UiPath Forward 2024 | Mariessa Coughner, Cognizant

Clips
News
More from UiPath Forward 2024

Mariesa Coughanour

Head of Advisory, NA Delivery & Mindshare, Automation & Agentic AI

Cognizant

Fully automated enterprise: Amgen taps tech partners for digital edge

Being competitive, resilient and adaptable in the constantly evolving digital market is triggering the need for a fully automated enterprise. To enhance operational efficiency, accuracy and compliance across its highly regulated and complex workflows, leading biopharmaceutical company Amgen Inc. has kickstarted its fully automated dream with the help of partners, such as Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. and UiPath Inc., according to Navin Rekhapally (pictured, right), associate director of information systems, digital, technology and innovation, at Amgen. Cognizant’s Mariesa Coughanour and Amgen’s Navin Rekhapally talk to theCUBE about the need for a fully automated enterprise

play_circle_outline From Pain Points to End-to-End Automation: The Automation Journey and Process Optimization at Amgen

play_circle_outline Need for tracking outcomes and demonstrating value

play_circle_outline The Critical Role of UI and Human Machine Interaction in Automation: Partnering with UiPath for Success

play_circle_outline Focus on scaling and usability of automation features

play_circle_outline Advancing Business-Tech Integration Goals Through Value-Driven Automation Solutions

Info
Transcript

Mariessa Coughner, Cognizant

Mariesa Coughanour

Head of Advisory, NA Delivery & Mindshare, Automation & Agentic AI Cognizant

UiPath FORWARD 2024 is happening at the MGM in Las Vegas. Navin Rekhapally from Amgen and Mariesa Coughanour from Cognizant Automation discuss their automation journeys. Amgen has been focusing on intelligent automation platforms for the past few years and emphasizes the value of automation for delivering drugs to patients. Cognizant Automation talks about the evolution of automation and AI, aligning technology with business needs. Challenges in automation include governance and security, according to Navin. Mariesa stresses the need for a flexible governance... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What is Navin's role at Amgen and how has the company's automation journey progressed over the years? add

What is the ultimate goal and direction for companies in terms of utilizing automation, AI-agentic, and maximizing potential in order to achieve desired outcomes and strategies? add

What factors were important in building an UI with human machine interaction, and how did the team address the need for the right tools at the time? add

What are some important factors to consider when evaluating the features of a product or system? add

What are some key considerations for integrating technology, bridging the gap between business and technology, and creating production grade solutions as accelerators in 2025 and beyond? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Mariessa Coughner, Cognizant

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Oops. Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath FORWARD 2024 here at the MGM in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside Dave Vellante, my co-host and analyst. We've got two guests for this segment. I'd like to welcome Navin Rekhapally, he's the associate Director, Information Systems, Digital Technology and Innovation at Amgen. Thank you so much, Navin, for coming on the show.

>> Thanks for having me.

Rebecca Knight

>> And we'd like to welcome back Mariesa Coughanour, head of Advisory NA Delivery and Mindshare Cognizant Automation and Gen AI practice at Cognizant. A long title, but clearly you're very important.

Mariesa Coughanour

>> There's a lot to do and I am lucky enough to get a chance to play in a lot of areas to get it done with clients.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah, no, it sounds great. So Navin, I'm going to start with you. Tell our viewers a little bit about what you do at Amgen. I mean, we're talking about your automation journey here, but what you do? But then also what were the pain points? What prompted the journey?

Mariesa Coughanour

>> Excellent. First of all, thank you for having me. I'm Navin. Like you said, I lead the intelligent automation platforms in the company enterprise-wide. That includes RPA, process intelligence and several other platforms. One of the things that we have done as a company in automation is that we started this journey like five, six years ago. We took the baby steps where first we have to explain what the technology is, the rules-based automation that what the platforms to offer. We graduated from there to a centralized COE model. Then we graduated to stop, simplify and automate. That was the mantra in the company for quite some time where we did not want to automate something that need not be automated or will not sustain the long-term gains that we were trying to expect out of it. And with the advent of AI and technology, we are really looking at end-to-end automations right now where we can look at the business process from the start till the end and figure out what technology fits in where and how can we go and solve the business problems, ultimately generating the value that our customers desire and ultimately Amgen delivering what it does, the drugs that the patients the need, which in most cases are very serious illnesses that we target for. So we are happy that we are able to contribute in meaningful way to the mission that Amgen is serving that every patient every time, so yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> So Mariesa, you've been on a couple of times now. I think you were on in 2021, which is one of the first shows we did.

Mariesa Coughanour

>> Actually the whole way back to 2019.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, that was the first time, but I was going to say one of the first shows we did coming out of Covid.

Mariesa Coughanour

>> Oh, yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> And we talked about the Game of Thrones, game of Bots, but at the time we were still in that world. It's funny, Daniel, I don't know if you saw his keynote yesterday, he talked about some of the things we got wrong. He was very humble. He said, "We had the vision of a robot for every person." And he said, "Really, we didn't quite envision the agentic age coming, but we still feel like that automation for every person is very important." But you guys bought into that. I think it was 2018, you sort of started your journey, but now it's evolving. So I'm curious as to how that resonated with you when Daniel said that and where you are on act two.

Mariesa Coughanour

>> Yeah. First off, fabulous memory, Dave. I got to tell you, that's just spot on all the data points. We've really just keep doubling down on that journey. So I will agree with Daniel. We're in act two. You have AI now, gen AI, agentic automation. This is really that next evolution that we need to get to, but we continue to really focus on how do we lead by example. So we ourselves continue to empower operations team to be able to do automation and what I call digital productivity because that's encompassing everything we're trying to do on this journey to drive real outcomes, not only for how we work ourselves, but also how we partner with folks like Amgen, being able to work with them on what is next. We've been able to help by how do we evolve these programs because the thing is that Daniel mentioned yesterday too is automation is hard. There is a lot of work to be done on this. There is the people element. There is how do you evolve the governance of these programs, how do you think about reusable so that you can really streamline how we also deliver this. And then ultimately, how do you keep tying it back to outcomes to deliver for strategy to be able to make sure we help these companies achieve what they're going out to look for in it. So I think first off, I agree with them. I think this next wave is exciting or act two is very exciting and I think there's just so much more to come as we think about how we take automation, AI-agentic, and really maximize what we're going to get out of this, the potential.

Dave Vellante

>> And it sets up the fully automated enterprise, which is what, I mean, we've been waiting for this day for years. We're going to have to wait some more time for the fully automated enterprise, but that is the direction that you're going. Explain that north star to the audience.

Mariesa Coughanour

>> Fully automated enterprise has been a vision, but did we have the right technology in place and available in the hands of customers like us? It wasn't. But with the advancement of AI and everything, so we are finding those missing pieces and all the technology improvements that each of the product vendors are bringing in are really helping us step towards that vision, right? Ultimately, it's a destination that we want to get to when there is a lot of things, the machine puzzles that we are trying to put together. Things that were announced in the conference this week were pretty exciting. But being a regulated company, it is very hard for us to immediately jump onto technology rather than we take those steps and understanding the architecture, the security frameworks, the compliance aspects of it so that we understand that fully before we adopt the technology. So we are meaning to... We're excited about what the future is for us and hoping that we can use these technologies to realize the vision for the enterprise.

Dave Vellante

>> And it's interesting. So it sounds like technology is not the barrier anymore. I'm interested in what is, but it reminds me of eLiza. eLiza was something that IBM introduced I think in the 1960s we're looking up on Wikipedia. What it was was a natural language interface to a mainframe that did pattern matching and was very much like an early version of today's LLMs. The point is though the technology just wasn't ready to scale, but it was a really interesting experiment. People thought it was magic at the time. Now the technology's here, or almost here sort of we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. So what are the blockers now that are holding organizations back generally, not just specifically Amgen?

Mariesa Coughanour

>> In general, specific to Amgen, we are highly regulated. So we have deep processes built in. So for example, if I have to do some kind of AI project, there is a governance framework that we have established, one, to evaluate the technology, to evaluate the processes and how the technology is going to be used in the company. So that is really something that we had to put in place so that the right use of technology happens in the company and we are not leaking data outside to the bad actors anywhere in the world. So that is one thing that we are very careful that we try to go slow. But the second thing is what this technology has enabled us to do, the fast experimentation. So previously for us to try out something, prove out something, it used to take months and sometimes years to figure out how to build it. And sometimes we are building the building blocks itself, but now the building blocks are available, which is allowing us to do those fast experiments in that way we can prove fast or fail fast and figure out our next chart on figuring out what the right solution could be. So that has really helped us.

Dave Vellante

>> I want to follow up Mariesa with... So Navin said, go slow. I think you really mean... Because then you said fail fast. I think by go slow, you mean be cautious.

>> Be cautious.

Dave Vellante

>> So go fast, but don't break things. It's sort of the new mantra, Mark Zuckerberg, fast and break things. Don't break things anymore. I wonder what you're seeing across any patterns across your client base of what some of the blockers are, how much technology is a blocker versus people and process and how that equation is shifting.

