Who is Muddu Sudhakar?
My first entrepreneurial venture/startup was Sanera Systems back in 99/2000. I was at a Silicon Graphics and was fortunate at the time to work with people like Jim Clark and John Hennessy. When I saw what they were doing: disrupting the industry in startups and new ventures it led me to want to become an entrepreneur and start my own company. My first goal was trying to disrupt storage market with Sanera Systems. I wanted to provide a next generation storage solution that would provide high-throughput and a low latency network to connect servers and storage.
What’s the story behind Aisera?
I was at service now in 2017 and talking to my good mentor Ram Shriram — a founding Google board member who has served the last 20 years — about how we can provide a customer service solution for organizations and improve the life of service agents and contact center members. We wanted to come up with a cloud-native AI-first solution to automate mundane and repetitive tasks that are completed by agents and help desk agents. The goal was to improve the experience for the consumer and user by providing a solution which would be always available, 24/7, and able to resolve issues in timely manner.
What was the most difficult part of your experience in the early beginnings?
After five other startups nothing difficult part for my experience with Aisera. There was a natural market interest and demand for it, and user interest in deploying a solution like Aisera so that made it easy. At the beginning of my time as an entrepreneur, in 2001, I experienced 9/11. It was very difficult to going through a terrorist attack, and the whole industry shut down. Coming out of it took time, and what paid off was perseverance, consistency and dedication to continuously adding value to the customer to improve their experience.
What are you most proud of regarding your business?
Aisera is changing the lives of call center agents and customer service agents in real time. Many of them are living at the poverty line. So, if I can automate the mundane tasks they encounter, giving them space to grow they can change their lives than that’s profound. There are tens of millions of these people. Moving them into a better job, better quality of life, that’s where we’re adding value. It’s not just a business benefit, but helping humanity with call centers, change their life and making an improvement in their life, making it so they can pursue higher value jobs, improve their professional career and their personal lives.
What is your vision for the future of Aisera?
We will continue to provide an AI-driven customer service solution and AI-powered helpdesk solution for enterprises of all shapes and sizes. Whether it’s B2B or B2B with the aim of improving the user experience and cutting costs. That remains the vision.
What’s your advice for businesses that are trying to adapt to the current economic climate?
Focus on the customers and users. Add value and make transformative change. Do something bold and impactful even if you have to disrupt industry giants.
Please name a few technologies which have the greatest impact on your business and in your personal life.
Uber has had the biggest impact and changed my life for me. I enjoy the experience and how it changed access, as well as made it possible to not own a car. Same for Google and its ability to create access to information in the last 20 years.
Professionally, it would be Zoom, Microsoft Teams, ServiceNow and Salesforce.
What books do you have on your nightstand?
Zero. I prefer podcasts. Anything that talks to business strategy, how to be a disrupt industries and be a bigger player in the market.
Because of the current economic climate our publication has started a series of discussions with professional individuals meant to engage our readers with relevant companies and their representatives in order to discuss their involvement, what challenges they have had in the past and what they are looking forward to in the future. This sequence aims to present a series of experiences, recent developments, changes and downsides in terms of their business areas, as well as their goals, values, career history, the high-impact success outcomes and achievements.
