UiPath Sees Continued Strength as AI Tools Sharpen

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3:14in an increasingly agentic automation world. That is something we're going to dig into with our next guest. We got Ashim Gupta with us, CFO and COO of the$9.4 billion market cap company, UiPath. The share's up close to 40 % so far this year. 12 % of the float is shorted. Also with us here in the Bloomberg Businessweek studio, Nina Tretman, Bloomberg News Senior Editor. She writes the CFO Briefing newsletter. You should subscribe to it at bloomberg.com slash CFO Briefing. Ashim, good to have you on the program. An application software company, robotics, automation software, remind everybody and introduce people who don't know exactly where you play in the industry.

3:51Who are your customers and where do you where do you fit?

3:54Ashim Gupta:Yeah, thanks so much for having me. For those who don't know UiPath, UiPath is an AI powered platform that helps businesses and enterprises transform their enterprise processes and organizations to yield productivity and ROI. We do so by emulating what humans do through both deterministic rules-based automation and agentic automation, using agents and AI to automate a lot of those tasks. You know, we own more than half of the Fortune 500 companies in the world. We have 10 ,800 customers that span industries from financial services to healthcare to the U.S. federal government. And we operate in overall over 100 countries.

4:40Ashim Gupta:The reason for that breath is because we are very relevant to what every enterprise of almost any scale does in terms of taking away mundane work to yield for a more productive workforce. So wait, so do me a favor, just because I'm stupid and it's Friday. So tell me, give me, I'm okay, I'm really okay with it. Give me just in 30 seconds a quick example of a company that you work with and what you do for them. Yeah, so Carol, Voya Financial, just as an example, is a large-scale bank in the United States. We're working with them to automate everything from HR operations, such as employee onboarding, to financial processes.

5:20Ashim Gupta:If you step back and look at almost any enterprise that's there, think about something as mundane as procure-to-pay, where you're receiving invoices, entering them into systems, then moving that data that you're entering into systems, doing reconciliations, that work can be done by software and does not need to be done for the hours that people are putting into it. You take something like that as a simple example, but then you can go and you look at a Fortune 10 healthcare company that we work with. All of their claims processing gets touched by our software. entering data, analyzing and understanding data, and with Agentic, providing reasoning to allow for decisions to be made.

6:05Ashim Gupta:Those are two examples. Just wondering, Ashim, in your finance organization, are you using it there too? Huge. You know, when you look at UiPath, UiPath is scaled from almost zero revenue in 2017 to over$1.8 billion of ARR to where we are today. Within our finance department, but across our enterprises, we employ our own software. So we have not had to add people net-net to our company in many years. We've been able to achieve that scale both geographically as well as from a revenue perspective using automation. And that's not unique to us. That is something that a lot of our customers benefit from.

6:50Okay. So we all sat up, Ashim, a little bit straighter because there is so much of a narrative and conversation going around AI and what it's going to do to the labor market. It sounds like you haven't had to hire people. Reality check, are a lot of companies going to be able to not hire people or even let people go because of what AI or JetTick AI is going to be

7:10Ashim Gupta:to to do for them yeah let me make let me make a small um nuance here okay we've hired people just in the places that provide higher return in terms of revenue or higher pieces of innovation so in our minds companies should be hiring and people will continuing to work but it's going to be working in higher higher skilled areas and areas that have a higher return to the enterprise whether that is working interactively with customers or whether that is on pace for designing the next feat of innovation to bring to the market over the next couple of years. So this isn't about hiring less. It's about hiring where you want to.

7:53Ashim Gupta:And all of that translates to ROI. it. Ashim, just wondering, we've seen a lot of concerns in recent weeks, specifically in November, among investors around AI and whether what we're currently seeing is leading us into a bubble at some point. If you look at your bookings for next year, what does that look like? What's the feedback that you're getting from clients if they're thinking about their spending plans for next year? Yeah, look, I think what our customers feel is they feel a variable macroeconomic environment, I think like all of us do. And, you know, a lot of times what we all discuss in our various forums, whether that's formal or informal, what I can tell you is what's encouraging is customers want to spend.

8:38Ashim Gupta:The key area is they're not going to spend unless they see ROI. So as we're looking at our demand funnel, we launched our agentic platform, bringing agents and AI infused automations to enterprises earlier this year. You know, if you go back to maybe 2016, 2017, 2018, there were innovation funds that you could go and say, hey, let me go and spend$2 million and just experiment. I think experimental funds are moving down, but there's a lot of funds available for projects and areas that yield ROI. So once we launched our platform, the demand for proof of concepts and pilots really were super encouraged by even in the first five to six months more than 700 of our 10 800 customers they are these companies are going and building agents on our platform and figuring out where are the highest roi areas so there's a lot of activity and i think funding will follow activity so long as that there is roi that is there and that's what gives us a lot of confidence and optimism as we look into the years ahead for you actually very briefly very interested in the work that you do for governments in the U.S.

9:48and around the world. How do you characterize that work? Like, what do you do for them? And also, how big of a business is that for UiPath?

9:56Ashim Gupta:Yeah, so the public sector is double. It's greater than 10 % of our revenue base just globally. You know, that was as of two years ago. We haven't disclosed figures since then, but it's, you know, I would imagine it's in a similar vein here. I can represent that. When you look at the U.S. government, it's everything from, you know, from areas of agencies that are in high paper network. They use our software to actually scan, read and extract data so they can process things fast. There are partners that we work with with the government that are taking papers that are sitting in caves and in parking lots, trailers and trailers of them and digitizing them as a part of their digital transformation.

10:39Ashim Gupta:Getting audit compliance across the government, which involves retrieving documents and processing different areas for auditors and business teams, that is a key area that we can look at. But we're across every agency that is there. What I'd say is we've gotten super close to the government over these last years. We've continued to have a great relationship with them. And just like enterprises, what's encouraging is they're looking for high ROI, high impact, transformative areas to deploy our software. All right. Well, super interesting. And I hope you'll stay in touch so we can continue this conversation.

11:13Ashim Gupta, CFO and COO of UiPath, joining us from afar. And of course, right here in studio, Nina Tretman, Bloomberg News senior editor. She writes the CFO briefing newsletter, which you can subscribe to at Bloomberg.com slash CFO briefing. You get a new one every Sunday. Nina, thanks. And Ashim will be featured in an upcoming edition of the Bloomberg CFO Briefing Newsletter. Also, for more coverage of CFOs, you've got to check out Chief Future Officer, the series from Bloomberg. The newest episode premieres next week. It features the CFO and COO of Hasbro. That's Gina Getter. Watch next Wednesday at 9.30 New York time.

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