UiPath Fusion 2025 | Keynote Analysis

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Dave Vellante

Co-Founder & Co-CEO

SiliconANGLE Media, Inc.

Rebecca Knight

Host

SiliconANGLE Media

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play_circle_outline UiPath's transformation since its early events, showcasing elegance in branding and presentation.

play_circle_outline Market cap fluctuations and financial performance of UiPath leading up to the event.

play_circle_outline Concerns about AI disruption; Daniel Dines presents automation as a tailwind instead.

play_circle_outline Driving ROI: Cultural Change and Orchestration for Effective AI Integration in Business

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Keynote Analysis

Dave Vellante

Co-Founder & Co-CEO SiliconANGLE Media, Inc.

HOST

Rebecca Knight

Host SiliconANGLE Media

HOST

In this UiPath Fusion 2025 Day 1 keynote analysis, theCUBE’s Dave Vellande and Rebecca Knight break down how UiPath is reframing enterprise automation with a platform-first, agentic AI strategy. Fresh from the main stage, they unpack CEO and founder Daniel Dines’ thesis that AI is a tailwind for automation – provided organizations invest in orchestration and process discipline. The discussion covers UiPath’s Maestro orchestrator, the “agentic AI meets ROI” mandate and notable partnerships announced on stage with OpenAI, Google Gemini, Nvidia and Snowflake Cor... Read more

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What were the notable aspects of the events held by UiPath at the Fontainebleau in Miami over the years? add

What recent announcements were made regarding UiPath and its financial performance? add

What are the current challenges and perspectives regarding UiPath's position in the market, particularly in relation to AI and automation? add

What key factors contribute to the success of customers using UiPath, according to Daniel Dines and the analysis presented? add

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Keynote Analysis

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good morning, everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Fusion here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside my co-host and analyst, Dave Vellante. We are both fresh from the main stage, lots of top UiPath executives and thought leaders, as well as customers, and of course, the CEO and founder, Daniel Dines, who will be on our show later this morning. Just tell me your first impressions, your first thoughts.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay, so this is my seventh... Well, they now call it Fusion. It used to be called Forward, so it was Forward 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Rebecca Knight

>> Right, keeping with the F theme though.

Dave Vellante

>> And this is our seventh. We missed the first year. The second year was at the Fontainebleau in Miami. And what a transformation, this company. So, at the time, UiPath was on a rocket ship. Their CEO and founder, Daniel Dines, he's a developer, he's a technologist at heart. He came on theCUBE in a T-shirt. And now, he's very polished, but he's the same guy, it's awesome. But the Fontainebleau, of course, is this iconic hotel in Miami. And then, over the years, what we've seen is UiPath always has a little different flair to its events. They build beautiful sets for us. This backdrop is always super cool. They've got this shaded glass, the tinted glass. I remember in 2021, they were one of the first to come back from COVID. We were actually outside, it was a tent scene. Very cool. As you know, Rebecca, the exhibits, they're not the typical tech show gaudy, right? It's very elegant. And so, the branding team here at UiPath is conveying that message of elegance that you would expect from a software company. You get this from an SAP or even an IBM, it's high-brow. And so, they've done a really good job of that this year. I tweeted this out. As you know, they had a really interesting twist where the keynotes, and the keynotes were packed, I don't know, 5,000, 6,000 people in there. And each row had a line, multiple columns of side tables with a little lamp on there like you'd see at a speakeasy.

Rebecca Knight

>> It felt like luxury. I agree with you there, yes.

Dave Vellante

>> And it had these great little booklets on there and nice pens, legit pens. And so, okay, is that super important? No, but it is a nice twist, and I think the customers noticed that. Now, to UiPath, this is a company that, prior to going public, had a $38 billion valuation, went through a series of challenging quarters as a public company, had some go-to-market issues that had had to restructure, brought in a head of sales, that didn't work out. Daniel Dines took back over. So, prior to today, the market cap was under $7 billion. Now, today, they made a bunch of announcements that we'll talk about with Nvidia OpenAI, Google and Snowflake. It feels like a little dot-comish where those types of announcements with those high-flying names. At one point, UiPath had added a billion dollars to its market cap earlier this morning. But they're at $1.7 billion annual recurring revenue company. They're growing at about 11%. They're running at an operating profit, but once you do all the stock-based compensation and all the gap accounting, they actually lose money. But their non-gap margin is improving, it's about 17%. They get 11% operating cash flow margin, and that's improving. They raised their guidance, so that's a positive sign. And this company started as outside the US. They're an international company, and then they came here and started to grow the US. That's rare, as you know. But as a result, as the dollar weakens, they're translating dollars, now that they're headquartered in New York, back into international currency, back into depreciated dollars. So, there's more of them. So, that's been a tailwind for them. You're seeing some flatness at the high end of the big spenders, but they're working through that. Here's the thing, people just assume that UiPath is going to get disrupted by AI. Daniel Dines has always said it's a tailwind, and he laid out a case today that we're going to talk about as to why it's a tailwind. Basically, their automation experts. And his argument is, "We know how to do automation. We know how to do hard things and agentic is hard." And everybody's, I think, starting to realize that.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, exactly. And they were very candid about that recent MIT study that is oft-cited here at these conferences. 95% of AI pilots fail when they go into production. That is something that a lot of ,frankly, executives already know well, that they're very hyped up and excited about AI, but the reality is coming slower than they'd like, for sure. So, Daniel Dines, and a lot of other customers that they brought up, which again, we're going to talk about here in this analysis, they're the 5%. They're the ones who are actually succeeding. And the key, according to UiPath, is orchestration. The tagline for this show is agentic AI meets ROI. And they are saying that orchestration is the key to unlocking ROI. And I really also was interested in how they really talked about the cultural change and the cultural shifts that are absolutely necessary in order to get the benefits from AI. Process is the hero, not the tool, is what they said. So, let's talk a little bit about how Daniel Dines characterized how AI is going to the tailwind of UiPath and your impressions of that?

