UiPath Fusion 2025 | Craig Le Clair, Forrester Research

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Craig Le Clair

VP, Principal Analyst

Forrester Research

The risks of random acts of automation in today’s workplace

Artificial intelligence and automation are moving faster than governance can keep up, reshaping the nature of work and customer experience. When enterprises deploy tools without a clear strategy, they risk fragmenting processes and undermining long-term trust.Quick wins in automation often morph into disconnected “random acts” that remove humans too quickly from critical processes, according to Craig Le Clair (pictured), vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc

play_circle_outline Navigating the Risks of Automation: Craig Le Clair on Employee Experience and the Pitfalls of Misguided Automation

play_circle_outline The importance of having humans in the loop when implementing automation technologies.

play_circle_outline The interaction between AI and human workers will shape future workplace dynamics.

play_circle_outline Understanding the importance of accountability for the effects of automation on employees.

play_circle_outline Redefining Work: Balancing AI Advancements and Human Cognition for a Brighter Future Beyond Job-Centric Lives

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Craig Le Clair, Forrester Research

Craig Le Clair

VP, Principal Analyst Forrester Research

In this UiPath Fusion 2025 segment, Forrester Research VP and principal analyst Craig Le Clair joins theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Rebecca Knight to unpack the ideas from his new book, Random Acts of Automation: How to Fight Back When Automation Threatens Your Work, Your Life, and Everything You Do. Le Clair spotlights why “random acts of automation” emerge in a probabilistic, non-deterministic AI era, why “self-service hell” erodes customer experience, and why keeping humans in the loop matters. He examines how automation impacts different worker cohorts, the ... Read more

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What are the random acts that enterprises engage in, and what smarter approaches could replace them, particularly in the context of automation and workforce effects? add

What are some key themes or concepts discussed in the book regarding the impact of automation on workers and the digital divide? add

What is the impact of AI compared to previous technological advancements like the internet and the cotton gin? add

What are some concerns regarding accountability and laws related to automation and privacy in the context of AI and technology? add

What is the perspective on job identity and the potential effects of AI on work and standard of living? add

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Craig Le Clair, Forrester Research

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of UiPath Fusion here at the Wynn. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside my co-host and analyst, Dave Vellante. This is our last segment of the day, and I would like to welcome back to theCube, we saved the best for last, Craig Le Clair, VP principal analyst at Forrester Research. Thank you so much for coming-

Craig Le Clair

>> Thanks for having me back....

Rebecca Knight

>> back on our show.

Craig Le Clair

>> Yeah, it's a pleasure. Always a pleasure.

Rebecca Knight

>> So you are the author of a new book that I need, I need this book, Random Acts of Automation: How to Fight Back When Automation Threatens Your Work, Your Life, and Everything You Do. I need this book.

Dave Vellante

>> This is book written for you.

Rebecca Knight

>> It is. You feel the tension in my voice as I describe it. You're warning against these random acts of automation. Talk a little bit about what you see as these random acts that enterprises engage in and what would actually be the smarter replacement play for this.

Craig Le Clair

>> Well, there's a very basic thing that's very different. The period we're entering into where you have probability, that you like to gamble, how well do you do on the crap tables out here, it's all probability and statistics and that's what's going to be driving a lot of processes and events going forward, which is inherently why they're random. They're more random. The examples in the book, I have a chapter on customer self-service. I call it self-service hell. We're just driving people off a cliff by just pushing automation at them. You just watch the 80-year-old woman trying to read the four-point font on the avocado to scan it at the kiosk, right? There are many examples where we're taking humans out of the process too rapidly, and that's something that was not predicted. The biggest random act is what the effect on the workforce is, and that's really the heart and soul of the book. I mean, you have these four categories of workers and I drill down into how automation's affecting each one and it's affecting them differently. No one thought about it. The hyperscalers, you think they're sit there thinking about, "Well, what's this going to do to Joe who's been working in the back office of the insurance company for 20 years compiling data and filling out forms that this model that we're building, this AI agent that we're building is going to just chew up his work instantly?"

Dave Vellante

>> So many teasers in this table of contents. First you start up with we need humans in the loop, I mean, everybody you talk to, this is clearly... But then the self-service time bomb, I mean, we could go on for hours here. How workers in the middle can automation-proof themselves, that's quite a hook, right? Digital elite class takes over. Wow. AI leaves learn to code behind. Those are just like three or four or five of the hooks in the book. So, why did you write this book and why now?

