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Robert Schneider

Intelligent Automation Manager

Conagra Brands

Vivek Sinha

Global Head of Sales, AI and Automation

Infosys

How intelligent automation is helping companies do more with less

Intelligent automation is quickly becoming a game-changer for businesses looking to stay competitive in an increasingly digital landscape.From streamlining repetitive tasks to enhancing accuracy across complex processes, this technology is revolutionizing operations by allowing organizations to optimize resources and improve efficiency, according to Vivek Sinha (left), global head of sales — AI and automation — Topaz, at Infosys Ltd. The integration of AI-driven solutions, such as self-healing robots and agentic AI, is empowering companies to do more with less, reducing manual errors and accelerating workflows

play_circle_outline Conagra Brands overview and automation challenges

play_circle_outline Infosys partnership and AI capabilities

play_circle_outline Self-healing robots and benefits in automation

play_circle_outline Infosys role in facilitating success at Conagra

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Transcript

Robert Schneider, ConAgra Brands & Vivek Sinha, Infosys

Robert Schneider

Intelligent Automation Manager Conagra Brands

Vivek Sinha

Global Head of Sales, AI and Automation Infosys

The CUBE covers UiPath Forward 2024 at the MGM. Robert Snyder from Conagra Brands and Vivek Sinha from Infosys discuss automation and AI. Conagra Brands uses automation to stay competitive globally with help from Infosys. Infosys focuses on AI and automation to deliver ROI. Conagra Brands prioritizes use cases for technologies like UiPath. They are interested in agentic AI for automation processes. Infosys partners with Conagra to implement automation frameworks. Conagra plans to invest in technologies like document understanding for further benefit. Robert S... Read more

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What challenges did Conagra Brands face that led them to partner with UiPath and Infosys for intelligent automation solutions? add

What role does Infosys play in facilitating and making things less complex and more facile in the technology marketing world? add

What are some challenges faced when working with RPA automation and user interfaces, and how can those challenges be addressed with advancements in technology such as agentic AI? add

What role does Vivek play as a transformation partner working alongside clients such as Conagra, and how does he contribute to their success? add

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Robert Schneider, ConAgra Brands & Vivek Sinha, Infosys

Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon, everyone. We are here in the home stretch of theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward 2024 here at the MGM. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Alongside my co-host-

Dave Vellante

>> You mean it's almost over?

Rebecca Knight

>> It's almost ... Dave, I know.

Dave Vellante

>> No, it makes me sad.

Rebecca Knight

>> I know. It's been a great show.

Dave Vellante

>> Great show.

Rebecca Knight

>> And it's about to get even better because we've got two great guests coming on the show. We've got Robert Snyder, he is the Intelligent Automation Manager at Conagra Brands. Welcome, Robert.

Dave Vellante

>> Very happy to be here. Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Vivek Sinha, he is the Global Head of AI and Automation at Infosys.

Vivek Sinha

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.

Vivek Sinha

>> My pleasure. Good to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm going to start with you, Robert. Conagra Brands, I mean it's kind of a household name, but tell our viewers just a little bit about your company and what you do there.

>> Yeah, for sure. So Conagra Brands is a food company, and what we do is we manufacture products for our customers, like your local grocery stores. And we have a host of brands that we manufacture for our customers, including Reddi-Wip, Duncan Hines, Bird's Eye vegetables, quite a few. A lot of the products in your grocery store, if you turn them around, you'll actually see our logo on the back. So maybe you'll find your favorite product actually is made by us. And last year we had over $12 billion in revenue, so we're a fairly good-sized company, and we do it for our customers.

Rebecca Knight

>> Exactly. And you are, as the Intelligent Automation Manager, what do you do and what were the challenges that you were finding that made you want to team up?

