UiPath Fusion 2025 | Rajat Kalia, VOYA

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Rajat Kalia

CTO, Workspace Solutions

VOYA

play_circle_outline Overview of Voya Financial's primary business areas: retirement, employee benefits, and asset management.

play_circle_outline Approach to de-risking transformation through re-engineering business processes rather than just deploying technology.

play_circle_outline Voya’s focus on harmonizing data for integrated customer experiences and AI applications.

play_circle_outline Recognition that cultural shifts and technology pace are barriers to agility in implementation.

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Rajat Kalia, VOYA

Rajat Kalia

CTO, Workspace Solutions VOYA

In this UiPath Fusion interview, Rajat Kalia, CTO of Workplace Solutions at Voya Financial, joins theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Dave Vellante to share how a “progress over perfection” mindset helped Voya move agentic automation from experiments to production. Kalia outlines Voya’s mission across retirement, employee benefits and asset management, and explains why leadership sponsorship (starting with CEO Heather Lavallee) plus organization-wide AI literacy were essential to change management. He stresses that transformation is people- and process-led (“a fool ... Read more

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Fusion here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside Dave Vellante, my co-host and analyst. I would like to welcome fresh from the main stage, Rajat Kalia. He is the CTO of Workplace Solutions at Voya. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.

Rajat Kalia

>> Well, thank you for having me.

Rebecca Knight

>> So you were up on the main stage with Daniel Dines and lots of other top executives from UiPath, talking about how you shipped agents into production. But before we get to your AI journey, for the unanointed, why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about Voya?

Rajat Kalia

>> Yeah, absolutely. So Voya Financial engages essentially in the business of three primary businesses. I'll say one is retirement, the second one is employee benefits, and then the third one is asset management. And really our purpose is together we fight for everyone's opportunity for a better financial future. So it's everything from sort of individual thinking about their financial future to investors as part of the asset management business. I have been at Voya for a little over 20 years now, and in my current role as the chief technology officer, I support two of our three primary businesses, which is retirement and employee benefits. And we generally refer to that as workplace solutions. Hence, you see that in my title.

Rebecca Knight

>> So financial services is not exactly an industry known for moving fast, but you in fact have shipped agents into production. What was it that you did differently? What broke the logjam?

Rajat Kalia

>> Yeah, and look, it is something that I'll say we've talked about and spend a lot of time internally as well, honestly. And for us, one of the things that if the mantra that we've taken on is we're going to focus on progress over perfection, right? And sort of taking that approach has really given us the confidence to move with pace and to be able to create and demonstrate value early. If we focus on just moving forward, we've been able to use that to create and embrace a culture across Voya that allows us to move with pace, that allows us to focus on driving business value and outcomes, and it's creating a lot of excitement and confidence across the teams as well. The other thing is obviously there's a lot of support across the leadership team, and that's been really, really important for us to do that. We're continuing to make small progress, taking baby steps, and then we continue to look at, well, how do we improve from there? It's really more about incremental growth and instead of going for the big bang.

>> CTOs often tell us people process technology. Technology, we got that covered, it'll come, it'll go. It's the people in the process. Then the change management, that's the really hard part. Is this any different, and if you look back over your 20 years, have there been any technology transitions that were different or do you still have that sort of same approach?

Rajat Kalia

>> Very similar approach, I'll say that we've taken over the years and spot on. One of the things I tell my team all the time, and I use this phrase as part of the keynote as well, is a fool with a tool is still a fool. And I truly believe in that because, and coming from a technology leader, that seems strange because there's not a single day when I don't get an email or phone call, a text message from their partner that wants us to look at their technology. And to me that's an important aspect. But as you said, the people process component is a big part of this, especially when I think about what we're trying to do here, which is really leveraging AI, leveraging agentic automation to drive transformation. That transformation doesn't happen without the people in process piece. There's a big aspect of change management and honestly, we've been doing a few things to help sort of advance that. So one is really making this an important agenda item for our CEO, right? So our CEO, Heather Lavallee has gone out across the organization, and she has been very clear about AI and agentic automation, and automation is a key pillar for how we're going to execute on our strategy. This is not a technology-led initiative. This is not something that you can just hand over to technology and it'll get done. So I think that's helped a lot. As we think about our strategy, we look at this as sort of a key component of how we're going to execute on that for the next several years. So I think just taking a little bit of that different approach and it's both sort of top-down and bottoms-up. And I like to say that you have the CEO and the executive committee that is part of this, and then you have every frontline employee that's also engaged in this, which then allows us to really bring everyone along for the journey that we're taking.

Rebecca Knight

>> But how do you do that? I mean, it's one thing for the CEO to stand up there and say, "This is a pillar of our agenda here," but as we know there is a lot of fear and anxiety about the job's displacement angle of AI and agentic AI. What do you do to allay those fears as the CTO?

Rajat Kalia

>> Yeah. Yeah. So it's a couple of things, right? One I think is education. And one of the things that we've recognized is there is still a lot of sort of fear and mystery around AI. To your point, is AI going to take away my job? Are they going to replace me? And whether it was starting to roll out some of the individual productivity tools like Copilot or even get a Copilot. Even before we got to doing some great things with UiPath, we've been very focused on just getting these tools in the hands of our employees, and it has allowed us to start to demystify. We're very focused on driving what we call just overall AI literacy across the organization. And again, part of that is we want to give them the tools, we want to hear from them. We want to celebrate the success that we see across these teams. I'll say instead of, I call this a contact sport, we're going leader by leader, team by team. As we're engaging the teams, we're making sure that the leaders of those business areas, operational areas, functional areas, are also leaning in because when their teams see that their leaders are part of this journey and they're excited about it, I think that just drives a very different level of engagement and excitement than we would see otherwise.

>> In the early days of Gen AI, what we saw was that the funding came from pockets. Organizations were kind of stealing from other areas to fund their AI initiatives. I think it was the first speaker today, Ben, who said, "Yeah, we've gone from this magic wand now to agentics really difficult," and that is sort of rebalanced. I was interested in Daniel's comments that one of the reasons why these pilots are failing is because people aren't ambitious enough. I thought that was kind of curious. So how do you think about it? Because big transformations are risky. How did you de-risk it?

Rajat Kalia

>> Yeah, so I think a couple of things, I'll maybe hit on the funding aspect, and I think it also goes to how we're just approaching this transformation, which is we're not really running this as, hey, you have to go build an agentic AI. It's not about how many agents we can build and deploy. It's about where can we transform the business. How can we completely re-engineer, redesign a business process to make it more efficient? And that's really helping us with identifying some great opportunities on how we go after those. And that approach is I think, one that we're going to continue. And Gen AI and we sort of were on that journey as well over the last couple of years. And I think that helped Voya set a very strong foundation around how we want to approach these kind of transformations. So what we're doing now is we're really embedding this and making every leader accountable to think about how will they take advantage of AI? How will they take advantage of agentic automation to really run their business differently? So start to reimagine your business. And again, that's where I go back to this is not tech led. We're there, I'm there, my team is there to really enable that transformation. We work with partners like UiPath, and we bring that expertise to the teams and we talk about, well, how can we do HR completely differently? How can we do wealth management differently? How can finance close their books differently? So just making sure that it's all part of that I think has been really helpful.

>> So HR, finance, wealth management, there's data associated with all those. And you don't hear a lot about data at UiPath. They're the horizontal orchestrator and connector, but we constantly hear no good AI without good data. So how are you thinking about the data layer? How are you harmonizing that data? We know what's important, but you can't just do it all at once. It's a real challenge. How are you dealing with the data problem?

Rajat Kalia

>> Yeah, so I think what's been helpful for us at Voya is we sort of started down this journey around data several years back. So over the past probably four to five years, we've made a lot of meaningful investments in data and starting to harmonize the data. To be honest with you, not that we knew that agentic AI was coming three years back, but as we think about our businesses, we believe and what we bring to our customers are integrated, connected experiences. You have a retirement account, you have your benefits account with us, you have other employee benefits. We want to provide an experience that is all connected. And to be able to do that, it was important for us to have the data harmonized. So that is an area that's always been a priority for us. And as AI and agentic AI is coming along, it's certainly sort of surfacing additional opportunities for us to continue to make some additional investments and harmonizing that data. And I always like to say, "Data is a battle well fought, never won. So look, that journey continues, and I think we're continuing to make some good progress.

>> Is that an internal effort? Is it a combination of internal and third parties? Are you doing novel knowledge graphs? How are you harmonizing that data?

Rajat Kalia

>> Yeah, it's a combination of internal and external. So a lot of it is certainly leveraging the strategy we've had, the internal talent we've had, but everything else, we do partner with some of the leaders in the data space to help us really bring that to life.

>> Well, it's interesting, the announcement with Snowflake and the connectors there with Cortex, because obviously there's good data inside of Snowflake, but there's good data, there's bad data everywhere else or a lot of different places. Like you said I liked how you said that, battle never won, like golf.

Rajat Kalia

>> Yes, there you go.

Rebecca Knight

>> So you are of your big financial services company, and you could have been your own agentic platform, a lot go that route, but instead you partnered with UiPath. Can you walk our viewers through that decision and what gave you confidence to partner instead of building yourself?

Rajat Kalia

>> And look, I would be lying if I said that we don't create this every day, every week. We do that for every use case. We do that for every technology that comes in. I think in this case, when we started to think about making progress, a couple of things. One, what was really important for us was pace, just speed to market. And when we started to apply that filter, we said, "Well, who are the partners that we can work with, and that would allow us to go fast." And certainly UiPath, I'll say, was on that short list. So we've been a customer of UiPath for several years. We have about 130 plus robots that we have in production today we've had for several years. We have a few other capabilities from UiPath. So within our ecosystem, we already have a lot of their products that are sort of integrated across of our estate. The third thing was we were looking essentially for technology for a platform that would allow us to do a few things. One was orchestration. Again, we have a lot of different technologies. The second was interoperability. That was important for us. The third was explainability. We wanted to have clear logging and visibility and observability into the data. So when we started to look at all of those, UiPath seemed like a great choice to start with.

>> So okay, so the observability caught my attention. Are you seeing a lot of shadow AI, and how are you dealing with that? You've got the visibility to go and plug those holes, unlike probably in the big data days when people were just spinning up new data lakes everywhere.

Rajat Kalia

>> Yeah, so I'll say the great news is we don't have any shadow AIs, at least not that I know of. And the reason for that is I think we put in place a really strong governance structure, and that is everything from around the architecture to evaluate technologies. It is around what we call sort of the ARC or it's the AI Review Council. So any new AI related capability that comes to Voya has to be reviewed and approved by this ARC. It's a governing body that has stakeholders from legal and security and architecture and compliance and data privacy. So I think that essentially gives us that single pane of glass. If we do ever find that a technology's trying to make its way in, I think we have enough controls in place to ensure that that doesn't happen. And not because we're not encouraging the use of bringing in more capabilities and technologies, but it's also we are a regulated financial services organization, and it's really important for us to have the right level of governance on everything.

>> You mentioned that you don't want to get locked in. You said that at the end of your conversation. You want the ability, and you gave an example of change models, but of course you like everybody, uses a lot of SaaS, which is in a way the mother of all lock-ins. Oh, I could say, "The cloud can be that too." But when you think about the process logic that's locked inside of those applications, UiPath strategy is different. It's to be that horizontal Switzerland. How do you think about squaring that circle, making sure that a company like UiPath has access to that logic and all the metadata associated with that. Is that just sort of one of those ongoing battles? How do you as a customer interact with your vendors to try to make sure that happens?

Rajat Kalia

>> Yeah, it is. Look, and I think that's a constant battle as well. And it is one that we fight with a lot of our partners because again, everyone is investing in agentic and everyone wants us to look at that. And for us, it is important to have that Switzerland approach because that also gives us flexibility. I truly believe that we need to invest in the architecture that we're doing now, but we also need to future-proof ourself because tomorrow there might be another platform or other technology that's giving us some of the options that we might not have today. And again, as a CTO, I want to be able to take advantage of those. So I truly believe in not locking in. And again, I know it's hard for technology organizations to hear that for vendors and partners to hear that we cannot lock in a client, but I just feel like this field is evolving so fast, that what we're seeing today and what we'll see 12 months from now will be very different.

>> Well, you remember the days where open meant Unix, right? So that's evolved. And it seems like open today means the entries and exits into that system, and the ability to connect to those different systems is fundamental. And if a SaaS vendor doesn't allow that, then they're going to probably lose in the long run. So they've got to find other moats.

Rajat Kalia

>> Yeah, yeah, I would completely agree. And I think generally we're pretty fortunate that I don't think we have that issue because again, I think most large vendors understand and appreciate that it's hard to lock anyone down into one specific technology or platform. Yes, they do try to sell what they're building, which makes all the sense. However, there is no organization that is essentially on one technology platform. I mean, we have everything from Microsoft to Salesforce, UiPath. I mean, we have a lot of different technologies across several businesses. So I think it's important for us to be able to do that.

Rebecca Knight

>> So with orchestration being the key and humans and bots and agents working together, can you paint a picture of what that actually looks like, and how that changes someone's job and tasks in either wealth management or HR?

Rajat Kalia

>> Yeah, absolutely. And I think I can hit on those examples. I'll give you another example that we're doing sort of another back office space. And one of the things we're looking at, we have some robots that we had deployed several years back, and then we decided to build an agent, and now we're sort of starting to orchestrate across those. But there is still the human in the loop. And again, one of the reasons why that was very important to us, to get our compliance and risk teams comfortable, we need to have a human in the loop. So the way we're sort of doing that is a lot of this is shifting where our teams are spending their time. We're starting to take some of those more mundane tasks out of their hands, and we're expecting them to focus more on the high-value tasks, the intelligence that they bring to their role. How can they serve the customers more than they're able to today? And I think that's really where the focus is.

Rebecca Knight

>> Does that mean in human-to-human interaction with those customers, or does it mean thinking the higher-level strategies to invest their money?

Rajat Kalia

>> It's both because not every role really interacts directly with our customers. In some cases, it's more bringing their intelligence, their thinking to, well, how do we redefine the process. Right now that I see sort of these mundane tasks are being handled by an agent or a robot? Well, can I help reimagine this process so it makes it more efficient for either of employees or for the customers?

>> What's the biggest barrier you see to executing on your agentic vision? Is it cultural? Is it pop-down management? Is it bottoms up buy in?

Rajat Kalia

>> I think we're going to see bits and pieces of all of them, and I think we're making the right moves to ensure that we can get ahead of those. I also think the pace of technology is going to be another interesting one. Is once you make a decision and you decide to stay with one technology, how long can you really do that? And we don't want to go back and continue to re-engineer sort of things that we're doing today and undo the decisions we're making. Culture will be an important aspect, and I think I am very confident about the way we're approaching the cultural sort of shift and the change management at Voya that will not be a barrier for us.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent, well, Rajat, a pleasure having you on theCUBE.

Rajat Kalia

>> Absolutely-

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you so much....

Rajat Kalia

>> appreciate it.

Rajat Kalia

>> Thank you so much.

Rajat Kalia

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

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