Yellow.ai is a San Mateo, CA, based company that provides enterprise-grade conversational AI powered by next-gen automation solutions. It currently serves 1000+ enterprises worldwide. We recently interviewed Jaya Kishore Gollareddy, CTO & Co-Founder, at the Kissflow CTOTalk at Chennai, to understand how the company keeps ahead of the curve in these challenging times.

Ahead of the Curve

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

The journey of Yellow.ai began with the intention of solving the problem of providing customer support at the fingertips, using the customers’ preferred mode of communication. This could be through telephony, WhatsApp, or any other mode.

In the last eight years of building the company, adapting to the rapidly changing environment has been a constant thing. Regardless of which stage the company is in, staying ahead of the curve is crucial. For example, since COVID hit, businesses had to rebuild their tech teams and adapt to remote working environments. At Yellow.ai, we started hiring across the globe from Indonesia, and Bangladesh to Abu Dhabi and the US. We started hiring remotely. 

After multiple rounds of COVID-19, there was an economic downturn we had to factor in. We did so by optimizing costs and strengthening our infrastructure and resources by focusing on efficiency and productivity.

The next storm was ChatGPT and LLMs and we started adapting to it quickly. Then, we redefined our roadmaps to stay ahead of the competition.

Business Meets Tech

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

Almost always, while technology enables the business, it is the business that drives the outcomes. Business sets the outcomes and then technology enables them. The driver of and the primary motivation for building strong technology has to be the business and customer requirements rather than the other way. 

We believe in this mantra; be close to the customer, be close to their business, and draw insights from there to build your technology and product strategy. 

When we started our company and identified our first few customers to work with, we realised that what we had built didn’t completely fit into the end-user use cases. That’s because we cannot validate the needs or how the product should be before we get actual users. But it is these customers and stakeholders who become our product leaders and technology leaders as they enable us to shape the product. So, the initial customers had a huge influence on our roadmap and the way we built the product later on.

Process 

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

Our initial experiences have also shaped the DNA of the company. We have a strong customer advocacy program in our company. As a result, despite our late stage mature state, we still follow that customer advocacy program really seriously. We still let our customers shape our products so that we can serve them better.

Visit https://yellow.ai/ to know more about Yellow.ai offerings.