Vivek Sinha

>> Yeah, absolutely. So at Conagra Brands, just like any organization, we're a very lean organization, and we have the challenge to do more with less. And with automation, robotic process automation and intelligent automation, it gives us tools that we need to continue to be competitive in a global marketplace. UiPath had a unique set of tools that allowed us to expand our technology and our business processes to do them faster, more accurately and assist our business partners. Ultimately, we want to make sure that people that are on the ground making our products, making our food, are able to do so without the need to worry about an invoice being paid in the back office or a process or a business process that they're waiting on to ship in order to a customer. And we were able to successfully, with a partnership of Infosys, successfully automate quite a few of our back office processes that allow us to be more efficient, more effective, and ultimately deliver our product faster.

Dave Vellante

>> So Vivek, we live in a world, in the technology marketing world, where everything's seamless. What's the reality, and what role does Infosys play in actually facilitating and making things less complex and more facile?

Vivek Sinha

>> Thank you. That's a great question. As a way of introduction, Infosys has 300,000 plus people. I lead the AI and the automation practice, which is approximately 3000 people. The reason why I'm telling you those numbers is because some of the impact that we make is proportional to the number of people that actually get deployed in the projects, in AI and automation both. So from that point of view, I think AI is here and now. Everything that I heard today, starting with the keynote that was there, agentic AI, my vantage point tells me that this is something that is coming our way, and it is here and now for us to explore and grow. There is huge ROIs that we think that everybody's looking from AI is on us to deliver.

Dave Vellante

>> Let's talk about the ROI for a little bit because the very clear ... The ROI of RPA was sort of a no-brainer. Largely back office functions, you're automating a lot of paper shuffling, and it was pretty clear the return. In AI, people complain, "Well, not really sure the ROI. We're doing a lot of experiments. We're getting a lot of use cases and prioritizing them, but it's going to be huge." And I believe it, by the way. We've written a lot about it, but it's almost you've got to take a leap of faith. So how do you help clients cross that chasm, to use that phrase?

Vivek Sinha

>> And there is no secret sauce to it. It is hard work and grind that gets you. The biggest thing that I actually want to tell is just because the compute and the data processing capabilities have increased so much that you can really do mundane tasks with lots of compute behind it. The reason AI is so dramatic in terms of ROI influence that it can bring is because it is an order of magnitude improvement that you can get. We typically engage with our customers. We have a very well-defined framework that we set aside saying, "Here is the right framework to choose the right use cases to do AI, continuously monitor and measure," and then present the results with the board and the CEO organization that is looking for those ROIs and benefits. So identifying the right use cases is, I think, the biggest mantra for success in the AI world.

Dave Vellante

>> And Robert, when you have an initiative like automation, you obviously have to present a business case, you got to sign up for some value, you got to deliver that value. And so how do you think about the trade-offs of potentially, it's a pejorative, but paving the cow path? In other words, making an existing process better, but getting value out of it versus something that's a more substantial transformation where you could create telephone numbers for the organization? It's riskier, but how do you balance that?

>> In regards to balancing risk between, if I'm understanding your question correctly, between new technology and existing capabilities, you really have to identify a framework on how you want to identify the work that's going to be placed in front of you. And then you have to bring your business partners along. You have to tell them and show them the art of the possible. There's a lot of talk around AI and generative AI and a lot of people that aren't as familiar with what the tools and the processes could do for them. So the first step is to get your business partners excited about the opportunity to partner with yourself, and other COEs, that can help define and accomplish those business processes that you're trying to automate for the business.

Dave Vellante

>> Are you hitting singles or you're shooting for the moon?

Vivek Sinha

>> So I think it comes down to, again, putting together a framework in which you can identify potential business use cases. And once you get to the business use cases, you can look at AI capabilities and categorizations and start to basically bucket these ideas into these different capabilities and frameworks. And that gives you a direction for your organization to begin either looking for partnerships to enable those types of technologies or start looking for an off-the-shelf type of solution like UiPath. And what UiPath really gives us is the ability in a known and trusted platform that we have today to enable further technology like document understanding, computer vision, agentic AI agents that we saw today, some self-healing robots. That was very cool. We're very excited about that, by the way. And be able to use those bolt-on capabilities with the trust that we already have in the platform that's delivering for us today. I'm very atypical, so I like to categorize things. So we take these ideas from our business partners, we figure out what is going to be the ROI, what's going to be the revenue generation, and then we categorize those capabilities and we say, "These are the ones we're going to try to tackle next."

