How an IT Services Startup Wants to Disrupt Itself in the AI Era: Sanjay Jupudi, CEO of Qentelli (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the work force?

Sanjay Jupudi: We just touched 250 people.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers are you servicing?

Sanjay Jupudi: About 30 customers. The good part of what we have done is when we go to customers, we are doing a lot of work for customers instead of just touching the surface.

Sramana Mitra: That’s great. Landing a customer and growing the customer is a good way to build a business. I think it’s good 

to have some amount of risk distribution. Just having one or two customers makes the business very risky. If you have 30 customers, that’s a good risk distribution. At the same time, you can grow them steadily.

Sanjay Jupudi: All of this is because we are confident in signing the contract. Even now, we know what we are getting into. We scope it out really well. Our customers don’t need to go back saying, “We missed this.” Our typical customer is a Director or a VP of IT and not the CIO. They have some reservations about going back for money. The way we de-risk is, we get a very deep understanding of what we are getting into. We spend a lot of time upfront to understand the solution. Once we are ready, we give the contract.

Sramana Mitra: I have one last question. I understand your business. We’re familiar with this model. It’s a tried and true model of scaling companies very effectively. The question that I have is, what do you foresee AI will do to your business and how are you preparing for that?

Sanjay Jupudi: We are bringing AI into our own business.

Sramana Mitra: I was hoping to hear that.

Sanjay Jupudi: It goes back to my childhood memories. It had a lifelong impact. I should disrupt rather than someone disrupting me. Most of our solutions are AI-driven. We go and tell our clients that if you are engaging us for the same project for more than two years, you’re doing something wrong. Everything should be automated.

There are two reasons why we do this. One is, we have a long-lasting impact. I’d rather have a 300 to 500 people company and use automation and AI rather than try to scale it. At the end of the day, we want to deliver faster for our clients. If AI is the way to do it, we’ll use it. We use TensorFlow of Google. We have implemented quite a few AI and machine learning projects for our customers.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. What are you learning?  What are the key takeaways?

Sanjay Jupudi: We are still scratching the surface. I wouldn’t say we are an AI expert. A recent AI project that we have done involved using NLP. We are using some tried and tested NLP protocol. What we have seen is, there are a lot of benefits, but they are not satisfied with what we have done. They are challenging us. It’s an exciting time but we also are aware that everything has a limitation. Managing expectations is one challenge that we face with our customers.

Sramana Mitra: I would be curious to see how your business evolves in the AI universe. Yours is the kind of business that is going to get disrupted as well as there’s a great potential if you disrupt yourself.

Sanjay Jupudi: That’s exactly what we’re doing. We hope to come out as a winner by disrupting and using AI.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : How an IT Services Startup Wants to Disrupt Itself in the AI Era: Sanjay Jupudi, CEO of Qentelli
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