The workplace-automation train has entered the station — now what? Do we all lose our jobs? Can we get robots to work for us while we stay home and snooze?

Between those extremes, there are now real people actually using automation at work. They’re discovering its flywheel effects in productivity, creativity and efficiency.

“People think that new technology is the train and the world is the station, so the station remains where it is, and the train moves on,” said Mihir Shukla (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Automation Anywhere Inc. In fact, it doesn’t work that way, he explained.

The world is neither a station nor stationary. It moves along with the technology train, rebuilding itself on top of new inventions. Automation doesn’t show up, plop itself down and take people’s jobs; instead people seize it and use it to revolutionize the way they work.

“It is about empowering people so that they are more productive unlike any other time in human history,” Shukla said.

Automation Anywhere provides an intelligent digital workforce platform with robotic process automation, artificial intelligence and analytics. Adoption has been phenomenal, and customers continue to pour in from 120 countries, according to Shukla, who spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Automation Anywhere Imagine event in New York City. They discussed the company’s growth and how automation workers are using automation in the real world (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Going deep in specific domains

“Of the 2,800-plus customers we have, I have visited hundreds of them and talked to thousands of people on the ground who use this technology, and there’s not a single one of them who would go back,” Shukla said. The technology is taking drudgery off the table and freeing up brain power for higher-level tasks, he added.

The company provides domain-specific automation technology through partnerships with 700 partner industries from finance to oil and gas. “They bridge the gap between technology and the customer-specific, domain-specific processes,” Shukla said.

The company’s community edition is available free to small businesses, students and developers. Last year, it secured one of the largest Series A funding rounds in history. It is using the $550 million in investor dollars to expand its intelligent digital workforce platform through research and development, global expansion and acquisitions.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Automation Anywhere Imagine event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Automation Anywhere Imagine event. Neither Automation Anywhere, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE