AI in the Workplace – Digital CxO Podcast EP91

Hello and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Ani, and with me today, I'm so excited to have the Jitterbit CTO and SVP Manoj Chattery. How are you doing today?

I'm doing great and glad to be here and looking forward to our discussion today. Happy to have you on our show. So tell me a little bit about jitterbit and what services do you provide?

Yeah, so you know, Jitterbit at its core started as an integration company, but now in last two to three years, we evolved into an automation company. So at a very high level, if you look, what we offer is a low-code AI infuse platform, which allow our customers and user to solve end-to-end business processes, right? So what does that mean?

If we break it down further, what we offer inside the product, this platform is integration platform as a service, A PIM application builder and eed i slash B2B gateway. So let me give it a little bit more color on it, right? So if you want to integrate the data, which means if you want to move data from one system to another system based on a particular event, you use our low-code AI infused IBA.

If you want to then expose the, those integrations as APIs, then you use our A PIM product. If you then want to use those APIs you built, or your existing APIs to build an application, whether it is a web application or a mobile application, you use our app builder AI infused low-code app builder. And finally, if you have a use case for e-commerce and B2B, you use our EDI offering.

Now all of this is bundled into a single low-code AI infused platform, right? And when I say AI infused, you know, I have used five times by now the AI infuse because we take a very different approach of AI in automation space. What we are doing is we are giving our customer a choice.

They can u keep using our low-code product to do the automation, or they can adopt our AI capabilities, which we have currently in beta, and that that's a choice for them and they can adopt on their own speed. So let's say I started building an app, a web application using our AI capability, and I went up to certain extent and then say, oh, I, I I don't want to use it. You can go back and use low-code, or you start with the low-code and then switch to ai.

Both is an option for our customer. Now, if I have to sum it all in, in one sentence for your viewers, ter bit empowers technical and non-technical teams to efficiently develop, deploy, and manage automating automations is what we offer. So it's really breaking down a lot of those technology barriers when business leaders are having trouble finding people with the right skillset, it kind of reduces that skillset a little bit.

Absolutely. Our key goal is to lower the entry, lower the barrier to the entry. So not, so not only technical people can do these automations, but the business analyst and business users can do the automation.

If you look at one of the biggest challenge in automation industry is what you said it, the reliance on the technical expertise and technical expertise is most scarce in the world. We know the coders are hard to find and that's what we are doing. We are essentially, uh, loading the barrier to the entry by infusing AI and giving a low-code options to our users.

Now, have you experienced some business leaders being hesitant to embrace AI for one reason or another? You know, the the, so yes, but it's changing at a very rapid pace, right? If you look at Gartner, Gartner, I don't have the exact number, but Gartner claims that majority of CXOs have the AI as part of their strategy in this year, FY 25 itself, right?

So that shift is changing. The adoption to AI is there. The second thing is, last year everyone was trying to experiment and AI is, especially the generative AI part of AI was all about coolness.

Now it's about bringing value to their user by adopting the ai. So I, it it's there adoption is increasing at rapid pace and what is happening now is lot of focus along with providing the value is what guardrails I have to have when I introduce AI into my customer base or user base. So that, that's where the industry is very focused on, uh, right now.

What solutions do you have for business leaders as they do try to bring everyone on board with this technology? Yeah, so, so what we are doing essentially in roed, right at first, I have to tell when I say AI infused in roed, essentially what we are doing is evolving, lowering further the barrier to entry. Today we do offer our users low code, right?

Low code is still hard for business user because they need to figure it out. What thing need to be dragged from where, what configuration needs to be filled. It's still hard.

So what we are going to do is in the Jitterbit platform, we allow our users to literally converse in the natural language, to build automations. That's what we are doing, right? So when we do that, obviously the entry reduces, the barrier reduces further, people can build easily, but you can make sure that, as I said, you can adopt at your own pace and whatever options you had to safeguard your application.

I should not say applic safeguard your automation through our abnormal platform is available in AI as well because it's an infusion, it's not a new product we are offering to our customer. So all the guardrails, all the governance, all the protection we had on our platform before is still available to our customer now. Right.

Well you recently released a survey and I wanna talk about the survey. What was the purpose of this survey and can you share who was polled? Yeah, so we did recently a survey, um, done by consensus wide in May of uh, 2024.

