UiPath CEO Daniel Dines wrote a 168-page book with AI: 'It was like a Socratic dialogue'

Good morning. I’ve long thought of Daniel Dines as a kind of philosopher king in business. Growing up in Romania, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of UiPath wanted to be a novelist. Even after he’d created a leading platform for robotic process automation, he’d often start his day with a book, sometimes followed by a nap before turning on his computer. Whether giving advice to entrepreneurs or talking about founder mode, Dines will often insert references to writers like Friedrich Nietzsche or Jack London.

So, when I learned that Dines has written a book called The Work That Remains with Claude and ChatGPT (which you can download here), I was intrigued to find out more. It’s a book about how humans and AI will work together, with Dines outlining a model in which AI proposes, humans decide, and automation executes. It’s 168 pages, around 40,000 words, and can of course be distilled to an AI summary or a haiku. Such are the wonders of technology.

When speaking to Dines, I was less interested in his conclusion than how he arrived at it through AI. “It was really like a Socratic dialogue,” he told me, with each session involving a series of hypotheses, challenges and instructions. “I used two models and did adversarial prompts: This is the theory. Read this article. Create opposing views … The book grew at one point to be almost 100,000 words. AI is extremely verbose, so the real work was cutting it down.”

Those interactions were intense but iterative, with his thesis taking shape over three years as he took time to reflect, observe, read, refine and run a business. “When I started, I didn’t have such a clear idea of where I wanted to land. The ideas I got came through the process of writing the book. Our company strategy, the book, they evolved together,” he said. “I had many evenings and mornings where I couldn’t wait to wake up and write. I was in a complete state of flow. You have to be immersed and challenged and work together and consider it as a partner.”

And what did he learn about the limits of AI? First, that it’s only as good as the data it’s trained on, which makes it better at dealing with a known math problem than a novel idea. Second, that challenging feedback is critical for both AI and humans to avoid hallucinations and getting stuck in a rut. Thoughtful collaboration can work. “I have ideas, but I don’t have the time and the talent to put them on paper in a structure, in a manner that can be consumed by the public at large,” he said.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]

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