‘We Have Been Developing Our Products Through R&D In India’: Suman Reddy, MD, Pegasystems India

Pegasystems has delivered enhanced capabilities in CRM and BPM, powered by advanced artificial intelligence and robotic automation, to meet strategic business needs. The company is now looking at the BFSI, telecom and healthcare sectors, says Suman Reddy, Managing Director, Pegasystems India.

Pegasystems has had an R&D presence in India for the last couple of years and now that you are contemplating to take it to the customer, what is your roadmap?

Pegasystems has been selling for three decades now. However, India as a market, is a new one. For Digital Process Automation (DPA) and customer engagement software companies, India was not a very sought after market, but ever since the advent of Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, and mobile, India has turned into a market of which all big players are taking note. This puts a lot of pressure on the government as well as the private sector to cater to the needs of the people. The earlier ways of organisations buying commoditised solutions is not going to work anymore. All private sector companies will have to make huge investments in their technology and bring in the best of the technology that is already available. Therefore, markets like India have become relevant for Pegasystems and our competitors as well. Since we have been developing our products through R&D in India, we are not new to the market as we have been here for 11 years. In the last two years we have observed that India is selling actively. We also see it as an opportunity for our R&D workforce. They can communicate with local companies to learn about which banks, insurance companies and telecom companies may require a software which has been developed locally to run their businesses.

Which sectors are you targeting?

We are looking at BFSI, telecom, manufacturing and government and are keen about all these sectors with AI, robotics and the rest.

Please throw light on Pegasyatems’ AI initiatives?

AI is not a technology by itself – CRM and BPM are technologies. In the context of a customer, AI, blockchain and data analytics have to be built within a system to be made useful. AI has been relevant to us for a long time – it is not a new concept. We provide CRM systems to our customers. CRM comes in three flavours – ‘service’ for any service-related request, ‘sales’ for the salesforce to use, to sell to your customers, and ‘marketing’ which could be upselling, cross-selling or outbound marketing. For all these three areas, we have customer relationship management. Now, coming to how Pega uses AI, compared to our competitors is that, unlike us, most organisations do not have a unified platform that AI is built on.

We are the only company that has sales, service and marketing built on one unified platform. The benefits can be better explained through our Customer Decision Hub – we call it ‘Always on customer brain’- it is our AI engine. Our Customer Decision Hub is built on the core platform which is the central layer. From a customer service perspective, it allows you to make decisions based on data coming from sales, services and marketing. It becomes very critical to have the view of that level of data, which AI algorithms have access to. AI makes services proactive and helps provide superior service, and most organisations are beginning to realize the benefits as well.

Today, we are dealing with a lot of AI native companies that were born only after AI’s birth and are impacting our lives and we are invariably using their services. When we watch television at our leisure, the streaming is based on our personal preferences which is driven by AI. It also plays a big role in ordering food or shopping online as well.

The organisations Pega works with are some the world’s largest, including the Global 3000 companies. For all these organisations, irrespective of the vertical, one-to-one engagement has become extremely critical; there is no segmentation of any kind. This is possible due to the capabilities of AI and how it has evolved over time. Each customer wants to be given their individualized service.

AI is right in the middle of everything that we do. In fact, a recent example which is quite interesting is of RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland), which is one of the world’s largest banks. At one point, they were the leading bank in Europe. However, post the financial crisis, they had become one of the least performing banks in the world. A new management was created and it wanted to revolutionize its next move by applying technology to pick up the pace. They it created ‘personology’, which has been made into a science. In fact, every employee at RBS has to sit through a ‘personology’ certification so that they are aware about their customers. The idea behind it is that it is always beneficial to know what each customer’s requirements are.

If you had walked into a bank in the 1970s, the bank manager would know your name and other personal details – it was easy to have a personal equation back then. As banks have grown in scale, that personal equation has ceased to exist. We have observed this in India as well – the bank manager does not know many people now. AI is able to bring back this equation through all the data collected– they create what is called Next Best Action. At any given point, the organisation knows what the next best action for that particular customer would be. They have created personalized services. RBS is now one of the best performing banks in Europe, as it has completely transformed with the support of AI and tech.

Any India specific example? How are you tying up with BFSI, healthcare and other sectors?
We have only started selling in India since last year. Prior to that, we were primarily an R&D centre developing our core technology out of India. We started our journey by first selling it to one of the largest transformation initiatives (probably globally, and not just in India) with the Government of Andhra Pradesh, which has selected the Pega Government Platform as the technology backbone for e-Pragati – a new centralized government portal that aims to integrate all departments, streamline services, and drive higher citizen satisfaction.

They are re-writing their entire line of citizen services across the state. The population of Andhra Pradesh is around five crores. Currently, all citizen services are supported by 750 different services and applications. With the help of Pega platform supporting epragati, all these services will be written on one platform.It is going to be a huge project, the way the Chief Minister describes it by saying that citizens can interact with the government at any time.  In fact, he said he wanted to transform government operations from a “black-box” to a “glass box” model – to build every process or interaction that a citizen has with the government across any department or service on a single platform. This would allow any and every citizen to know their position in the process. From a citizen perspective, it has become extremely efficient due to paperless procedures since everything is accessible with fingerprints and iris scans. It will also enable the government to review its own performance in terms of delivering the services to the citizens, as the CM, other ministers and the Principal Secretary will have their own dashboards.

Have you already started working on this project?
Yes, we have built several applications that have gone live already. However, it is a journey for the
next five years. Currently, there are a few hundred people who are deployed in Amaravati who are building the systems.

Apart from this, are there any other initiatives that you are working on?

Yes, most of them are in the pipeline. The banking sector in India looks keen since banking is one of our core areas across the world along with healthcare and telecom. We are in talks with banks, large insurance companies, big telcos and other state governments.