SPEAKER_00 1:31

Welcome back to Inspire AI, the podcast where we help leaders stay calm, capable, and intentional in an AI-accelerated world. Today's conversation is about something that's happening in organizations right now. The way we work is changing, not gradually or predictably, but at a speed that most people are still trying to process. And that's exactly where today's guest operates. Working across industries like financial services, healthcare, education, and consulting. What makes this conversation particularly important is that the VEC isn't just thinking about AI as a tool. He's thinking about AI as a system-level shift in how work itself is designed. In fact, through his work with companies at different stages of growth, he's identified a pattern as organizational scale. They get the same friction points over and over again. And with AI accelerating faster than any previous technology wave, those friction points are becoming impossible to ignore. In this episode, we explore what he calls the future of work. Not as a concept, but as something very real and already being built. We also talk about why AI feels different from past technologies, why it's forcing people to rethink their roles entirely, and why this speed of change might be the most destructive factor of all. We also get into what this means for individuals, the skills that matter, the mindset that's required, and how to stay present in a world where intelligence is becoming embedded into every system we use. So again, it's not a conversation about tools, it's more a conversation about adaptation. Because the future of work is something that's already unfolding around us. And the real question is, how do we respond to it? So let's get into it. Welcome to Inspire AI, Vivek. Thank you for coming on the show. Absolutely. Thank you, Jessin.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Pleasure is mine.

Vivek’s Cross-Industry Pattern Spotting

SPEAKER_00 3:54

Thank you for having me. Yeah, why don't we get started by telling the audience a little bit about yourself and what brings you here today? For sure.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

I'm leading an IT services company focused on Digital Foundation. We have been doing a lot of work with organizations in financial services, advisory consulting, healthcare, education, nonprofit in multiple of these different industries for years. After having done that for a lot of years, we realized that there are certain pain points that every organization goes through when they look at growing their organization from stage one to stage two or try to grow it exponentially and based on their own growth patterns and everything. So we understood what are the paths that every business has to take in order to achieve the level of growth they are looking for. With that, we realized with a lot of innovation coming in with AI technology, there is a significant amount of contribution that we could provide. And our knowledge and AI innovation, combining both of these things together, uh, we decided to come out with a solution that we call future of work. And that's what we are really focused on at this point. So my goal for today's session is to talk a little bit about what that future of work looks like, how would that benefit organization, you know, what's the foundation for it. I would like people to understand which direction AI is gonna take in the next six to nine months and how our future of work platform is going to enable organizations go through AI transformation to be ready for what's ahead in the next six to nine months.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Awesome. So you have a lot of experience helping businesses grow through phases of their maturity cycles, and you have identified the technologies are there ready and capable of supporting your business model as well as those that you want to help. And you call this technology minds.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

That's correct.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

And it's based on your concept of the future of work. Do I get all that right?

SPEAKER_01 6:29

Yes, absolutely. That's correct.

Speed And Role Disruption

SPEAKER_00 6:32

And you know, from my angle, AI Ready RVA, our nonprofit, the 501c3, that uh manages or hosts this podcast is extremely invested in understanding what the future of work is like from many different angles so that we can support the greater Richmond region's growth through the next one to two to five years of the technology disruption that it exists today. So I think this really aligns very well with our audience. Yeah. So let's let's go ahead and uh kick off the first question here. Okay, so what's fundamentally changing with the technology these days? Why why is AI becoming the catalyst for changing how we work?

