In an exclusive interview with Prasanna Kr. Srivastava for Sify.com, Satyen Vyas, CEO at SymphonyAI Summit, gets candid about the power of AI and automation, its impact on the workplace, and the next industrial revolution in India.
Vyas has been instrumental in the company’s growth from a startup to a global entity with customers and partners in North America, India, Southeast Asia and GCC regions.
Prior to SymphonyAI Summit, he was a Vice President at IBM in India and South Asia, where he was instrumental in growing the company’s x-Series servers to a market leadership position. He also served as General Manager for mid markets at Dell India.
Excerpts from the interview:
What’s the story behind the unique nomenclature SymphonyAI Summit?
SymphonyAI Summit is a group company of SymphonyAI. Led by Dr. Romesh Wadhwani, SymphonyAI is a $1B group with a mission to “Transform Business Enterprises with AI Solutions”.
All group companies have the prefix Symphony displaying the synergy in our existence.
SymphonyAI Summit offers AI-powered Enterprise and IT Service Management solutions to business enterprises. Our goal is to transforms the way enterprises work by leveraging AI and Automation technologies to deliver consumer-grade, responsive digital workflow to employees for their IT and Enterprise service needs.
Tell us more about AI driven IT management.
It has been our constant endeavour to provide employees with a consumerized service experience at the workplace. Modern consumers are pampered with convenience and comfort at each touchpoint. Whether it is online shopping or banking, customers get seamless and user-friendly experiences wherever they go. This has given rise to their expectations at the workplace too. With convenience at every step in their personal space, why should employee service experience be complex and tedious? This shift in consumers’ behaviour is pushing organizations to embrace new ways of providing employee services to their workforce.
Technology that propels productivity is always at the forefront. Where legacy tools limit productivity, transformative technologies like AI and Automation have opened avenues of new promises for productivity, issue resolution, agent effectiveness, and complete IT control. Harnessing the power of AI and Automation have helped technology decision makers resolve issues faster and more efficiently even during the tough times of COVID-19.
SymphonyAI Summit ensures that its AI-driven knowledge intelligence helps organizations drive digital transformation by integrating IT Service Management (ITSM), Enterprise Service Management (ESM), IT Asset Management (ITAM), AI-driven Digital Agent, and Service Automation in a single easy-to-use software suite.
SymphonyAI Summit’s single service portal connects people, functions, and systems to accelerate business processes and enhance productivity.
AI driven IT management has helped many of our clients provide their employees with faster resolution, empowering them to thrive and be more productive.
In your opinion have we over-estimated the power of AI?
On the contrary, we believe we haven’t utilized its capabilities to the maximum, although adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to increase, and the technology is generating returns. Enterprises are leveraging AI across multiple areas of business and seeing results. However, it is not yet utilized to its full potential. A lot of work remains to scale impact, manage risks and retain workforce. Only a few high performers take the lead to show the way. There is still a huge gap between implementing AI into processes and scaling it up for profits. It needs a transformational strategy combining people, processes and technology to realize the multiplying power of AI
Has cloud benefited AI?
Cloud and AI are interlinked in many ways. AI technologies such as Machine Learning and NLP learn from large volumes of data to make predictions and solve potential problems before the user even notices them. The scalability and availability that cloud ensures help process large volumes of data and derive actionable insights. We could conveniently say that these two technologies are emerging as one to empower us with information and insights.
Is India prepared for 5th Industrial revolution?
5th industrial revolution is not too different from the 4th. While the 4th introduced us to the emerging technologies, with AI making grand entry into enterprises ousting the legacy systems, 5th IR is witnessing the amalgamation of humans and machines at the workplace.
The fear of AI taking away jobs is reducing, and the coming together of Artificial and human intelligence is what is driving the 5th industrial revolution.
Enterprises in India are moving towards harnessing the unique attributes of AI and empowering employees and equipping them with more insights to make better, and informed decisions.
What role do you envisage for SymphonyAI Summit in the 5IR?
We have always believed that employees are the first customers of enterprises and the main anchor that takes the business to the next level. Therefore, it becomes critical to keep them empowered and satisfied.
We are at the forefront of this paradigm shift wherein machine and humans are working together towards productivity.
We are geared to empower organizations to leverage the benefits of the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine reasoning to IT and Enterprise Service Management, while keeping the scope for human interference and intelligence intact.
