From Microsoft to Construction AI Founder: Isha Juneja on Building ContraVault and Redefining Risk in Construction

Rishi Srivastava (00:00)
Welcome to Finance at the JobSite, the podcast where construction finance meets the field. I’m your host Rishi Srivastava, founder of Beiing Human. In each episode, I sit down with construction CFOs, controllers, owners, project managers, IT leaders, ERP consultants, and industry experts to uncover how they connect the back office with the field, choose and implement technology, manage cash flow, and drive profitable projects.

Whether you are running the numbers, leading the team, or designing the systems that keep projects moving, this is your place to learn what’s working, what’s broken, and what’s next in construction finance.

Rishi Srivastava (00:38)
Today our guest is Isha Juneja Isha welcome

Isha (00:42)
Hi Rishi, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Rishi Srivastava (00:44)
Perception here, Isha, is on your career journey and entrepreneurial path. You’ve gone from Natwest to Microsoft to founding two startups. What drove you to make the leap from corporate to entrepreneurship?

Isha (00:59)
yes, I think I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my roles at NatWest and Microsoft both. I’ve had great teams, but then there was always this spark which told me that something is still missing. I would always feel that I’m doing a small part of a very big ecosystem and.

you know, people at the top won’t even recognize who I am and what I’m doing. And if I am to make that big an impact, I’ll possibly need like another 15 years. So, and I think one burning pain, which I always felt was if I worked 15 hours a day for myself instead of somebody else, what is it that I could really change in my life? So I think, yeah, I thought that I have limited.

Rishi Srivastava (01:25)
Mm.

Isha (01:39)
number of hours in a day and I’m only going to work for let’s say 14-15 hours max if I stretch myself. So I thought why don’t I do something which involves more of my blood and gives me more of the returns. So yeah, mean that’s where the journey started and then I found the right people, my co-founders along the way. One of them is my brother, the other one is my husband now. So these guys gave me a lot of strength to dream big.

And yeah, here I am sitting with you.

Rishi Srivastava (02:08)
Yeah, starting a company with your family members is tough. How do you establish this boundary between, let’s say, you and your husband’s personal relationship versus this company that you have?

Isha (02:11)
Yeah.

yeah.

I think I’ve been asked that question from the investors so many times now. It almost feels like second nature when I’m answering this question. But, Suresh, it’s been tough, honestly, because most of the times we forget that we have any boundary between the personal and professional because we always talk work. So sometimes it gets hard to find time for ourselves and just ourselves. But we’ve been able to set up

Rishi Srivastava (02:27)
Mm-hmm.

Isha (02:47)
know, hard timelines, put things on our calendar so that we don’t miss out on still being, you know, two people who are married, who love each other. But I think ever since we started working together, we’ve started respecting each other a lot more, you know, because we’ve seen sides of one another which are a lot more intelligent, a lot more creative. And it has just opened up new avenues.

for both of us. And we’re a great team, it seems, you because when we did actually start working together, we solved many more problems than we imagined we could. And that brings the happiness from work to the personal life and then it goes on. So yeah, it’s been a tough journey. It always is, but yeah, we draw some lines, we make some rules and we try to make it work.

Rishi Srivastava (03:33)
It did. Ultra POS was aquihired by Super Tales. What was the most surprising lesson you learned through the acquisition process?

Isha (03:43)
I think the biggest lesson that I learned was that I did not like the fact that I was losing ownership on my own thing. So even though I was very elated that my first, my first born baby, my first startup was actually being acqui hired and it was a great fleet for me in front of my eyes as an individual. then

when the acquisition really happened and I started working with another team, which almost felt like, you know, I’m working for somebody else all over again. So, you know, that feeling where I lost the ownership on everything that I was doing. So Shayan was there with me through that journey as well. My husband that I was talking about, my co-founder right now at ContraVault So the two of us felt that…

Rishi Srivastava (04:15)
Yes.