SPEAKER_01 7:21

There are a lot of different ways we can answer that question, but let me introduce two primary perspectives of analyzing the topic that you just brought up. The first, I would call it speed. You know, there are a lot of different innovations that happened over the last couple of decades. What is different about artificial intelligence is the speed at which it is being adapted, it is innovating, it's a lot faster than what we all have seen in the past. So one of the things that's different and causes anxiety in people's mind is the speed at which it is growing because people are used to seeing the technology grow as they have seen in the past with any other technology. So AI growing at such an enormous speed makes people a little bit anxious about it, and that's one of the biggest things that's different about AI. Another thing is in most of the cases, newer technologies have extended people's ability to do their activities. If you look at mobile technology, it has provided you an additional channel of communicating or performing your tasks or jobs. If you look at cloud, it has simply taken away our individual server farms from businesses over to one co-located collective server farm, but it's still pretty much doing the same thing. It hasn't really disrupted people's individual responsibilities in such a greater way, but expected them to adopt this new technology. AI is fundamentally challenging people to start rethinking about their own job roles. The way you do your job today, you are not expected to do that in the future. Look at anybody in the world, right? It's just not I'm talking about service jobs or manufacturing jobs or anything in particular. I'm saying even the least affected areas by AI manufacturing have started seeing introduction of artificial intelligence in their business roles. Whether sales department, doesn't matter which type of industry you belong to, had come to utilizing AI in such a greater way that I would say 40 to 50% of their job role is being done by utilizing the AI tools. What had changed with introduction of AI is people having to rethink about their job role, job roles no matter which industry, which title, which you know classification, which department they belong to, they have to really start rethinking it, which has never happened before.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

Yeah. And the having seen your demo prior to this session, I wonder, do you start with the job or do you start with the business, the concept behind the business, the business model, what they need, or do you think about the job itself and its fundamental responsibilities when you think about helping redesign the future of work? Uh so I'm thinking like, do you consider the salesperson in their role, or do you consider the business? And how do you address those two various perspectives when you think about the future of work and the platform that you've developed?

SPEAKER_01 11:09

Yeah, absolutely. So I think of business and job roles, they both are connected with each other. So they're not exclusive separate entities. So when you look at one, you automatically consider another one. Our focus starts looking at specific departments and functions. And by looking at analyzing them and finding a way to introduce artificial intelligence by minimizing the frictions, we are making those job roles or functions more efficient. By doing that, we are making individual departments more efficient, and that overall improves the AI adoption for the entire business.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

Okay. So you look at the business department, and various companies or clients of yours have different needs, but they generally have similar frameworks around their department structures and things like that. So a lot of that is reusable. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Absolutely.

Department-First AI Adoption Reality

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Um take a look at that list. I want to ask: do business leaders generally approach this problem from a business perspective, or do they get they build buy-in with their employees first? Do they talk with their employees or do they just say, hey, by the way, we're we're taking on a new technology here and we want you to start using it? Now go learn this platform. And then there might not be a right or wrong way to do this, but I'm just curious, like, how do businesses begin adopting such a new mindset?

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Yeah, absolutely. That that's a great question. And Jason, ideally, we would like business leaders to start thinking about their AI strategies, AI transformations, and then see the need coming for them to bring a solution like this in-house and then start integrating it. But still date, what we are seeing happening is people not envisioning it at this point, or at least, you know, very few percentage of people are envisioning it at this point. It's just not a piecemeal type of approach that they need to take. They need to take a holistic approach in visualizing how their AI transformation is gonna look like not today, but six months down the road, one year down the road. And very few people who are able to see that feel a tremendous amount of need to onboard a platform like ours, where they want to see everything under one umbrella so that they can control it, manage it, and utilize it for the entirety of their of their entire organization with multiple departments involved. In reality, what's happening till date is in most of the cases, we're having to target individual departments. So we first talk to sales department, and they like our approach towards innovating sales function roles, and then they say, okay, we're gonna use it. Then once it gets established, then customer support comes in, and then you know, accounting comes in. So it kind of expands department by department. And that's fine too. You know, that's okay. At least they are building that foundation for their entire organization, one piece at a time. But I think ideally, or probably in the next few months, when people get a little bit more educated about the challenges that they're gonna have with piecemeal approach, they're gonna start looking at the importance of platform like ours more proactively than they do today.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Yeah. That's where my mind was going. I'd really love to hear from you on what kind of risks are involved there. Do you think we can talk about that now, or should we talk a little bit more about the platform and the future of work before we head into that?

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Um, no, we we can definitely talk now, not an issue.

