Juan Felipe Mejia gained’t wait to be handed a roadmap. He is aware of AI is essentially altering how his business works, and but he is aware of that his twenty years of experience within the house are invaluable in understanding methods to deploy that expertise for the betterment of a corporation. The present senior director of worldwide gross sales compensation technique and operations at UiPath has constructed groups and deployed comp buildings from scratch sufficient occasions to know what sort of repeatable duties AI can deal with, and methods to give again time to workers to give attention to higher-level work.
“The individuals operating the operations perceive the place the friction actually is, they usually’re those who know methods to take away it,” Mejia says merely. He’s targeted his personal continuous schooling on analyzing simply how AI can impression UiPath, and extra holistically, his business as an entire—modeling incentives, forecasting payout legal responsibility, figuring out plan-design gaps, and serving to the business reply to market shifts sooner than any handbook course of ever may.
A Totally different World View
Mejia is shaping how a worldwide, high-growth tech firm like UiPath rewards and focuses its income engine. However his experience spans a a lot wider vary. The Colombian native has constructed and maintained complicated comp and incentives operations, lots of which have been in world roles, in broadcasting (Univision), banking (JPMorgan Chase), tech (Intralinks), publishing (Wiley), and now agentic automation and AI at UiPath—an organization that has advanced properly past its robotic course of automation roots right into a platform that mixes AI brokers, robots, and folks to automate complicated enterprise workflows.
“Once I come to the desk, I believe I have a look at an issue in a really totally different method than somebody who has solely spent their profession in tech,” the senior director explains. “I’ve a fairly clear view of what corporations throughout a wide range of industries have performed, and I’m in a position to apply that pondering in a extra diversified method. I believe it helps discover higher options.”
These options can have huge implications. In his present position, Mejia has helped drive a 40% minimize in handbook processes and practically $25 million in incremental income by means of incentive redesign and modernization.
“The individuals operating the operations perceive the place the friction actually is, they usually’re those who know methods to take away it.”
Juan Felipe Mejia
What’s most essential to grasp about Mejia is simply how efficient he will be throughout a wide range of roles. That is perhaps as a result of, early on in his profession, he had to be.
However it’s additionally reflective of a thoughts that must be challenged. He’s presently pursuing cloud and AI certifications, and the communities he retains say quite a bit about the place he thinks the sphere is headed. He’s a founding member of the Gross sales Comp Suppose Tank, a personal peer group of senior compensation leaders hosted by Forma.ai, the place practitioners pressure-test concepts and debate the way forward for the self-discipline. He’s additionally a member of the Xactly Buyer Advisory Board (CAB), serving to form the path of one of many business’s main incentive compensation platforms.
“I simply wish to be a part of a corporation the place there’s extra to study,” Mejia says. “I’m at my finest once I will be challenged to tackle complicated world issues.”
Persevering with Curiosity
To this present day, considered one of Mejia’s proudest accomplishments is coming to the US within the early 2000s, with extraordinarily restricted English and an accounting diploma, and making a life for himself. He revalidated his credit and accomplished a enterprise administration diploma at Kean College. Alongside the best way, he participated in an government administration program at Tsinghua College in Beijing.
The expertise in China widened his subject of view and helped set up a worldwide perspective that he would spend the subsequent twenty years refining. It taught him to see past any single market or tradition and gave him context for methods to suppose globally, particularly as a future chief.
Early on, Mejia needed to be scrappy. He functioned in, basically, three totally different roles concurrently at a small mom-and-pop store, the place he discovered he was nice at multitasking. He discovered early that whereas he initially excelled on the books aspect of the enterprise, he may construct rapport and robust relationships with the gross sales aspect of organizations.
If there’s a distinctive scenario, Mejia has in all probability navigated it. He got here to UiPath pre-IPO. At Wiley, a 200-year-old publishing establishment, he needed to modernize a gross sales compensation course of that was largely handbook and deeply rooted previously. At Intralinks, he constructed a crew from scratch. He additionally had the chance to be each the motive force and passenger in M&A offers that noticed his group buying and selling fingers a number of occasions.
“Going by means of such vital M&A, I obtained an actual sense of danger, stability, and long-term design,” Mejia says. “Compensation operations want to carry as much as that type of stress.”
To those that might contemplate shifting to the US, Mejia stresses persistence and humility. He speaks of a buddy, a extremely regarded authorized advisor of their house nation, now navigating a recent begin within the US with far much less recognition. His recommendation: set a couple of milestones, don’t attempt to do every little thing directly, and keep constant, particularly when issues get powerful.
“I’ve been the one who arrives with nothing, who doesn’t converse the language,” Mejia says. “These experiences construct your spine, they usually construct character. You finally determine the way you let these form you.”
