Muddu Sudhakar, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Aisera, Talks About AI at Work

For all the focus on productivity and efficiency, the truth is that even the most modern tech companies require workers to do lots and lots of repetitive tasks. Staff in customer service, IT, and HR, among other departments, answer some version of the same questions and solve some version of the same problem, over and over. Muddu Sudhakar, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Aisera, recognizes that as a big waste of talent.

Muddu Sudhakar is a successful entrepreneur, executive and investor with great knowledge on enterprise markets such as Cloud, SaaS, AI/Machine Learning, IoT, and Big Data. He founded Aisera to provide businesses and organizations with consumer-like self-service and automated resolutions. Aisera is a top-tier, VC-funded startup and a strategic partner with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Azure, Google Cloud, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday, Atlassian, and Zendesk.

We asked Muddu about the growing role of AI within enterprises and what possibilities lay ahead.

GD: I understand that Aisera uses AI which allows clients to automate many human-to-human interactions, such as customer service calls or employee calls to the help desk. What are some examples of what Aisera can do, and to what extent does it remove humans from the process?

Muddu Sudhakar: The goal of technology like Conversational AI is to make our lives easier. Our product does that by enabling human capital to take on other roles, remove busy work and create better outcomes. The technology works in accordance and as a complement to human workers to boost productivity. 

For example, Aisera has worked with Zoom to enhance revenue and customer service operations. With more than 200,000 monthly cases from over 150M users and rapid customer growth, Zoom was looking to improve customer experience through self-service and automation. With Aisera, Zoom automated billing and subscriptions (helping accelerate revenue growth), customer service, and technical support with greater than 75% accuracy. Aisera’s platform delivered tangible results, like significant CSAT improvement, 75% automation accuracy improvement and 60% productivity improvement for its agents. 

Another example is the work that Aisera has done with Dartmouth. With long user wait times and high-ticket volumes, Dartmouth was searching for a virtual assistant that provided instant IT support to students and faculty on the channel of their choice. The total ticket volume was over 4,000 tickets per month, severely taxing the 12 support agents tasked with managing the campus service desk. Their goal was to make digital access to learning, teaching, and collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic easy for students and employees, enhancing their overall service experiences. Some key takeaways from this partnership included an 86% auto-resolution rate, 64% increased student and faculty satisfaction and a 21 second (mean-time-to-resolution).

GD: I have heard you use the term “plastic infrastructure”. What is that? Is it something that exists in enterprise systems, or is it something they need to work towards?

Muddu Sudhakar: “Plastic Infrastructure” is one that is more flexible, able to run workloads and malleable. Old, physical servers limit our ability to add new enterprise options like AI and limit the ability to channel human roles to their best position and automate functions that help things run more smoothly.

Enterprise systems need to work toward this. Some hybrid solutions help, but we still need more flexibility in our IT infrastructure. Companies need to embrace automation solutions so they can begin to overhaul their traditional server structures and create a more functional system, able to grow and adapt. Streamlining enterprise processes with automation recovers value from their internal operations and frees human capital to be profitable in new ways.

GD: I have also heard you say that enterprise systems should be proactive, predictive, and prescriptive. What does that mean in practice? Are those systems like that now, or is Aisera meant to transform them into those sorts of systems?

Muddu Sudhakar: Systems are not like that now and they need to change. Physical server-based systems don’t allow for advanced computing or quick changes or growth, and are limiting.

Aisera can absolutely transform enterprise systems by connecting service elements, learning from your customer’s inputs, profile and reacting in ways that create solutions and direction quickly and efficiently. This transforms an IT department of 10 people who can only handle a request at a time to a department of thousands of potential answers, accessed at lightning speed and deployed by Aisera. Now, the 10 IT people can leverage their human capital to build out other IT structures, monitor other parts of the system and all help desk-type duties are solved faster, for more people and with even greater success.

Moving to cloud and more flexible enterprise scenarios allows for machine learning and AI processes to work effectively and prompts innovation. If your system can predict and respond to basic or rote tasks, the workflow immediately improves.

GD: With all due respect for your accomplishments, both academic and in the tech industry, Aisera is up against Amazon, Azure, Google, and probably others I can’t bring to mind. How do you like your chances against them?

Muddu Sudhakar: Everyone in tech is exploring machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the capabilities we gain with cloud computing. But Aisera didn’t start at square one. We trained our systems in a massive language library first and it’s learned from there – we leap frogged NLP learning with our system and now Aisera knows more than 1 trillion words. We’re ahead of the competition.

We’ve also built substantial partnerships. We are Zoom’s virtual assistant. We work with Microsoft. As a new company, we have strong partners that keep us in the lead as the industry continues to innovate.

GD: Anything I’ve neglected to ask about that you want to mention?

Muddu Sudhakar: You’ve likely already met Aisera. We have been deployed in healthcare, financial services, high-tech, education, logistics and nearly every industry vertical. You may have already been serviced by an Aisera virtual assistant.

And as more companies turn to AI to streamline their workflows and offer Digital & Automated Self-Service, Aisera will continue to be at the industry’s forefront.