The Hidden Cost Of AI Silos

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Okay. So tell tell me more about what the piecemealing does to the business that sets a bit of a disadvantage to their future growth capabilities leveraging this sort of platform.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that might also give us a good segue to take a look at our future of how we see it. So let me first describe the problem, and once we understand the problem, then I can I can give you a little bit of demo to see how we solve that problem. So what happens today is the sales department feels a need that they need artificial intelligence in order to build efficiency as part of their departments. In some cases, there is a mandate that comes from the top and say, okay, 30% or 40% of automation needs to happen with AI. So either way, sales department starts looking for AI transformation type of platforms. What happens if they decide to go for the vendor that only specializes in sales type of transformation? Is the sales department then just it starts working with them and create a silo? We need to understand that AI technology, when that gets introduced, it's not just like you created an application in Java. AI comes with a lot of different elements that have to work together. You have to have your LLM, you have to have your agent uh business logic that is created, you have to have your own organizational data shared and exposed, you have to have build your guardrails, business logics, a lot, and compliances, there are a lot of different things that have to go with AI in order for you to completely integrate it as part of your organization, as an enterprise-ready solution.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:37

Imagine the sales department brings one solution, does all of that to it, then customer service department feels a similar lead, they go to the vendor one, they bring that solution in, and again do the same thing all over. Now, accounting department has a similar need, go to the vendor three, bring a third solution in, and go through the similar exercise all over again. Imagine you do that in five departments, five different times. Your one-time costs have gone astronomical. All of the things that you had to do once, you ended up doing five times. But if the story doesn't end just at one-time installation cost, your maintenance also becomes a nightmare. If something changes in compliance of your industry, then you have to go to all these five different vendors and then do it. If something has to change in your business logic, maybe you are changing your business model, maybe you're introducing a new line of business, there could be anything that might require you to change something about business. Once again, you have to go through all those five different vendors.

unknown 18:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

And you know, the funny thing about it is since you don't have control over what underlying AI architecture is being used by these individual vendors, no matter how hard you try, you might never be able to bring them all at the same page. Your sales agent might talk something different, but your customer service agent might actually not agree to. So now there is no brand consistency. There are tremendous amount of problems. And then finally, if you ever want to see the complete 360 degree of what's happening with your AI transformation, you just can't do it because your data is sitting in silos.

SPEAKER_00 19:30

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

So I think once you are going to go through AI transformation phase in a little bit of matured way, you're gonna see all these problems coming in. If you're not seeing it today, it's just because you're at a very early level. The more maturity you gain, the more of these problems that you're gonna see. Now, the question is if all of these problems are gonna come up, how do we solve them? And our solution that we call future of work is an answer to it. If you don't have any other questions, maybe I can jump in and very quickly give you a demo of how we see future of work and walk you through the potential solution for this problem.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Well, how about I do ask you a direct question then? Because you've you've set it up pretty well. Vivek, I hear the business model, I hear the approach. So, what does an AI-augmented worker actually look like in practice? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 20:33

Let me jump in and give a quick demo of what our product looks like. And I think with the help of our solution, I would be able to describe that a little bit better.

Inside The Future Of Work Platform

SPEAKER_00 20:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Great. Thank you, Jason. So, what you're looking at is our enterprise AI platform, and this platform is built with an understanding of what would be the least friction solution to bring AI transformation for businesses today. We tried to build this AI transformation in a way that looks closest to the organization's business model today. Every business that you look at has multiple different departments. Each of the departments have multiple different roles. It doesn't require a lot of time and energy for somebody to take a look at a solution like this and then relate the agents listed in the solution and the business roles that they have within their own organization. So it's a very good one-to-one match that they can correlate with and very easy for them to comprehend what these agents are going to be doing and how they will be solving their efficiency problem or help them improve the efficiency of their workers. If you very quickly look at the sales department, you would see that we have AI SDRs, we have agent to generate codes, then web research, produce sales analytics. Similarly, if you look at customer support, we have AI chatbots, AI call centers. If you look at finance, we have an agent to generate invoices, we have another one coming up for processing invoices and making the payments to the vendors. If you look at human resources, we have chatbots to help employees find information about their organization, recruitment assistance that filters through resume coming in for any of the profiles that you have posted online. And once found relevant resumes, this assistant makes a call to them to find out their availability and interest. Everything works out. Then this agent goes ahead and sets up a meeting on hiring manager as well as candidates' calendar. So you can see how the different roles that exist in organizations today match up with the roles that have been assigned to each of these agents. And because of this one to one relationship that we have created, we see this as a solution. That presents least friction to get integrated in the current structure that organizations work with.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

