Thinking Differently About Automation at 2Gather: NYC

On November 10, 2022, C2C returned to Google's offices in Chelsea, Manhattan for a 2Gather event all about intelligent automation. The robust event program included a fireside chat with representatives of Granite and Becton, Dickinson, and Company moderated by C2C partner Automation Anywhere, a presentation from partner Palo Alto Networks, a conversation between partner Workspot and their customer MSC, and a panel featuring the speakers from MSC, Workspot, BD, and Granite. Google's Drew Hodun introduced and moderated the event program, but the majority of the content was driven by the participating customers and partners and the guests in attendance with questions and ideas to share with the speakers and with one another.

After a hello and a word on C2C from director of partnerships Marcy Young ( @Marcy.Young ) and an opening address from Drew, Ben Wiley of Automation Anywhere introduced Paul Kostas of Granite and Nabin Patro of BD. and offered some background about Automation Anywhere's mission to build digital workforces for organizations that need them, with a particular focus on business processes like data entry, copy and paste, and parsing emails. Ben also mentioned Automation Anywhere and Google Cloud's joint solutions for office departments like contact centers. Paul made a point of shouting out solutions like AA's Automation 360 and Google Cloud's Doc AI, which Granite used to build 80 automations in 9 months, and Nabin touched on how automation helped manage some of the work that went into BD's manufactured rapid diagnostic test kit for COVID-19.

"The technology is forcing us to think differently."

Next, Akhil Cherukupally, and David Onwukwe of Palo Alto Networks took the stage to walk through some of the technical components of the security platforms the company offers organizations navigating the cloud adoption process. Then Workspot's Olga Lykova ( @OlgaLykovaMBA ) brought up Google Enterprise Account Executive Herman Matfes and Dung La and Angelo D'Aulisa of MSC for a look back through the history of the companies' work together. Olga started things off with an origin story about the Citrix leaders who left their company to start a cloud-hosted platform with Workspot, which turned out to be a superior business model. Then she turned to the other guests to explore how Workspot helped MSC build automations on the front end of their business processes and ultimately implement these automations end to end.

Finally, Drew, Angelo, Dung, Paul, and Nabin returned to the stage for a panel discussion breaking down all of the issues raised during the previous sessions. A question from Drew about how each organization's work has impacted its customers prompted Paul to go long on the benefits of Granite's services. When Angelo gently added, "We're a Granite customer," the audience laughed along with the panelists. "Thank you for being a customer," Paul said. Drew also asked the group about what's coming next at each company. The answers ranged from the concrete to the philosophical. "The technology is forcing us to think differently," Nabin observed. In response to a question from a guest in the audience, Paul acknowledged the human impact of automation and stressed the importance of getting people to feel good about automating processes rather than fearing for the future of their jobs.

As usual, the conversations did not stop here. The speakers and guests continued to share ideas and brainstorm solutions into the networking reception and even the informal dinner that followed, where Clair Hur ( @write2clair ) of Vimeo stopped by to explain how the company is cutting costs significantly after migrating from AWS to Google Cloud. More of these stories will be collected in our upcoming monthly recap post. For now, watch the full recording of the New York event here:

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