An intelligent approach to automation

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Debbie Forster MBE:
Hello, and welcome to the XTech Podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster, MBE. I’m the CEO at the Tech Talent Charter and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry. I’m delighted to be working with Fox Agency as the host of the XTech podcast and as a curator for the XTech community. Today I’m really delighted to be joined by Paul Taylor, who’s the CMO at SS&C Blue Prism. Welcome, Paul.

Paul Taylor:
Hi, Debbie.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So Paul, our listeners like to get to know you a little bit as a human before we find about you as a technologist. So how did you get into tech? Was it really straightforward, born with a laptop in the hand? Or did you sort of wake up and find yourself in tech?

Paul Taylor:
Absolutely didn’t get born with a laptop in my hand. I wasn’t one of these geeks that grew up dismantling computers. I fell into it really like I think a lot of people tend to do these days. I was just somebody that was really motivated by solving challenges. And let’s face it. There’s plenty of challenges within tech companies and financial services companies today. For many years I was a banker, always in operational roles, middle office and settlements and things like that. And that really just gave me a really good grounding in what businesses need today and what they were struggling with, that perennial problem that people who are in business have, the need to do more with less.

And then around 2012, I moved into the core tech space and that was actually in the payments and financial crime compliance parts of the industry, a great grounding into some of the core challenges that sit within that financial sector today. Through all of my roles really there’s just been this red thread of being interested in solving challenges within a business context and seeing if there’s different ways of being able to do things that deliver more efficiency or value.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I often find this as a sort of even split on guests on the show. And we need both. We need people who are fascinated for tech in its own right because that’s how they really push it to its limits, but it doesn’t work if we don’t have people in the sector who actually want to solve problems that can help define that. Otherwise, we just create a whole lot of hammers when we need a whole lot of screwdrivers.

Paul Taylor:
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, one of the kind of special superpowers really of people that have been in industry that then move into tech companies is that you’ve just got this innate understanding of what the problems are. So I agree. I think it’s very helpful for people to come in through many different avenues when it comes to tech.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So obviously before we’ve met up, I’ve done a little bit of homework, a little bit of stalking. When I was researching you, the term intelligent automation kept coming up. Now probably like me, not everybody uses that term in their day-to-day language. Can you walk me through what that means?

Paul Taylor:
Yeah. Interesting phrase, isn’t it? I think to be honest, it can be quite confusing and I think actually many of us in this part of the industry feel that it might be becoming a little bit outdated, which is actually where some of our work at the moment and over the course of this year is concentrated, is taking a look at re-categorising this tech category, because we want it to be clearer for customers so they can understand what they get from it. But really what we mean by it is that it’s quite simply a collection of tools to help you automate processes across your business, be that tools to read unstructured documents through to tools to map processes through to tools that help people understand where they can automate.

And I guess the argument that we try to make with our customers is that a process worthy of a name is something that fundamentally can be automated so that humans don’t need to sit there and endlessly press keys because at the end of the day, humans are actually better set to do the things that they’re actually really good at, like creativity and relationship management and things like that. I think you then start to take a look at what those sorts of opportunities are for people to automate things across their business. And you can do anything from sort of data population and data formatting and data aggregation all the way through to more kind of human-connected opportunities within healthcare, which we could explore as we discuss further.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Oh, yeah. Let’s definitely circle back to that. So that all makes sense. When I was looking up, I was also getting the phrase digital workers, and I don’t think you meant little humans there. Can you talk me through what that is and how they work?

Paul Taylor:
Yeah. Digital worker is really just a smart phrase for a software robot really. They are the arms and legs really of the operation of the automation. You don’t really need to know anything special to do this automation and things either. You just need to know the process. The tool is pretty much a drag and drop of objects within a process chart. We’d argue that adding a process orchestration layer across the top of that will allow you to better map those processes and then the digital workers just go off and act on what you told them to do. The digital workers follow the process that you’ve mapped, conduct the work. Again, let’s imagine that it’s a process that might need to go off and gather data into other systems. That’s a really basic example of what these digital workers can go off and do.

But as I mentioned, we’ve got 1000s of use cases across the use of this technology, across probably over 70 different industry verticals. And some of the best examples of these digital workers going off and doing their work are the human-based stories. Medical insurers is an example that have sped up claims from 60 days to three days so that people can get clinical care earlier. Or some of our work with the NHS on speeding up cancer pathways. Some other good examples within the NHS, certainly during health crises of recent years, has been the kind of speedy onboarding of new consultants, nurses and doctors so that people can get the care that they need. Really, it’s just a case of mapping the process and digital workers going off and doing the work.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I want to look at that, because I think what’s interesting, we often hear when we think about automation, it gets oversimplified into, “Okay. It’s going to take people’s jobs,” but it sounds like that this could actually be a great way of addressing that issue of quiet quitting, people getting fed up and leaving. How does that come together?

