A rigorous and systematic approach to planning, creating, and executing is key for successful AI/ML roadmap: Mr. Chandra Gundlapalli, CriticalRiver

CriticalRiver Technologies is a USA headquartered technology consulting company with a strong expertise in the areas of Digital Transformation, Digital Engagement, and Digital Engineering. Within a short span of time, it has been recognized as trustable solution provider to companies like LinkedIn, Uber, Intel, and Oracle, among others. Digital transformation is not a trend, but a necessity for today’s corporates. Mr. Chandra Gundlapalli, Senior Vice President – Digital Transformation Strategy CriticalRiver shares more insights on the same.

1. How has increased focus on customer engagement paved the way for AI/ML incorporation in Organizations?

Client centricity and satisfaction, along with the right business benefits, are the keys to success for clients as well as for our organization. In order to serve the customers better, we need to shift from a reactive to a proactive addressal system where customer incidents are identified prior to occurrence, as well as help the customers move their products quicker to market to stay ahead of the competition. The scope is not only limited to improving our services in supporting  our customers better,  AI/ML also plays a key role in enhancing our customers to reach their business goals by providing key actionable insights on their line of business along with automation of their business process, the scope is quite extensive and organizations are ready to adopt AI/ML technologies do deal with the disruptions in an efficient way, hence its quite important for us to incorporate AI/ML technologies into our organization asap.

2. AI/ML has aided operational efficiency. How does this help the overall optimum utilization and holistic growth of the organization?

As an IT service provider, CriticalRiver is always looking for ways to maximize the utilization of our workforce and, at the same time, efficiently provide the right services for our customers in developing and managing their business applications. Our services mainly fall into the following main categories:

• Application Development
• Application Maintenance and Support

Support and maintenance entail addressing customer application issues effectively, reducing business application downtime, and ensuring the business even during the most critical times and outrages. The keys to our organization’s and our customers’ success are optimizing resource usage in both development and maintenance areas, automating ALM, and proactively identifying and addressing issues. AI/ML models can predict business application and system outrages so that the responsible team can take the necessary action, as well as assist the development team in predicting the key issues in any new development or CR to reduce the development life cycle. Additionally, automating repetitive tasks and key development processes in the life cycle helps us to optimize resource usage and deliver the artifacts on time, creating a win-win scenario for us and our customers.

3. What is the road map for organizations to follow who are starting out in their AI/ML journey?

Digital transformation is an enterprise-wide undertaking that keeps the business goals of our organization in mind as it determines how new information technologies will be implemented and business processes will be changed to drive growth. The key focus is on developing enterprise AI applications across the organization’s operations, and these applications present new challenges, both technical and organizational in nature.

To succeed at developing and deploying AI applications, organizations must take a rigorous, systematic approach to planning, creating, and executing their AI roadmap. Such an approach will help ensure efficient and effective processes that deliver significant, measurable business impact and economic value.

Organizations must perform the following key activities before determining their road map to AI:

Analyze their business: Analyze their business and their business goals, identify the issues and bottlenecks that hinder their progress towards achieving their goals, and derive specific use cases that can be meaningfully addressed using AI.

Document the business use case: Each identified use case needs to be documented with relevant qualitative and quantitative data that can inform the qualification, prioritization, and development activities.

Qualify use cases: Evaluate each use case candidate for its expected ROI and ease of implementation, including required resources and time to value.

Build a roadmap of AI use cases: Prioritize use cases and sequence them on a timeline for development and deployment.

The organization should also segregate their use cases into small modules and start implementing these in phases so that they can see the benefit quickly, and these plans should also be incorporated into their roadmap.

4. Digital transformation has multi-faceted advantages for clients, employees and the organization, could you expand on a few?

Digital Transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business. It results in fundamental changes to the way a business operates. Organizations across industries enjoy the benefits of digital transformation. It enables businesses to modernize legacy processes, accelerate efficient workflows, strengthen security, and increase profitability. The digital transformation changes the way an organization operates. Systems, processes, workflow, and culture are all part of this process, which affects each level of an organization and impacts the organization, its employees, and its clients.

A few of the benefits that digital transformation brings to organizations at all levels are listed below.

