In this episode, Mark and Brent recap the past few weeks of news, toying with node-red, and take another look at attended vs unattended in a recent project. More discussion about citizen developers come up with some recent articles.
Industry News & Recap
SPEAKERS
Mark Percival, Brent Sanders
Brent Sanders 00:05
It's been a while since we've done one of these episodes, just go through the news. Talk about latest and greatest in the RPA industry or the automation industry.
Mark Percival 00:14
Yeah. I mean, there's obviously a lot going on right now but we've kinda moved on doing interviews and been working on things we've seen in our last interview.
Brent Sanders 00:37
Yeah, yeah. So I was kind of captivated. That was a really enjoyed the interview with Alan I mean, he just has such a depth of knowledge around the space. And I feel like we really only scratched the surface. So definitely want to have him back in the future. But you know, looking at his open flow project, which was I think it's built for or maybe more so intended to be used with open RPA in a certain degree, but I dug into that project just to get it running. And I did and tinkered around but really dug into node red. So inside of his, his project is really a wrapper around no read, he's got all these sort of nice to have appliances like rabbit mq, all the stuff that you if you're gonna want to productionize this, this work, sort of working set of tools, he has that done for you. So I just dug into no read and got it running on my local machine, they have a, you know, like a one line Docker installation. And I actually use it. So I recently in the fortunate owner of a Tesla. So, you know, the first thing I'm going to do is try to connect it to the Tesla API and see if my car can make, you know, other automations work. And so I, in looking at node red, I found this huge community in the home automation world. Yeah, this is like, what I found is one of the interesting things about the project is like it's been embraced by the home automation audience, which I think really helps production I production eyes, or is that the right word, make your code or the project like validate that it works well in production, because we have all these home tinkerers putting it through its paces connecting it to all these different, you know, platforms. And it seems to be really well regarded. And so I very quickly found a Tesla node. And you basically just configure the node, you know, you put in your your login credentials to the, you know, Tesla comm which also, then as soon as you issue a token, and you can consume the API, and so one of the things I wanted to validate for myself, you know, Elon mentioned on the podcast, there's over 2000 nodes. And there are and I was thinking, Okay, there are, but they're in various states of, you know, there's probably, you know, 500 that are really working, and then there's 1500, that, you know, have been uploaded, but it was hard. Yeah. So there are two Tesla nodes. One I, you know, says it's like, this is for development only, it's not really production ready, the other one worked great. And so, you know, in my cursory example, it was just kind of brilliant. So you, you're really, you're not coding necessarily, you can, you can have nodes that just trigger some JavaScript function, you know, but they all take some sort of payload. And it's like, you know, at least in my experience, I was only exchanging JSON payloads from node to node to node. So you basically, you know, you can have it invoke, which will run the automation immediately, or you can, you know, be waiting for an HTTP request, or whatever, I think you were, did you get it up and running as well?
Mark Percival 03:45
Yeah, no, I played with it, got it up and running. The HTTP requests. HTTP request thing works really well. It is very much like a low code platform. I mean, it's kind of neat, you basically just drag these, you know, different inputs onto the page, and then control the flow. And I say, just drag and drop the flow to where you want it to go. It didn't take me very long to get up and running. I thought the node or sorry, the Docker instant, was phenomenal. I have it running in like five minutes. And then I was like, Yeah, but it does have a lot of pieces that you know, you kind of have to build onto it. So like mq TT for queuing, you'll need a server built on that which is not automatically running with a Docker instance. And that's kind of where Allen's stuff comes in. But yeah, I think there's all these other libraries out there for it, or they call them nodes. And I guess if anybody's out there listening to this and thinking, Well, what is node Reddit? It really is just sort of a platform. I mean, I don't know how the best way to describe it. It's a process control platform. I mean, it's an idea of visual GUI design, where you can drag and drop things and say, you know, hey, if a message comes in here, run it through this function and then send it over here. And so it allows you to plug in these other open source pieces, like if I see a message in my queue, or I think yours is I'm assuming pulling, or is it pulling from Tesla?
