Muddu Sudhakar, CEO and Co-Founder of Aisera – Interview Series

Muddu Sudhakar is the CEO and Co-Founder of Aisera, Aisera empowers organizations with business uptime, improved productivity, cost reduction, and a consumer-like self-service experience for both employees and customers.

Muddu Sudhakar is a successful Entrepreneur, Executive and Investor. Muddu has deep product, technology and GTM experience plus knowledge on enterprise markets including Cloud, SaaS, AI/Machine learning, IoT, Cyber Security, Big Data, Storage and chip/Semiconductors

What initially attracted you to machine learning?   

I was attracted to machine learning when I realized how it can be a utility to automate any customer service process and how it can significantly improve customer experience and customer service agent’s lives. Seeing how companies like Tesla and Alexa have created new standards for customer service experience, I wanted to create a platform that can automate enterprise-wide services.

Could you share the genesis story behind Aisera? 

Aisera was founded in 2017 to make a difference in the way employees work by improving the customer experience. We focus on keeping the customer, instead of the organization, in mind throughout the process. This approach can be applied to service-oriented enterprises that employ help desks, customer service, and call centers. The goal is to improve the life of the customer service and contact center agents and to automate repetitive tasks, so agents can perform higher value services.

Could you tell us more about Aisera's Service Management (AISM) solution? 

Aisera is leading today’s transformation to streamlined, enterprise-wide, end-to-end automation for the customer support and employee service desks industry using an AI Service Management (AISM) platform. Aisera’s innovative unsupervised NLP-based conversational AI and RPA solutions offers the world’s first scalable, personalized, proactive, and secure AI self-service experience. This enables unprecedented user satisfaction across requests, business processes, tasks and workflows. Aisera’s global taxonomy includes 5B+ intents and 1T+ phrases for IT, HR, Sales & Customer Service domains. Aisera’s patented and patent-pending AI uses unsupervised NLU, NLP, and NLG to auto-resolve user requests.

Could you define what AISM is?

AISM is Artificial Intelligence Service Management. As an AISM platform, Aisera automates service management with proactive and predictive AI virtual agents to provide resolutions and self-service for user's organization-wide internally and externally. For example, Aisera is integrated into ServiceNow and Salesforce, allowing users to converse with an AI virtual agent that can quickly answer any questions or complete tasks such as password resets.

The conversational AI space is quite competitive, in your opinion what differentiates Aisera from its competition?

Aisera has many differentiating features. However, the most significant, Aisera is more conversationally aware than other AI services. Using unsupervised NLP and NLU, Aisera provides consumers with a unique and personalized experience like they are conversing with a human. Further, Aisera was built with intent and phrase disambiguation which is imperative for understanding exactly what consumers are requesting. With this, Aisera is able to easily respond to any inquiry or even prepare a customer service representative with answers and solutions to the requests.

AISERA self-learns from every interaction, what are some of the different machine learning technologies that are used to do this?

The first machine learning technology used in Aisera to allow it to continue to learn through its interactions is unsupervised NLP and NLU. Aside from this, Aisera uses knowledge graphs, deep learning and is programed with user behavioral algorithms as well as graph algorithms.

Aisera recently partnered with Dartmouth College, could you share some details regarding this collaboration?

Mitch Davis, CIO and Maureen Hennigan, Senior Director, Service Strategy and Design were the drivers of this successful partnership. The leadership team had the vision and perseverance to see the project through, which is imperative for projects of this magnitude.

During COVID-19, Dartmouth launched Aisera’s AI Service Desk, including a virtual assistant, internally known as Dart Infobot (DIB) to students and faculty. Users now interact directly with DIB within Slack or on their client services portal to get their requests resolved in seconds. Aisera’s AI Service Desk solution automates answers to common IT questions and provides proactive user notification and engagement through an all-in-one conversational platform. By leveraging Aisera’s advanced Conversational AI and AI-powered Conversational RPA, Dartmouth delivers natural language self-service resolutions to students and employees. Overall, Dartmouth has continued to be extremely happy with Aisera as their new desk-service delivery model.

For Aisera Customers case studies you can find them here.

Could you walk us through the process for a company that wishes to get on board using the Aisera platform? 

The onboarding process consists of 5 steps that take place over a week. The first step that must be taken is acquiring Aisera’s AI Service Management solution for internal or external service desk use. After this, the organization will begin integrating the technology with one of our collaborative platforms, including Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or through traditional voice or email. After this, the organization will receive credentials to access our knowledge base and AI learning that is fully automated by Aisera. After this access, the onboarding organization will integrate the service with the ticketing system of their choice, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Team Dynamics, Zendesk or Jira. Finally, the onboarding organization will receive credential access to applications, business services, and IT systems for automating actions and workflows—allowing for total workflow automation.

On April 21st, 2021 Aisera announced a new $40M in Series C Funding, Led by Icon Ventures. What does this mean for the future of the company? 

Aisera is on a path of rapid expansion after a time of explosive growth as we continue to deploy our platform across enterprise IT, HR and customer service environments. In fact, we have several partnership announcements coming soon and foresee them continuing as organizations react to the new standards for customer service experience.

In addition to achieving year-over-year growth of 300% and a base of over 65 million users, the company has secured a number of new enterprise customers including: 8×8, Autodesk, Dartmouth College, Dave, McAfee, NJ Transit, and Zoom. Significantly, Aisera provides 65-80% Auto-Resolution Rates for IT service requests and achieves 85% CSAT and ESAT improvement for customers. Aisera’s accelerated growth in partnerships has resulted in the company’s expanded Marketplace App accessibility with partners Microsoft, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. Additionally, Aisera has added new partnerships and integrations with Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams that empower and increase collaboration for enterprise customers, while driving growth for the company.

Is there anything else that you would like to share about Aisera? 

AI technology is a must—this has been proven with the challenges of COVID19. For example, the Dartmouth partnership, Aisera remedied the lack of remote IT support for students and faculty by providing conversational AI to quickly troubleshoot and find solutions.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Aisera.