The organization drives the business transformation mainly to improve its operational efficiency and reduce costs. A few of the areas that benefit organizations due to this are:

1. The collection of the right set of data and the analysis and identification of the right metrics from this data are necessary to drive the business forward. By doing this, it produces a single view of the customer journey, operations, production, finance, and business opportunities.
2. Stronger resource management Digital transformation consolidates information and resources into a suite of tools for business. Rather than dispersing software and databases, it consolidates company resources and reduces vendor overlap.
3. Data-driven insights and better customer insights
4. Encourages the digital culture and increases profits, thereby driving growth.
5. improved agility and productivity

Employees of an organization benefited by utilizing their skillsets properly and inducing the right digital culture to ensure growth. Employees with the right tools are tailored to their environment. This digital culture shift is crucial for employees to remain competitive. It forces the upskilling and digital learning of team members to take advantage of the benefits of digital transformation.

Clients will benefit from the improved experience and reduced downtime on the applications they use. With proactive outrage and sentiment prediction in place, clients will benefit by providing the right needs and fulfilling their future business requirements with less business outrage. Overall, digital transformation benefits all aspects of an organization, making it a win-win situation for all parties involved in this digital journey.

5. How does CriticalRiver help diverse verticals maximize automation to ensure seamless experience?

As part of its work with customers, CriticalRiver not only focuses on implementing key transformations to improve operations and prepare for future challenges, but it also looks for ways to drive client growth and help organizations reach their business goals by integrating the right set of tools and techniques into their end-to-end business process.

As a part of our diverse industry presence, we have identified the following areas that need more focus to ensure maximum automation and an enhanced digital experience:

1.Application Lifecycle Automation: As an IT service provider, CriticalRiver works with its clients to develop and maintain business applications for its customers. Since most organizations’ automation is limited to continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), we are focusing on implementing automated processes in all stages of an application’s lifecycle. By developing the following intelligence tools, our team has been able to automate most parts of this process:

1. 1. BPM process to identify the bottlenecks in the process
   2. Application Maturity Model to identify the areas that need automation and improvements to existing automation
   3. Tools to automate all the areas like requirements collection, requirements mapping to technical areas, development, CI, CD, and continuous operations
   4. Predictive incident management combined with proactive incident management
   5. Auto-healing by automating repetitive tasks

2.AI tools on client data to get the key actionable insights and improve the market reach

3.Tools for our clients in the following areas:

• Banking and finance with following tools, payments automation and fraud detection

4.Invoice automation across verticals

5. Automated Infra Cost Optimization on cloud

With these tools, we are able to provide complete visibility on the entire process and optimize resource usage by ensuring focus on the right areas rather than spending time on repetitive manual tasks or tasks that can be automated. These further drives growth, reduces human-induced errors, and ensures faster market reach.

6. What other disruptive technologies and solutions do we foresee coming that will revolutionize the way we operate?

CriticalRiver foresees the certain disruptive innovations disrupting already established systems. These innovations were originally focused on a niche and, with the passing of time, will be able to achieve a good share of the market, overtaking the previous one.

5G Technology

We have seen a lot of discussion on this for years. We do see this changing in the telecommunications sector. 5G will definitively introduce the Internet of Things (IoT) into our daily lives. This disruptive technology will make it possible for all devices to be connected and share information at high speed, enhancing the digital transformation across industries around the globe.

Advanced Virtual Reality

Advanced Virtual Reality will definitely change our entertainment industry as well as bring an authentic revolution in many other areas. A key example will be the use of virtual simulation models prior to the implementation of any new solutions. This will help us to be more flexible and agile in the face of possible changing circumstances.

Big Data

Big Data collects and manages large volumes of data that are then analyzed and applied to a specific area. With this analysis tool, organizations can make more profitable and efficient decisions. This disruptive technology represents a great competitive advantage for companies because it reduces costs, saves time, decreases margins of error in processes, and improves the quality of the final product. 

Smart Cities

Smart cities are those cities that apply Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to improve their infrastructure, mobility, and public services. The aim of Smart Cities is to place people at the center of ecodesign and sustainable development, creating a value network and improving the quality of life of citizens. With the IoT and 5G revolutions, we do see more and more smart cities coming up in the future.

Robotics and computer vision

In recent years, robots’ styles have evolved in order to expand into new areas. Manufacturing companies are exploring smaller robots that team up with human workers to make jobs safer and more efficient. Changes like these have drastically improved several other industries. Some industries can expect some drastic disruption.

 Agriculture: When robotics and CV are used, they will change how farmers do things like weeding, harvesting, spraying pesticides, and measuring land.

 Mining: In the future, robots could be used to get around in flooded mines. They could also use a variety of sensors to find rare minerals and figure out if it’s worth reopening closed mines.

 Healthcare and Manufacturing: We have seen robots being used in these areas, and they could further penetrate these sectors in the future.