That goal was to see what is the office worker view on the ai. And what we found in this survey is threefold. One, the journal outlook is really positive, right?

And when I say journal outlook is really positive, 85% of the respondent believes that AI will help improve their role and it dispels the fear of job displacement and embracing the potential of job augmentation and optimization. Now if you go further into the younger generation, they're even more excited. Younger generation in 18 to 25 years of age group, 98% of workers office workers believe that AI will be educational tool and they want to embrace that educational tool y to improve their skills.

Now, young generation is more excited, older generation is a little bit less, but it's still very high in, if we average out across the, uh, respondents, 88% believe that AI is a great educational tool to improve their job uh, offering. Right? And then the last bit we found in our survey is that it, the office workers believe that AI will enhance the productivity and foster the innovation.

It will, what is it essentially is that it will reduce the time in information gathering and information distribution and allow them to focus on building prototypes and building the solutions and giving it to the users at a high level. Those are the findings of our survey with office workers. Interesting.

So what does this mean for business leaders? What should they take from the results of this survey and what action steps should they take next? Yeah, so I think the business leaders, what they have to do is if they have peer of that, that the worker will feel that the AI is going to displace them.

That's not happening because 85% of cus users of of the office worker employees believe that AI will help them. They want to adopt it. So I think the leaders should take away their concern that their employees are thinking that AI will replace them, is no more true, right?

So they should adopt they, and the second thing I'll say is they should adopt at their pace, the pace which suits their culture, which suits their environment. But don't be concerned that employee will get concerned if they introduce AI into their employee base. In fact, they will make their employers much more happy.

Based on the numbers I just shared, Do you think it would help to have some sort of educational or creative collaboration groups within companies where the different staff and employees can see use cases with AI and and play around with it and give out their ideas? Yes, absolutely. Like one thing which AI will bring, as we just were talking about, lowering the barrier to the entry.

Like today, what happens is because majority of stuff, majority of automation, specifically talking about automation, you need technical worker. So let's say a business user has an idea to go build something. So what they have to do is they have to write that use case, that requirement, and then educate somebody else to go build that for them.

With ai, because they can quickly themself prototype that requirement and prove that what they want to build is gonna be valuable, it's going to foster much more closer collaboration because when they go take that business use case or the requirements to the person who's gonna do it, they are much more confident and clear on what their ask is because they have played with that requirement. So the collaboration become much easier. The friction between the teams reduces significantly.

So AI is advancing very rapidly. What do you envision is the future of AI in the enterprise, say two years from now? Yeah, you know, AI is moving so fast.

The solu, especially the generative AI branch of AI that every few months something new come up, right? We started with chat GPT, then the, the model is only open ai. Now we have so many models out there.

Then we said, oh, LLMs are not the only option because people have to build AI solution on top of their data, not only on the internet trained LLMs. So Rack came into the picture and now everyone is talking about agent ai. I think the future is going to be autonomous agents where agents can work along with the, with the humans.

They make the complex decision. They will learn from those mis dis automatically learn from the decisions they are making is what the future is for the ai. But it is, it is always going to improve the life of humans by allowing them to focus on business critical task and ending over the tedious, the repetitive task to the ai.

So that's what I think the autonomous agent is the future of the ai. And the last one, the ultimate everyone which is talking about is a GI, right? Is the future.

Yes. And I do you feel that that's still a little bit far away though, That that's as far I, I don't know. It look it, it could, in my opinion we are still a decade away from it, but it's moving fast.

You never know in next five years we have initial version of a GI, but, but I'm skeptical about it right now. Mm-Hmm. Well if there was one key takeaway that you could leave our audience with today, what would that be?

So if what I have to say is one, adopt ai, it's gonna help you and help your customer. Two, what AI specifically going will do to the industry specifically in automation is ability for the local tool to now transform into a natural language tool. So you will able to do what you were able to do by dragging and dropping simply by talking to the tool.

When I say talking, you are basically typing with a bot and bot is generating for you. And that's what I'm excited about and that's what I would uh, have your users encourage to use automation tools which offered them that level of ease and con and giving the control to them to build their requirements and their use case. Alright, well thank you for coming on our show and sharing your insights with us today.

Thank you very much, Amanda. I really enjoyed our conversation. Me too.

And thank you to our audience and stay tuned because there's more.