Isha (04:30)
You know, it’s always a different feeling to run our own show. It felt like we’ve tasted blood once before, so it’s hard to go back now. I think that was the most surprising lesson, Rishi. We thought we would be fine, but we still felt that lack of ownership and responsibility. So yeah, that made us, of course, give a lot of time to ultra pause and…

draw it towards a conclusion in the new company as well, but then it also encouraged us to possibly reignite the spark of starting up something else all over again. And that’s how Contraworld was born. But yeah, it’s been a bittersweet journey, but yes, this was the most surprising thing that I discovered.

Rishi Srivastava (05:12)
How long was the acquihire process? So let’s say you signed the LOI and then get out of the acquirers company.

Isha (05:20)
Yes, so we were working on UltraPos for about 10 months when we got this offer. And in the next three months, we were officially a part of SuperTales. So yeah, it was 10 plus three months in that way.

Rishi Srivastava (05:33)
wow, that’s a very quick turnaround. And then you worked for Super Tales for some time, maybe a few years. Yeah. think the entrepreneurship, that bug once it bites, it has a strong addiction.

Isha (05:35)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yes, yes for about 18 months. Yeah

Yeah.

I’m

It has an impact. 100%.

Yeah, it’s like tasting blood. You don’t want to go back.

Rishi Srivastava (05:55)
What inspired you to start Contra Vault AI? And how did you spot the pain point around tender analysis and RFP risk?

Isha (06:04)
Yeah, well, I have to give it to two people in my life. One is Tanmay, who’s my third co-founder, also my real brother, my sibling. So as soon as Gen AI came into picture, Rishi. Tanmay being in IIT Delhi and pursuing graduation, mean, BTECH at that point in time, he was always interested in building things.

He was fiddling around with the new technology, building chatbots here and there, and getting surprised at the magic it was. So he would always share things with me and Shayan. And I already talked about the itch that we felt while we were in Super Tales. So these two things started happening in parallel where my brother was building something and then we were feeling the itch to do something of our own.

There came a point when the three of us sat together, had a lot of brainstorming sessions on, where does this technology go from here? Because everybody is going crazy about GPT. So can we do something about this? So we made a nice chatbot. We started showing it to some companies, just gathering in that interest, trying to understand whether there existed a real problem statement somewhere. Along that journey, Shayan’s dad, who used to work with construction companies throughout his life.

He’s worked with companies like GE, Altstorm, ABB, where he would actually read and understand a lot of tender documents. It’s called tenders here in India and Europe. It’s called RFPs in the US and Canada. these documents are pretty complex in nature, very, very difficult to read and then build proposals out of. he was looking at our chat bot one fine day and he said,

can you actually make this chatbot sit on my tender document or my RFP document because this piece of paper is the most difficult part that my team has to go through back at my company. So do you think that can happen? And then Tanmay being the genius he is, he said, yeah, why not? Like give me two days, I’ll spin up something for you. So that’s where Rishi, we created our first real MVP of a real problem statement where we got

a sample tender document and Tanmay built a chat bot or a smart search on this 1000 page or long RFP or tender document. So then Shayan’s dad was actually pretty impressed by this MVP and he said, I think I can gather my management to see this and take a look at whether this smart search can help them in any way. So the next thing you know, we were running a full fledged demo with

25 people at Paharpur cooling towers, which is one of the biggest construction companies in India. And the demo was scheduled for one hour. It went for three hours. And it was a surreal experience because every person in that room was jumping out of their chair. When they saw this demo, they were like, oh my God, this information, we took five days to find out how does this AI engine finding things with so much ease in 10 seconds.

And that was the moment for us, the aha moment for us, the three of us where we thought, okay, we think that this can take off. This has something, some real meat in it. So yeah, Rishi, that’s where the journey began and post that we spoke to more and more companies. Paharpur gave us a very good deal. They started paying us. So they were our first paying customer. And from there, we never looked back.

Rishi Srivastava (09:18)
Yeah, yeah, Gen AI I, know, 2023 when the models came, it was such a shock to the market. And I was working as an NLP engineer at Bank of America, know, 2019 to 2022. I was also seeing the models for getting better. 2023 was just like the tipping point, the models just got so much better, the GPT-3 to GPT-4, you know? So, for…

Isha (09:32)
Yeah.