Brent Sanders 05:04
So what I ended up doing is like, playing with it, so I could text something, and then it would warm up the car. I mean, it's all it was totally pointless because there's a Tesla app, I was just tinkering. But I was pushing commands to the car, or pushing a command to then push another message back to me, you know, like vite texted something, you know, sending it to Twilio, essentially sending it to the node red server, it was completely convoluted and stupid, but it allowed me to play with it. And you know, where I see fit in the automation practice is kind of what Elon was saying is like, if you have some sort of bots, you know, you're beyond the point of developing your first couple bots. And now you're trying to think of like, Okay, well, how do I make them a little bit smarter? Or how do I use the term orchestrate? How do I orchestrate them in a way that makes sense for my business? Or my use case? This is killer. This is like, it's a great tool.
Mark Percival 06:01
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the, it allows you to do things like kick off a process, for example, with a trigger, right, right times you think of automation is, sometimes there's a trigger, sometimes it's a cron job that runs it. But typically, there's a trigger. And then you have this automation run. And if you want to add anything to that, you're basically going into that, say UI path, flow and making modifications there. But you're very much in the UiPath world at that point. Whereas this one is, you really can kind of pass it along to other processes pretty easily. Yeah. And it does. It's a very different feeling than building something in UiPath. It feels a bit more. I don't know, as a developer, it's actually really nice.
Brent Sanders 06:43
Yeah, I, I'm happy to not have to script this stuff and get a server deployed and all the sort of noise that goes along with that, which is like, okay, fault tolerance, or I mean, that being said, Before I dive in all the things we don't have to worry about, I haven't gotten this to a point where I feel confident, like, production ready, sort of deployment, but it does seem like Like I said, if it works for the home automation people, I mean, it it, I believe that it works and then it comes down to Okay, how do you actually support it in the production market, which I think.
Mark Percival 07:17
Is an interesting crowd.
Brent Sanders 07:18
Yeah.
Mark Percival 07:20
I feel like, every time I bought everything I talked to somebody who's in home automation, it's like, yeah, I have this thing that like when you come in and recognize your home, and it dims the lights, or whatever. And then like, if you visit them in like a month, it's like, hey, that doesn't work anymore. Like, I haven't had a chance to fix it. Yeah. Like, I almost feel like an interview question for somebody who's getting into automation. If you're hiring somebody to architect it, it'd be like, do you like how automated is your home? And if they answer Yeah, everything's automated. You should be like, No, I'm not gonna hire.
Brent Sanders 07:48
Yeah. You don't know. You have no idea.
Mark Percival 07:53
I mean, I know, this is just, I bought a Z wave controller to do home automation, right, like a plug. And I remember I got it hooked up last year for Christmas lights, and it's like, fine, I was like, gonna get it back out this year and hook it up. And then I bought just a photocell controller, like, like, the sunsets and it goes down. And so the last year, I spent all this time trying to get like, my lat long coordinates in and like, it would rise, and then it would turn off the lights, and then the sun would set and it would turn back on the lights, like 15 minutes before it sets. And then like, I solve this problem with an $8. Yeah, you know, photocell controller that like just plugs into the wall, and it's like, yeah, there's no light. I'm gonna turn the lights on.
Brent Sanders 08:29
The Internet goes out. It still works.
Mark Percival 08:31
Yeah, really. It's amazing. Yeah, my z wave ones, like, I need to pair it again with the Z wave controller. And I'm just gonna, yeah, so I feel like home animation is just like this Sisyphean, like task where you just kind of just always are messing with something. It's like you get two steps forward, and it just all falls apart. And you go back.
Brent Sanders 08:50
Yeah, well, the only thing I would recap on node red is I feel like it gives us the opportunity in our automation practice to make our bots dumber. Right. It's like there's always that desire to like, do less per bot, and I feel like this, introducing this tool. And again, there's probably a fair amount of work to do to get this to a point where like, we're comfortable using a project. But anyways, that was a big, big sort of takeaway from Alan's interview is you need to do some, some weekend warrior ng, in Node red land.
