UiPath and the Reality of Managing AI at Enterprise Scale

what actually happens when ai moves past experimentation and starts doing real work inside an organization that's the question behind today's conversation because i think so many teams still find themselves stuck in proofs of concepts running pilots that never quite make it into production let alone scale and the so-called promise of ai everywhere dominates conversations but the path to business value still feels unclear for a lot of leaders today so today's guest though he's going to bring a refreshingly grounded view on the front lines and he's from a company called ui path where he spent years working directly with organizations turning automation and ai into something operational measuring sustainable something that delivers real business value but more than anything we're going to talk about what he's seeing right now where ai is delivering value where teams are getting stuck and why scaling matters far more than flashy demos and yet we'll also talk about agentic workflows orchestration cost controls and why enthusiasm for ai is spreading well beyond it into everything from hr finance and operations so if you're looking for a clear-eyed view of how ai and automation are actually being used today and what leaders should be focusing on next and how to avoid repeating the same mistakes we've made during those early cloud years i know i'm biased but i think this conversation is well worth your time now before we begin today's interview and there's some great insights in that i just want to give a special mention to my friends at denodo who are passionate about the future and logical data management and agentic ai because they're going to be talking about how they're going to be able to move forward in the future and how they're going to move forward in the future and how they're going to everywhere you look agentic ai is undoubtedly the next big shift but here's the truth it can't operate on messy inconsistent or siloed information with denodo you can create a unified governed layer that connects data across your lakehouse warehouses across your apps and clouds instantly and without duplication this means stronger ai governance faster lakehouse acceleration and reusable data products that your teams can trust so if you want ai that doesn't just automate but operate on your own you can create a unified governed layer that connects data across your lakes start with logical data management at denodo.com and now it's time for me to officially introduce you to today's guest so a massive warm welcome to the show can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do no i think you do and good morning so yes i'm the area vice president for uipath for the uk and i uh been at uipath for just over seven years now so uh a pretty long time in uh in this in these day and age um i joined uh from a company called uh netapp uh who was backed by a data storage company so i spent 19 years there which was a good haul and previous to that i was a chief weapons engineer in the raw navy so there's something a bit different for you yeah i mean i can't just let you drop that and walk away chief weapons officer tell me more about that was it a tech role or yeah yeah it was it was it was a technology role so we were looking after the kind of the missile guidance systems um so so that was my role uh seawolf was the system i doubt very much it's still around but um yeah so i spent 10 years traveled the world had a great time and the last job the navy gave me was setting up the it school for the raw navy and the uh and the army so that kind of led me into a nice transition into into tech really love it what a great story one of the i love finding out more about the origin story and how people ended up in that career in tech i'm curious if someone that would travel in the world learning about technology etc anywhere in particular any big highlights of places you've got particularly fond memories of so i was really fortunate actually you know i managed to sail all the way down to uh darwin in australia and back so uh going through going through the med down through the sailing through the sewers canal which is an obviously a a massive experience a really really kind of impressive um yeah all the way down to australia papua new guinea which is a place not many people have been to and it's not on too many people's holidays lists that's for sure but uh yeah fascinating countries so many different cultures to learn and appreciate it was it was absolutely probably the best trip i've ever experienced without a doubt wow that's there were some lots of fun trips as well but we'll just talk about the good ones yeah yeah uh and we have had people from ui path and indeed net app on over the years and although we have people listening out around the world why is the uk and ireland such an important region for ui path right now and why is it such a a pivotal moment for businesses here we hear a lot about the doom and gloom over here enough i'd love to restore the balance in the universe and talk about something positive yeah so um i think obviously the financial hub of london give gives london a a big standing uh across europe and if if american companies are going to break into europe usually london and germany are the two places they they they kind of target first big size of the markets the variety of the markets as well not only have we got the banks we've got pharmaceuticals we've got big insurance houses some really big companies that are based in the uk and and with ai as well i think uk is becoming a good hub spot for ai in general you know we've acquired two companies in ui path both both the uk and i based so uh it gives you a kind of a standing of how important the uk is to the global market and and what we're doing well as well in the space of ai and at the moment we're seeing many organizations all around the world experimenting with ai many are unfortunately caught in pilot phase not making it into production and the ones that do very few of them have scaled it successfully so i'm curious from everyone you're talking to out there what are your you seeing as the biggest challenges and equally the opportunities when it comes to turning ai into real business value getting that roi and i think there is i think everyone's is stuck in kind of proof of value poc swarm everybody's trying to do lots of different things um a lot of hype as well um so kind of created by lots of people all this hype about what a gentic ai will deliver what it won't deliver even but um people are getting bogged down a lot trying different things trying to see how it's going to work but i think scaling is going to be the is going to be the big question mark how do we scale this how do we make it enterprise ready um it's all well and good having a poc in the up and running but if you can't deploy it or scale it it's it's a it's a totally different ball game so i think we're beginning to see the transition we're beginning to see some proof of concepts move over into production um that's certainly beginning to happen now and how we scale those when they're into production is the question um okay i've i've chatted with the guys this morning in the office to say right okay give me the latest use case um that we've done a poc and there was actually one of the chaps got on ordering yesterday uh building materials company it was the quote creation you know people want 10 tons of aggregate or whatever it is that they want to buy um using agents to do that and they kind of talk me through the process that they have to check if it's an existing customer where which quarry has got the stock in have they got lorries that can move all of this thing that was manually done previously um yeah that's all being done with agents now um and and the poc was successful the proof of value i think they got 100 000 of these quote requests a year so uh that that one's moving into production and i was thinking i said oh can we can we talk about them yet and they said no but as soon as it's in production neil i'll give you a shout and we get you what what they're doing they've they've agreed to talk about it when it's in production so uh i'll i'll give you a heads up when they're ready and we can certainly talk about that one because it's a cracking use case of somebody that's gone through the process they've identified a process they've seen they know what the return of investment is going to be on it so they've done the proof of concept everything worked perfectly and and so they've moved into production but i think we're beginning to see those um definitely beginning to start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and i do love a good teaser so it sounds like we will have to get you on later in the year to find out more about that particular use case and from other conversations that you're having and everything that you've seen again don't have to mention any names here but are there any other examples of how you've seen automation and ai already making a real difference for organizations yeah obviously i've been here as i said seven years and one of the biggest customers we always used to talk about back then um was dwp which is a public reference for us um getting people that need money yeah getting the money into their hands as quickly as possible so there was a big backlog that was going on there then the only way that dwp were going to solve that problem was automation there you could just never throw enough people out i think they had 30 000 in backlog um so they put in automation cleared the back backlog off in weeks and got money in people's hands that needed it the most and i think dwp is a classic example of that and i think it's a good example of that it's been doing this not in the last year but you know seven years i think they've probably been in production now because i remember speaking about it my first ever sale kickoff it was a big case sonny so yeah there's some classic examples as well just pure automation with just pure rpa that's still up still running they're still delivering an roi which is the most important thing and i'm curious from everything you've seen and heard are there also any myths or misconceptions that you've seen around ai and automation over the years you've had an incredible career i suspect you see a lot of things on your news feed that might frustrate you is there anything we can lay to rest today that no i try and stay away from all the myths and things i try and stick to my my facts and and i've i've you could waste a lot of time talking about myths and fighting all that like fud i you know i don't like to talk about my competition either um they doing what they're doing my my job is to prove value to a customer um and and that's what i can continue to do throughout my career because that seems to be what's the most successful thing i've done in my career and i think that's what i've done in my career and i think that's the most successful thing so no i stay away from the myths there's lots of people that have lots of different opinions and they're more than welcome to them in mind in my board love it and looking forward as you can uh continue to deliver value to your customers throughout this year and the next few years and into the future what do you think ai success looks like for organizations and what role do you see uipath playing in that journey too so i think one of the reasons i took this this role the this role back on is obviously i've been working at an international level everything outside of america that is for uipath seeing what all the different countries were doing was fascinating because you got some leaders laggers and seeing on markets who's leading with ai um and i think that ai landscape going ahead is is not just about a single product it's about an ecosystem um i this this new companies appear with fantastic products almost over the top and overnight um so i think the way i see the market going is we've got to build the partnerships with the different companies that are coming along that are new that really add value that may have a point or a vertical solution so this is the way that we i'm looking at how we change the way that we work is create this ecosystem with the right partners maybe more verticalized solutions um and i see that as as the way forward it's it's not going to be a one product fits all that's for sure um and i can see people changing their products overnight you know we have this product it worked great it was doing a great job but something new came along in two months down the road and you may want to swap it out and i i think that's that's a good position to be in but yeah we've got to be part of an ecosystem to help to deliver this value to our end customers