Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Now I’m going to ask you about the delivery side. So you and your friend Chandra started the business. How did you grow the implementation team?

Anji Maram: Initially, we relied on some of the people that we worked in the past. We hired them.

Sramana Mitra: You hired them in the US or hired them in India? What is the structure of your company?

Anji Maram: We are close to a thousand people company now. Around 20% are in the US, around 50% are in India. We have another 25% of the team members in Latin America and Philippines. Then we have a sales office in the Middle East in Dubai. That’s the way our teams are distributed.

Sramana Mitra: Why did you do the Philippines?

Anji Maram: The utilities industry specific applications is a specific, very niche application. The application was originally engineered and built in Philippines by a company. Naturally, as there was a talent available in Philippines, it was very hard for us to find the talent in India or other countries. We then had to depend on that talent. Culturally, Philippines is a very committed and very reliable country in terms of the resources.

Sramana Mitra: Yes. We have people in the Philippines as well. So, I’m very familiar with that. Latin America is because of time zone?

Anji Maram: Yes. Our customers demanded that some people should be working in the same time zone. So, we started a team in Brazil and then a few team members are in Costa Rica. We’re trying to see how we can leverage those regions to synergize more globally and then grow.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. So now, help me understand where in this picture does AI come in? Before AI comes in, what kind of margin level were you operating at? What kind of velocity level were you operating at? And what does AI do to that equation?

Anji Maram: AI is a game changer for companies like us. It enables us to think a little differently and bring a lot more value to our customers. As you said, services companies are considered to be low margin and low value businesses compared to product companies.

Sramana Mitra: Not low value, but low valuation.

Anji Maram: Low valuation compared to product companies. But if services companies like us bring solutions or accelerators or products using AI, then we have a strong advantage. The way I approach it is, we’ve built a strong customer base and very trusted relationships.

Our customers really trust us because we always do the right things for them. If somebody like us creates a solution using the trusted relationship and when we take a good solution to the market, our customers would be ready to adopt our solutions, basically provided those are valuable to them.

Our strength has been enterprise systems, whether it is ERP, CRMs, or any supply chain applications, we understand the data and business process of these applications very well. Using our strength, we’re trying to bring more value to our customers using AI on the enterprise data. End of the day, AI operates on the data or AI automations can operate on the applications too.

Our focus now is to use our strength. We created some AI IP recently. It would enable our customers to consolidate the enterprise data in one place and have a conversation with that data using our AI framework. We have two customers already signed up. One customer is already live with this product. We are in the process of enabling for the second customer.

Sramana Mitra: Conversation is around what? Is it sales kind of conversation? Is it internal employee conversation? What kind of conversation are we talking about?

Anji Maram: Typically, CFOs in any medium to large organization go through these challenges. They use multiple diversified systems and struggle to find where the data is, bring the data together, and do their finance operations such as reconciliation, flex analysis or audit. Most of their time is spent in figuring out where the data is, where it is coming from, consolidating the data, and reconciliations.

So, we identified a gap. Typically, a lot of the technology efforts in a company are spent more towards sales, marketing, or engineering rather than towards finance. So, we found that gap and then we started working with our large customers to first bring the data together because that’s when AI works.

Then we started building a conversational AI framework on the data. There are a lot of conversational AI tools, but nobody is focusing on enterprise data. Nobody is training the conversational AI on the core business scenarios. Everybody is coming up with a framework. You can put on your data and then it gives answers, right? But nobody is training to the core domain. We’re training our AI framework to the domain.

Since we started working with finance now, our AI framework really understand the finance language – all the AR and AP scenarios. In addition to that, we are automating a lot more finance processes that were being done manually and introduced mistakes. So, our solution helped CFO organizations to scale fast without putting in a lot of effort and people. Then the data accuracy increased.

Sramana Mitra: The automation increased.

Anji Maram: It’s become more efficient and helping them make a lot more important decisions using the outcome that comes out of the solution.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver
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