Few people have done more to automate the office than Daniel Dines. So it is striking that the UiPath founder’s message on AI and jobs is a plea for patience, and a confession that he feels the anxiety too.
Dines built UiPath into one of Europe’s biggest software success stories by selling robots that do the repetitive parts of white-collar work. The company has since pushed hard into AI agents, most recently by buying the compliance-automation firm WorkFusion. Yet on the company’s podcast, The Path Forward, Dines spent much of his time warning against the very thing his tools enable: cutting staff in a hurry.
“Everybody feels some sort of anxiety, me included,” he said, in conversation with UiPath colleague Andrada Morar. “We don’t know how our kids’ career is gonna look like.” His answer to that unease is a line he repeats often. In times of anxiety, action is the answer.
No Einstein in the data centre
Dines is impatient with the biggest promise of the moment. Some in the industry talk of “50 million Einsteins in the data centre.” He thinks that is only half right. A model, he argues, is an average of everything it has read. “An average by definition doesn’t have a taste.”