Mark Percival 09:20
Yeah, no, it's a cool project. Definitely low code like anybody. I think the only downside is really, it's almost like there's very low, it's very low code. But the setup is not low code, right. You know, it's still a server instance, is still running in the web. And so you have to kind of go and launch it. But then once you get it there, it's actually really nice, because everything else is just, like I said, it's just drag and drop. Yeah. So no, it's really it's really nice. The other thing I think, you know, we had, I think one of the mentioned was the we've been doing some work with a client on attended and we had originally kind of built a bot that was gonna be more unattended. Yeah. Listen Thinking about just, you know, the kind of the pros and cons of attended versus unattended operation? And I think, especially from the UiPath. world, there is this, there's obviously a licensing difference, right? There's that which is just unintended costs tend to cost a different amount. And then there's the other issue, which is Where are you running the unattended? Is it running on a virtualized desktop somewhere, versus attended, where it's actually running on someone's machine, who kicks it off attended, typically is something that's triggered. But there's all these things that come up with this with this distinction and attended versus attended. And I think what we were kind of dealing with was, you know, I think as a developer, unintended makes what you naturally kind of fall towards, it's just, yeah, I have this thing on a server and it runs and I can put something and it outputs something else. And then the, the attended model is very much like, it's like when, you know, it's like when automation, right? It's just, right, it's just, Hey, I have this macro, and I run it, and it goes and does all these things. And I think, you know, with this particular client, we spent some time building a bot that ran a bit longer than we would have liked to, I think we would like to broken it up a bit more. But there were also these issues of, you know, there's some advantage of attended that's hard to kind of get around with on attended. And the sense that like, there's a bit more surface area for unattended where you have to build more more tooling around it, I we kind of part of the risk was we launched bot commander with this idea that you could kick off bots that are unintended, via command line, or sorry, via a web interface that somebody would look into. And that works really well. But you know, the attended bot does have some benefits that we ended up going with attended for this particular client. It was still in robot framework, but it was an interesting learning around kind of just, you know, this bot this bird bot, in particular, this process was a bit more complicated. And so we wound up having more points of breakage, and having the attended model was interesting, because it really allowed us to kind of see where it was breaking or let the end user see. Right. And that was interesting, because the unintended really did have this idea of like, it's a black box, right? You kick it off. And then if it fails, you kind of have to go back to the logs and figure out what happened.
Brent Sanders 12:20
Yeah, and I would say this, the reasons, you know, it's the front of each project has its own little snowflake problems. And in this case, we had a target system that just was very slow to work against, like, it was almost as if we had sleep statements at every turn, right? It's like, per record. And we have, you know, how many records were we parsing there was a couple 1000?
Mark Percival 12:41
A couple 1000 per run, was coming on a fairly legacy, you know, application. And so it was a bit slow to get into that, it would have occasionally just like moments where it would just, you know, would fail. So you had to handle that. And then yeah, I think, you know, the other issue was, you know, the attendance allowed us to more quickly kind of build out the ability for the end user to make decisions when those things happened. Right. And that was I think, the really the critical piece. And that's the thing that you don't get to the end attended where you can get in and attended. But it's going to be a lot more building block cases where you're gonna have to say, hey, I need to throw this into like a work queue or some type of item. Yeah, somebody come in and make changes later, it's hard to sometimes start and it's hard to sometimes fail out of that, push something into that queue, and then come back and pick up where you're at, depending on the kind of system you're working in. So you really do kind of need that immediate, you know, that immediate intervention? Yeah, I mean, yeah, like you said, we could have broken it down in a really small granular pieces where each record was run as its own job. And it's like, that resistance was like, we're almost there. We're basically done with the implementation. And it was like, Well, I mean, when we think about. It feels like a mono repo versus like the, you know, yes. services or the micro services.
Brent Sanders 14:05
Yes. But then you forget, it is the same thing is true for web services, or micro services, it's like, you forget about that overhead of, you know, what is it cost now that I'm going to break this into pieces? What's the overhead to make everything talk to one another and be past the state correctly and not create duplicates? And it's like it for us, it probably wouldn't have been that big of a deal. But for the client, it would have been really introducing all this like confusion where otherwise they can see the process running in front of them. And yes, it's going to take hours. Like that's okay, that's what was expected that was communicated. And we understood that upfront, but it was when you're working in a sort of minutes environment that that gets a little little deadly, where it's like, Okay, this is gonna run for hours, it's gonna sync up all these records. But, you know, obviously, we don't want to have a person do it, but the idea that you can have somebody who's working and then in a comes up and says, Hey, we're in a state can, you know just in the right direction or do something to get us back on track.
Mark Percival 15:06
And this is, and this is another thing piece of this is in the robot framework. So you can actually run, we're running it in a Chrome browser, that's actually separate from their normal browser, when you launch a robot framework, depending on how you launch the browser, you can launch it as a separate instance. And that can actually run in the background. And so the worker can actually continue to do their work in another browser, and not, you know, be distracted by this, which does allow a lot more freedom and flexibility for that user to say, Hey, I'm going to kick this process off, I'll get a prompt that'll come up if I need to interact or take some intervention. But it's gonna sit there and run in the background while actually do my job.
Brent Sanders 15:43
And we should mention that we're, we're on the leading edge, or some people like to say bleeding edge, right. And this is a beta feature offered by Robocorp, yeah, that they, it kind of came in perfect timing for this, this project, I mean, I want to, you know, temper that the choice of using a beta product in production actually fit really well. And it ended up working and kind of being our Savior versus having to, again, go back to this other route, where we're gonna add, you know, very deep level orchestration. And like, we're totally comfortable doing that. But this was something where we could really make the client, I think, much more comfortable with the solution. So they're, like, comfortable using it, and operating it versus us being the forever owners, and it's too technical for them to even understand. So, you know, in the case of using something that probably isn't, you know, deemed even by the Creator as production, rather, using something as a beta piece of software worked really well, and continues to.
Mark Percival 16:44
yeah, no, I think I mean, you're seeing it's kind of a feature that's being copied from UiPath, in the sense of, you know, you have this agent that sits on your desktop, and then shows all your potential problems, you can run, and then the person goes in and the Robocop app and says, Hey, you know, I want to run this process right now. And it kicks off the process starts running it, and then thankfully, it does it in a different state. So you don't actually have to be bothered by it. Which I also thought leads into the other thing I saw last week, Brent I sent it to you.
Brent Sanders 17:14
Yeah, so cool. Picture. I was blown away.
Mark Percival 17:18
Yeah, I mean, this is a cool feature. If, obviously, podcast, we can't show it off. YouTube and type in I think, just UiPath p IP, or picture and picture. They're demoing it. But basically, the gist of it is, rather than having the automation launch on your particular desktop, they're essentially building another desktop, I actually assuming it's just windows views, that is another virtual desktop, like if you had it on a separate monitor. But essentially, it's happening in another desktop that's in a window. So you can actually allow that, that process to continue on without interrupting, interrupting your workflow on your own. Yeah. I think that's actually, I mean, that goes farther than just the browser stuff that actually can act interact with actual items, you know, actual Windows apps, UI elements, which I think is pretty tricky one right now, if you were to do that today, in UiPath world, without the picture in picture, you would be somewhat limited in what you could do on the same desktop, while you're allowing that automation to run.
Brent Sanders 18:17
I think this is a really killer feature. I love it, just from a, like, does it look cool, or it's not purely that but it's this ability to keep sort of one eye on your other work, because this is how I'll do a lot of you know, initial automation, if I'm even in my like, personal life or professional life is like, you know, start with something I want to keep an eye on, I don't want to just watch it, but like, do my normal work and, you know, keep some form of monitor open just, even if I'm like debugging something to this is a really, I'm all about this feature. I think it's really cool that they're, you know, they are continuing to innovate on UiPath. And yeah, it's always great to see.
Mark Percival 18:57
I mean, I thought it was cool, you can drag and drop the window anywhere. So I mean, you can put this on an external monitor, so you can have your second monitor, running this and watching the automation take place while you're doing something else. So I think as a developer, you know, my, a lot of times when you do automations, I'll actually do it in a virtual desktop, like on AWS. But this is really nice, just if you're local, you can actually just run this and not have to have it get in the way of your normal flow.