Craig Le Clair

>> Well, it's a little bit of I'm more at the end of my career than the beginning and most of my career has been in automation, and mostly what automation does is it reduces human effort. In many cases, in projects that I've worked on and tech companies I've worked for, the goal has been eliminating workers. I don't want to sound like I'm any kind of wonderful person to try to write a book like this, but I kind of felt like I would like to do something that might help workers since most of my life has been automating the amount of jobs. It's a bit of an insider's view of the tech industry as well. As you know from the analysts in your analysts in your own right, you talk to everybody, you talk to tech vendors all the time, you understand how they think. I worked for a vendor for years before I got a more honest living as an analyst. So you get a sense of kind of their hubris, kind of the arrogance, kind of the lack of empathy, the driven during our system, which is it's the best system in the world, but it is driven by the normal capitalist goals. There are going to be unattended consequences with that approach, which is why I wrote that. It's not on one tell, it's a tell-all book, but it's very critical of the tech industry. The Zuckerberg move fast and break things, that approach worked well in the deterministic period. It's not going to work so well in the period we're going into because of the non-deterministic aspects to AI agents.

Rebecca Knight

>> So your book is critical of the tech industry, but here, UiPath brought you here. You're giving a keynote.

Craig Le Clair

>> I wondered about that.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. No. But what is your message to the tech industry? You're saying that they're not perhaps understanding. They are not understanding the real human element. Some might say there's a crisis of entry-level workers-

Craig Le Clair

>> We say that....

Rebecca Knight

>> who can't find jobs right now. Talk a little bit about that. What your message would be to the CFOs who are reading this book and also making decisions about, "Hey, we could automate this. We could save for here"?

Craig Le Clair

>> I said this on stage today. I started off, they say in any kind of a big speech, you honor the audience. I said, and I believe this, "The people in this audience that are here are the next generation of automation creators and they have a responsibility. They're going to have a great future. They're digital elite in the book, and it's very easy to develop really negative attitudes towards everyone else. You're in a very pretty position despite challenges you'll have due to AI. You're in the catbird's seat, so drive a little empathy." I have a section in there, John D. Rockefeller, the son of the great Rockefeller, was his company that he acquired was involved in a miners strike where the military came in and killed 16 people. It was the watershed event for workers' rights. He was so blown away by that that he became a recluse for about a year, but he went out to the miners in the camps and he lived with them, and the section is called get a piece of bread and sop up some gravy because he'd never had any meal like that in his life. I think the digital elite can start to look at people that work with their hands better. They can look at and have more empathy for what they're doing and what its effect on the workers are.

Dave Vellante

>> So if this works out, this AI boom, there's going to be a giant productivity uplift. We heard Brynjolfsson last year, he said he'd be disappointed if it wasn't a... I thought he said three to 4X increase improvement in productivity, which is, of course, massive in $115 trillion global economy, which means there'll also be a huge labor, agent to labor arbitrage coming. My question is when you think about your career in automation is do you expect this will be different in terms of the pace at which workers in society will pivot and recover? Will it be faster? Will it be slower? Will it be more shocking? Hard to predict, but .

Craig Le Clair

>> Yeah, I've given up on trying to predict the numbers of jobs. No one could do that. We certainly tried at Forrester, we were always wrong. The economists that have the longest data set always say, "Yeah, that's what we said. It's going to be..." But it's the shifts. It's the disruption. It's the shifts from middle to front line worker. It's the shift from digital elite to the middle. It's knocking off the grid of that growing 35% of people that I call work-life pioneers that are finding other ways to piece together in existence. It's the movement and the disruption that is more predictable, and so that's what I focus on here.

Dave Vellante

>> I mean, you think about the PC boom, the productivity boom, I think it elevated the middle.

Craig Le Clair

>> It did.

Dave Vellante

>> The internet really disrupted industries and company bits and atoms, Negroponte. Is this wave more impactful for the individual perhaps than those others?

Craig Le Clair

>> I think it is. I mean, even the internet created new industries. It destroyed some, but it created a whole new set of things to do, and that's the big argument for the historians or the economists that you look at the cotton gin, you look at all these, they created new. I think that a lot of the AI is what I call so-so technology. It's taking out pieces of jobs that aren't fundamental and aren't going to create a new industry. It's taking Harry out of the back office. It's taking Mary the agent out of the call center because the next generation of AI agents talking to customers are going to be a heck of a lot better. The biggest challenge I think going forward is this sort of democratization of intelligence that AI is going to bring us where we actually relatively get less intelligent as the models increase their intelligence, right?

Rebecca Knight

>> Because of our cognitive offloading to those models?

Craig Le Clair

>> It's things like you don't remember your phone number anymore. There is a cognitive unloading, but remember, they're going to get smarter at a rate faster than we are. Even with training and up-skilling, their rate of progression for cognitively is going to be stronger than ours. What does that mean? Well, it means that we might suffer some anxiety and some self-esteem issues. I have a whole section on mental state due to automation. The printing press, the Gutenberg press democratized information, which helped destroy the Catholic Church a bit, but this democratizes intelligence and makes... This is the optimistic path for the middle because the middle person can look at AI as a way to do work that required more education in higher levels of credentials that they couldn't do without AI's assistance. It's just a numbers problem because there are far too many people in the middle that aren't going to be able to take those newer jobs that AI creates. You're not going to have the 28 million in the call centers are not going to stumble out of there and become data scientists because using gen AI. Percentage of them will, but not all of them.

Dave Vellante

>> Do you think, you were somewhat critical of the industry, our industry, we tend to over-hype things? Now, based upon the CapEx that's being spent, there's a bet that this wave will be bigger than the subsequent waves, which probably true. Let's grant that, but do you feel like we sometimes over-hype the impact like the biggest ever? It seems to me that before the internet and Google Search or search generally, where would we get our information? We had to go to the library and we had to do research. So to me the jump from that to Google Search was much greater than the jump from Google Search to ChatGPT in some ways in terms of the impact.

Craig Le Clair

>> I would agree with that, Dave.

Dave Vellante

>> I do feel like in some ways it is over-hyped and I also feel like we underestimate the impact of the physical world. I mean, the example somebody gave to me the other day was if it's you're sweltering in the summer, would you give up your air conditioning or your AI? Well, it'd be an easy choice. You sleep at night. So I do think we tend to lose sight of how important physical comforts are in the world about that.

Craig Le Clair

>> Yes, and how important physical agility is, human physical agility, which is a positive path for those workers, which I call human touch workers because this physical automation that is ramping up, physical robotics is going to make their jobs a lot... The 3D's, they're dirty, they're dull and they're dangerous. They're going to make them less. So there is some positive aspects there. Of course, it's over-hyped and I think we're at the precipice of a bubble just like we were in 2000. I think you look at the $100 billion numbers being thrown around Nvidia and OpenAI and Oracle and what data centers and so forth without any regard to return on investment. Does that sound familiar? I think there are a lot of startups, particularly in the custom agentic framework area that are going to really suffer in a chaotic period is going to come with a de-hyping for this area. At the same time, these AI agents are real and they're going to be our coworkers. I talked a lot about on the stage about what I call AX, the agent experience, and I isolated six generic roles in companies and said, "You know what, these are the five skills we need and it's not one size fits all. Interaction skills are more important for creative types and critical thinking skills are more important for expert roles." We have to change the culture of companies to think. I was interviewing a Brazilian chemical company and they're merging their IT department with their HR department because they're thinking, "We're going to be managing AI agents as well as people, we might as well have it done the same way and by the same people."

Dave Vellante

>> Interesting.

Rebecca Knight

>> So you've got some cautionary words for and some critical words for the technology industry, but what about Mary in the back office and Harry who's on the floor? What is your advice for them, particularly as you said yourself, we do have some to worry about their mental state, especially in the US where people's jobs are so tied up with their identities? We are a special country in that way. So, what is your advice to the worker here?

Craig Le Clair

>> Well, that's what a lot of the meat of the book is, but there is a blueprint there for, depending on what category you're in, how to stay there or to move up. The advice is think about it, think about it and study it and think about how you... You can't ignore it. You can't ignore it. You've got to develop these critical skills, the critical thinking. You have to ramp up your human touch point integrations. There's some generic there, but they're also very specific things. If you're working at McDonald's or in retail food, get out of it, but use your device skills. The average high school graduate has device skills that give them many, many jobs, manipulating flat screens and warehouses, actually maintaining physical robotics in these physical environment places. Talk about the importance of physical environment. There are a lot of opportunities, there are a lot of specific skills for those workers. I mean, middle workers can try to find... When they're looking at a place to work, there's a profile of companies and questions to ask them about how they they're going to treat automation going forward. What are they going to invest in? What are their goals for automation in the company? These are questions that no candidate asks and how that company is going to invest in physical automation to help with the 3Ds, how they're going to invest in cognitive automation. Are there opportunities for becoming a data manager or curator? There're just tons of opportunities, but you have to become an AI operator. So this is very specific skills on how to do that.

Dave Vellante

>> Do you have a point of view, Craig, on the role of public policy here? I mean, clearly, right now, the US administration is fueling the bubble. Maybe not a bad thing if you're in an AI arms race with China, but I think it's a fact that that's happening.

Craig Le Clair

>> Certainly, if you had Intel stock, you like that, right?

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah. Right. Okay. So you've got that, but is there a role for public policy in the context of-

Craig Le Clair

>> So this gets a little controversial and I've had people that vehemently disagree with me on this.

Dave Vellante

>> No, let's bring it up.

Craig Le Clair

>> I don't think there is. I think the tech industry is too fast. It's a juggernaut. It's uncontrolled. It outpaces the ability of government to rent to legislate against it. I don't dismiss. I welcome the work that the Europe's doing, the European Union and their directives around AI and all of that. Continue to do that, but don't count on it. Workers have to think independently. It's self-determination and autonomy. Don't expect the government to help you on this.