Dave Vellante

>> So, I want to start and answer that question by that MIT study, because everywhere we go, we hear it. And normally, what you hear is, and you see it all over LinkedIn, "Well, not our customers. I mean 90% of the tech vendors have success stories," and I'm sure they do. Have you read that MIT study?

Rebecca Knight

>> I mean, I've read bits of it, yes.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, so you know well that the headline is somewhat mischaracterized, right? There's a lot of nuance in that study, and so I would encourage everybody to get a copy. But what I really liked, because when I heard it, I said, "Okay, here we go again. They're going to talk about how their customers are actually succeeding." But what UiPath did that I really liked is, well, first of all, they said agentic last year was like this magic wand, and the reality is very difficult. And then, they pivoted from that MIT study and they asked Daniel, "Why is it that people fail so much?" And he said, "There are four reasons." He said, "The first one is they don't have a strong automation foundation." Now, that is self-serving, but it's probably true. If you're just paving the cow path or you don't have any experience in automation or in around process, you're going to struggle. The second one was really interesting to me, Rebecca, he's basically said, "Ambitions are not that high." And what I've been reporting is that customers, I call it hitting singles. They're getting ROI, but it's small ROI. So, you think about ROI, everybody throws the term ROI around. How should you think about ROI from a financial standpoint? ROI is just a percentage, benefit over cost. Okay, so if I have a dollar of benefit and I have 10 cents of cost, I have a very high ROI, but my net present value, the amount of money that it throws off, is not much, 90 cents. Woo-hoo. So, that's not going to get you too excited. And also there's a timeframe like when it breaks even. So, those are the three dimensions, if you will, simplified of ROI. So, and some things matter to different companies. And so, he was saying, essentially, ambitions should be higher, that net-present value, in other words, the amount of value that you throw off is really the key that small POCs, they're not-

Rebecca Knight

>> Worth the time? Right. Right.

Dave Vellante

>> They're not critical processes. You're not moving the needle. It's like, "Eh, let's try it." And the problem with this approach is it's not meaningful enough to overcome the normal expectations. It's basically, if I get 60% of a hit on a small process, what good is it? But if I get 5% on a huge NPV, that's a big difference. So, I thought that was really-

Rebecca Knight

>> Insightful....

Dave Vellante

>> contrarian as well.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. No, and exactly, because I think that, and I want to hear the rest of the reasons, but so often when we talk about AI, the advice to companies is, "Just start. Experiment. And often, start small because then it's not too risky and you can really control it. And it also helps bring people along and they can start to see the small benefits." But the point being, and he brought up customers to really prove the point, that, "No, you've got to start with something that is going to fundamentally be transformative for the business and for people and how they do their jobs."

Dave Vellante

>> So, I want to ask him about that because it is risky. IT is risky.

Rebecca Knight

>> It is.

