Formulated Automation Podcast | RPA Podcast | Business Automation | Process Automation: Recent Episodes
Formulated Automation
A podcast dedicated to the art of business process automation through tools like RPA, Intelligent Automation and Hyperautomation. We'll be talking with business leaders about their experiences in the automation space and how they made it work for their organizations.
We speak with Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times, and author of “Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation”.
Interested in getting started with automation? Get in a free consultation at Formulated.
On this episode, we speak with Mike Mirandi and Todd Schiller of PixieBrix. PixieBrix is a browser extension which believes that everyone should be able to customize their softwares even if you’re just an average user and not a software developer. In this episode, we talk to Mike and Todd about their background and how they got up into space and into this business.
On this episode of podcast, we speak with Adam Schweickert, partner and integrator at Wetmore Consulting Group. In this episode, we talk to Adam about his background and how he got up into space. He also shares his automation processes and its some sort of process improvements.
On this episode of podcast, we speak with Clara Durodie of Cognitive Finance.ai. She is the author behind “Decoding AI in Financial Services - Business Implications for Boards and Professionals”. We talk to Clara about her background and how she ended up studying artificial intelligence applications in financial services.
On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Tolani Jaiye-Tikolo. Tolani has been working on RPA, been creating a lot of great content on the RPA space, trying out a lot of new products. She shares her experiences and strategies for what structures are working. Specifically, Tolani is working on RPA Jargon and she shares her insights in the RPA space.
On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Jenna Schnizlein and Scott Sanders of Sikich. Sikich specializes in accounting, advisory technology and managed services. We talk to Jenna and Scott about the rundown of what Sikich is, its background, the genesis, where the company is headed and how they got into the automation industry.
On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Sean Chou, the CEO of Catalytic. Catalytic is a platform of no-code workflow automation. We talk to Sean about his background, the genesis of Catalytic and where the company is headed.
On this episode of the podcast, Brent catches back up with Dmitry Karpov the cofounder and CIO of Electoneek. Dmitry gives us a quick update on Electroneek’s rise in the market and its growth.
On this episode of the podcast we speak with Sagi Eliyahu the CEO of Tonkean. Tonkean is basically what we call the operating system for business operations. And in a more practical way, it's a no code platform that allows operation teams to create solutions that are custom to their processes, to automate exact mix you talked about of people, processes, and systems. We talk to Sagi about his background, the genesis of Tonkean and where the company is headed.
On this episode of the podcast we talk with Kieran Gilmurray, who have been in the automation space for almost 25 years. Kieran talks with us about what automation looked like back in the year 2000. He also recalled and shared the types of problem he is seeing in the modern RPA versus the types of problems he has seen back in the 2000s.
On this episode of the podcast, we speak to Alex Zekoff and Dan Parsons. Alex and Dan are the co-founders of Thoughtful Automation. They will share a little bit about the company and introduce us to what appears to be a new style of automation consultancy.
Mark and Brent catch back up with Tom Taulli, an author of books regarding RPA, AI and several Finance books. In his book, he talked about the basics of Artificial Intelligence which is called "Implementing AI Systems". He also have another book called "The Robotic Process Automation Handbook" which is a guide to implementing RPA systems which are both tackled in the podcast.
On this episode of the podcast, we speak to Doug Shannon. Doug is a veteran IT product lead that has been deep in the world of RPA. As a practitioner, Doug shares his experiences and strategies for what structures are working. Specifically, Doug makes the case for how an internal RPA team adds value. We talk citizen developers, security, and self-healing bots.
In this episode, Mark and Brent recap the past few weeks of news, toying with node-red, and take another look at attended vs unattended in a recent project. More discussion about citizen developers come up with some recent articles.
On this episode of the podcast we talk with Allan Zimmerman, founder and maintainer of OpenRPA, a popular open source automation platform. Allan talks with us about how he got started in RPA and what he's working on now, including his work with IoT and the open source IBM backed orchestrator Node-Red.
On this episode of the podcast we speak with Stine Rasmussen, Senior Manager at BDO Denmark. Stine is a leader of IT and Digitization and is allergic to dumb work. She takes a refreshingly common sense approach to automation and RPA. Stine takes us through some strategies for bridging gaps to common organizational pitfalls that RPA-projects face as well as how Excel may be the right tool for the job after all.
On this episode of the podcast we speak with Antti Rauhala, co-founder at Aito. Aito is a predictive database that you can spin up and put into production quickly.Aito replaces the current machine learning tools that have a steep learning curve and generate single-purpose models. It seems like it could be a great fit for a variety of RPA applications. We talk to Antti about his background, the genesis of Aito and where the company is headed
We chat with Tom Kelshaw, managing partner, operations, and technology at Wavemaker, a global agency under the WPP umbrella. Tom walks us through his automation practice and how he eradicates dumb work. This is an interesting application of RPA outside of the usual domain.
We're talking Bot Commander, our new open-source project that creates a human-friendly bot interface. The project can be found on Github - https://github.com/FormulatedAutomation/BotCommander - We talk about the solution and how we use it on our own automation projects. It is built on nextjs, and offers solutions for authorization and authentication with Auth0 out of the box. In short, Bot Commander is an API client that allows you to trigger bot execution from a nice TailwindCSS-based web app.
On this episode of the podcast, we chat with Anders Jensen an RPA Developer and author of the Anders Jensen RPA YouTube Channel. Anders has an interesting back story, coming from the world of online poker. We chat through his evolution into a full-time automation career and the growth of his fantastic YouTube channel.
In this episode we speak to M. Scott Ford, the Chief Code Whisperer at Corgibytes. A company that focuses on mending software. He is also the host of one of our favorite podcasts - Legacy Code Rocks. This episode is all about legacy code, a topic that is really near and dear to the RPA community.
Just a note this episode may get technical but have some solid lessons for anybody dealing with tech that frightens them.
On this episode of the podcast, we talk to co-founders Jackson Ostler and Dave Aditya about their company Plena Data. Plena has built their own RPA platform and has focused the offering on some very specific finance and accounting use cases. We talk about their experience getting into the RPA space as well as their model for how they operate and deliver value to their customers.
Mark and Brent catch back up with Antti Karjalainen the CEO of Robocorp. Robocorp is the leading open-source RPA company that has recently released their GA release. We dive into how they are supporting other open-source projects in the space and what tools are in the works in the coming months. We also talk about how community-driven projects can help the initiatives of the company.
We chat through how the team and Antti himself manages remote work and growing a team during the COVID-19 pandemic. Brent shares his experience hiring automation engineers on upwork to write automation in Robot Framework. Antti reveals some upcoming content that is in the works including an upcoming certification course.
Also Robocorp is hiring!
Brent and Mark chat with Babu Sivadasan, CEO of Jiffy.ai. Jiffy is an IPA (Intelligent Process Automation) platform that is meant for scale. We get a background on Babu and why he got into the space. We also dive into some of the key features needed to execute IPA. Babu talks to us about leadership qualities for successfully ushering automation through an organization. We also talk about how change affects automation and the timescale lens that Babu looks at automation through.
We speak with Dmitry Karpov the Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Electroneek. Dmitry has a rich background in automation and entrepreneurship. Dmitry walks us through his experiences and how Electroneek is different than the competitors in the space. We discuss what ingredients are needed for RPA to flourish in an organization.
In this episode, we have a conversation with Guy Kirkwood, UiPath's Chief Evangelist. We discuss his story and perspective as hire number 27 back in 2015 to the current state of the company and marketplace. Guy talks about the reality of implementing RPA and what effect it has on culture or "Mood Music" as he calls it.
We also dive into what the future holds for the RPA space, some exciting features on the UiPath roadmap and the real value of human capital.
Mark and Brent walk through the week's news and dive into what is included in the Robocode General Availability release. Robocode is an exciting company making waves in the open-source RPA space. We got access to the product and walk through some of the high-level features and pricing.
Tom has a technical background and got his start in publishing literally publishing his code to magazines. He got exposed to RPA when he was writing his book on AI and found there wasn't much available about RPA. In digging into RPA he spoke with several CEOs and immersed himself in the space. We chatted about what is happening in this space. His response - the winners are winning. There are over 70+ vendors in the space and the competition is tight. Most companies interested in adopting RPA are likely to rely on a Gartner report to even start the vendor selection process.
What of mid-market RPA? Enterprise RPA is growing and the ROI is convincing. We chat through the notion of how the smaller companies may benefit but the adoption issues that come from licensing to start. Why can't you just get a clear picture of what it will cost to use most RPA software?
We chat through the players and recognize that Microsoft wants it all. The price compression in the space (for licensing) is not yet happening but will. Tom predicts that Amazon and Google will likely get involved through acquisitions.
Tom teaches Brent what BPM software is and how it got it's roots. We cap off the conversation in talking about open-source RPA and the unique challenges and possibilities it contains.
Mark and Brent dig into the latest news in the RPA space. With fundraising happening left and right, what will that mean for the RPA space in general. We gaze into the crystal ball and make some initial predictions. Also, Mark talks about the new open-source robot-profiler project that is a power tool for understanding the environment that your bots run on.
Mikkel has an interesting background. He came from the world of hardware, working in physical robotics. It isn't a mystery that lessons in the physical space carried over to the software space.
We went into what RPA looks like in the public sector. What platform they selected and why and understood where RPA plays best. We also heard about a blossoming citizen-developer program. An interesting approach to a difficult space of non-technical user adoption.
Mikkel told us more about the robust environment surrounding over 40 bots across 9 VMs. The business units that leverage the bots ultimately control the bots but Mikkel and his team take great care to build and maintain a set of common libraries. This approach requires diligent effort is paying dividends to avoid downstream headaches and reduce bot breakage.
Brent and Mark share some sample code:
- Brent's Search and Store Example
- Mark's OTP Library
We dive through these examples to demonstrate how Robot Framework and RPA Framework work together. We examine the landscape is like for developers to use these Python-based open-source automation tools. Take a look at the code in conjunction with this podcast to follow along. Mark and Brent discuss what the difference between this toolset is vs the big RPA players (UI Path, AA, Blue Prism).
Rob Valdez of Kaufman Rossin joins us to talk about his experiences with RPA in the financial and banking sector. Rob got his organization into RPA from a shark-tank-style competition and it has since flourished into an external offering. We talk platforms and the impact of licensing (specifically community licenses). We also dive into what the term RPA means to Rob.
We went in-depth on the state of open-source robotic automation with Antti Karjalainen aka Antti from Robocorp. We dove into Robocorp's upcoming offerings and the roots of Robot Framework.
We interview Marshall Sied with Ashling Partners about his experience implementing RPA and automation for their clients.
This week we talk about whats happening in the RPA space, like recent venture investments in Tonkean and Electroneek. We'll also talk a bit about legacy COBOL and why we think low-code is still code.
In this episode, Brent and Mark discuss the 12 factors of what makes a successful RPA project.