You’ve seen them quite often around the Pathfinder-verse, heard them speak at events or virtual meetings, maybe even dialogued with them in a forum thread—they’re our Most Valuable Pathfinders! They are the spark keeping the Pathfinder Community ablaze, so it was about time we took a beat to really get to know each one of our MVPs better and share their unique stories with you!

So without further ado, let’s get to know...
 

Jim Frost

The Basics

• Years of Automation Experience: 6 years, but he’s been using automation techniques since the ‘90s!
• Current Company: R-Path Automation
• Official Title: Lead Engagement Partner

But this is how Jim would actually describe what he does: I lead our clients and programs in relieving their teams of manual work that doesn’t require any cognitive effort—mainly swivel chair operations, repetitive copy and pasting between applications, etc.—and I automate that work using the Automation Anywhere RPA platform. I take routine work that really doesn’t take any brain effort out of people’s hands so they can be put on things that are more creative or impactful in their organization.

• Biggest Professional Achievement to date: Automating a data management problem for a nationwide cell carrier. The company was deploying new technologies across the country, which was a massive undertaking. Jim and one other team member worked together to automate this entire endeavor, from gathering data from the disparate systems into a single database and driving material shipments to sites, to creating C-level dashboards and calculating projected completion dates. All of this together truly made the project a success and brought him continued work in the same vein from this client. He says that had he had Automation Anywhere available to him at the time, it would have been a significantly easier task!

Five Fun Facts

• His birthday is October 30 - Costume party, anyone?
• If he had any superpower, he’d love the ability play the guitar like Eddie Van Halen - Rock on!
• His favorite movie is Apollo 13
• He has free climbed 1,000 feet of a sheer rock face
• His favorite place to travel is the Alps and he will never tire of going back to visit (or maybe live someday!)

Expertise / Specializations

Jim acknowledges he has a decent technical understanding of his work and can even perform some technical work on his own, but that’s not where his time is best spent. He tends to approach his work from a client perspective versus a technical perspective, and the majority of his duties are underpinned by leadership and business analysis. In his day-to-day, he’s often focused on educating his clients about automation and helping them understand the best strategies to evangelize an automation program inside their organization. For all those reasons, he’d love to continue to strengthen his leadership, business, and CoE development skills.

When thinking about AI, Jim admits that nearly every one of his clients has mentioned AI and seems to be eager to deploy this new tech, but they don't necessarily realize the complexity in doing it. While Jim likes AI as an emerging tool, he is less certain about giving it free rein in his automation work. He wants to make sure it's well under control. In reality, Jim is more excited about the possibilities of leveraging AI's capabilities to improve existing technologies, such as intelligent document processing—making it faster, more accurate, easier to deploy and sell, more cost effective, etc. He is approaching AI with the mindset of: How can I use this with my clients to lower the cost on existing tech that they weren't able to leverage before?

If he had one piece of advice for someone new to automation it would be:
 

“No matter what role you want to get into - developer, business analyst, or engagement lead - start by learning the core elements of development. Get a good grasp on those topics first because you can’t fake your way around them. Then, find someone willing to share code with you and explain it. Steal with pride and learn, learn, learn!”

Jim in the Community

Like many of our other MVPs, you can find Jim active on Linkedin. He likes to refresh his feed throughout the day to stay up to date on any news related to intelligent automation and RPA. He also makes a point to share (or re-share) pertinent information and some of his internal documentation that he knows specific members of his community will benefit from or get use out of it.
 

What’s Next for Jim

Up next, Jim is working on completing a massive learning course series on digital transformation, which covers everything from quantum computing, Scrum, Lean Six Sigma, and more. He’s been working through the course for over a year now and hopes to complete it by the end of 2023. Outside of that, he will also be continuing to follow the moving target that is AI. He wants to stay acutely in tune with how he can wrap its capabilities up in his offerings and determine how he and his team should be selling and/or deploying AI to clients. He’s got a full plate for sure!

Thank you, Jim, for letting us all get to know you better. And thank you for your continued contributions to our Pathfinder Community!