we work, Ellen, is anytime my company grows, I have these toll booths I call them where I have to pay every SaaS company something as a SaaS model, right there. So that's a SaaS tax. It's kind of a toll booth. But what if it wasn't there and instead we were more outcome-based and more... and so we can invest more in innovation. So I think we offer a solution where you could take sometimes 30, sometimes 60% of your SaaS tax out because our agents drive outcome and you never have to worry about the SaaS system behind it. And the third one, autonomous enterprise does not mean no people. On the contrary, people have to be 3x more productive. Now this is important, the if is that 10% more productive, that's another IT project that you have been running, right? It has to be three times more.
Yes, because... and how do you do that?
And so we offer, of course, software, many nine predefined solutions. Our platform is called Agentic Process Automation Platform and you can customize it to implement hundreds of solutions. These nine solutions that we bring, autonomous IT, autonomous finance, autonomous support and many others, they transform how those organizations operate and I encourage people to take a look. And hear it from other customers who have done it. Seeing is believing. We had a customer here earlier who stood up on a stage and said I saved $120 million in three weeks. And unless that customer was saying it, you won't believe.
I got to be honest with you and I learned not to doubt you. Let me just rehash so our audience gets it. Number one, we've got a 3x employees, right? We've heard about 10x engineer and I tell my own employees this. This is not meant to take your job. This is meant to make you more effective. You're the first person I've heard who've put a number on 3x. I love it. Secondly, 80% of our processes should be automated. Whether it's Agentic or, you know, RPA or IPA, 80% needs to be automated. And that's how you get... I don't think you could get there without a 3x increase. But they one feeds the other. It's like a virtuous cycle. The third thing is to decouple yourself from... decouple from the SaaS. And this is something people have said, the SaaS apocalypse, it's holding us back. Yeah, it is a tax because what has happened is that if you look at a typical company, somewhere between 70 to 90% of your IT budget goes keeping lights on. Which is important, then you invest a little bit in growth and a little bit in transform. I think the way IT teams should be configured, and my CIO, we often have debates on this and say look, how about if we only spend 40% on running the company, 30% on growing the company, and 30% on transforming it? And I said at that point you are my transformation engine, you are not my keeping lights on engine.
I love that. And I think who wouldn't want to do that? Because now you are the powerhouse in an engine. I'm not a cost center, I'm a revenue generator. And even an amazing CIO who got us from now I think 45% run cost, he has five more percent. So it's still a little... but I think keep going on that direction and it is liberating for people.
So what is the right model? So people are saying okay I want to go look at Automation Anywhere because I don't want to pay the SaaS tax. What's the right model for software usage then?
So it has to be based on amount of work getting done because that's the only measure we all get measured on, right? So look, no matter what your job is, there are only three outcomes and we all one or the other way at one or more. You either increase revenue, you manage or reduce cost, and you manage or reduce risk. That's it. That's what it comes down to. So what are we going to do that will make that impact? Sometimes I hear about, you know, when there's this idea of people doing pilots and sometimes there are more pilots than airlines, right? But if let's say there is a 5% of people in your organization and you did a pilot that would improve them by 5%. That is a quarter of a percent in a large company sense and did that benefit show up in an outcome or did you have more time on water coolers which you probably don't have anymore but you get the idea.
I get it. Yeah. Well you got to figure out what is there an outcome, right? Because without outcome these things don't last too long.
And so we encourage customers to just think about what is the unit of work that you're doing and reimagine how that unit happens. So you know, your unit of work is number of calls or number of tickets in IT service management or number of orders. I mean everybody has their unit of work, right? And can you achieve that unit of work with up to 80%? Take an example in IT service management. Today we offer a solution that on average it will autonomously resolve 80% of all tickets. Now that number is somewhere between 67 to 92.
