AI is becoming more mainstream and it is basically eclipsing all of tech, says Fractal's Srikanth Velamakanni.
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00:00 - Hello and welcome to Energy Profit.
00:01 We are at the NASSCOM event today
00:03 and speaking to us from the sidelines of the event
00:05 is Mr. Srikant, he's the CEO of Fractal Analytics,
00:08 an AI company that has been in existence
00:09 for more than two decades, if I may say so.
00:12 Srikant, welcome to Energy Profit.
00:14 - Thank you, great to be here.
00:15 - Okay, first up, you were here last year,
00:17 we were also here last year.
00:18 What is the sense that change that you're seeing
00:21 from last year compared to this year,
00:22 especially where as AI, the conversation is concerned?
00:25 - See, last 31 years,
00:27 NTLF has been the flagship tech event in India.
00:30 But this year, it's all focused on AI.
00:33 It's AI is the only topic everybody's talking about.
00:36 And that is also a reflection of how AI and tech
00:39 have merged together.
00:40 So almost everything exciting in tech is now AI driven.
00:43 And you can see that reflect in the energy levels,
00:46 in the conversations we had Fei-Fei Li to begin with,
00:49 and then we had Mustafa Suleiman
00:50 from Inflection and DeepMind.
00:52 And then we had JP Kothua from Microsoft.
00:54 The entire panel of people have been on the show so far
00:58 are all AI practitioners and AI evangelists.
01:01 So it's a huge difference,
01:03 because AI is becoming more mainstream
01:05 and it is basically eclipsing all of tech.
01:07 So all of tech is now AI.
01:09 - All right, so what is the sense
01:11 that you're getting from visitors here?
01:12 You briefly dwelt on it.
01:14 Just give us what they're sensing from this event.
01:16 What are the takeaways from this event
01:17 that may have they have for the coming years?
01:20 - See, in general, people are very keen to understand
01:23 what is this AI beast?
01:24 It's such a big new phenomenon.
01:27 There's so much conversation.
01:29 People are saying, countries are saying,
01:31 AI will determine who's going to lead the world.
01:34 In that world, they're saying, how does it affect me?
01:37 What should I do differently?
01:39 What should I learn?
01:40 If I'm in the tech industry, is my job at risk?
01:43 Because coding assistants have come in
01:45 which are automating coding.
01:47 So how do I navigate this in order to be competitive?
01:50 They know it's exciting, AI is exciting.
01:52 They're trying to figure out what is my role in AI
01:55 and how can I use AI to get better
01:57 and make progress in my own lives?
01:59 I think companies are thinking of
02:00 how can I leverage this trend in order to get more business
02:03 and how do I grow my business with AI?
02:05 - All right, we were attending your session some time back
02:08 where you mentioned that AI is the new electricity.
02:10 And you also dwelt on the fact about
02:12 the jobs of coders going ahead.
02:14 Can you just tell us something about those lines as well?
02:17 - So I think the key point is that
02:19 six million people in India write software code
02:22 for a living every day.
02:24 And these coding assistants, AI driven coding assistants
02:27 have replaced or augmented coders.
02:29 So what's happening is instead of writing code from scratch,
02:33 I will ask an AI assistant to write the initial code
02:36 and then work on it.
02:37 Or I might write the initial code
02:38 and then ask AI to debug it.
02:40 Or create test cases or create documentation.
02:44 In all of these activities,
02:45 there's almost a 50% improvement in productivity
02:48 or even higher.
02:49 Which means that if I was taking 10 hours,
02:51 I may take only six hours now to do that work.
02:53 So that is the world in which we're living.
02:56 Then what happens to the six million people?
02:58 Do we need all the six million people?
02:59 Or because of this demand in AI,
03:02 demand will expand and explode so much
03:05 that we'll actually need more than six million.
03:06 So this question is at the center of everything.
03:09 And depending on who you ask, people have different views.
03:11 And that was what I was trying to tease out
03:13 as to what is going on in the world of AI
03:15 and how it affects the software industry per se,
03:18 apart from all the other industries as well.
03:20 >> Okay, so essentially not an impact on jobs,
03:23 but actually more on productivity.
03:24 >> Productivity and therefore potentially impact on jobs,
03:27 unless the demand really expands dramatically.
03:30 And we think it should.
03:32 Every time a cost of a price of a good comes down
03:35 and it's kind of a technology good,
03:37 the adoption picks up dramatically.
