Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: EdgeVerve CEO Sateesh Seetharamiah (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The use case that you just described works a lot better in automation than as humans. For humans to look at things and decide at what price to bid and whether to bid or not, there is no way humans can beat AI in doing something like this.

Sateesh Seetharamiah: It was done by humans. Even today.

Sramana Mitra: Wall Street traders made huge amounts of money in functions that don’t need to be done by humans.

Sateesh Seetharamiah: Exactly. What we’re trying to do is to identify similar use cases. There are so many of them. The kind of transformation that happens on the manufacturing floors, which was done by humans, is what we believe enterprises need to be doing. You don’t need a lot of these processes to be executed by humans. That’s the layer. There’s a tremendous amount of opportunity to automate that layer.

Sramana Mitra: There are two kinds of automation. There is pure workflow automation that is not decision-based. It’s not looking at data. It’s not drawing conclusions or making any kind of data-driven information. That’s perfect for AI.

Then there is automation that is not AI automation. Manufacturing pipelines fall in that genre of automation. You brought up manufacturing. Isn’t manufacturing more of the latter kind of pure workflow?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: It is until it comes to quality control. In quality control, there is a lot more AI being used. Most of it looks like the former but there is the latter as well in there. When it comes to systems, there is a tremendous amount of opportunity to self-heal and make decisions. AI-led automation is already there. We’re seeing this transformation happen.

What is interesting is, there are studies that show that 40% of all human effort that goes into an enterprise can be automated. It is not contiguous. There may be pieces and parts. That’s why one of the things we focus on is what can we do to apply automation to amplify human potential. Can they use it for themselves to understand what opportunities exist and how can they adopt this technology.

Sramana Mitra: Every domain has its own workflow and a ton of domain knowledge that goes into the stuff that you’re talking about. In the world that I inhabit, which is the startup world, people are looking for problems to solve and productize problems, this is one of the most popular areas right now. It’s come to be known as vertical cloud and vertical AI.

We talked about manufacturing. If there’s a particular manufacturing problem that happens everywhere and some startups come in with a solution that automates that problem and builds a product around it, that’s a desirable product for everybody. How much of this are you seeing? How much of these domain-specific solutions are you encountering in the market?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: It’s huge. Massive numbers. For these technologies to make a difference, it has to be very contextual.

Sramana Mitra: Domain knowledge is very critical.

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