Paul Taylor:
Yeah. I think for us, the main point about automation is that companies should automate where they can and use people where they should. As I said before, people are way better at creativity, relationships and, if you look at some of the healthcare examples, looking after other human beings. You wouldn’t want to necessarily be looked after by a robot.

Another example is that we know just how infuriating it is to be caught up in a bad chatbot experience. So I think very often it’s about selecting the right opportunities to automate and not over-automating and removing some of that human-based care and relationship management and things that people need within business.

There’s no two ways about it. When you do use this technology, sometimes that does mean that roles change. I always say sort of 40, 50 years ago, Silicon Valley didn’t exist. There was obviously a mass growth in the internet and things, and hey, 2024, we sat on a podcast today, these things didn’t exist until four or five decades ago. So people find different skill sets. And I think certainly for the generation of human beings coming through today, I think you’ll find that their work experiences will again be very different to ours. And I think things like artificial intelligence and automation and some of those other interesting kind of boom tech categories are going to be things that people train in and find more opportunities in and continue to evolve, because humans are really good at evolution, right?

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah. So from what I’m hearing in that, what I think sounds important is if I were working with you in thinking about automation, it’s never automation for its own sake. It’s got to solve those problems. And what I liked is you talked about freeing people to do probably the bits of the job they love most and to really think about how do we maximise the parts of our processes that humans need to be involved with, get the human to human increase and the human to data search, data typing down. Is that about right?

Paul Taylor:
Yeah, it’s about right. Just looping back to your quiet quitting comments from before, I think in addition really through the use of automation a business can guard against knowledge loss and be ready for that next disruptive business event that I’m sure is on the horizon somewhere. And we’ve even got new research that’s coming out I think in the next few weeks from Forrester that proves that it can also result in business growth too through the speed of onboarding new customers as an example. So coming back to your point, it’s about automating in the right areas and having this kind of blend of workers that you can use across your organisation.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it comes back to one of the things I do love across all of our podcasts, it’s never just about tech. It’s about people. And it sounds like the other thing I need to be looking at is how do I keep my people agile, how do I keep my people happy and comfortable and reskilling, cross-skilling, changing roles, changing jobs, and be involved in this process, because I would imagine if we’re designing intelligent automation, great digital workers, we need those insights from our humans. And so we do that with them rather than for them or to them.

Paul Taylor:
Exactly. And another great example of the way that we kind of encourage that is we have a community of users. So we have the Blue Prism community, 100s of 1000s of users of this technology in that community environment helping one another to train, learn, find new ways of using the technology, sharing thoughts that they have in terms of what could be done. And it’s a really vibrant group of people that are actually kind of stretching the possibilities of using the tool as well. So it’s just another really great example of the way that humans are coming together with technology to get the best gains out of it really.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Lovely. So taking a step back and looking at your company and how it’s been on this tech journey, I think like many companies, we can see on the history of Blue Prism that there were times that rather than build, you acquired companies and products, and then not too long ago, you were acquired by SS&C. Having been on both sides of that journey, and we both know it can go really well or really badly, are there any secrets to success that you’ve learned on that journey to make that journey of acquisition or being acquired best for everyone?

Paul Taylor:
Yeah. So in terms of the build versus buy strategy, obviously that just needs to come down to what’s on the market, what the requirements are and finding a neat fit both in terms of capabilities and cost and all the usual sorts of things that you have to put into a business case. And we’ve acquired things in the past. We acquired a cloud piece of technology a few years ago that allowed us to offer all of this automation into a cloud environment as we saw that our customers were moving increasingly towards that kind of deployment option.

And then on the point of being acquired, yeah, we were acquired a couple of years ago by SS&C Technologies. Of course, one of the concerns when a company is acquired is the impact on its people and culture, but I can happily say that none of that came to pass. For us, it was actually about being a lot better capitalised so that we could invest more heavily into our product. It also provided a tremendous opportunity for us to cross-sell into 20,000 customers across that parent group. And furthermore, it provided a great opportunity for us to embed the automation that we supply to all of our customers across the whole of the SS&C Technology Group themselves. And we’ve actually deployed, I think, somewhere in the region of 12 to 1,300 digital workers across that estate. And I think at last count we were yielding something in the region of around 100 million in savings so far.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Wow.