03:39 So there's so much need for tech in the world.
03:42 We expect that everything has to be more techified.
03:45 We expect our cars to be smarter,
03:46 our refrigerators to be smarter,
03:48 our phones to be smarter,
03:49 and everything else, right?
03:50 Even this mic should be more smart.
03:52 Everything should be smarter.
03:53 So in which case there's need for more and more tech and AI
03:56 to make these products more smarter.
03:57 So when that smartness, yes productivity will improve,
04:00 but demand will significantly improve.
04:02 And a third big thing here is also the user interface.
04:04 How we embrace technology.
04:07 Technology has been typically very clunky.
04:10 So now we expect technology to be much more human-like,
04:12 much more easy to use.
04:14 >> Essentially flowing like electricity
04:15 as what you pointed out.
04:16 So a couple of last questions.
04:18 What are you at Fractal doing on the generative AI space
04:22 at this point of time
04:23 and what we can look forward to from you?
04:24 >> So Fractal has been in the business of powering
04:27 every human decision through AI.
04:29 That's been what we've been doing
04:30 and it's great to be in that space for this long
04:33 and to suddenly see it explode
04:35 like the way it is exploding.
04:36 So we're seeing a lot of enterprise adoption of AI.
04:39 So it's very exciting that way.
04:41 And at Fractal we are building a lot of AI tools
04:44 that are hopefully change the world.
04:46 So for example, one of them is called Collido.AI
04:49 and it is actually generating images from scratch
04:51 through Indian languages.
04:52 So you can type in Assamese or Udaya
04:54 or Bengali or Hindi or Marathi
04:56 and you can generate beautiful images from there
04:59 and it's free to all at Collido.AI.
05:01 So that's one example.
05:02 So what we are doing is apart from working
05:05 with the large enterprise of the world,
05:06 the Fortune 100 companies
05:07 and driving AI adoption in those companies,
05:10 we're also seeing what kind of AI tools can we build
05:12 for the common person, everyone,
05:14 and which also builds the Fractal brand
05:16 and attracts great talent to come and work for us.
05:19 >> So innovation as well as service from your company.
05:22 >> Of course, it's all about innovation
05:23 because frankly AI is that electricity
05:27 which will power and which will sort of
05:29 create the intelligence in everything that we do.
05:31 So everything that Fractal does with Fortune 100 companies
05:33 is also about very innovative new stuff.
05:35 But if they're doing something in a certain way,
05:37 how can we infuse intelligence and productivity
05:40 and better user interface
05:41 in order to drive greater impact?
05:43 That's really at the heart of everything that Fractal does.
05:45 >> All right.
05:46 We also came to know about the Marshall Goldsmith bot
05:48 that you have deployed.
05:49 Just talk to us a bit about that as well.
05:52 >> So Marshall Goldsmith is one of the leading
05:53 executive coaches in the world.
05:55 He coaches, he has coached Alan Mullally,
05:57 used to be the CEO of Ford.
05:59 So he's obviously one of the most respected coaches
06:01 in the world.
06:02 He's 74 years old and he's been thinking lately
06:05 that what happens to my legacy?
06:06 I've written all these 27 books.
06:08 I have a million words spoken, hundreds of videos done.
06:12 Can somebody capture all of that?
06:13 Capture my voice, my video, and just be Marshall Goldsmith
06:18 as a virtual Marshall Goldsmith coach in the world?
06:20 So we have done that.
06:21 So we've taken his million plus words,
06:23 we've taken his voice samples, his video samples,
06:26 and now MarshallGoldsmith.ai is available
06:29 to coach everyone.
06:30 In fact, a couple of weeks back,
06:31 Marshall went and met one of the CEOs
06:33 of Fortune 100 companies,
06:34 and he used MarshallGoldsmith.ai to actually coach.
06:37 Because he says that MarshallGoldsmith.ai
06:40 is a better version of Marshall himself.
06:42 And we expect coaches to use it,
06:44 we expect individuals, anybody and everybody can use it.
06:47 It's a free tool.
06:49 And the idea is like it's a guru Dakshina
06:51 because I've been fortunate enough
06:52 to have Marshall as my guru.
06:54 - Okay, all right.
06:55 Thank you so much, Shrikant, for joining us today.
06:57 Thank you viewers for tuning in.
06:58 This is Tushar for NTD Profit.
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