Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: EdgeVerve CEO Sateesh Seetharamiah (Part 1)

We explore the topic of Vertical AI further in this interview.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to EdgeVerve.

Sateesh Seetharamiah: I’m the CEO of EdgeVerve. EdgeVerve is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infosys. I’m an entrepreneur. I started companies and then later joined Infosys to see how similar startup ideas could be harnessed in the context of large enterprises. That’s what I’ve been doing. EdgeVerve is one example of taking innovation in large enterprises for large enterprises.

Just to dial back a little bit, I started in the early days before IoT was called IoT. You mentioned MIT. I was one of the founding members of MIT Auto-ID Lab. At that time, I was working at Brambles. It’s an industrial services company. We were trying to solve a very unique problem. We had over five million assets.

Sramana Mitra: Physical assets?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: Yes, physical assets. It was used in multiple industries. They had asked me to see how technology can be leveraged to bring more visibility to their supply chain. It was through that that I learned a lot more about the supply chain. That got me going. This was in 1999. That led me to Princeton.

Even Proctor & Gamble was trying to solve a similar problem. We realized that Philip Morris was trying to solve this problem. A few of us came together. We all came together to say, “What kind of technology can we harness to provide visibility to millions and millions of assets? That led us to RFID. It was relatively early days. There were a lot of interoperability issues.

Sramana Mitra: At that time, RFID was the only way to do it.

Sateesh Seetharamiah: Now it’s so pervasive. At that time, it was novel. Then we came up with many use cases to solve. We started dreaming of a very different world where all things can be connected. One of the colleagues I was working with named it IoT. We didn’t realize that the name would stick, but it stuck around. That’s how I got into the technology sphere. I’ve been excited ever since then.

Sramana Mitra: Is EdgeVerve also in the logistics space?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: We’re a digital platform. We are in three spaces. One is in intelligent automation. We leverage AI to drive different kinds of automation. The second space is in the document digitization space. That also leverages extensive AI capabilities. We are also in the supply chain space. We have an offering called TradeEdge. Over $200 billion of retail trade is processed on it. We have three digital platforms that are used by Global 2000 companies.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the company?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: We’re in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers are we talking about?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: We work with around 400 customers. This is across different verticals and geographies.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: EdgeVerve CEO Sateesh Seetharamiah
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