Automation Anywhere: CEO History

1 leader · 2003 to present

Who is the CEO of Automation Anywhere?

Mihir Shukla is the CEO of Automation Anywhere, in the role since 2003.

Current CEO: Mihir Shukla (since 2003)
Leaders documented: 1
Founded: 2003

Name	Role	From	To	Years in role
Mihir Shukla	Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Board Chair	2003	Present	23

Company Overview

Automation Anywhere is a large player in the rapidly growing field of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Despite the name, they do not build physical robots; they build 'software bots.' These bots are deployed across large Fortune 500 companies to do the highly boring, repetitive tasks that humans hate, like copying and pasting data from an invoice into an Excel spreadsheet, or migrating customer data between two ancient, incompatible banking systems. They essentially act as a digital workforce that operates 24/7 without making typos. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California.

The business model is enterprise SaaS. Automation Anywhere licenses its Agentic Process Automation System on annual subscriptions: a cloud Control Room platform fee, named licences for the people who build automations, runtime capacity for attended and unattended bots, and consumption pricing for document pages processed and AI agent execution. Renewals are argued on payback, because a deployment that clears a backlog of invoices or service desk tickets can be measured against the labour it replaces. Since the Aisera acquisition the company has also pushed outcome-based pricing, charging for work completed rather than seats, and it signed the largest outcome-based contract in its history in the first quarter of fiscal 2027.

Mihir Shukla

Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Board Chair

2003 – Present

23 years (current)

Key Decisions & Impact

Ran the company on customer revenue for fifteen years, taking no institutional equity until the $250 million Series A announced on July 2, 2018 and the $300 million SoftBank Vision Fund extension that November. Backed a full rewrite of the platform from Windows client-server software to a browser-based cloud-native system, shipped as Enterprise A2019 in October 2019 and rebranded Automation 360 in March 2021. Bought Klevops in 2019 and FortressIQ in 2021, then reset the product line around AI agents at Imagine 2024 and acquired Aisera in November 2025. Held the company to consecutive non-GAAP profitable quarters from the period ended October 31, 2023 onward.

Legacy

Co-founded the company in 2003, has been its only chief executive, and is also board chair. Serves as an information and communications technology governor at the World Economic Forum, where he speaks on agentic enterprise operations.

Source →

Challenges & Strategic Context

Automation Anywhere faces intense strategic and technological disruption in the enterprise automation landscape. Key challenges include aggressive platform competition from Microsoft Power Automate, which bundles desktop and cloud RPA into Microsoft 365 enterprise agreements; the rapid emergence of generative AI autonomous agents threatening to bypass traditional procedural RPA screen-scraping bots; defending mid-market accounts against low-cost open-source and specialized vertical workflow tools; and managing sales cycle elongation across Global 2000 IT departments during macroeconomic software budget reviews.

Automation Anywhere CEO and Leadership FAQ

Who is the current CEO of Automation Anywhere?

Mihir Shukla, who co-founded the company in 2003 and is also board chair. He has been its chief executive without interruption for twenty-three years.

Has Automation Anywhere ever appointed an external CEO?

No. Leadership has stayed with co-founder Mihir Shukla since 2003, through fifteen self-funded years, $840 million of equity funding and two full product resets.

Who is the Chief Financial Officer of Automation Anywhere?

Vikram Khosla is chief financial officer. He is listed in that role on the company's leadership page.

Who runs operations at Automation Anywhere?

Ankur Kothari, a co-founder, is chief operating officer and a member of the board. He previously served as chief revenue officer and as chief customer and strategy officer.

Who leads AI, product and sales?

Adi Kuruganti is chief AI and development officer, Peter White is chief product officer and Jeff Tworek is chief sales officer.

What roles do the other two co-founders hold?

Rushabh Parmani is chief customer officer and Neeti Mehta Shukla is chief impact officer. Both remain on the leadership team alongside Shukla and Kothari.

What major platform shifts has Mihir Shukla overseen?

Three: desktop macros to server-managed RPA through the 2010s, the browser-based rewrite shipped as Enterprise A2019 in October 2019 and rebranded Automation 360 in March 2021, and the move to AI agents announced at Imagine 2024.

What does Shukla mean by the Autonomous Enterprise?

An operating model in which 50% to 80% of processes run autonomously or with AI assistance, employees are more productive, and software costs stop scaling with headcount. It is the company's stated end state for customers.

Who is the CEO of Automation Anywhere?

Co-founder Mihir Shukla serves as the visionary CEO, driving the company's massive transition toward integrating generative AI directly into their legacy RPA bots.