Dave Vellante

>> Tell me about the self-healing robots. What problem does that solve for you, and why are you so excited about it?

Vivek Sinha

>> Well, just like any RPA automation that's out there today is you work with user interfaces, and there's always going to be improvements from the development team that creates those user interfaces or changes. And we work with a lot of vendor portals because we work with a lot of customers. We have to notify them when their product's ready for pick-up, maybe some other use cases where we're getting information from them to schedule product delivery from us and their portals may change. What happens is the robot doesn't know how to handle that nuance in that UI. And what we saw today allowed us to really imagine a world where the automation's telling our support team what they need to do, how can they solve this in a shorter timeframe and get us back into an operated state? UiPath was the leader in the market before that in its exception handling, being able to handle business exceptions and system exceptions and get us at least a head start. But this is taking it to that actionable thing, to that agentic AI where not only is it notifying, but it's giving a recommendation and assisting with the solve. It's pretty remarkable.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Vivek, you are a transformation partner. Can you describe what it is that you actually do in working hand in glove alongside Conagra and other clients, of course, but how do you define your role, and how do you help contribute to their success?

Vivek Sinha

>> Thank you for that. From Infosys' point of view, we typically partner with our customers, and Robert had been one of the outstanding leaders that we have worked with for so long. He helps us keep us grounded as well. But the things that we typically do, and the same thing we did in Conagra was we established a center of excellence. So because we have done similar projects for so many other customers, we bring that knowledge that we have to our customers. And in case of Conagra, Conagra we actually helped in initially setting up the center of excellence that brings in framework elements, and how do you evaluate a particular business case in terms of KPIs and measurements? How do you make sure that the templates and frameworks for code reviews and deployment procedures, and et cetera, are actually implemented in the best possible way and so on so forth? So from Infosys' point of view, we bring all the expertise of having done this before at other places to our customers and help them scale and grow. And in that respect, UiPath has been also a great partner. They continuously enable us in the new platforms and tools and technologies. I'm really excited that, in couple of weeks, I will have my hands on the Agent Studio from UiPath, and so we'll be able to build some cool agents using agentic AI framework that UiPath provides. So looking forward to it, and all that.

Dave Vellante

>> Agents today are co-pilots. It's usually, typically today you see single agents, single co-pilot. It's interesting. Agentic division is laying out what Bobby Patrick called, and we've written about, swarms of agents working together. How are you thinking about the use cases around that? Craig Le Clair laid out a risk-reward framework today. How do you prioritize? Any thoughts, initial experiments that you're running that you can share? What are the best use cases initially for agentic?

>> So we have, and I don't know if I can go into too much detail, but we receive emails from our customers that request to get deductions on their invoices. And a part of that is taking that documentation, and we're a large SAP shop and actually financially clearing those deductions through our processing tool. But that process is very manual because if you can imagine the number of grocery stores that exist in our country, they all send a different type of document or a different type of way of requesting this sort of deduction. So I see the potential, and this is just one of many examples, to be able to assist with the categorization, the identification, as well as potentially the execution, the deterministic execution, because we don't want it to accidentally enter in the wrong value and then they don't owe us as much money. That would be bad for revenue. But we need a way to help us to get to that point or speed up that process for both assisting our customer service, assisting our customers, reducing the workload for the employees that are manually doing this today. And that's just, again, one of many. And so I see opportunities where the input of the process or even maybe the aftermath of the process isn't so clear as it would be in a deterministic model where we can apply this technology and leverage a deterministic model to actually complete the outcome.

Dave Vellante

>> So what's the business logic that goes into that deduction, and where does it come from? Is it tribal knowledge? And how do you incorporate that into an automation or an agent?

