The more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s going to be the theme of our article as we do our annual check in with UiPath (PATH), a robotic process automation (RPA) company that just cracked $1 billion in revenue for its wide-ranging automation software for enterprises that does just about everything but […]
The old “John in Mumbai” joke heralds back to the days when Indian support desk agents were given Western-sounding names which didn’t manage to fool anyone. These days that slight accent you hear when calling a support desk is the twang of Tagalog, the predominant language spoken in the Philippines. We’ll just say what everyone […]
While much of our attention has been focused on the seemingly never-ending bull market – pandemic and economic reality be damned – it’s hard not to notice just how much money is being poured into the private market. Global funding to startups in the second quarter of this year was $156 billion. That’s just three […]
Even seasoned investors confuse stock price movements with the quality of the underlying business. We may say to avoid a stock because we don’t believe the business model is economically viable. When the stock doubles the next day because some chump on Reddit decided to manipulate it, people are quick to say “see, you were […]
Just prior to the dot bomb era, evidence was emerging that customer service functions were being offshored. What started with John in Mumbai ended up with Rosie in Manila. Cheaper office space and labor, a greater propensity to please, and a greater degree of “accent neutralization” were all factors in the migration of customer call […]
“Robots are stealing our jobs,” you’ll hear people say. This blanket statement fails to capture the nuances of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). If you take a shower after work, you’re probably going to be just fine. The two industries with the least amount of digitization right now are construction and agriculture. Ironically, both industries […]
The way venture capitalists (VCs) look at business ventures depends on which stage they’re coming in at. American television show Shark Tank gives us a glimpse of what VCs look for in the earliest stages of a business – signs of traction, which usually comes in the form of revenues. “We did $700,000 in sales […]
About four years ago, we first came across the concept of robotic process automation (RPA), which originally sounded to us like some marketing hack had repackaged software automation around the hype in artificial intelligence. A couple of years later, the RPA market suddenly exploded. Gartner estimated revenue grew by 63.1% in 2018 to $846 million, […]
Global equities continue to defy explanation as stocks set new highs in the face of a pandemic that’s decimated entire sectors. Taking a bearish outlook seems like the sensible thing to do. Putting the pandemic and coming American elections aside, the irrationality on display is perhaps what’s most concerning. Thirteen million investors now use Robinhood […]
In a recent piece on hyperautomation, we talked about a success story where a professional services firm saved half a billion dollars by adopting robotic process automation (RPA). That’s the sort of exponential value that’s an easy sell at the C-level. Companies that can manage to implement RPA successfully are now reaping big rewards. Then, […]