Mariesa Coughanour

>> So I think on the technology front, there is a lot out there. There are a lot of different players come in the space. There's a lot of tools. So it's figuring out how to navigate that and also what actually fits in their ecosystem is one area that there's a lot of help needed on. And folks are even saying, "Look, we bought all these tools, we have a lot we're using. They're not utilizing everything. Help me come back, rationalize, think about do I have what I need today, but more importantly, do I have the right tools for tomorrow?" So that's one question. But I think the second piece is around how does the process get evolved. It's very easy to go and tackle a few more task-oriented issues in a process. But ultimately, if you really want the benefit of automation, and even more importantly AI, we have to think about how is work going to change and evolve? And with that brings the last element, which I actually think is the one that is the toughest, is how to bring the people along the journey. And that's one thing that we really spent a lot of time with clients on is, how do you break down barriers? How do you bring business and technology closer together and converge those relationships so that you're aligned? It's actually one thing I think Amgen has done really well. And Navin and team, they just continue to think about how are all those different personas, how do you help them train, how do you help them learn, and how do you... Doesn't mean everyone has to be involved in building, but how does everyone get involved along the journey so they reap the benefits and also help transform how work is going to be done in the future.

Rebecca Knight

>> So let's tease out some of those best practices because as you said, the people part is often the most challenging. So it sounds, get everyone involved in the process, make sure that everyone feels they have a stake in this, the ability to experiment and not be punished if there's a mistakes made or that things don't work out as planned. What are some other key best practices that have emerged in terms of getting everyone on board as Mariesa said?

>> I would say when we are thinking about the process, think end-to-end in a sense and think about the design patterns. There could be several design and architectural patterns that can think of. Always try to figure out whether there is value in doing something or not. The value could be in the dollar savings, it could be productivity, it could be compliance, it could be security. It could be various different things, but understand the value, prioritize all those things. And once you have done that, then think about the way you want to deploy the technologies going forward. Is it a big bang versus an incremental, right? I think there is a balance that you need to maintain when you are going with very advanced technologies. Incremental works very well. RPA as a bread and butter technology has matured so much that you can think about a big bang of an entire process or a sub process itself. So some of these are actually really helping the overall solution thinking and now it's also the mindset that has to change. So for example, like Mariesa mentioned, we do a lot of engagement with our larger user base so that we tell them what the technology is, what it offers, when to use it, when not to use it, and how to use it. And what is the path for you to get onto this technology, learn about it, contribute to it. So when you have the automation-first mindset, the opportunities that you bring to the central team also are also thought through in that way that yes, this is something that can be automated or something that can be looked at from an automation perspective.

Mariesa Coughanour

>> One other thing, if I can just add.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, please.

Mariesa Coughanour

>> And I think you guys have done really well, is how you're communicating your outcomes and your metrics. You just have this lovely way of doing real-time value and drivers through dashboards. And I don't know if you'd want to expand a little more on, Navin, but I just think that's such a best practice is being able to... Because you're not only communicating, you're showing and you're making it available to everyone to know what the team is doing and what kind of impact they're driving.

Rebecca Knight

>> And reminding everyone of why we're doing this.

Mariesa Coughanour

>> Yeah, exactly.

>> Great point. And what we do is, like I said, we have set up an intake mechanism where we capture the projected value at the start. And when we build whatever kind of automation that we are building, ultimately we try to capture the real estate, what it is actually delivering, and then we put it on the dashboard. The idea behind that is not only to show what the value of the program is generating, but to actually get people excited that this kind of technology can generate this amount of value in a sense. So getting that insights in front of them has really helped them to actually adopt the program, come join us, join us in the transformation. And many of the transformation projects that we do, automation as a mindset has been inculcated just because we track the value and the metric so well that everyone wants to do it in some shape or form in their own programs itself.

Dave Vellante

>> When you golf with friends, you get two mulligans, one in the front nine and one in the back nine. I don't know if you golf, I don't really golf well, but if you had two mulligans and you could do something over, what two things would you sort of revisit and maybe do again, each of you in your journey?

Dave Vellante

>> Two things that I would definitely want to think about is when we started our journey, it was all about let's go automate, automate, automate. To the middle journey, we understood that that is not the philosophy, maybe the right philosophy. So we did a slight change and stop, simplify and automate. I think that's a mantra that's ticked on and it is continuing and I want to recommend to everyone. So don't go just try to automate anything and everything. Rather look at the process. If you can simplify it, go and simplify it first and then try to automate it. And when you're automating it, also look ahead in terms of how long is the automation going to sustain? Are there any technology changes happening in ecosystem that will make the automation redundant? So having those questions up front sometimes really helps what you're building, the value is delivered and it is a sustained value rather than just in value delivered for once and gone over.

Dave Vellante

>> Anything you'd add, Mariesa?