Brent Sanders 19:23
Yeah, it's really cool piece of technology. I don't know I you know, we kind of go back and forth we use UiPath from time to time use Robocorp from time to time, it's really client specific tends to be but and you know, this isn't a feature that it's like, oh my god, you got to use it for this one specific use case but it it's a nice thing to see and I hoping to, you know, continue to see what else they're coming up with.
Mark Percival 19:48
Yeah, no, it's it's it's a thoughtful piece of software feature. So for sure. And I think yeah, there's other. Yeah, I think we were gonna go over some News in this podcast, and I'm trying to.
Brent Sanders 20:01
Yeah, let's go through.
Mark Percival 20:02
There's not like a ton of stuff that happened this past week, I think the week before we had seen, we can kind of go back a bit farther, there's been some fundraises, there's been a company scan AI, raised 14 million that was in our newsletter last week or two weeks ago, I think replicated, which was the, you know, I think they use 25 million for their on premise on premise software platform, which I thought was interesting. They're actually, you know, replicated basically is, the way I would describe replicated is they allow you to, if you're a software vendor, they allow you to easily build your software in a way that can be taken on premise, and run there locally.
Brent Sanders 20:42
That's great. That's great. It makes sense.
Mark Percival 20:45
a big, big user of that, I think I'm assuming it's for orchestrator. So if you want to learn locally, they're kind of handling the on prem rollout or platform for doing that rollout, which I think is actually pretty interesting. It's, I know, it's not totally related to RPA. But it is certainly something that RPA software companies or anybody in the RPA space who's making a platform that they want to take on prem, it's certainly a platform that you would want to look at. And for, you know, $25 million dollar raise, clearly there's some weight behind it.
Brent Sanders 21:14
Yeah, I think one of the things we're seeing all of the RPA news is this McKinsey survey that came out, you know, it's the McKinsey Global Institute. Yeah. And, you know, I'm going to be paraphrasing here, but essentially, they were, they were surveying business leaders, and, and they're saying that about 60% of occupations, at least one third of activities that make up a specific job could be automated. Yeah. So I've think I've seen in every piece of news, you know, people extrapolating the potential for savings, there are people, you know, what does that number mean? And, obviously, for RPA, software companies, that means selling more licenses, and there's more sort of value for these licenses. But I think that, like, everyone's gonna kind of twist that into their own, you know, whatever they're selling. And, you know, we'll be no different. I mean, this is obviously a growing space, this is, once you see it sort of working in one context, you naturally can start thinking it's another context. But the part of this going back to the attended versus on the 10th of the part of this that seems really interesting, is that it's not it doesn't seem to be 100% of anybody's job. And I think we've seen that in a lot of the implementations we've done where it's like, you'd like to say that very cleanly, the, you know, the resource that is being augmented with automation, can be released to other tasks. And it's never like, I mean, I haven't seen it before, where it's like someone's entire job, it's like, we can take the annoying stuff out of their job, right, this like thing that takes 60% of their time, and really only delivers 10% of the value, like that's great to automate. But I think this is where the picture and picture some of the you know, attended solutions really are proving to be it again, it's all depends on implementation, there's so many is a very loaded assumption, but that's the way I see I do see more people picture and picturing their, you know, boring tasks, three or four of those and monitoring them and stepping in when things need to be, you know, queued up, versus, you know, all of these bots that are running behind the scenes. So I really, I think there's going to be, what is the Ray Kurzweil term for the, you know, the, not the confluence. The Singularity is Near when it comes to, you know, workplace bots, I do think we're gonna be working closer hand in hand. But anyways, I'll go back to you know, the news that we've been saying, pretty much every press release, or release in the last two weeks or so is included a link to that study. So I'll let our listeners go and check it out for themselves if they haven't been beating over the head with it.
