Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: EdgeVerve CEO Sateesh Seetharamiah (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s pick three use cases and talk about what problem are you solving. What is exciting about that use case?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: I’ll pick three use cases that are publicly available. One of them is Philips. Philips had an opportunity to drive tremendous automation in its entire accounting and finance space. They had hundreds of people. Reliability was not up to the mark. There was a tremendous opportunity not just in terms of automation but also in terms of timely and efficient interventions.

Today, it’s one of the largest automation implementations that exist on Azure worldwide. Philips has gone ahead and declared that they’ve been able to solve millions of man-hours leveraging this automation suite which we call AssistEdge.

Sramana Mitra: Automation in what?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: Month-end closes is an example. These large enterprises come from an age where they use large enterprise systems. That has value but has created its own problems. In the case of Philips, they have multiple instances of SAP where closes had to be done. There were hundreds of people who had to work day and night to manage these.

We have deployed bots to mimic human actions. Every click that a human does is completely automated. It is almost like a bot that’s doing the human work on an enterprise application. That’s what AssistEdge does.

Sramana Mitra: Let me summarize what I hear. There is an underlying finance system that you are working with. Your technology interfaces with an existing system from Oracle or SAP. Then you are introducing bot-driven automation into specific workflows within that system.

Sateesh Seetharamiah: Correct. And working across multiple applications.

Sramana Mitra: Double-click down one more level and give me an example that a bot would automate that used to be done by humans before.

Sateesh Seetharamiah: I’ll take a different example. Let’s go to logistics. They bid every single day to get trucks assigned to service a load. That truck and the load had to be bid. This whole bidding process is done on a portal. They used to have logistics operators sitting there taking their orders from the system. They used to go to this portal and make decisions. There’s a central system that serves all the bidding for all the logistics companies.

What we have been able to do is take all the flow where a human would have been involved. We take the orders from the backend system and then we go into that portal to pull out information from that screen. The bot is seeing something on the portal that a human would have seen. It’s able to pull that information out and make necessary decisions and close that bid.

All this bidding would have been done by a human. The faster and quicker the bid value, the more you fulfill orders and get a better price. Using bots, this logistics company has been able to do this phenomenally well.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: EdgeVerve CEO Sateesh Seetharamiah
1 2 3 4