AI co-pilots and autopilots to speed up and automate software development tasks: Manav Khurana, CPO, New Relic

In a recent conversation with Express Computer, Manav Khurana, Chief Product Officer, New Relic, discusses the innovative strides being made at the company’s Indian innovation hub, located in Hyderabad. As a centre of excellence, the hub plays a pivotal role in driving New Relic’s advancements across product, design, and engineering, particularly focusing on AI, observability, and ecosystem integrations. Khurana also shares New Relic’s vision for AI-driven observability, highlighting how the company is leveraging AI to enhance user experiences and manage the complexities of AI-powered systems.

Could you elaborate on the key product and engineering innovations being driven out of New Relic’s Indian innovation hub? What are some of the recent breakthroughs or projects that have come out of this centre?

Our Hyderabad location is a centre of excellence for product, design, and engineering. Teams in Hyderabad own the full product lifecycle–defining, designing, building, and maintaining innovations across the New Relic observability platform. For example, teams in Hyderabad are focused on AI, application performance monitoring, security, and ecosystem integrations among other areas.

Why did New Relic choose India as a location for its innovation hub? What specific advantages or synergies does India offer for product development and innovation in the technology space?

It’s about talent. We have been able to attract talented and driven individuals across product, design, and engineering disciplines. The teams are all co-located so they can operate as a self-sustainable team, and as a peer to our US and European innovation centres. We established a similar model in Barcelona a number of years ago which has been very successful, and are replicating the same success here in India to take advantage of the incredible talent that the country has to offer. With India fast becoming one of the world’s key hubs for data, AI, and analytics, leveraging the incredible talent here in India to further build out our capabilities was a very deliberate decision.

As an added bonus, India is also where many of our customers are, both Indian companies and global companies with a local development centre. We’ve seen incredible traction in the breadth and depth of customers that we have acquired since we officially launched our Indian business in 2020, and the engineering and product talent available to us in India is incredible. Along with our valued Indian customers, many of our large multinational customers that work across the finance, automotive, technology, and manufacturing sectors also have innovation centres here in India, which makes it far easier for us to run tailored training sessions, hackathons and events to further enable our customers to get the best from our platform.

What is New Relic’s AI strategy? How is the company leveraging AI to enhance its observability platform and deliver greater value to customers?

AI is a generational shift in software and also in observability. We have a three-pronged approach: AI to improve observability experiences; observability for AI-powered applications; and AI-powered DevOps to speed up incident response and even prevent interruptions in digital experiences.

We use AI to improve observability experiences. The world of data and observability has its nuances that are not easy for every IT and software engineer to grasp. New Relic AI, the industry’s one of the first AI assistants for observability, helps to democratise observability by removing the observability learning curve so developers, operations, security, product, support, and QA teams can use observability and the power of data for their daily tasks. It’s like a ChatGPT purpose-built for observability and all the necessary context for observing digital experiences and the underlying tech stack.

Every company we know is building AI-powered applications taking advantage of LLMs and smaller models. While the promise is unbounded, so is the risk. New Relic AI Monitoring is one of the industry’s first APM for AI. It provides unparalleled visibility across the entire AI application stack by observing, analysing, and managing AI systems and applications to ensure accuracy, performance, cost, and compliance with established standards and objectives.

New Relic AIOps utilises a compound AI approach with machine learning and GenAI to automate insights for rapid alerting, incident detection, correlation, and resolution. With New Relic AIOps, organisations can fix issues faster, reduce outages, and increase development velocity and innovation. It can help pinpoint, explain, and apply fixes to code-level errors right inside the Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

We are seeing strong customer momentum. New Relic AI has been adopted by tens of thousands of users across every industry and company size, from startups to enterprise customers with hundreds of daily users, and they are seeing tangible business benefits. For example, our customer Global Processing, a digital financial services platform that powered 2,700+ million transactions in 2023, used New Relic AI to reduce alert noise by 50%, improve its ability to resolve IT outages by 30%, and experience 10% faster platform onboarding.

Why is the rise of AI creating growing demand for observability solutions? How does New Relic’s platform address the unique challenges and complexities associated with AI-powered systems?

Organisations are adopting AI-powered applications adding LLMs and their own models at a rapid pace, creating complexity across their IT stack and driving up costs. Observability is essential in helping to manage this complexity. Organisations that leverage observability can accelerate their use of AI and win against their competitors.

In addition, embedding a compound AI engine into our observability platform is expanding the value customers get from observability and therefore increasing our adoption.

What is your vision for product development at New Relic as an AI-powered observability platform? How do you see the platform evolving to meet the changing needs of businesses in the era of AI?

Our vision is to be the leading AI-powered, intelligent observability platform. We are already making this a reality with New Relic AI which has been adopted by tens of thousands of customers. In terms of the evolution of the platform, I imagine New Relic as an Intelligent Observability Platform. It’s going to be the next generation of what observability is today. You’ll see it will be easier for every user of New Relic to get value using AI. It will be possible for our customers to make sure their AI-powered experiences are serving their customers and business needs in a responsible way.

How can deep tech companies like New Relic help bridge the AI skills gap in India? What initiatives or programs is New Relic undertaking to enable businesses to adopt AI without adversely affecting employment opportunities?

India is fast becoming one of the world’s key hubs for data, AI, and analytics and we plan to leverage the incredible talent here in India to further build out our AI capabilities. AI is going to automate for the better. For example, our New Relic AI product democratises observability within our platform, and has the ability to use normal language prompts to understand the health of your systems, so folks across the organisation, from developers to product managers and project managers, can leverage the platform to uncover insights.

While AI is simplifying some tasks, the reality is that we’ll also end up with the creation of a raft of new specialised roles such as data curation and AI integration roles that help organisations integrate AI into their legacy technology systems. The role of human operators is also important, as they are needed to vet the AI algorithms to ensure that fair and accurate outputs are being produced.

In relation to AI upskilling, this can be viewed as a dual responsibility between the individual and their employer. It’s like any set of technology tools that you have in your toolbox. At New Relic, employees have access to tools, training and development programs to develop their knowledge in AI.

How do you see AI evolving in the future? What does it mean to have an AI-driven enterprise, and what challenges and opportunities does this present for businesses?

From a product perspective, we’ll see AI playing a pivotal role in the software development life cycle (SDLC). First, and this is already starting to happen, we will see co-pilots for each stage, which will help humans get answers much faster. For example, if I’m doing research, I’ll be able to use a research co-pilot, if I’m writing a definition, I’d use a definition co-pilot. If I’m doing design, a design co-pilot would be used.

Next, there will be autopilots that do specific tasks for you unassisted. This will be the point where you feed a problem into the system, and the auto-pilot will do all the work for you for each stage of the life cycle. Next, you will see the orchestration of those copilots and auto-pilots. So for example, if stage one has completed, it automatically orchestrates stage two. And if you learn something new in stage two, you go back to stage one, and orchestrate the whole software development life cycle.

This will get to the point (albeit in a fair few years from now), where you will come up with a problem to solve, it will be fed into the system and out comes a new product. Obviously, this future world will require a lot of governance and will have its challenges. It will require the right data, the right reasoning, and the right skills from a human operator point of view to be effective, and while it’s far away, it’s pretty exciting. The productivity that we can create, and quickly we can go from idea to product will be a lot faster because of AI. I’m seeing the early signs here, and we are using New Relic as a tool to bring together the data to do each of these steps. That’s how I see the future of AI evolving.