Ganesh Gopalan, CEO & Co-Founder
Ganesh Gopalan is a technologist and have worked for companies like IBM and Texas Instruments over the last 20 years. He is a first generation entrepreneur at gnani.ai, a voice first conversational AI platform.
What's your industry?
My company helps improve customer experience across industries using AI technologies.
How did you end up sitting where you are today?
I have been a technologist for several years. Working for innovation leaders like Texas Instruments inspired me to set up my own product company.
What kind of work does your daily role involve?
My job is helping companies improve their customer experience through AI driven automation and analytics. I talk to customers every day to understand their customer experience challenges and leverage gnani.ai’s Unified AI CX platform to radically improve their CX.
What gets you excited about your industry?
The customer experience industry is extremely exciting. Almost every customer is embarking on a journey to improve the CX and it’s really satisfying that we have a ready product to help them.
What's the best advice anyone ever gave you on your journey in business?
The best advice I received early in my career was to keep listening to customers. Recently, based on inputs from several customers, we launched a new product that assists customer service in real time by providing AI based hints and helps in reducing the average customer handling time. This has received great feedback from customers and it was a pleasure to pilot the product with the customers who gave us the ideas to launch the product. Essentially, the more we listen to customers, the more ideas we get.
What's the most challenging project or situation you've overcome to date?
The most challenging situation we had was when we had to scale our automation work with one of our customers overnight to handle over a million automated conversations in a day. It was a great challenge and I wanted to tell the customer that we needed more time, but the team pulled it off. Really proud of the team for making it happen.
Are you using any AI tools right now to help grow your business or, if not, do you plan to use any this year?
Yes, we are fundamentally an AI company that helps customers improve their customer facing business processes – this is typically reflected in their improved customer satisfaction scores.
Overall, do you see AI as a good thing for business?
Yes. AI is definitely good for business – the capability of AI to automate human tasks and analyze large datasets to extract insights is incredible. At gnani.ai, we are amazed every day by the positive impact our AI products are making for our customers. Obviously, care needs to be taken that the AI systems don’t end up being biased or inaccurate- but the potential of doing good is incredible.
Overall, do you see AI as a threat or an opportunity in business?
AI is definitely an opportunity for the customer experience business since the industry is barely getting started to embrace AI and we are already seeing customers benefit from AI in terms of scale and customer satisfaction scores.
If you had one wish for the future of your industry, what would it be?
The one wish is of course that all the customers see the benefits of AI quickly and benefit just like the early adopters have done.