i just want to give a big thank you to my sponsor who is supporting every show every episode across the tech talks network this month and this 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going to alcor.com slash podcast or follow the link in the show notes below and before you came on today i was reading that uipath was named a leader in the gartner magic quadrant for ai augmented software testing tools this has got to mean a lot to you guys too right to be recognized in this way yeah yeah so the the testing is is a very high growth product uh line for us at the moment um agentic testing you know getting getting a an agent to create the test for you run the tests and everything else this all helps speed up the life cycle of software the quicker you can get software out is the the quicker you can get to market obviously a public reference for us is is nat west and how they're using uh our software and they talk about the nat west banking app fortunately they are my customer and i do bank with nat west and i do i love their app and they were talking about how they release new features in it basically because they they can test this product a lot quicker and get the product out there to market a lot quicker so the the augmented kind of testing is is growing fast um and it's built if you think about rpa if we take it back all the years we have customers do kind of doing testing with rpa anyway because it's just a repetitive task but bringing in the ai element has just speeded up the whole process and we're recording this right at the beginning of 2026 and i'm curious from all your focus everything you're working towards this year what makes you excited to jump out of bed in the morning anything in particular that has particularly excited you around ai enhancing human potential or just your work in general and and delivering that value to customers no i the buzz i get is the potential um i love speaking to customers i love listening to what their issues are and it just gets the mind thinking about how we can help solve that problem i love the idea of this and i i'm i'm an engineer by trade as we mentioned so i like to fix problems um so i love listening to customers that's that's the best bit is the customer stories and bringing together a team whether it's just ui path or whether it's our partner ecosystem bringing them to all together to try and help solve that problem that's what i get my kind of my personal buzz out of um what am i excited about this year is the scaling of agentic and i think that's something that i've been really excited about for a long time so i'm really excited about this year because it has its challenges and um i kind of talk about those it's i i had breakfast with with somebody that's one of our head of legal and we were talking we're both of a generation that was here when cloud computing came around and we were discussing cloud and obviously i worked at netapp when cloud came around and selling on-prem storage and cloud computing coming around was probably a bit of a threat to us but we carried on but we were talking about vm sprawl if you remember when people were talking about vm sprawl and i was talking about vm sprawl and i was talking to people moved to the cloud everyone was creating vms here there everybody whoever had a credit card could basically create a virtual machine stand up in a cloud and then forget about it and the company was still paying for it two or three years later we were talking about how similar this this may be with with agents my 17 year old son yes he's computer literate he can create an agent okay he's not studying computing or anything like that he's studying economics and business and he can create agent if he can create an agent anybody can create an agent that's not disrespecting him by the way i hope he's not going to listen but uh but yeah i this is a concern this is the thing that's going through in my head um and then we could get a cost we could lose control of our costs because i've got these agents that people are creating that are making calls to them we've got to pay for this somehow there's going to be a pay so i think this is where the orchestration side of things is going to come along in a big way so to help scale there's going to be this big focus on like okay if i want to scale how can i orchestrate this how can i see how much a workflow is costing me from start to finish i need to be able to see that and that may not be it could be any vendors agents in there it could be robots or even human beings and i kind of roll back to those days with cloud and when all these costs went out the window and everybody just moved it for the sake of it and i still have this concern around that we've got to be very conscious about when we move to this agentic world and we've got to be very conscious about when we move to this agentic bringing in not just agents but robots and people how we can understand the actual cost of that workflow that is going to be really really important and that's going to be something that we're going to have conversations with kind of going into this year and and seeing the maturity around the around the product and how people are driving this out yeah i'd completely agree i was talking to a large enterprise on here a few weeks ago and they were talking about launching thousands of agents at once and the it guy made me a little overcautious on that and of course you you talked there a few moments ago about you one of the things that you love is talking to customers and you've got quite a unique vantage point here if you were to put all those conversations that you've had in the last 6 to 12 months and uh call it a big melting pot any trends in the kind of things that they're coming to you and asking for your help with are there any big things that everyone's chasing now so the biggest thing i like first of all is the enthusiasm from our customers you know okay so our customers are going to be driving this everybody wants to be doing this not everybody knows where to start um but what i'm most impressed with when we have customers we have a nice office in london we have customers coming in to do these agentic workshops and and and the and the difference i see is in the rpa world we'd have the coe they would come in and they'd learn the latest and when we're doing agentic workshops now with customers we're not just getting the coe