A Global Business Services department takes responsibility for maximizing efficiency in costs and processes. It’s also an important driver of digital transformation in enterprise.

The GBS team at multinational food, snack and beverage corporation PepsiCo Inc. is a pioneer of intelligent automation, leveraging the capabilities of UiPath Inc. to help it accomplish its digital transformation goals.

“Not every automation project is going to be transformation project, but for every transformation project you will find the automation at the heart and the core of it,” said Akbar Thobani (pictured, right), global lead of intelligent automation and artificial intelligence at PepsiCo Inc.

Thobani and Param Kahlon (pictured, left), chief product officer of UiPath, spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and David Nicholson at UiPath Forward, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the partnership between the companies and how UiPath has evolved its automation platform to meet the needs of enterprise customers. (* Disclosure below.)

UiPath upgrades its business automation platform

Companies are looking to take the next step with automation by embedding it as a core tenet of their digital transformation journey, according to Kahlon.

“They’re saying that it’s no longer just an automation tool, ‘It’s the way we operate. It’s the way we innovate in the organization,’” he stated.

In response, UiPath announced enhancements to its business automation platform to meet enterprise demands. There are three unique but connected layers of the platform: discover, automate and operate. Discover is about identifying the processes to automate and managing the return on investment, Kahlon explained. Automate is the level where UiPath applies semantic automation to identify the data, documents, screens and communication that forms the digital building blocks of an enterprise. And the third layer addresses the requirement of enterprises to operate at scale.

“You’re processing not just a task a thousand times, but you are fulfilling millions of transactions. You’re looking at trillions of records to identify processes. You need scalable enterprise platform that’s able to ingest a lot of data, report on metrics and has reporting efficiency,” he said. “So that’s what we’ve announced … an automation platform that companies can put at the center of the digital transformation journey.”

PepsiCo’s GBS was an early adopter of UiPath’s platform, which Thobani describes as “a very critical component to our digital transformation capability” that is “leveraged across PepsiCo.”

The company encourages citizen developers, inside and outside of GBS, to take advantage of implementing automation within their operations.

“[If] you have that muscle, you have that resource and you have that power. Uou definitely want to utilize that,” Thobani said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the UiPath Forward event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the UiPath Forward event. Neither UiPath Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE