Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Muddu Sudhakar, CEO of Aisera (Part 1)

Aisera is doing some incredibly advanced stuff with AI-driven workflow automation within the customer service space.

Muddu talks eloquently about these innovations. Read on!

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

Muddu Sudhakar: Aisera is close to four years old. We started in late 2017. I came out of ServiceNow to start Aisera. There are now more than 150 employees worldwide. It’s been great so far. I had spent time talking to Ram Shriram. I and Ram wanted to disrupt the customer service and customer support industry mainly to get people to do things in an automated manner.

There are around 40 million in contact centers worldwide. Every large company wants them to continue doing the contact center job whether you are a global system integrator. Let’s say your Salesforce solution is not working. Call centers are the working horsemen who keep our lives going on. They’re doing this manually.

My purpose of creating Aisera is to automate mundane repetitive tasks so we don’t rely on someone else to do it. That’s how we started Aisera. What areas can we automate in customer support? That was our vision. We are a business helping internet helpdesk, which is what we call AI-driven service desk. We built three product lines in the last four years. We’re fortunate to get good customers working with us to build a solution.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the ecosystem map. This is a space I know well. Freshdesk, now Freshworks, was incubated in One Million by One Million. It’s a space that we’ve been very close to for a long time.

Tell me about how you differentiate versus all these players. Where do you come in and what is the differentiator?

Muddu Sudhakar: Other vendors like ServiceNow, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk are ticketing systems. We sit on top of them and make those systems more automated. We have customers using us with Freshservice. Our customer support agent uses Salesforce tickets. The agent will come in to solve it. I don’t want agents to solve tickets; I want AI to solve them automatically. If you want to talk to me, you don’t want to open a ticket. That’s too bureaucratic.

What has happened in the last two years during the pandemic, people are living in distant channels like Zoom and Slack. You ask me a question and I’ll try to respond to that question. You don’t need a human to respond to that question if AI can solve that problem. Why don’t other vendors offer it? Their pricing is per number of tickets or number of seats. The more you automate, the worse for their businesses.

Sramana Mitra: You would reduce the enterprise spend on their system.

Muddu Sudhakar: They partner with us mainly because they also want to do the right thing.

Sramana Mitra: My feeling is that one of the areas where AI is going to have the maximum financial impact is in customer service.

Muddu Sudhakar: There’s a huge value there.

Sramana Mitra: There’s a huge value and opportunity to reduce the number of jobs. From an enterprise value point of view, there’s tremendous value to be had by automating these processes. I can fully understand why this is valuable and interesting.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Muddu Sudhakar, CEO of Aisera
1 2 3