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For RBC Capital Markets among the analysts that raised its price target on UiPath following recent earnings. In one note from RBC, they said the company is set to continue recent trends like new netnew annual recurring revenue also known as NNAARR for those keeping track. They also cited stabilization and improved profitability despite debate around its role in an increasingly edgentic automation world. That is something we're going to dig into with our next guest.
We got Ashim Gufto with us CFO and COEO of the nine point four billion dollar market cap company. UiPath shares up close to forty percent so far this year. Twelve percent of the float is shorted. Also with us here in the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Studio. Nina Trappman, Bloomberg News senior editor. She writes the CFO Briefing newsletter. You should subscribe to it at Bloomberg dot com slash CFO Briefing. Ashe I'm good to have you on the program. An
application software company robotics automation software. Remind everybody and introduce people who don't know exactly where you play in the industry. Who are your customers and where do you fit?
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. For those who don't know UiPath. UiPath is an AI powered platform that helps businesses and enterprises transform their enterprise processes and organizations to yield productivity and ROLI. We do so by emulating what humans do through both deterministic rules based automation and agentic automation, using agents and AI to automate a lot of those tasks. You know, we own more than half
of the Fortune five hundred companies in the world. We have ten thousand, eight hundred customers that span industries from financial services to healthcare to the US federal government, and we opt in overall over one hundred countries. The reason for that breath is because we are very relevant to what every enterprise of almost any scale does in terms of taking away mundane work to yield for a more productive workforce.
So wait, so do me a favor just because I'm stupid and it's Friday, so tell me give me. I'm okay, I'm really okay with it. Give me just in thirty seconds a quick example of a company that you work with and what you do for them.
Yeah, so Carol Voya Financial. Just as an example, is a large scale bank in the in the in the United States. We're working with them to automate their everything from HR operations such as employee onboarding to financial processes. If you step back and look at almost any any enterprise that's there, think about something as mundane is procured to pay, where you're receiving invoices, entering them into systems, then moving that data that you're entering into systems, doing reconciliations.
That work can be done by software and does not need to be done by for the hours that people are putting into it. You take something like that as a simple example. But then you can go and you look at a Fortune ten healthcare company that we work with. All of their claims processing gets touched by our software, entering data, analyzing and understanding data and with a gentic providing reasoning to allow for decisions to be made. Those are two examples.
Just wondering actume in your finance organization, are you using it there too?
Huge? You know when you look at UiPath. UiPath is scaled from almost zero revenue in twenty seventeen to over one point eight billion dollars of arr to where we are today within our finance department, but across our enterprises, we employ our own software, so we have not had to add people net net to our company, and many years we've been able to achieve that scale both geographically as well as as well as from a revenue perspective
using automation, and that's not unique to us. That is something that a lot of our customers benefit.
Okay, so we all set up a stream a little bit straight. Because there is so much of a narrative and conversation going around AI and what it's going to do to labor market, it sounds like you haven't had to hire people. Reality check, are a lot of companies going to be able to not hire people or even let people go because of what AI or jetic AI is going to be able to do for them?
Yeah, let me make let me make a small nuance here. We've hired people just in the places that provide higher return in terms of revenue or higher pieces of innovation. So in our minds, companies should be hiring and people will continuing to work, but it's going to be working in higher skilled areas and areas that have a higher return to the whether that is working interactively with customers, or whether that is on pace for designing the next fee of innovation to bring to the market over the
next couple of years. So this isn't about hiring less. It's about hiring where you want to and all of that translates to ROI.
A sheem just wondering. We've seen a lot of concerns in recent weeks, specifically in November among investors around AI and whether what we're currently seeing is leading us into a bubble at some point. If you look at your bookings for next year, like, what does that look like? What's the feedback that you're getting from clients if they're thinking about their spending plans for next year. Yeah.
Look, I think what our customers feel is they feel a variable macroeconomic environment. I think like all of us do. And you know a lot of times what we all discuss in our various forums, whether that's formal or informal. What I can tell you is what's encouraging is customers want to see spend the key area is they're not
going to spend unless they see ROI. So as we're looking at our demand funnel, we launched our agentic platform, bringing agents in AI infused automations to enterprises earlier this year. You know, if you go back to maybe twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, there were innovation funds that you could go and say, hey, let me go and spend
two million dollars in just experiment. I think experimental funds are moving down, but the funds that but there's a lot of funds available that for projects and areas that yield ROI. So once we launched our platform, the demand for proof of concepts and pilots. Really we're super encouraged by even in the first five to six months, more than seven hundred of our ten thy eight hundred customers.
They are these companies are going and building agents on our platform and figuring out where are the highest ROI areas. So there's a lot of activity and I think funding will follow activity so long as that there is ROI that is there. And that's what gives us a lot of confidence and optimism as we look into the years ahead for upas.
Actually very briefly, very interested in the work that you do for governments in the US and around the world. How do you characterize that work, like what do you do for them? And also how big of a business is that for UiPath.
Yeah, so the public sector is DOLE. It's greater than ten percent of our revenue base just globally. You know, that was as of two years ago. We haven't disclosed figures since then, but it's you know, I would imagine it's in a similar vein here. I can represent that when you look at the US government, it's everything from you know, from areas of agencies that are in high paper network. They use our software to actually scan, read,
and extract data so they can process things fast. There are there are partners that we work with with the government that are taking papers that are sitting in caves and in parking lots, trailers and trailers of them and digitizing them as a part of their digit transformation. Getting audit compliance across the government, which involves retrieving documents and processing different areas for auditors and business teams. That is a key area that we can look at, but we're
across every agency that is there. What it'd say is we've gotten super close to the government over these last years. We continue to have a great relationship with them, and just like enterprises, what's encouraging is they're looking for high ROI, high impact transformative areas to deploy our software.
All right, well, super interesting and I hope you'll stay in touch so we can continue this conversation. Ashima Gupta, CFO and COO of UiPath joining us from AFAR and of course right here in studio. Nina Trttman, Bloomberg News Senior Editor. She writes the CFO Briefing newsletter, which you can subscribe to at Bloomberg dot com slash CFO Briefing. You get a new one every Sunday in thanks, and she will.
Be featured in an upcoming edition of the Bloomberg CFO Briefing news that are also for more coverage of CFOs, you've got to check out Chief Future Offer, the series from Bloomberg. The newest episode premieres next week. It features the CFO and COO of Hasbro. That's Gina Getter. Watch next Wednesday at nine thirty New York time. This is Bloomberg BusinessWeek Daily