Daniel Dines, co-founder and CEO of UiPath, does not want knowledge workers thinking that automation is going to take their jobs. Don’t think displace, he says. His word of choice? “Enhance.”
Dines’s company develops robotic process automation (RPA for short). The software “aims to automate manual routine tasks that knowledge workers are performing in front of their computers,” Dines says. As long as a process is rule driven, the robots will be able to emulate the user.
“If you look at most of the knowledge-worker jobs, they consist of a series of tasks, some of them are highly repetitive in nature,” he says. “And these are the ones that we can automate. But many others are much more strategic, are about communication or about social skills, empathy, creativity, and strategic thinking.” Those tasks, Dines says, will remain the work of humans.
Dines joins Fortune cohosts Ellen McGirt and Alan Murray on a recent episode of Leadership Next, a podcast about the changing rules of business leadership, to discuss automation, workplace transformation, and much more. Listen to the full episode below.