July 30, 2025
Mihir Shukla, CEO – Automation Anywhere
Unleashing 400M Digital Workers with AI-Powered Automation, Mihir Shukla – CEO Automation Anywhere
Listen on:
Most every C-suite leader wants AI to help their people perform tedious tasks better. We still live in a world where we are stuck doing too many time-consuming, lower impact tasks – like organizing spreadsheets, manually processing forms and data entry, or swiveling information from app to app across your company’s hundreds of applications. Ugh.
Helping the corporate world get closer to a reality where humans are not mired in low-efficiency tasks is Mihir Shukla, Co-Founder and CEO of Automation Anywhere, an Agentic Process Automation (APA) pioneer delivering agentic solutions that leverage AI agents to get work done faster, better and more reliably.
A Silicon Valley veteran, Mihir is a multi-decade pioneer of automation and has a vision to fully deliver an autonomous enterprise, where 80% of work is done through automation or AI-assistance. But what happens to our jobs? For Mihir, it’s important to note that an autonomous enterprise doesn’t eliminate human work – it redefines it. Employees transition from managing repetitive tasks to overseeing AI-driven systems and teams, with the ability to make strategic decisions, drive new business models and focus on delivering strategic impact. Sound good?
With incredible market momentum, top-shelf partners and customers, top marks from analysts and a vision to fuel the future of work by unleashing human potential, they are at the forefront of empowering 400 million automations and AI agent ‘digital workers’ to shape the enterprise of the future – today.
Paving The Path To This Point
The road to getting to the position that Mihir and Automation Anywhere are at is a long one, although with Mihir’s long history of leadership within multi-billion-dollar companies, he probably knows the best way to do it. It all begins with his childhood roots back home in India. When Mihir was growing up, his first time interacting with a computer wasn’t until he went to college and first witnessed the life-changing potential that this technology could have. He thought, “What could I create that could benefit the next generation in leading the next revolution like a computer?” That revolution today is being led by the AI agents that Automation Anywhere employs to fundamentally change how we work.
Putting Their Work Into Practice
One of the scary things about creating a new software product that will be interfacing with a massive consumer base is knowing when it is ready and good enough to ship out. Then, you need to know if it is good enough to bring to your customers. The way Mihir and his team do this is by applying their automation capabilities internally first, using an inside-out approach. Luckily for them, has been a huge success. If you look at customer service for example, “Within three months, 40% of our customer service interactions became autonomous,” says Mihir. “With customers choosing automated responses without human involvement.” This internal use of their automation platform and solutions is one of the reasons they are able to stay ahead.
A Beginner’s Mindset
A piece of wisdom that Mihir has for all current and aspiring leaders is to have a “beginner’s mindset.” This means being like a beginner in a field, where you are forced to learn everything from the ground up, and in doing so, come out with a better grasp of the field or the topic as a whole. Mihir himself did this recently by challenging himself to learn no-code tools through ‘Vibe coding’ – even though he has a degree in software engineering and decades of experience with coding. This ability to learn something new with the curiosity and vigor of a beginner is what Mihir believes will distinguish great leaders in the years to come.
This is also why Mihir and those of us at Reboot Partners urge people to take AI seriously and learn beyond the foundational tools from LLMs like ChatGPT. Pick up that pencil and notebook, challenge yourself to learn something new, and maybe one day you can help us get closer to those Star Trek-level spaceships.
