Robotic process automation is still an emerging market with a lot of growth potential, but it has already become quite competitive, with many players positioning themselves to rake in a piece of the pie.

One of the largest companies in the industry, UiPath Inc., has a clear strategy for continuing to thrive in this battle: providing faster time to value while building the most advanced and powerful automation for its customers.

“We show our customers and our partners this is a technology that gives you the faster time to value, and, actually, faster time to value translates into much higher return on investment,” said Daniel Dines (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of UiPath. “In a typical automation project, the license question is maybe 5% of the project, so the moment you shrink the development time, the implementation time, you increase exponentially the return on investment.”

Dines spoke with Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during UiPath’s Forward IV conference. They discussed what UiPath believes to be its competitive advantages, how the company maintains its culture of innovation while growing exponentially and the trends for the automation market. (* Disclosure below.)

Reducing friction and expanding use cases

UiPath’s roadmap for its “customer value-first strategy” focuses on continually seeking answers to three key points, according to Dines, including how to reduce development time, how to reduce friction and how to expand the use cases. This is what permeates the solutions and products developed.

“We win a lot in all the contests where we go side-by-side with other competitors, and it’s a very simple strategy for us asking customers just go and test it side-by-side and see,” he said. “And they see [that] we implement the same process in half time, half of resources involved. It’s an easy math, multiplied by 1000 processes, and it’s done.”

The transition from an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform also puts UiPath at an advantage, according to Dines. Being independent is another core value.

“Even in our competitive situations, when we are capable of explaining to [customers] what is the value of having an independent automation platform … not tied to any big silos that application providers create, we will and we win by default somehow,” he added.

Automation for good

Automation has enormous room to grow, including helping to increase business productivity and solving some of the planet’s problems. This is called automation for good.

UiPath sees automation as fundamental to address issues related to, for example, the slowdown in population growth in several countries, such as the United States, which could threaten the future performance of GDP.

“The modern world is built on the idea of continuous economic growth. The moment growth stops, the world stops; we’ll go back to our caves and restart the engine,” Dines pointed out. “So, automation is hugely important in continuous GDP growth, which is the engine of our life.”

While UiPath is ready to spread automation far and wide, it is learning on other fronts. As a new publicly traded company, it’s learning to deal with the demand of investors and to communicate with them. After UiPath’s initial raise of $1.4 billion in its April IPO and a 23% jump in share value, the company’s shares have been on a roller coaster since, rising and falling based on market concerns about growth potential in an increasingly competitive field.

“It’s a lot of learning for us, and like any learning environment, [there is an] initial learning curve with stuff, but you progress quite a lot,” Dines explained. “So, I believe that over the next few quarters we will be in the position to build trust with the Street, and they will understand better our business model and they [will] see that we are building everything for creating durable growth.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE