Chris Duddridge

Chris Duddridge

Area Vice President and Managing Director

Chris Duddridge, Area Vice President and Managing Director, UiPath (UK and Ireland), discusses automation trends, innovation and the impact of COVID-19...

Prior to joining UiPath a year and a half ago, Chris Duddridge spent the past 20 years working within the HR , payroll and ERP software sales where he spent most of his career working for companies like Sage and Deltek, before joining UiPath, progressing through the company to what he is today - Area Vice President and Managing Director at UiPath (UK and Ireland). “What drew me to UiPath was its people and being a part of a new emerging technology sector which was growing faster than any other I’d ever experienced.. I started off leading our enterprise sales team. So I managed a smaller team than I do now, focused on the new client acquisition. I’m now very lucky to represent UiPath UK & Ireland across all business functions from our sales engagements with new clients, but also our existing account management, Pre-Sales, Customer Success, and Partner channels. I’m incredibly fortunate to have an amazing team, who obsess over our customers’ projects and objectives, which makes it a great deal easier for me when we work to amplify our approach across our marketing and PR channels,” says Duddridge.

“UiPath is very different to other companies,” comments Duddridge. “Just four short years ago, it was a Romanian start-up whose co-founders were driven by this vision of making work fun again. There were humble beginnings and this culture of staying humble, accepting feedback and seeking to improve, remaining obsessed with our customers’ success still permeates our present ethos. This vision of shaking up the workplace in order to free up employees from the mundane part of office work with the help of software robots and letting them focus on value-added work like analysis, creative activities, and strategic tasks producing revenue impact made UiPath the global successful company it is today. Dedicated to what we like to call accelerating human achievement, we focus on the whole narrative not just on the commercial gains.”

In the last four years, Duddridge details that the company has seen astronomical growth. “At the tail end of 2018 when I arrived at the company, I joined with about 40 or 50 other people within just the UK. In a very short time we were almost tripling our headcount and in equal measure, tripling the number of customers that we had and the size of those customers, and we were growing at that rate globally too. Today the company is maintaining a steady level of growth and we are focusing on engaging with our customers in a better way to help them grow their use of automation within their businesses as well as bringing new businesses to journey with us.”

Duddridge believes that the company’s biggest strength is its community of partners. “Our partners are all trained individuals who work within large corporations who've embraced learning the services that UiPath provides. I would say these users are the first bastion of how we service our customers. Bringing it back though to UiPath I believe we are incredibly progressive in what we do. Not only are we investing in automation and robotics for reducing the need for humans to complete manual boring repetitive tasks, we have also been investing in our platform making it a true end-to-end hyper automation platform, responding and actually anticipating this mega-trend you'll hear Gartner and other analysts talking about. This involves taking our core platform of RPA and raising its capabilities to respond to real-life demands, such as intelligent automation or end-to-end automation. I would also say the breadth of all of our technology capabilities is now able to get any organisation at any scale on the road to true digital transformation.”

Reflecting on the company’s successes, Duddridge steps back from client wins and looks closer at the organisation itself. “My view on what we've done is our acceleration of a better workplace for people. Keeping it really pertinent to this point in time that we're going through as a business, our core value continues to echo through to the current climate, and we have taken an attitude to try and help not sell, which is something that makes me exceptionally proud. We are looking at where we can help to invest and conduct pro bono initiatives as opposed to an investment that will make our bottom line.”

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