Mariesa Coughanour

>> So I would do a couple things. I actually ran an automation program, but also what I see with clients, I think one is don't forget to put in a governance model. It's very easy to jump in, dive in, get excited, try to start running. But if you're going to start getting to scale at some point, you're going to have to be able to run it. And also make sure that model is flexible. So it's not just about automation, right? This is automation, this is agentic AI, this is gen AI, and it's going to continue to evolve and that model needs to be able to evolve with the just technology landscape, but also with the company's needs. And then I think the other one is kind of tying back to some of this outcome management. Make sure upfront you are tracking what are people working on, what is that value you're driving back to the organization. Everyone's going to want to know that. At the end of the day, everything we're doing here is about helping companies achieve their strategy, moving them forward, achieving value for themselves, for their clients. And if you aren't able to demonstrate that, it's going to become a harder conversation. Even if you can feel it, everyone wants to show the meat behind it, show me, the "don't show me" quote, right? And I think that's one that's easy to forget. It's really hard to go back and do later because now you're having to establish it. You're trying to go back and figure out what were those numbers. So I would say those are two things that if I were telling someone as they're starting this or even maybe just doing a re-evaluation, if you've been a long-standing program, everyone's going to re-evaluate at some point to say, "How do I move forward?" Those are two things I would definitely take a look at is the flexibility, adaptability of your program, and making sure you're demonstrating that value and have a way to do so.

Dave Vellante

>> As automation experts, you're sort of, by association, process experts too. You have a lot of visibility on process. And irrespective of what you think about as politics, Elon Musk has this concept of delete, delete, delete. And the whole, if you're not familiar with the concept, it's when you think about how to do something or build a product, take out more than you think you need to because if you're not putting stuff back in, you haven't deleted enough. So he's got this delete, delete, delete mantra. My question is, as you go through automations, do you find that you're doing a lot of deleting of steps or are you finding that there's gaps and you actually have to add stuff? Is there any insight that you can share there?

>> Okay. So when you're automating it, so many a times when we start the journey, it's always like you look at a small process, go automate it and say, "Okay, it is done," right? But many a times that is not what the customer wanted or the users wanted. They wanted to see a much bigger picture, much better automation. They want to have an UI in front of it, they want to have the human machine interaction in it. So all that was important and we wanted to build that, but we did not have the right tools at the time. But we also look at the partners and also the product vendors like UiPath and bring some of those questions back to them and give them the feedback saying that, "Hey, can you bring it into the product? Or you can simplify this aspect of the product that will help us actually accelerate the adoption or accelerate a better technical solution that we can get to the end users?" Ultimately, it's all about partnership and how we can figure out the right balance that the product vendors offers us, what we can bring to the table. What partners like Cognizant can bring some accelerators to the table is to figure out the right solution. In my opinion, there isn't a right answer on what should be, should not be. It depends on who needs what and what time. But are the features good enough to be used and are the features good enough that they can scale are two things in my opinion that is important.

Rebecca Knight

>> So it's hard to believe that 2024 is almost over, but looking ahead to next year, what are some of your key automation goals and how are you thinking about your digital transformation?

>> It would not be nice if I don't use the word agentic, this being the team.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah, exactly. It's the word of the day.

>> And I've been listening to some keynote talks in the morning from . I think the vision is there. Some of the companies have the broad vision on how to go about and solve it. We would have to wait and see and get our hands on the technology because ultimately we as company, we want to adopt such fine-grained technology that we can stitch the end-to-end process in much beautiful, seamless manner. But does the technology is ready today, will it be ready in six months? So I'm looking forward next six months to a year to get hands on the technology and figure out how I can integrate it into my workflows, into my company, go through the processes that I need to go through and make sure that the technology is compliant and reliable and secure and so that I can scale and deliver better business value and outcomes to my customers and end users.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Excellent.

Mariesa Coughanour

>> So I'm thinking 2025 and maybe even a little beyond. I think there's a couple of things. There is of course AI, agentic, all of that's coming into play. But I think really important one is how do we integrate that technology together, because all of this has to play nicely in these organizations and it has to do so in a way that does make sure there's compliance, that there is risk addressed and controls in place, but ultimately also that we do drive to value at the end of the day. I think the second piece that we're looking at is how do we continue to bridge that gap between business and technology so we continue to think about how do we not just enable, but how are we catalyst within these organizations? Because when we do that, we're not talking just an ROI, we're talking multifold returns. So I think that's one we at least keep trying to double down those efforts on. And then for us, the last one I think is around how do we help create solutions as accelerators that are not just POCs, they're not just these small implementations, but really how do we move to production grade and enterprise solutioning because that's where everybody wants to get to. That's when you achieve the promise of what we're talking about. So for us, that's where we're investing our time, our effort, our money to make sure that we're ready to help our clients get there. And not just get there, but get there fast and reap those benefits.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, Mariesa and Navin, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE.

Dave Vellante

>> Thanks, guys.

>> Thanks for having us.

Rebecca Knight

>> A really interesting conversation.

Mariesa Coughanour

>> Thank you so much for having us.

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.