Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: EdgeVerve CEO Sateesh Seetharamiah (Part 4)

Sateesh Seetharamiah: I’ll give you an example. Today, 80% of data is hidden in documents in enterprises and is very inaccessible. Why don’t we apply AI to solve this problem? Let’s build a horizontal platform – a domain-agnostic platform – to extract information. While the platform can do it, as soon as you start throwing it to a customer, they say, “What do I do with it?” It’s a very natural question.

We went through an exercise of saying, “What are the areas that we can pick?” This is a problem that’s faced by many entrepreneurs. We don’t have domain capabilities. We are technologists. We build horizontal platforms. How do I bridge that gap? We decided to engage with a customer.

Sramana Mitra: That kind of solution formulation is happening in two ways. It’s happening either through customer engagements if you can find lighthouse customers who are willing to bet on your technology. The other way is where entrepreneur teams are coming out of those organizations. They pair off with somebody who’s a deep horizontal technologist.

Sateesh Seetharamiah: We picked an area in the underwriting space. It’s one of the most complex areas. The most critical decision-making in the insurance industry is done by underwriters. The number of documents that they have to go through is enormous. We started working with an insurance company and built ExtractEdge. That has know-how about specific documents that are encountered in this process.

Sramana Mitra: This is an example where you have learned through the customer.

Sateesh Seetharamiah: Exactly. We’ve hired a couple of people who had domain knowledge.

Sramana Mitra: You can’t do that in every domain.

Sateesh Seetharamiah: Then the next question is, what do you do with your platform?

Sramana Mitra: Are you doing a PaaS strategy so people can build on top of your platform?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: Exactly. That’s what we intend to do – allow people to build different use cases.

Sramana Mitra: The PaaS initiative hasn’t started yet.

Sateesh Seetharamiah: It’s a work in progress.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve been writing about PaaS.

Sateesh Seetharamiah: On TradeEdge, we’ve done that. We’ve leveraged the horizontal supply chain visibility and allowed people to build analytics on top of the data.

Sramana Mitra: Other ISVs come?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: Yes. Context is not only domain-specific but also customer-specific.

Sramana Mitra: How many ISVs do you have operating on the supply chain platform?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: We have around five ISVs. Infosys is one large one. We are doing PaaS on the supply chain side, but we’re yet to do the same thing on the document digitization space.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to point to areas that you see are good opportunities where an ISV could work on, what are some of those use cases?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: The document extraction is a classic one. It is an area where we would like ISVs to come work with us. That is one area.

Sramana Mitra: Which domain?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: Many domains. We’re looking at KYC for Mortgage processing and Insurance. Many large multinational companies supply beverages to remote areas. They also provide them with cold storage because they want people to experience their product at a certain temperature. But they have no clue what happens to any of this. It’s not in their visibility.

We try to solve this problem to see how we can confirm that only their product is being used in the refrigerator. Second, it’s also at the right temperature. We didn’t realize that this was a problem. It’s the same technology portfolio but applied to a different problem.

Sramana Mitra: This is what the startup world is working on right now. All kinds of vertical problems and applying AI. It was a very interesting conversation. Thank you for your time.

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