Zenoti provides AI-enabled end-to-end SaaS solutions for wellness businesses, including salons, spas, medspas, and fitness centres across the globe. Started in 2014 with headquarters in Bellevue, WA, the company serves more than 25,000 businesses world over. Recently, we caught up with Anand Arvind, the CTO, at the CTOTalk event organized by Kissflow in Chennai. He talked to us about how the company stays ahead of the curve by addressing business challenges using AI-driven solutions.

Ahead of the Curve

In a rapidly changing world, how do you envision the evolution of emerging solutions such as AI/ML/VR/other frontier technologies? What strategies are you adopting to stay ahead of the curve?

We are investing heavily in AI/ML and some VR cases in our product to solve problems that could not be solved before. At Zenoti, we view technology as an enabler and focus on solving business problems. These frontier technologies facilitate this elegantly and at scale. For example, it has become easier to answer customer queries with the suppoer of AI. AI systems are able to take a part of the workload that support agents are doing, freeing up their time to solve more complex problems.

AI systems are also good at analyzing interactions to see if agents are able to solve customer problems effectively. This also helps in coaching agents on how they handled the call and what they can do better in the future. Earlier, when humans were analyzing calls and providing feedback, we could sample only a small percentage of the calls, but with AI systems, we are able to audit 100% of the calls and draw more accurate insights. 

We are in a service industry that offers a highly personalized solutions. It is about making people feel good about themselves when they go to a salon for personal transformation. VR can show the users what they would look like when choosing treatments, haircuts, lipstick colors and such. We didn’t have the technologies or computing power to do this earlier. But now, devices are getting faster, and technology is becoming smarter, enabling us to deliver the solution on the phone and solve some interesting problems for our customers.

Business Meets Tech

How do you ensure the alignment of your technology strategy with the broader business objectives and customer needs?

We are a SaaS product company, and technology is our strength. But any technology has to solve business problems and not create problems to justify technology. AI enables us to solve problems that we could not have done in the past. That becomes exciting for our customers as it starts to solve something meaningful.

We are using Generative AI and understanding language to make the user interface intuitive and easy for customers to use our technology. New users will need less training to use this product in the future. You can speak or type a few words, and it anticipates your needs and helps you accomplish your tasks.

Another area where this helps our customers is to derive insights easily. Earlier, the user would have to look for the data in various reports and pivot them to figure out the data and then derive insights. But now, with AI, users can ask questions, and the system will pull up and present relevant data and even draw graphs. Users can also post supplementary questions to get additional data for further analysis, enabling them to understand how their business is performing.

Process

Give us a peek into your company’s tech innovation process.

AI is introducing a paradigm shift in the technology market, and everybody has to pivot around it. Instead of hiring an AI team to figure out how to use it in our company, we encouraged all our engineering teams to figure out how to use AI. This democratizes innovation. Our product engineers are smart and come up with new ways of solving problems and doing things.

We facilitated innovation by encouraging our engineering teams to share ideas and provided the necessary resources for them to do their research. We provided AI training and AI education and also ran a hackathon to get our engineers to prototype and develop their ideas. We have now funded the ones we selected to build them into the product.