in we're getting hr we're So that's the one thing that I am noticing, is considerably different which is really handy we moved into this new office a year ago fortunately we put in much bigger meeting rooms because if we'd stuck with the old office we could never have handled this because the meeting rooms weren't big enough we're not getting three four people from a customer we're getting 10 15 um it's huge so we're seeing that expanding um more people buying into it more people want to do things and it's if you've got a customer that wants to drive something it makes it really easy to work with them but we also have to kind of be very cautious about where we spend our time so we've got to make sure there is an ROI on the project they want to do so we're spending a lot more time doing qualification of right okay this is your use case that you've brought to us that you think's a problem is the cost of solving it there you know is is the cost of solving it too high that actually it's not worth solving we do come to we do come to you know we sit there and go actually it's not worth it let's find another one let's find the right one to go after and i think this is where people are getting stuck on this poc pov just merry-go-round to keep churning these things through but actually doing the qualification is probably the most important part and i think that's a great moment to end on but before i do let you go it's time to have a little bit of fun with you i always ask my guests to leave everyone listening with a book that means something to them that we can add to our amazon wish list and they can check out or a song that we can play for them and they can play we can add to our spotify playlist could be anything at all guilty pleasures are allowed but what would you like to leave us with and why so i did have a figure is they did they did give me a heads up so i was trying to have a a thing and you know i'm i'm a navy boy at heart uh i was i was kind of live on the sea i love being on the sea and i like my water sports and everything else so uh i listen to a lot of jack johnson um i do like it it's my my happy place it takes me to a beach in an evening with a fire on the beach and and preferably with a beer in my hand so uh i can shut my eyes and jack johnson always takes me there and i was also thinking about what's the most relevant song um at the moment and and i came up with better together oh so uh better together by jack johnson was my song because i think the next guy of nine twelve months is all going to be about partnerships um and working together to solve our customer problems lots of different vendors involved in there so yeah better together jack johnson what a great song i'll get that added straight to the spotify playlist if i'm honest with you i was just relieved you weren't going to say in the navy by the village people there i thought you were taking me down that road for a moment we'll tell you an embarrassing story we were in singapore and i was doing a presentation at our sales kickoff and they put that on as my walk-on music um which was entertaining for everybody apart from me i think yeah i love it and i was like no i'm not going to do that i'm not going to do that i'm not going to do that you're a football fan a final question i'm going to ask you are wolves gonna beat derby county is the worst uh premiership team of all time and for people listening derby are my team yeah i i actually think wolves said obviously they've picked up a bit of form recently so uh i think they might do a southampton and just scrape by so uh unfortunately neil for you i think you're going to keep that record for a long time to come beautiful thank you for that and finally for anyone listening wanting to learn more about you uh some of the big announcements that might be coming out etc where would you like to point everyone so obviously uipath.com is our place to go we we do have a big event coming up in march you are for the uk and i so our uipath fusion we also have another one in las vegas in october i think it is they're always great customer events but yeah uipath.com always a a great place to start and and linkedin obviously awesome well i'll have links to everything that you mentioned so much i loved about our conversation with you and i think it's going to be a really good conversation the ground we covered and most importantly it's not about the technology it's delivering value to customers and just listening to you today that that really comes across so thank you for sharing your story oh perfect it's been great having a conversation and i i look forward to coming back with a customer in hand for you now i think if there's one thing simon made clear today it's that success with ai it has very little to do with chasing trends and everything to do with discipline focus and following through and you heard today why is where most initiatives succeed or fail and how agentic automation can unlock very real outcomes when it's orchestrated properly and why cost visibility will become a defining issue as more teams start building agents and simon also shared a powerful reminder that ai adoption works best when it becomes a shared effort across the business not something owned by a single team or a function that are busy working away on an ala project and there's a calm confidence in that conversation i think it it comes from experience whether it was clearing backlogs in the public sector or accelerating software delivery and banking the example simon talked through today show what happens when automation is tiered to clear outcomes and clear accountability and hopefully this episode has helped you think a little bit differently about your own ai roadmap so please pass it along to your customers and to anyone that you think is currently struggling and wrestling with pilots budgets or scale right now and if you want to stay close to where automation and agentic ai are heading next keep an eye on simon's work and the conversations that are coming out of ui path over the next year ahead but over to you as ai becomes easier for anyone to build how will your organization make it stays intentional governed and delivering genuine value tech talks network.com at neil c hughes on linkedin and all social channels let me know your thoughts and i'll return again very soon with another guest meet me here same time same place bye for now