Yeah, 100%.

Rishi Srivastava (09:41)
Those of our listeners who do not know what IIT Delhi is, could you explain? And could you compare it to maybe Howard here in US?

Isha (09:48)
yes, I think I would definitely compare it with the MITs of the world where MIT is one of the biggest one in the US and I’ve always seen students from MIT making it big in the industry, building beautiful startups like unicorns and whatnot. So for people who don’t know about IIT Delhi, it’s India’s biggest engineering college. You get the best B.Tech degree out of here.

And it’s the toughest exam, one of the toughest exams in the world. So yeah, that’s what IIT Delhi is. And know, Rishi you would know most of the unicorns which are coming out of India, most of them, think 23 out of, I mean, I think 30 % of these startups who are unicorns are actually coming out of IIT Delhi. So yeah, these guys have some fancy things to talk about themselves for sure.

Rishi Srivastava (10:39)
Yeah, I went to IIT Kharagpur, so maybe I’m not at that same level, but you know.

Isha (10:42)
Mm-hmm. You would know. ⁓ come on

Rishi being the modest self that he is.

Rishi Srivastava (10:49)
Next question here for you is how has your MBA from XLRI shaped the way you approach strategy and operations today?

Isha (10:57)
So for people who don’t know about XLRI it’s one of top five B-schools here in India, guys. Rishi, I would say MBA has really helped me structure my thought process better. Although I did not feel that it brought real life experiences to me on my table and I would solve real life business problems and…

Rishi Srivastava (11:02)
music

Isha (11:20)
learn something that was out of this world. But then at the same time, I think I was sitting amongst the most brilliant minds in the country and it would always keep challenging me. At the same time, I think the network that this MBA has given me is just something else. When I was building UltraPos, we raised a 250k US dollars angel fund round for us and

All of that came from people who were a part of XLRiA. So I raised from my seniors, alumni of the same college. I think it has added a lot of value, of course, a lot of credibility to my experience. But then at the same time, it has actually helped me meet so many people who’ve achieved so much in life, draw inspiration from. And you know, these

Two years at MBA gave me a lot more perspective into how to look at problems differently because I was just a fresher who’s worked in an analyst role at NatWest for two years, but here I was challenged every day. So yeah, it really trained me for the better, I would say.

Rishi Srivastava (12:26)
You know, MBA degree, it’s mostly for the industrial age. It’s like you’re trying to make a widget faster. In the new age, what are some of the gaps in an MBA degree? Can you say something about that?

Isha (12:42)
Mm-hmm.

I think in this age where the technology has reached today, I don’t think we need an MBA anymore because GPT is there at our disposal and we can already learn so many things. And then I would say when it comes to networking, we can find new ways to even do that. So I think MBA, I wouldn’t do it again if I were in the GPT age, but for sure.

Rishi, think the one thing which I felt missing in my course was that we would gather a lot of bookish knowledge, but practical experiences and practical business problems were lesser to be seen. I could only see the practicality when I was interning at Microsoft and I was actually solving a real life problem for Microsoft Excel, to be precise. But outside of that, mean, it’s.

know, case studies, group competitions, etc. It’s not that close to the actual business problem, I would say. So that’s something that can definitely be improved.

Rishi Srivastava (13:40)
Someone like you who has an MBA and now you are running a real business, you have so much more insight, right? Like from…

Isha (13:44)
Yes, 100

% it’s very different. Yeah, for sure.

Rishi Srivastava (13:49)
So the next section here, Isha, is on risk decision making and AI. At Contra Vault AI, you focus on servicing hidden risks in tenders or RFPs. What parallels do you see between risk management in procurement and risk management in construction finance?

