SalesTechStar Interview with Muddu Sudhakar, Founder and CEO at Aisera

Muddu Sudhakar, Founder and CEO at Aisera dives into the growing importance and impact of AI on business revenue operations and end goals in this quick chat:

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Hi Muddu, we’d love to hear about your journey through the years…tell us more about Aisera and what inspired this platform?

My first entrepreneurial venture/startup was Sanera Systems back in 1999/2000. I was at a Silicon Graphics and was fortunate at the time to work with people like Jim Clark and John Hennessy. When I saw what they were doing: disrupting the industry in startups and new ventures it led me to want to become an entrepreneur and start my own company. My first goal was trying to disrupt storage market with Sanera Systems. I wanted to provide a next generation storage solution that would provide high-throughput and a low latency network to connect servers and storage.

I was at ServiceNow in 2017 and talking to my mentor, Ram Shriram — a founding Google board member who has served the last 20 years — about how we can provide a customer service solution for organizations and improve the life of service agents and contact center members. We wanted to come up with a cloud-native AI-first solution to automate mundane and repetitive tasks that are completed by agents and help desk agents. The goal was to improve the experience for the consumer and user by providing a solution which would be available, 24/7, and able to resolve issues in timely manner.

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We’d love to hear your thoughts on the growing impact of AI on the digital customer experience of today?

If you provide the right AI and the right technology, it can actually improve the customer experience. AI is tied to resolutions, provides self-service, and helps support agents get the job done. It’s a win-win situation across three groups: Consumers, Companies, and Service Agents. Being able to leverage AI with customer sentiment and delight helps companies put their customers through the journey they want them to experience.

AI can sense if it’s going to be a positive or negative experience with a customer and correct the course.

In what ways are you seeing new innovations in salestech and revtech redefine the way revenue and sales leaders are innovating their core processes, operations and strategies?

For revenue opportunity and growth, AI should be at the core. It’s the first line of offense. For example, AI should be at the center of subscriptions, renewals, etc., and from a marketing perspective, AI can understand leads in real time and improve user behavior analysis.

AI can improve customer engagement and be able to understand and see the engagement the customer is having with the brand, allowing the brand to upsell a lot faster.

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How can sales leaders and revenue leaders today create better personalized customer experiences; in fact, as the need for better and natural personalization grows, what are some best practices and challenges you’d caution them against?

When it comes to automating the customer journey, one of the most important practices is to understand customer sentiment. Having the historical knowledge from AI will allow for a proactive and productive engagement with users.

Another best practice is to automate processes that relieves tension, like billing and invoices.

Lastly, revenue growth and the ability to up sale based on customer tracking will help sales leaders create better personalized experiences.

What are some core sales technologies and customer experience technologies that you feel should form the crux of a tech stack for a customer facing team?

Conversational AI: Businesses will want to have a web interface that provides 24/7 services, on any device.

RPA: This is for the backend workflow processes for customer facing teams to automate human dependent type tasks.

Ticket Intelligence/Agent Assistants: We still want human to human connection, but also support from AI service agents to provide quick resolution.

Unsupervised AI: This is the big differentiator in artificial intelligence. AI needs to be more intelligent than scripted, supervised AI. Overall, AI needs to run on its own.

A few thoughts on what you feel today’s sales and marketing leaders need to do differently?

What sales and marketing leaders need to do differently is to take risks! To bet on technology, especially emerging technologies to scale business. Organizations need to change their business models in depth, as well as their sales and marketing models, by using AI and be proactive with users. W Listen to user engagement, look at those experiences and fine tune. Take those risks and go for it.

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