Siddhartha Agarwal: Next-gen challenges for gen AI

Anyone can toss out a query to GPT and get impressive results in seconds. Business leaders who want to bring the same utility to the workplace, however, face innumerable questions and challenges—from data security and defining use cases to rethinking how software is designed and coded. 

In a recent panel discussion from AWS re:Invent, Siddhartha Agarwal, Freshworks senior VP of product strategy, joined a panel with several other SaaS executives—Matt Bell of Anthropic, Glen Nethercutt of Genesys, Jeremiah Stone of SnapLogic, and Andy Perkins and Sherry Marcus of AWS—and offered his take on next-phase opportunities for generative AI in the enterprise.

Democratizing AI

“Our real role is to democratize AI for this huge customer base all the way from SMB to enterprise,” said Agarwal. Generative AI “made us think a lot more about how to change our roadmap to be able to deliver [customer] needs for self-service and to enhance how self-service could be done.”

Data-driven bot design

In sectors such as retail where merchants compete with thin profit margins, any incremental improvement in customer experience delivered through chatbots can directly impact a company’s bottom line.

Read also: 5 strategies to reduce generative AI risk

With generative AI, Agarwal explained, “one of the things that we think will disrupt” the industry is “leveraging all the data that we have, across all the customer support conversations that have happened across our 65,000 customers. We are able to go in and figure it out for retail: What are all the customers’ questions that are being asked?” 

That capability could prove a critical one for retailers, he said, because with gen-AI-enhanced experience, “the margin cost equation goes down because of leveraging generative AI and the data that we have.”

Reinventing the software supply chain

One key trend generative AI is driving, Agarwal said, is “how our supply chain for building software is going to change.” He sees a seismic shift happening in software development processes, where product managers become more independent and capable. With gen AI, “product managers can actually build prototypes by themselves."

Gen AI will also help reduce engineering dependencies and offer a natural-language approach to creating integrations: "We can actually have integrations built for you by just conversationally asking for them."

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