Okay. So what I'm looking at here is a portal that accesses multiple job families. And each of the job families you have sales, customer support, finance, HR, et cetera, have individual agentic systems that take certain job functions and deliver efficiencies based on the business need. These efficiencies are associated to the job function, but they're specific to certain responsibilities. And you have identified ways of decomposing those job functions and those responsibilities into various agents. And that's essentially what your platform is doing for the business. It's scaling across these job functions using your back-end system. And how does this get approached by, let's say, a sales rep person or an HR manager in the business? Do they see this and do they push these buttons, or is there a different um workspace for them specifically to be able to leverage the agents directly?

SPEAKER_01 24:55

Certainly. So in order for people to use this solution, first of all, an admin will have to create an account for whoever they subscribe to. So the subscription model for a solution like this is very simple. Either you can subscribe to this entire platform or you can subscribe to a department, or you can subscribe to any one agent in a department. But let's say if you subscribe to this entire platform, then you have to decide which roles to be assigned to which person in your organization. In a sales department, a sales director or a VP should have access to everything in sales. So you can create something like here, sales, you know, that can be assigned to your sales director. So what's going to happen is when they log in, they're not going to be seeing any of these tabs of other departments. If they only have access to sales, they would see only sales tab. And when they click on this sales tab, they would be able to see all the different sales agents that you have subscribed. If you subscribe to only one agent, then you're going to see that only one agent. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. The privileges are set up the visibility of each of the modules and the agents specific in the modules. You're a sales agent, a sales rep, and you have access to these modules, and you use this system to energize or exponentially deliver on your against your role with these technologies. And that's that's essentially what it's doing is giving the individual worker the ability to 10x their job function. So it's not it's not replacing anybody, right? It's not a bunch of agents running the sales department. It's giving the worker more efficient tools and technologies to advance their job function. So based on this version of the platform that you've you've developed here, how would you describe the future of work? Because there might be a lot of folks here in the audience that aren't gonna be able to see this screen, but based on this platform and and what you envision for companies uh in the next six, twelve, uh, eighteen months, what is the future of work like?

What AI-Augmented Work Looks Like

SPEAKER_01 27:35

Correct. Thanks, Jason. I think that's a really important question for people to understand. I think future of work is gonna be incorporating artificial intelligence as part of your daily routine. Look at any other technologies that we have seen in the past decades. Look at innovation of computers, right? When they initially came out, people were scared a computer can do a job of about 20 people and then jobs would be lost. But today we can't see ourselves working without computers. Our discussion and meetings today is happening because we both have access to computers and we can efficiently utilize it. Otherwise, we probably couldn't have talked to each other. So the potentials of humans to be able to do things is growing with the introduction of technology, and AI is going to bring um is going to bring similar opportunities. It is going to extend and enhance abilities for humans to do things that we haven't been able to do so far. And what it would take, I think what it would take is for us to very quickly realize and understand that one AI is here to stay, it is not going to go away, and we better adapt it and learn how to work with it to make ourselves more efficient. I think that's what is really going to be key. People who are going to be more successful are not the people who are the smartest, but are the people who are going to know and learn how to utilize AI in the smartest. I think individual persons' smartness would definitely have an impact on their career goals, but the factor that would contribute a lot is how smartly you are going to be able to utilize AI to your benefit. If you don't use it, you're going to be at a significant disadvantage in comparison to the others who are using it.

Skills That Win: Adaptability Creativity

SPEAKER_00 30:16

Since they're going to be uh embracing these technologies more and more, what kind of like generic skills would you recommend? Like your platform looks very intuitive. Like you have an interface where you deliver the right services to the right job family, and they can go and leverage those agents whatever way they feel they need to go throughout their daily routine. But what about those that are not able to leverage systems like that yet? What do you think they should be doing right now to set themselves up for success, if you will? And we can talk about generic communication skills. Any generic skills is fine to reference here, but I'm thinking like the technology, when people get their hands on this stuff, like how should they learn about it? And what what would you recommend they they do to embrace the next two to three years of change that's coming?