Paul Taylor:
That’s probably one of the biggest and broadest scaling deployments of digital workers on the planet today. I think in terms of the learnings, I’ll mention one or two, I think linked to the opportunity to cross-sell across the SS&C estate, I think it became obvious that we needed to understand more about this new customer base and indeed the kind of parents group business. We kind of walked into it thinking, “Hey. This is going to be really straightforward,” but one of the kind of key tips that I would sort of take away from that was that we needed to understand a lot better what some of these customers were using the parent company for and then playing into that. And thankfully now we’ve got a huge number of SS&C customers using automation, linked into the internal automation work that I mentioned as well.

The really interesting thing there was that we had to tread the same boards as our customers and learn how to create centres of excellence and how to convince people to embrace the new technology and also have the appropriate tools in place to measure its impact. I’m not sure whether there’s necessarily a playbook on this, but we certainly took a lot out of being acquired and learning these things. And certainly when it comes to deploying the technology, we feel that we can actually have much more honest and deeper conversations with customers about how it works and what they need to think about, which I think is a huge benefit to the people that end up using the technology themselves.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I hear this often. It is… Just like anything in tech, don’t assume anything is just simple. It doesn’t mean it’s complicated, but it’s complex. And what I like that you heard is there has to be an intentionality. There has to be that learning journey, whether that is about how do we bring the customer market together. I love breaking through that myth, because a lot of times when people are being acquired or acquiring, it’s, “We’ll just cross-sell. We’ll just get it across, and that should be easy.” And that’s not it. You have to go back to those first principles that you did as a standalone organisation, understanding the customer, understanding the customer needs. It’s also really important to bring people together. And I like that you talked about culture. How was that? Because again, I do see some companies when it’s M&A, they just throw everybody together, because of course, “It’s all tech,” or, “It’s all sales,” or, “It’s all over. What could go wrong?” A lot. So what do you think are some secrets to success how you did that?

Paul Taylor:
Well, I think what we’ve played really well there very shortly after the acquisition, sort of almost on day one or day two, is that we actually bought the product organisations together. And product people at their heart like to come together and build things. And so the great thing really post-acquisition for us is that we started with products. We bought the organisations together. And within the first six weeks they’d delivered their first joint capability. And that really just, for want of a better phrase, kind of fired the starting gun on us being able to prove that these two things could come together.

And after that, you bring your sales teams together and your marketing teams together and your finance teams together and all the rest of it. But it just served as a really great example for people to get behind in terms of proving that point really, that we were all in it together, that this is now one combined group and much more importantly, it was one combined group that could serve a customer base that needed things from us. So yeah, just a perfect way really of being able to fire the gun for the race.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay. So where we can, try to look at before you start fully enmeshing the old, is there a way of grabbing together the most willing group to do something new as that sort of proof of concept that you can build from. Love that.

Paul Taylor:
Exactly. Exactly.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Love that. Okay. Well, let’s take something back. Come with me and jump in a helicopter. You’re looking to the horizon of tech. What’s most interesting? What’s grabbing your attention?

Paul Taylor:
Yeah. So I mean, it would be remiss not to mention artificial intelligence, I think. Obviously, AI’s been out there for quite some time, but it seems to be having a bit of a resurgence, and I think that’s a really exciting thing for a lot of people in technology, but also a lot of human beings as we go about our daily life and find different ways of being able to use artificial intelligence, whether that’s generative AI or any of the other kind of great buzzwords that are out there at the moment. For us, we’ve embedded AI into the tools that we have and that we’ve got even tools that can help automate automation too, so kind of self-building bots and things like that.

Again, it’s important to kind of take a step back and have a think about how you use these new tools. And certainly around artificial intelligence, I think it really does come down to risk appetite. We serve a lot of customers in the kind of critical process area, so processes that quite simply if they fail, there would be something quite significant that would go wrong. And so you find some of those kind of customers maybe in a financial services setting might be quite risk averse and so need to play around with proof of concepts and make sure that their critical business processes aren’t going to be interrupted. And then we’ve got the customers on the other end of the scale, maybe let’s pick on manufacturers or retail groups, that are more embracing as they seek to innovate within their businesses so that they can win new business and prove the point to consumers that they’re the most innovative product on the planet.

Again, on artificial intelligence, it’s easy to forget that actually AI really is just a brain and it actually needs the arms and legs to put the knowledge that it has into action, which I think is a role that the digital workers fill really well. The digital workers at the end of the day have been provisioning traditional AI services for years to do very complex process automations and orchestrations, and they can also do the same things with things like generative AI. At the end of the day, a lot of businesses, as I mentioned, need checks and balances or guardrails in place so that these sort of digital workers or the automations that are running through the digital workers can provide so much of that kind of guardrail and protection and mitigate through logging and auditing and exception handling and all these different kind of things that we have.