Isha (13:54)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, think tendering, the process of tendering is very pivotal to both these sides. So where I talk about, so procurement would be very generic. So you can see procurement happening in any company today. So any and every company would procure software, they would procure material, et cetera. But when it comes to construction, Rishi, we’ve seen that this industry,

the famously known AEC industry in the US, let’s say. This industry has been pretty traditional in nature in terms of adopting technology, taking risks to try out new things, solving problems using AI or using technology. I think while procurement can be very technology-led in spaces like IT, finance, BFSI and others, in construction specifically,

we’re having to create that category where construction companies, while they’re bidding on RFPs, okay, this can be done using AI as well. This is like a new concept for them. So I think that’s the biggest difference that we’ve seen and that’s why it’s all the more challenging. But as you know, the market, the construction market is absolutely huge out there in the US. And now we’re also actually serving the Asian as well as the European market.

the scope is endless that way.

Rishi Srivastava (15:25)
How do you think AI can shift decision making speed for industries that traditionally run on long cycles like construction or banking?

Isha (15:35)
Yeah, I think I see this every day when I demonstrate my software to so many companies in different geographies. A simple decision of going through an RFP and understanding whether it’s a go or a no-go for your company. Even that takes days for big companies and long hours for small companies. So to just compare it with how fast AI can do this, AI can get it done in like 15 seconds.

So that’s the kind of speed, ease of work and accuracy the AI brings on the table where you just have to be open enough to see what the technology can bring to you. And then it’s a one-time setup that AI definitely needs from the human beings where you have to teach it a little bit as to what it can do for your company, what are the conditions, rules, et cetera, that your company follows, the terms and conditions you’re okay or not okay with.

And after that, the AI can absolutely do magic for you because then the job gets really easier. So I think it’s a big shift because we’re already cutting 60 % of human effort throughout the bidding process. And we’ve substantiated this with enough case studies with multi-billion dollar companies. you know, it’s, it’s ringing a lot of bells for people that we’re speaking to in the construction industry across geographies.

Rishi Srivastava (16:51)
So the GPT models are prone for hallucination. How do you contain the hallucination in your software?

Isha (16:58)
Well, to go into the depths of it, Tanmay would have to be on a call with you, but Rishi, we’ve been working on this for the past 15, 16 months now. And of course, initially the models would hallucinate. We were not able to train our AI models on larger volumes of paperwork. But now we’ve been able to solve that problem by using

multiple LLM models for various things. So we’ve divided the entire bidding process into smaller chunks where, okay, go-no-go decisions is one, identifying risks is another, negotiating on clauses is one, but building a proposal is another. So we’ve actually segmented the entire process and we’ve found a combination of LLMs for each. So it’s not like only one LLM is doing all the job and it has all the context.

You’re not, we’re not overburdening one LLM with everything. So yeah, I mean, my tech team here works day and night to find the right fit, fine tune it better. And then, I mean, hallucination is something that we don’t see anymore, thankfully.

Rishi Srivastava (18:02)
Good. What’s your take on the balance between human judgment and automation when the stakes are high? For example, multi-million dollar bids are projects.

Isha (18:12)
yes, I think Rishi no matter how big or how intelligent AI gets, we can’t remove human thinking, human decision making out of the process. So I at least, mean, my thought process can change six months later given how fast the technology is moving, but.

As of today, while working with so many companies, I’ve understood that these bids, are worth millions of dollars, sometimes even billions of dollars, of course have to involve the right mindset, the right decision-making processes from human beings. But all the manual jobs that, you you don’t really need that much human effort, the AI can do it very effortlessly. I think the manual pieces should definitely be

replaced by AI and the ones where you’re possibly doing the estimation, you’re costing your bid, you’re making the final calls, you’re deciding whether or not this is a good fit for your company, whether this cost is okay or not okay for this particular client. I think these high level decisions should definitely be done by human beings still. The AI can do the heavy lifting for you for all the manual pieces, but…

you know, and gather the right analytics for you, but the final decision should be still taken by the human beings.

Rishi Srivastava (19:26)
A CFO I was talking to he said that the end of any AI process needs to be a human.

Isha (19:31)
100%. I agree.

Rishi Srivastava (19:33)
What common mistakes do you see teams make when reviewing complex documents and how can technology help catch them earlier?

Isha (19:41)
I think one of the biggest ones is that people assume that if a client is floating an RFP again, it’s gonna be very similar to the last one they floated. So there is a common assumption that, okay, this client is going to float similar structured clauses with similar number of pages of an RFP, they’re going to ask us to write the proposal in a similar way, but.