Mark Percival 23:56
I mean, it all makes sense. I think there's this there's this fear, right, the 60% is gonna be eliminated. But you kind of touched on that it's not, not really, I mean, you're basically. And we've seen this in our own clients, right? It's like, here's a job that this person does, and we want to automate it, it's not to get rid of that job, it's that that person is now swamped, they cannot continue to perform that. And so it's actually if anything, it probably stems. You know, it probably keeps you from having to hire another person to do that same job, but it doesn't really eliminate the job. It really is about, you know, typically, it's somebody who, it's, it's the company's coming down to this issue of like, they're spending eight hours, 10 hours a day on this, and we can't, we can't grow past that we can't scale because they're doing something stupid, like PDF matching to invoices. All right, and you're like, Okay, this is dumb. Like, this is incredibly easy to automate. But it's not getting rid of that person, that person is still gonna be there. If not, for just the intervention sake of coming in and saying like, oh, here's an invoice that imagine I'll fix it, but also just like they have they have usually have a, you know, some knowledge, internal knowledge of the company and they're going to be re-tasked with something else. And this just improved their productivity.
Brent Sanders 25:02
Yeah, or happiness. I mean, I think one of the know one of the things that they that I saw this survey, at least the analysis I read of it mentioned was like 15% of people could take a longer lunch break 10% could spend more time for personal reasons, you know, being able to shop or do social media, you know, I don't know if that contributes to productivity, but I do know what happier employees do better work. Like that's, that's a fact.
Mark Percival 25:27
Like, I looked at some of these, you know, processes that we've automated, and it is. It pains me. Yeah, I would hate that job. Right.
Brent Sanders 25:38
Obviously, you know, we're preaching the choir, this is one of the big gains, but you're looking at some of the other news. What else did we have on here? I think it was so interesting. using the term citizen developers, there was a, there was a post I saw recently, yeah. digitally dexterous organizations and their need for citizen developer.
Mark Percival 25:59
Right. This on LinkedIn.
Brent Sanders 26:00
Yeah. Yeah. This was Kieran Gilmurray's. Post, too. I'm not as familiar with but kind of an interesting post, I would say. And before digging into it, I would say we've heard a handful of things here from and this is purely from, and I wish we would have been more metrics driven and had a poll. But in talking to everybody that we've had on the podcast, which we've had probably about 20 interviews now is that episode. Yeah, yeah, maybe a little more. It's been an interesting mix. I think the people that sell services and RPA platforms, are believers, in citizen developers, for the most part, and general and again, generalities. But people that are implementers tend to be, yeah, that can be a thing, but it's not really at my organization. Yeah. Although we did hear from Mikkel Jensen from the city of Copenhagen, one of our favorite interviews of all time. I mean, they they're, they were actively trying to cultivate citizen developers. So anyways, I've just wanted to give the context of, you know, this is a hotly debated subject in the space that, you know, we talked about it, we asked people about it, and it doesn't seem like it's for sure. 100%, everybody's saying, yep. You got to have citizen developers. There's still developers. So in this article, he also links the McKinsey survey, which makes sense. I mean, this is part of the new platform. But you know, the thing I liked about this article, and I'll link it in the, you know, the post to the podcast, is they talk about, you know, how long this term has been going on, and they get a lot of perspectives, you know, they got a lot of good quotes from executive chairman and people that are in leadership roles and implementation roles on citizen development. But the thing is, it does still seem to be this big question of like, is this the direction that thing is going, is it not, and it still doesn't seem to be clear. So more, more questions around whether, you know, tech savvy employees are going to take hold, I just think that like we're putting a name and I feel like the RPA space, I'm just gonna get on my soapbox a little bit. I feel like the RPA space loves coining terms like Center of Excellence and citizen developers to make the industry feel special. I think there's always been this notion of tech savvy people that either, you know, become developers.
Mark Percival 28:31
The Excel jockeys.
Brent Sanders 28:33
Yeah, the Excel jockeys, I mean, how many? How many testers Have you known that have gone from QA testers to become software engineers just because they start automating the job?
