UiPath Co-CEO Rob Enslin came to UiPath a year ago with a mission to help founder Daniel Dines take the robotic process automation giant to the next level. The former president of Google Cloud and SAP talks about sharing the CEO role while positioning UiPath to win in a world shifting to generative AI.
Rob Enslin and Daniel Dines shared a lot of wine, war stories and insights about each other’s backgrounds and values before deciding to team up last year as co-CEOs of UiPath. The company that Dines founded to help customers automate business processes has struggled amid tougher economic conditions and new competition.
But Enslin stepped away from a career of leading large multinational operations to join UiPath because he says he believes the company is well-positioned to lead in the digital transformation of corporate America. He’s also connected with Dines on a personal level.
“We both came from countries which had strife — South Africa and Romania — so we've always been kind of underdogs,” says Enslin. “At the end of the day, we liked each other.”
Still, Enslin knows that his job is to scale the operations. To start, he felt that the focus on RPA, or automating individual processes, was too myopic. “There's no intelligence in it,” he says, arguing that UiPath has an opportunity to define the category of automation itself.
“What ChatGPT brought to the world is an awakening of AI and an understanding that it was not a data-science discussion or an engineering discussion,” but something much broader,” he says.
“I think everything is going to happen faster than we expected,” he says. “We're at that tipping point. I thought that, when I went to Google, the tipping point would happen...the technology wasn't there.”
For more on Enslin’s plans and predictions from here, click on the interview above.