Rebecca Knight

>> And don't expect the tech industry to do the right thing and-

Craig Le Clair

>> Don't expect tech industry.

Rebecca Knight

>> The human side.

Craig Le Clair

>> There is a stroke of independent thinking that's required of the individual that's down to you, and it's also some advice on where to go to school. We're way over-leveraging traditional degrees in college, community colleges and I taught at one just full disclosure years ago. I think you're undervalued in terms of what they can do. I have interviews with people that went to community college, took some AI courses and are doing great. So, not feeling ashamed of working with your hands. We need lots of plumbers. My plumber arrived with a Mercedes last year, pulled the 5 Series into my parking lot. So we have to culturally be more accepting of some of these job categories that when I was growing up, my mother and father said, "If you don't go to college, you're going to be a ditch-digger." It was like this negative, negative, negative thing. That's got to change because the way the world and the way work is going to approach us going forward was going to allow a greater variety of jobs, many of which require physical skills.

Dave Vellante

>> So to public policy, stay out of it for the most part. I mean, trying to micromanage and regulate LLMs was kind of absurd. That I agree with. There may be a role just in terms of certain laws that maybe need to be rethought with respect to privacy, copyright laws.

Craig Le Clair

>> I like the one in Europe that can hold executives of a tech company personally responsible for a random act of automation basically. When Hertz had the bug in their automation and you returned your car perfectly and then a sheriff showed up and put you in handcuffs because the inventory system had a flaw in it and there was no human in the loop, that should be personally accountability for the executives of Hertz. It didn't happen twice, it happened 500 times. This is what I mean, and that was deterministic automation. So these practices, the policies, the transformation, the new operating models all driven by GenAI and AI agents are going to be challenging for companies to do safely and they should be held accountable.

Dave Vellante

>> It looks like copyright laws in your world are out the window because we have to compete with China. I mean, I get the logic of that, but at the same time there are copyright laws.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah, they'd illegally sold.

Dave Vellante

>> Intellectual property ownership.

Rebecca Knight

>> Exactly. Exactly. So this is a very bleak conversation. What is the best-

Craig Le Clair

>> Oh, no.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay. Well, I mean, what is a best case scenario do you think that we could have with workers who take some agency, and pun intended, for their own careers and lives, tech industry, who it brings some empathy and compassion to this, some policy perhaps where they introduces-

Craig Le Clair

>> Well, I think you kind of hit on it earlier, that people should think of themselves as more than their work. If you talk to someone from France, the first thing they tell you isn't what they do for a job. They talk about their family. They talk about their religious commitments. They talk about the great food and the great... It's really unfair. They have the best wine and food already and they have a 35-hour work week. How do we get there? I think that's the long-term play is to get a better work-life balance and to be able to do things not as a gig worker, because the gig workers are becoming more transactional and they're being managed by algorithms and they're being horribly treated, but there is a middle ground where people are balancing their life better. I think that's the end game because ultimately John Maynard Keynes was right that the biggest worry will have 100 years from now, this is 1930, 100 years from now, almost there is what to do with ourselves because productivity is... This is the Industrial Revolution. Productivity is going to be continuing in advance. We're not quite there yet, but we should look at that as the end game, and so we have to think of our lives differently.

Rebecca Knight

>> So disentangling you are not your job.

Craig Le Clair

>> You are not your job. I think that's the number one message for people, to build a life that's not solely around your job, because what's happened in the last 20 years since my career, there's no loyalty from the companies. There's very inverse loyalty from employee to company. The mergers and acquisitions and Wall Street just wreaks havoc with people's lives. You have automation coming in and chipping away at good middle class jobs, which has been going on for decades, but now it's going to be accelerated. I don't want to get too doom and gloom here. Point is there are optimistic paths for people in the various roles, one of which is work-life balance, but the others are use your human agility skills. Go to companies that are investing in the right physical robotics to make your jobs less dull, less dirty, less dangerous. If you're in the middle, become an AI operator and figure out how you can use AI to your advantage to do the work of require more education.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay. So we are ending on a hopeful note. Okay.

Dave Vellante

>> I think that is the best case scenario, and I personally think it's a likely case scenario is an increase in the standard of living and wealth creation opportunities for all. I think that is the promise of AI and I'm hopeful that it delivers on that promise.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay. We're going to end optimistically. This is the ending day one of UiPath Fusion on an optimistic note. Craig, I thank you. The book is Random Acts of Automation: How to Fight Back When Automation Threatens Your Work, Your Life, and Everything You Do. I'm Rebecca Knight with Dave Vellante. Come back tomorrow for more of theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Fusion. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.