>> So the agent wouldn't necessarily clear the deduction, the agent would use our existing animations to clear the deduction. But the problem is that the input, we get 5,000 of these, let's say, and they're all from 5,000 different customers, the input is so non-deterministic that we need a way to categorize it into the right execution model. And I think that the agentic AI can get us to that final step of being able to really identify and take that cognitive process out to say, "Okay, this deduction belongs to this customer, so I'm going to process it this way because it's this type of deduction. This deduction belongs to customer B because it's this type of deduction, so I'm going to process it that way." It's almost deterministic, somewhat in nature, but the rules become so complex that using an agent to get us to that point will allow us to then execute the deterministic RPA and execute it accurately and properly.

Dave Vellante

>> So there are some clear conditions under which a deduction is applicable.

Vivek Sinha

>> Correct.

Dave Vellante

>> And you can program machines, essentially, enable machines to do that.

Dave Vellante

>> That's right. Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> So we've talked around it, but I'd love you to call out any benefits or any wins that you've seen in terms of customer experience, in terms of helping employees get back hours of their day, cost savings, efficiency. What are you seeing already?

Dave Vellante

>> I mean, in regards to intelligent automation and automation, there's a joy that you get from being in a program like this that you get to see employees become happier. We had a business process in which Infosys and us partnered with many years ago to help close our financials for each of our plants. And our business partners spent a long time doing this. It was a very complex process. And we've gotten it down to four hours instead of a week and an army of people to do this. And the team is just so ecstatic about the fact that it's accurate, it's on time, they can monitor it, they can see what it's doing, and it allows them freedom to work on the more, I guess the more important tasks that add revenue to our organization, and they can find ways to make other processes better and faster and easier. The financial close process before was very tedious, and it was not their favorite thing to do. So seeing those types of successes and wins was very rewarding for both an automation center of excellence as well as the business.

Rebecca Knight

>> So last for both of you, what do you see as Conagra's future plans in terms of its digital transformation? How do you see things progressing from here? Do you want to start, Vivek? I mean, as the partner?

Vivek Sinha

>> The North Star that we should probably aim for is how do we get Agent AI inside Conagra as quickly as possible? Try, experiment, fail, learn from that and scale from there. One of the use cases that we've been talking about and doing is within the software development life cycle itself, you write these automation scripts and the requirement comes from a business user. Is there a way for us to shorten the requirement cycle time, take less time from business, from their busy work and generate the user stories? Is there a way for an agent to create the code from those documentation that is there and so on and so forth? So there are multiple use cases like this. I would like to start that journey of Agent AI in Conagra in very near future. No?

>> Yeah. I'm very excited about all the things he said.

Rebecca Knight

>> .

>> Anything that delivers faster is going to be a success for us. For our immediate future, we're investing in document understanding, communication mining, as well as process mining. So we're very excited about those technologies and how those are going to benefit our organization. That deduction use case being a very clear document understanding use case, as well as others. Helping us with our receipts, helping us with our invoices and different things in our organization.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well -

Dave Vellante

>> One last question, Robert. If there were one thing that you'd like to be able to say next year, a year from now that you can't say today, what would that be?

Rebecca Knight

>> That I can't say it today?

Dave Vellante

>> You can't say today, but you'd like to say-

Rebecca Knight

>> Because it's not happening yet, it's -

Rebecca Knight

>> Oh, a year from now. Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> What's your dream? What's your big goal?

Dave Vellante

>> next year's goal?

>> Oh my goodness. One thing that I thought about this year, and last year when I attended, was it would be pretty darn cool if you could have autopilot take a PDD and build the automation via RE framework.

Vivek Sinha

>> PDD?

Dave Vellante

>> You think that's achievable inside of 12 months?

>> I think it is. I think you guys have the technology.

Dave Vellante

>> .

Dave Vellante

>> I think UiPath has the technology. And I used some acronyms there. PDD is a process document. And it can really speed up the development and delivery of an RPA product, and I think that would be very beneficial to -

Dave Vellante

>> Cool. Thank you for that.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Robert and Vivek both, thank you both so much for a really fun conversation.

Vivek Sinha

>> Absolutely, the pleasure was ours.

>> Thank you. We had a great time.

Dave Vellante

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward 2024. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.