So really good opportunity for people to explore the use of these tools. But again, coming back to the key point, you have to understand that the generative AI and the other AI tools is really just the intelligence and then you need the rest of the tool set to go off and actually do the work. A really exciting opportunity for us to blend these technologies together, I think.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it’s that blending, I think, where it comes together. And going back to that, like you said, the red thread through of solutions, problem-focused, that sort of piece. Excellent.

Paul Taylor:
Yeah. Exactly. Let’s not get away from the fact that AI and human can work together too, but let’s be honest, everyone’s always struggling with headcount numbers, and so I think it just comes back to automating where you can and making sure that the humans do the things that they’re good at. The other kind of linkage to this is a new platform that we’ve launched that embeds a lot of this technology, and it’s also something that we’re really excited about. It takes the cloud acquisition that we made a number of years ago a bit further and delivers a hybrid cloud environment, meaning that people don’t need to worry about upgrades and new technology that comes along anymore. And it also provides us a more flexible code base to release new capabilities at the drop of a hat.

So what we’re trying to do really as a company is future-proof ourselves so that when the next AI tool or other thing that we’ve not even given a name to yet comes along, we can just get all of these things deployed to our customers as soon as they’re ready. And I think it’s that blending and that kind of continual improvement and release that we’re really focused on.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Good. So lots to watch that the horizon of what’s happening at your end?

Paul Taylor:
Yes. Absolutely.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So Paul, we started with you as a human, so let’s finish that way. Our listeners love to hear what you’re listening, watching, reading, doing that recharges you. What is that for you, Paul?

Paul Taylor:
Well, like a lot of other people in this space, I’m fascinated by technology, so still keep my hand in on payments and things like central bank digital currencies and all those sorts of fun things that are going on in that space.

Outside of that, I guess subtly linked to things like crypto, I got swept up in the NFT craze that happened around the summer of 2021, particularly when some of the big blue chip artists became involved with some really interesting projects. And one in particular was a project that Damien Hirst, the famous English artist, got involved in. He launched this amazing project where he was trying to test out whether there was going to be greater value held in physical art or digital art and kind of created these pictures that he forced people to decide whether they wanted to keep this physical piece of artwork or whether they wanted to keep this digital piece of artwork as an NFT token. And so there was this interesting period for about a year where people were trying to make some decisions in terms of what they wanted to keep or what they wanted to actually burn. And for the people that decided to keep the electronic version of that picture, he actually burned somewhere in the region of about $80 million worth of artwork and sent it all up in flames.

So yeah, I kind of got swept up in that NFT craze and played around with some of that and it got me into other kind of artists and things like that that I follow these days.

Debbie Forster MBE:
It’s almost like a game show, isn’t it? Burn or keep. Burn or keep. So I’ve got to know, Paul, did you burn or did you keep?

Paul Taylor:
I kept. It’s on the wall quite happily. And yeah, it makes me smile whenever I walk past it because I just think back to those crazy times where these tokens were going for crazy money. And yeah, it was good to experience that and it’ll be interesting to see what happens next in terms of the use of the technology that the NFTs presented. Maybe not necessarily artwork in its next phase, but maybe some different use cases that people can find for the technology in terms of how humans can use it.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it’s interesting because we’ve had someone else on the podcast talking about NFTs. And I love the concept and I love how it opens the door, sort of democratises things like art. But in that burn or keep piece, like you say, it’s something on our wall, not our laptop screen, that has the story. Maybe that’s an opportunity for someone out there to think about, because NFT’s a great concept, but if I have to log on to look at it, maybe something around display technology might be a missing piece of that space as well.

Paul Taylor:
Yeah. I think so. I mean, look, there’s a huge amount of digital artwork, some of it better than others I would guess, that are just languishing in various different crypto wallets. And then you’ve got challenges like people losing their crypto wallet keys and things like that as well, which means that some of these things are just lost forever. So yeah, probably a really good opportunity for somebody to develop very high end digital displays that people can display some of this artwork through because artwork’s there to be enjoyed. I mean, yeah, sure, collect it, but if you’re not showing it, then what’s the point?

Debbie Forster MBE:
Completely agree. All right. Well, I’ll picture you now sitting there looking at your Damien Hirst and all the stories that brings up for that crazy couple of years when we were all locked in our homes. I guess that brings us to an end. Paul, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of XTech.

Paul Taylor:
Thank you very much for having me.

Debbie Forster MBE:
It’s been a pleasure.

Thank you for listening. If you’re a tech innovator and would like to appear as a guest on the show, email us now at [email protected]. And finally, thank you to the team of experts at Fox Agency who make this podcast happen. I’m Debbie Forster, and you’ve been listening to the XTech Podcast.

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