Mark Percival 28:44
But I mean, like, you also just see, I think, in general, the citizen developers, I mean, how many times have you run into a spreadsheet and your, you know, history of work, where you're like, what is going on here, and then you kind of dive into it, and the person has done some amazing witchcraft, to get it to do what it's doing. But you kind of look at it and say, Well, this person is clearly treading on the edge of being a developer.
Brent Sanders 29:07
Yeah, yeah, I agree. So there's a really good diagram about, you know, the kind of break down citizen developers into three categories, which I think is a really good way to look at it. That was kind of the thing I pulled from, obviously, the thing I pulled from the article the most was the pictures. But the citizen developers, the line of business developer, a business developer, and a power user, so they kind of slice it from a line of business developers, a pro dev who delivers admin and analysis use cases, a business developer who's like a business Pro, who delivers these use cases that a power user who's you know, delivering sort of personal and team like they're, they're helping their team out and themselves to get stuff done better, which I think is an interesting way to categorize and continue to, to thin slice this this world.
Mark Percival 29:54
Yeah, it's I mean, it's a good article from that standpoint, I think it's, it's worth reading. We'll definitely have to link to it in the podcast show notes. Yeah, I also think it's worth mentioning that we will be also putting this out in the newsletter that comes out every two weeks. Yes. So, you know, subscribe to the formulated automation newsletter. And we will provide you with all these links and variety of other things, not just our own content, but like other YouTube accounts that we find interesting in the RP world, other podcasts we find interesting. There really is kind of a list of everything we're talking about today is kind of always coming in there and every two weeks and that newsletter, yeah.
Brent Sanders 30:30
Any other news? anything you're seeing that's been interesting, the last week or two?
Mark Percival 30:34
You know, there's been some good podcasts. They're going to be in the newsletter on Wednesday. But, you know, I think we're seeing there hasn't been a ton of funding in the past few weeks, obviously, I think holidays, just November in general, kind of a bit slow as it winds down to the end of the year. But we're seeing, I think there's been some interesting, obviously, the McKinsey study came out. But there's been some other interesting articles around just the growth in the APAC region of RP are the RPA market. growth in general, all these companies, I think UiPath is crossing 10 billion is what I heard. Oh, yeah. So good for them. Yeah.
Brent Sanders 31:10
Glad to hear it. Um, you know, in terms of next guests, we're starting to schedule out a handful of practitioners that are going to give us some more stories of sort of frontlines and what they're seeing in their battles. We're in the process of getting those scheduled and excited to to have some new perspectives. Yeah, might be worth mentioning. If
Mark Percival 31:32
anybody that our listeners out there have anybody they think they would like to see interviewed. Feel free to reach out to us at Hello@formulatedautomation.com. Just you know, we'd love any recommendations on people. And from my standpoint, I would love to talk to somebody, you know, we work with outsource, you know, outsourcers pretty pretty frequently. But you know, would be useful to talk to somebody who's done this for a long time as an outsourced RPA. consultant. Yeah, outside of our normal network, because there's so many people doing interesting things in the space. So if you know somebody, they say, Oh, this is you know, I've worked with this person, they're great at outsource, outsource a lot of RPA tasks to them, and they have some specific skill set, always would love to talk to them. Because I think I think that's an interesting piece of this market, which is the implementers.
Brent Sanders 32:20
I think the thing to mention, and this goes for any of our guests, if you don't want to disclose your employer, you don't have to, we don't you don't have to publish it. I think one thing that I could be making this up but I do think that some practitioners, people that are you know, dedicated, let's say they work at a, you know, big name consulting firm, they may not feel comfortable, they feel like they're putting their job in jeopardy. So we can just say you're an implementer and you don't have to be from the sky is your company.
Mark Percival 32:48
Yeah, robot. Yeah, like the mafia style.
Brent Sanders 32:54
We make it so much more interesting.
Mark Percival 32:57
Who you work for? Right? You can be like I work yeah. And why?
Brent Sanders 33:00
Yeah. That's good. Well, cool. I think that does it for this episode.
Mark Percival 33:07
Yeah. Again, just reach out to us. If you have any questions or want to follow up with comments. Hello@formulatedautomation.com.
Brent Sanders 33:13
Yeah, thanks for listening.
