Top 10 Moments from Imagine 2021

Imagine Digital is a 3-day event with Automation Anywhere leaders, customers, and partners where you can see customer/Automation Anywhere led demos, hear about customer success stories, and get hands-on with our products in the day-3 tech tracks. There is a TON of great content presented, and lots of lessons to be learned. To help our developer portal readers get the most out of the information shared at Imagine Digital, we're highlighting the top 10 moments from Imagine 2021 so you can quickly jump to the sessions that can add the most value for you and your organization.

1. GM Financial Botathon

   Day 1 of Imagine started off quite strong and included an interesting interview with Craig Davenport, Senior Vice President of International Operations IT & Corporate Systems from GM Financial. In the interview, Craig and Automation Anywhere CEO, Mihir Shukla, discussed how many organizations struggle with getting employees on board with bot building and democratizing RPA capabilities across the organization. At GM Financial, Craig mentioned 2 things that have been extremely helpful in expanding out their RPA efforts:
   1. Botathons: Providing some minimal training for those who are interested as a part of a 3-day blitz to identify, build, and present their automation ideas.
   2. Internal Marketing: IT hasn't traditionally done a great job of marketing its capabilities in most organizations. GM took the approach of involving their marketing team to make a concerted effort to market RPA opportunities and possibilities internally across their organization. The goal of these efforts was to engage individuals and new business units into their RPA practice and make RPA capabilities available at the employee level.

2. Jaguar Land Rover Automation Expansion

   Hearing from Richard Harding, Intelligent Automation Director at Jaguar Land Rover, was another highlight for Day 1. Richard explained very plainly that JLR’s automation journey began with a POC Richard and team had created and shared with their CFO who immediately connected with the concept and stated “This could be something that really drives efficiency”. Two points really stood out in Richard’s conversation with Mihir:
   1. The snowball effect of efficiencies gained. Richard explained that their RPA initiatives started with 1-2 cross-functional processes, but as they delivered on promised made, additional resources were made available to continue to expand.
   2. JLR is achieving 3-4x…even up to 10x ROI on each automation that they create. This allows them to immediately reap the benefit of RPA and free up human resources for higher-value tasks.

3. Product Perspectives on Automation 360

   Day 1 also included a conversation with Neeraj Gokhale, Executive Vice President of Products at Automation Anywhere, and Kevin Murray, Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Automation Anywhere. Neeraj covered 3 particularly interesting aspects of Automation 360 that differentiate it in the marketplace:
   1. A single, integrated platform with intelligent document processing, RPA, human-in-the-loop capabilities, and process discovery enables the delivery twice the efficiency than using all those same tools from disparate vendors.
   2. Cloud-native scales better, is more redundant, and provides a much more stable platform for operations (not to mention it's designed with efficiency on cloud resources from the ground up).
   3. Automation 360 scaling happens 3x faster than on legacy platforms because of many of these cloud-enabled capabilities…little to no setup time, scaling can be mostly invisible to end-users, reduced training time with drag and drop interface, and reduced IT effort in system administration.

4. The Automation Anywhere + Google Cloud Partnership

   The conversation between CEO of Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, and CEO of Automation Anywhere, Mihir Shukla provided an awesome opportunity to hear from two visionaries on how they see their two platforms coming together to create end to end efficiencies for customers. What makes this partnership so strong?
   1. A shared vision for delivery of a competitive advantage for customers.
   2. A deep technical collaboration between the offerings – with lots of possibility for continued integrations.
   3. Go to market offerings that combine the best of Google Cloud as well as the best of Automation Anywhere

5. Automation Anywhere Social Impact Initiatives

   It's always refreshing to see the impact that technology can have across the globe. In this session, Senior Vice President of Brand Strategy and Culture, Neeti Mehta Shukla, shares some incredible stories of organizations across the globe working with the Automation Anywhere Global Impact Team to democratize access to RPA technology and training in order to change lives.
   1. RPA Nuggets shared their vision of upskilling 1 million women in Africa with the power of RPA.
   2. People Shores shared how upskilling and reskilling of individuals in the Mississippi Delta region has provided life-changing opportunities for individuals in that region of the United States.
   3. Rural Shores provides training and jobs to those in rural India - training over 36,000 youth and providing employment to 16,000 individuals across 19 delivery centers in 8 Indian states.

6. Customer Success at Republic Airways and The City of Seattle

   Zeth Baker from Republic Airways and Luke Keenan from The City of Seattle both presented valuable perspectives on how their organizations have leveraged Automation 360 to gain operational efficiencies.
   1. The Upgrade Perspective: Zeth shared how Republic Airways has seen tremendous processing-time improvements upon switching from v11 to Automation 360.
   2. The New Customer Perspective: Luke shared some of the ways that The City of Seattle was able to deliver their first Automation 360 POC + huge ROI all within their first year of onboarding to the platform.

7. The Concept of Bots from an HR Perspective

   In this session, Chief Human Resources Officer, Nancy Hauge, outlines the strategies to create a culture for humans and bots to operate in a combined workforce. Humans can focus on the work which only they can do best - such as creating, innovating, discovering, brainstorming, and learning - while the automated workforce can do the work that is robotic in nature. She decodes the areas that an organization's human resources team can consider automating, to relieve them from performing manual and boring tasks. Nancy also touches on some of the use cases that have been automated within the HR department here at Automation Anywhere. Finally, she shares an interesting use case of how automation can help organizations and employees both achieve their goals using a Career growth survey process performed at Automation Anywhere.

8. Tips for Scaling a Center of Excellence

   Scaling automation initiatives can be a real challenge for many organizations looking to grow their RPA practices. In one of the highlight sessions of Day 2, Laura Della Torre, Senior Director of Customer Journey Marketing at Automation Anywhere, takes viewers through some of the keys to an RPA practice that scales. A couple of key takeaways from the session:
   1. Align with the Business: Showcase automation potential and how it can align with business goals.
   2. Make it Easy: Federated automation development and management should be as straightforward as possible to onboard new business units.
   3. Maintain Quality: Set standards for things like documentation, development, testing, and delivery. Additionally, provide guardrails like a bot shell in an effort to maintain operational oversight.

9. Hyperautomation: Bots that Replicate Human Decision Making

   Most bots are designed to mimic human actions. In this session, Developer Evangelist, Micah Smith, demonstrated how RPA integration with ML capabilities can enable bots to mimic not only human actions, but human decision making. Some key takeaways from this session:
   1. Leveraging ML capabilities enables bots to leverage pre-trained models for automated decision making.
   2. The beauty of AARI is that there’s a human-in-the-loop. We can take full advantage of the “data exhaust” generated by that process to re-train and update our ML model (as demonstrated in the demo Micah shared).

10. Insight into your RPA Practice

    Automating burdensome processes using Automation 360 is great, but what additional insights could be gleaned from the data used/generated during these automations? In this session, Senior Developer Evangelist Arjun S Meda, takes attendees through the process of creating and customizing business, operational, and AARI dashboards using Bot Insight. Last but not least, Arjun also walks users through the process of integrating Bot Insight with a Tableau Dashboard to show how Bot Insight data can be used to power other business intelligence/analytics platforms.

Conclusion

Imagine Digital 2021 was great, and this list only starts to scratch the surface of some of the interesting and useful session topics. Tons of incredible Automation Anywhere, customer, vendor, and partner sessions were spread out over 3 days. If you haven't had a chance to check it out yet, all of the sessions are now available on-demand, so be sure to catch up as time permits. Enjoy all of the Automation Anywhere content, and Go be great!