Dave Vellante

>> And so, how do you minimize that risk is something that if I were a CEO, I would be asking Daniel. Third, he talked about security, the fear of rogue agents. And I think having a solid automation foundation. I don't know if you were in there at the end, you might've left because we had to come here. But he talked about the deterministic nature of robots. And he also talked about how RPA is really hard when things change a lot. RPA is good at these kind of sequential processes that are hardened. And so, I think, I want to ask him about this, I think he's saying we're going to blend the deterministic pieces of RPA with the probabilistic pieces of gen AI, and we're going to, through our orchestration, both govern and create value. Then, the fourth, he said, "There's just a lot of confusion in the market. People getting bombarded with hype," and then he pivoted to their platform. And I liked that because platforms beat products. UiPath started as essentially a point product. And then, they evolved through a variety of acquisitions, like ProcessGold, like Re:infer a few years ago, which the timing was actually fortuitous because that's when the AI heard around the world hit. And they built out through these acquisitions and through organic development, a platform. What does a platform mean? A platform is you have a platform and you can bring in new function and ad capabilities without ripping and replacing things. So, when they make an acquisition, and again, we should ask him about this, you can plug that into the platform and those services are available as part of that platform. Hopefully, there's a flexible pricing model, so you can easily add it. And then, basically he said, "The key is to connect all these pieces reliably." And that's where I think these partnerships that they announced come in and I'd love to talk more about that.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. Well, but before we get to that, because that is big news, I want to talk a little bit about the customers that he brought up.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, let's chat about that.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, CSL is a plasma donor eligibility, their science... That was really interesting about using AI to accelerate science. I mean, they're using it for some business processes right now, but it is really possibly really transforming their business. JPMorgan, you often say this, it is more of a software company than it is a financial services company. And they brought up an executive who was talking about how you cannot layer AI onto existing legacy technology. It really needs to be something that you need to fundamentally rethink. And he also talked a lot about the cultural change. And obviously, this is where I like to play, Dave, because I like to think a lot about the future of work and how employees think about their jobs, because it was really about bringing the human beings along and saying, "This is your role now. Here's what your role could look like in the future." Because I don't know if you follow Ethan Mollick, he's a professor at Wharton, but he talks about how AI can do part of your tasks. It can't do your job because your job is more than your tasks. Part of our job is interacting with each other.

Dave Vellante

>> Let's hope that's preserved. I think it will be too, I hope.

Rebecca Knight

>> Exactly, because a lot about it is relationships. And actually, Daniel Dines asked him about this, about how your relationships with your customers are going change in this-

Dave Vellante

>> You know what else he said that I thought was interesting is how he chooses between build and buy. He says he always has a third-party solutions about de-risking and getting the market quickly and learning fast and failing fast as part of his toolkit. So, that's obviously where UiPath fits.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay. Now, let's get to the big announcements because he talked a little bit about a new technology screenplay, but you want to get to the even bigger news and that is this partnership, this collaboration with OpenAI, Snowflake, and Google and Nvidia. It sent the stock surging this morning.

Dave Vellante

>> Investors have been skeptical about UI. They've had a lot of disappointments, executive turnover and things like that. Now, Daniel's back in, he's been in there now for a couple of years, taking over for Rob Enslen. And he's got a real product mindset. He's got a platform mindset, so that's all good. And they've made a bunch of announcements around... Essentially, this is the coming out for their platform. They announced their platform early this year. They announced Maestro, which is their orchestrator, but this really is where it becomes real, and we'll dig into that this week. But they made an announcement, and this is what sent the stock soaring. It was up 22%, added over a billion dollars this morning. It's pulled back a little bit with some profit taking. But they announced partnership with OpenAI, so ChatGPT connector. So, connecting OpenAI Frontier models to workflows, which is key. As you said, process is king. You didn't say that, I'm bastardizing your words.

Rebecca Knight

>> Process is the hero.

Dave Vellante

>> Process is the hero, right? They announced a similar integration with Google Gemini. They announced a deal with Nvidia around Nematron, which I believe is where they're doing healthcare, security and compliance. And then, they announced a deal with Snowflake for Cortex integration. You and I did Snowflake, Cortex being Snowflake's AI platform. So, they're interacting with all the Snowflake analytics data and their AI platform and their agents. And so, that's cool because their whole point is we got to connect the dots. We have to connect the dots in the enterprise. That's what you need to go end to end. And so, I was a little bit surprised by the reaction to the stock in the morning, but I think people see, "Oh, wow. OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, Snowflake, Intel and NVIDIA make a deal. Stock goes up. Intel, OpenAI make a deal, stocks go up." Sorry, I meant Nvidia and OpenAI stocks go up. So, I guess anybody who touches OpenAI and Nvidia and Google and Snowflake, that's-

Rebecca Knight

>> You're Golden....

Dave Vellante

>> seen as a positive. Now, you have to execute on that. You got to put it into action. But I'm really curious to continue to push Daniel on AI as a tailwind. He's made that case from day one. He's been confident about that despite the market backlash. And so, let's ask him about that.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, he's going to be on next. In addition to Daniel, we have a slew, a great lineup of guests, including lots of customers, lots of thought leaders, as well as Eric Brynjolfsson, who is a professor at Stanford and esteemed author.

Dave Vellante

>> He stepped up from MIT. He's now at Stanford. Wow.

Rebecca Knight

>> Hey, I think MIT and Stanford are-

Dave Vellante

>> We're going to ask him about that.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay. All right. Fair enough. So, Dave, this is going to be a great two days. I am really excited for this show.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, me too, Rebecca. Thanks.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay. And I hope you will stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Fusion with Dave Vellante, I'm Rebecca Knight. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.