SPEAKER_01 31:13

Yeah, yeah, great. Um thanks, Jason. Another, another very important question. I could be wrong, but what I really feel is the importance of those traditional skills is going to minimize in the next two to three years. You again go back and look at the importance of skills, how that had changed. When computers came out, people who were able to do very quick calculations stopped seeing their needs in the market. It was not needed anymore. Though they were very smart, they had, you know, very strong grasp on mathematics and everything, but that skill wasn't needed anymore. Similarly, I think the individual skills in technology is going to see a tremendous amount of change. It's not that we're not gonna need people, it's not that the need of human skills is going to go away, but the transformation that's is going to be significant. People, a lot of thousands and thousands of people who are sitting behind the desk doing the programming and coding would not last for another two to three years. I think in a matter of six to nine months, that's gonna go away. You don't need to be a huge communicator because ChatGPT, once you type what you have in your mind, does a great deal for you. And artificial intelligence is coming out with a tremendous amount of translation capabilities. You don't need to you don't need to know if any particular language anymore, you're fine with having ability to express yourself in your mother tongue, whatever that could be. So in my mind, what would make people more successful? I think one, their ability to adapt, and second, creativity. These are two going to be the very, very important aspects of any being successful in this rapidly changing world of artificial intelligence.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

Okay, so adaptability and creativity, yes. I can see that. I think that was a great like transition to two good questions. Vivek, given all of that, if someone early in their career asked you how to prepare for the next decade of work, what would you tell them to focus on?

Preparing For Careers And The Next Decade

SPEAKER_01 33:53

How about the next four years? Yes, I think that's definitely a little bit more reasonable. I think uh I would really say if you are going to focus more on technology side, definitely invest your time in figuring out how do you contribute in making AI better, or you focus on seeing use cases and applications of AI in business and learn how to do that integration. Because that's where most of the key or technology work is gonna go. Either make AI better or implement that for the benefit of organizations. I think this is really gonna be key for most of the technology jobs. For non-technology, for the business related, I would say you need to be very, very open-minded and be ready to adapt for any AI change that's coming in. No matter which industry, which job role we are talking about, I think AI is gonna enter everywhere. So if you think that AI has not entered into this field yet, so we probably don't need to think about or about it or worry about it, I think that would be immature. And if we are talking about the future, then we do need to start thinking about it and see how AI could enter in my area and I prepare myself for it. Because in the next six months or one year, people are gonna start asking for those skills.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

Yeah, I agree. So finally, if we zoom out five years from now, what do you think will surprise people most about the future of work?

SPEAKER_01 35:49

I think what would surprise people the most is the speed at which AI is going to become an integral part of their job rules. As I talked earlier, I think one of the biggest surprising factors for people, you know, I go to a lot of conferences related with AI. I've spoken at a couple of conferences, and what I see people is still not being able to understand this whole game is about the speed at which it is running. People talk about they're trying to learn it one at a time and trying to then experiment with it and then do the POC with it, and by the time they get done with it, they realize, you know, they're already outdated. So I I think what's happening is people are is still trying to tackle AI the same way they have tackled the previous technologies. They're not ready to adapt, they're not willing to understand that AI is a different beast, it's a different animal. You can't handle it with the same way and approach that you have handled the evolution of previous technologies. It's running too fast. If you keep doing the same thing to it that you have done in the past, again and again you're gonna realize that AI is ahead in the game, and then all the POCs and experimentation that you have done in the past probably would have no value and meaning. I think that's the surprise people have already started seeing, and I think the positive surprise that people would see after five years is AI would have already introduced, got it introduced as part of their daily routine job roles, and sometimes by force, by mandate, sometimes by their own willingness to admit and accept it with their own motivation of increasing their own efficiencies, one way or the other. I think it is going to find its way of getting introduced as part of their job roles. And I think people would be surprised to see how quickly that happened.

