Techstrong TV — Wed, Aug 5

AI Agents for IT Operations: The New CIO Playbook

Alan Shimel with Rajesh Ganesan

AI agents for IT operations are no longer a science project. Rajesh Ganesan, CEO of ManageEngine and a 30-year Zoho Corp veteran, joins Alan Shimel to walk through how ZIA Agents are triaging alerts, running root cause analysis and cutting cloud bills for CIOs. Rajesh traces his path from writing C and assembly at Zoho's Advenet in 1997 to launching ManageEngine after the dot-com crash in 2002. Twenty-four years later, ManageEngine serves roughly 90,000 customers across six continents with a full stack that spans service management, observability, identity, endpoint and SIEM. He and Alan then unpack the AI story. ManageEngine has been shipping machine learning in its products since 2012, and the latest wave is centered on purpose-built small language models rather than a race to the next frontier model. The bet is on efficiency, sustainability and use cases that only a CIO would love. Rajesh walks through three of them. First, a visual triaging map that ingests 20 different alert sources and points teams at the right first fix, with the option to execute the remediation autonomously after human approval. Second, automated root cause analysis that pulls data points, drafts the report and satisfies regulator requirements. Third, agents that cut through alert fatigue and benchmark spend against similar companies. The conversation closes on the bootstrapped, customer-obsessed model that has carried Zoho and ManageEngine into 190 countries with 20,000 employees, no outside capital and a very different view of what AI economics should look like.