AI allows us to do things today that were not possible just a few years ago: Krishna Tammana, CTO, Gupshup

Gupshup, a leading conversational engagement platform, recently hired its first-ever Chief Technology Officer, Krishna Tammana who will lead technology strategy, engineering and integration, supporting Gupshup’s product-led growth and market expansion. Krishna tells us his key priorities as a CTO and how he plans to change its technology architecture to prepare for the new experience economy

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What are some of the key priorities for you as a CTO for Gupshup?
Deep investments in product and engineering continue to drive Gupshup’s strong business momentum. I joined Gupshup as the company was gearing up for the next phase of growth. We have a strong portfolio of products that are already helping our customers to transform their businesses. My key priority is to significantly enhance our AI capabilities in text, voice and video and upgrade customer experience. And to ensure that the technology and engineering teams are deeply interlinked with the product, sales and customer success teams to support Gupshup’s product-led growth and market expansion. Another key focus area is seamlessly integrating teams from the companies we have acquired in the last few months, to unlock deeper synergies and optimize value creation for our enterprise customers. Innovation is the key here and we have an enormous opportunity to innovate in a rapidly evolving and growing market.

We are living in an experience economy. How is Gupshup planning to change or transform its architecture to be ready for this new world?
It’s not only an experience economy but also one that rapidly evolves based on technology evolution and customer needs. Agility is the key. Architecturally, we focus on agility and time to market. We use architectures that allow us to rapidly change and evolve our systems without impacting other systems and customers. Over 45,000 brands rely on Gupshup to reach and engage with millions of consumers globally. Our conversational engagement platform powers 9 billion plus messages every month. To support this scale, we have architectures in place that offer speed, agility of deployment, high availability, easy scalability and reliable performance.

How is Gupshup leveraging the cloud? Can you take us through some of the key benefits for your firm?
We have a multi-cloud strategy in place to deploy and maintain our carrier-grade network infrastructure. We have heavily invested in information security, automation, observability and monitoring tools to better support our enterprise customers, improve our agility, accelerate innovation and fast-track time-to-market. To support our rapid growth, we leverage technologies like kubernetes with micro-service architecture and auto-scale. This allows our customers to handle their growing needs without interruption or any manual intervention.

Your view on leveraging AI to improve efficiency of Gupshup?
AI allows us to do things today that were not possible just a few years ago. As mentioned earlier, it’s about customer experience. We leverage AI to improve customer experience and operational efficiency of businesses. Whether it is pre-purchase, purchase or post-purchase journeys that our customers go through, we leverage AI to track customer context, intent and sentiment to improve their experience. We are leveraging AI today but we are just getting started. With technologies like GPT3, our pace of leveraging AI will rapidly increase.

Can you take us through some of the key technology projects intended for the next year, and the proposed impact on them?
As leaders in the space of conversational engagement, automating processes across the customer lifecycle to lower costs and higher productivity becomes an essential deliverable for us. As enterprises across the globe move towards making headway in shifting from manual to automated processes, they need to be supported by the right tools and AI automation models that can help elevate the level of support and personalization. Not only does this ensure exceptional customer experiences, but it also brings down operational costs and allows enterprises to dedicate human resources to higher-value tasks.