SPEAKER_00 38:11

Wow. Agreed. I've I'm already seeing how because I've been on the path for a while, right? I I see how the transition is impossible to keep up with. You could spend all of your life trying to catch the changes, and you just will never catch them. There's just too many of them out there. And there's something very profound, like maybe subliminal in what you're saying that I'm I need to assess for myself, even because I I'm not gonna imagine that I'm I'm perfect in how to align myself, my career goals to the changes specifically. But I know that there's something about being able to envision yourself, envision your your organization using these technologies and and be the person that that kind of introduces those ideas, being the creative side, like you said, being adaptable, being open to change, all of those things are absolutely essential. And being a technologist for 20 years, I feel like that's where my mind is at. But uh instead of things changing drastically every six months, they're changing drastically every month or even faster. And it's just it's a lot to lot to think about, but I think about it regularly. And I can appreciate everything you just said, um, but we all need to internalize it, I think, and take it for what it is, where we currently are, and try to figure out ways to to adapt to it, to adapt to the change and be the be willing to accept that because it it's not gonna stop transitioning us, whether we like it or not.

SPEAKER_01 39:54

You said it absolutely correctly, Jason. And the more we try to stay away from it, the more we're gonna find it harder to let it introduce in our lives. The more open, the more adaptable we are, the more acceptable we are, the easier it's gonna get. It is a necessary evil or whatever you want to call it, maybe evil is not the right word for it. It's gonna enter as part of our lives. It would be the best for us to open up and easily accept it rather than negate it and stay away from it. That's the best thing we can do for ourselves and for our careers.

Habits For AI Strategy And Resilience

SPEAKER_00 40:38

Yeah. What would you suggest? Just in closing, some of the and I know you've been through the mindset shift and you've developed your own habits. What what habits would you recommend people develop to help their transition more seamlessly?

SPEAKER_01 40:54

I think it depends on what stage you are at. So if you still haven't test or you haven't started thinking about AI transformation for your business, I think the best thing I would recommend is try to get to learn quite a lot about what's happening in AI right now. The more you get to know it, the more comfortable you be you get with it. Unless you know the 10 different success stories of artificial intelligence, you will not get motivated enough. So if you are still on the fence, try to learn more and more about what's happening in the business so that you become comfortable with it. If you are already in it, so let's say you have made a decision that yes, I'm gonna move forward with AI, then at that point, I think you need to stay on top of your AI strategy. So now you're not in the game of yes or no, right? You are already in it, you know that needs to be done, you are evaluating it. The first thing that you should do is build your AI strategy. As I mentioned, a strategy problem with going with piecemeal approach one year down the road is going to make you stand at a point where you're gonna say it's unmanageable, I can't handle it, I can't do it, it is too expensive. So I think strategy really becomes very important for you to start thinking not about today how you're gonna use AI, what are you gonna do with this year down the road, two years down the road? Of course, nobody can today think about five or ten years down the road, but at least you start asking yourself questions about strategy for at least two years. Yeah. And if you are at the last stage where you have done the implementation and everything there, I would say just have the faith of accepting it and believing that it's gonna be successful because not AI, not all the AI implementations have delivered the results that you expect. And it's just not with AI, it's with anything, there's no hundred percent success anyway. So if you're at a point where you have already gone in, you have made up your mind, and you have done some implementation, don't let worse failure if that happens to you, demotivate you and get out of it. This is where you need to be. Stay in there, keep finding ways of making it better. If it hasn't been so successful in the first one, that's okay. That's how we learn. Continue to type finding better ways, just don't get out of it to make a way successful.

SPEAKER_00 43:54

Well said. Well, thank you for everything today, Vivek. I appreciate learning a little bit about your business model, about your insights and into the future of work, and how we can all embrace the change that's coming so that we can thrive in the businesses that we're involved in and the ideal state of getting through this technological change that is going to be impacting us all. I appreciate your insights and your inspiring words. So thank you.

SPEAKER_01 44:30

Absolutely, thank you very much to you as well, Jason. It was a true pleasure. You had amazing questions, very insightful and thought-provoking questions. So, thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed sharing what we have done, what we think the future of work is gonna be. So it was really nice. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 44:52

Excellent.