BENGALURU: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a tool that enhances productivity rather than replacing jobs, said Shelton Rego, vice-president of sales, Freshworks India. On the sidelines of 'The Freshworks Experience - AI-powered Service Revolution' event that was held in Bengaluru recently, Rego told TNIE that developers now collaborate with AI to deploy and debug code and employees must constantly update their skills to align with new technologies.
"As the saying goes, 'If you don’t use AI, you might be replaced by someone who does'. The focus should be on leveraging AI as an assistant to amplify your capabilities rather than fearing it as a replacement," he explained.
Nasdaq-listed Freshworks, which is the provider of people-first AI service software, in October unveiled Freddy AI, a conversational platform. "Conversations are one of the first places where you’ll see AI’s impact. It’s a platform where customers can engage with chatbots, which respond to most of their questions. This helps customers get answers quickly and enables agents to deflect many incoming queries, making them more productive," he said. Freddy is built on GenAI. It leverages large language models (LLMs) and learns from data—tickets, contact names, and customer interactions. This data trains Freddy’s algorithms, enabling it to provide relevant responses and insights.
Rego also pointed out that over the next few years, people's first interaction with AI will likely be through mobile phones. This convergence of mobile and AI is set to become significant. Whether it’s CX (customer experience) or EX (employee experience)—interacting with software, IT teams, or HR—we’ve built a range of use cases for AI on our Freddy platform. Agentic capabilities are going to be a big deal for us, he said.
In the future, one can see autonomous AI agents functioning independently with minimal human guidance. He pointed out, for instance, in ITSM (IT service management), diagnosing issues currently requires manual intervention. Autonomous AI agents can integrate various systems, diagnose problems, fix them, an submit an RCA (Root Cause Analysis) report to the site reliability engineer.
AI, being a general-purpose technology, impacts every industry. For example, in manufacturing, it enhances supply chains and production processes. He said that they see higher adoption in tech-enabled industries like FinTech, ride-hailing, EdTech, and even traditional banks.
Digital-native sectors are at the forefront because they’re already well-integrated with technology. Traditional industries like manufacturing, supply chain, and logistics are also adopting AI, but they’re a bit slower, primarily because many are still transitioning to the cloud. Cloud adoption is often the first step before leveraging AI, he explained.