I mean, I can’t hear the end of this when companies actually tell us that we assumed this incorrectly. And then later on we found out something sneaky was being pushed in between the lines in this RFP. And then later on we realized, my God, we’re going to now lose thousands of dollars on this because we didn’t read it properly earlier or we didn’t challenge our employer earlier before submitting the bid. So I think that’s where.

again, AI can help because it’s always going to do the laborious work of reading each and every line, no matter how many times the same client is pushing out an RFP. So I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes that we’ve heard people making where they assume that it’s going to be the same. We know what is written where. That’s one. And second, people are, I still see some people not giving AI a chance. So

Rishi Srivastava (20:53)
Thank

Isha (20:53)
or assuming that charge GPT can actually do everything under the sun, which is not true because verticalization of AI is so important today because Chat GPT is amazing. mean, Claude is amazing and every other level they’ve done a really great job at it. But at the same time, this AI needs to be further fine tuned on your industry, your problem statement.

So yeah, I think that’s another mistake where people think a co-pilot and chart GPT will do everything, but it’s not really true. And we’ve been able to actually prove that to companies today by comparing chat GPT and ContraVault side by side and showing to them what a big difference it is when it comes to finding the right answers or making the right decisions. So yeah, these are some of the classic mistakes we’ve seen.

Rishi Srivastava (21:39)
The next section here is on building teams and scaling impact. You’ve led teams at Microsoft, NatWest and now your own company. What’s your playbook for building high performing product or operations team?

Isha (21:43)
Mm-hmm.

I think Rishi, you’re giving me more credit than I actually deserve possibly, but I’m still learning in terms of building the right teams. I think as a founder, the most difficult job that I’ve found to date is hiring the right people. So I’m still figuring out, but the one thing that I’ve really realized is that the candidate should absolutely trust your vision as a founder.

So you should see that spark in their eyes when you talk about your company, when you talk about the customers, the fundraisers you’ve done and everything. And I think as a startup, the most important thing that I’ve seen is that the person should be very, very committed towards putting in the long hours, putting in that commitment. Because I was reading the other day about San Francisco Rishi, where big companies like Pylon and

You know, so many other multi-million dollar startups, they keep this criteria that you have to work on Saturdays and you you have to work 15 hour day long shifts. And I was thinking to myself, what are they doing? I mean, is it the right thing to do? But then I realized, yes, it is because if you need to be ahead of your game where AI is almost everywhere and every startup is capable enough today to build anything out of the, I mean, anything under the sun.

your team has to be the one who differentiates you from the pod, right? From everybody else. So I believe that with my product team, for example, we’ve always instilled that empathy towards the customers, the problem statement, but much before that, we’ve first tested whether they have the right commitment to build the product, to put in the long hours, to trust our vision, to take things seriously and work towards

one goal. yeah, mean, that’s those are the most important things that I’ve discovered while hiring new people.

Rishi Srivastava (23:38)
Yeah, the spark in the eyes so valuable and if they’re not loving you and your product and your vision. In a not gonna be the trade. Contra Vault AI helps teams go from document or looked to strategic clarity. How do you apply that same philosophy to running your own business day to day?

Isha (23:40)
If

It’s not worth it. Yes, yes.

Well, that’s a sweet analogy. So I would say that we all work long hours. put in the, we’ve put in loads of effort, but I think we have fun on Fridays. We have snack time and we have gratitude sessions. I think gratitude sessions have really helped all of us feel seen enough, heard enough and acknowledged enough. So all of us,

make it a point that we acknowledge the right things. We don’t shout out about somebody’s mistakes in public, but we do applaud them in public for sure. I think Rishi, having this kind of a tight-knit environment where we acknowledge somebody’s efforts, we go through the stress together, but at the end of the day, we chill out as well. So we have fun sessions and we have boost sessions and you know,

small parties here and there at somebody’s home or in a cafe, we keep doing that. That’s like strategic, that brings us to the strategic clarity where it allows us to not burn out while there is a lot of overload of work happening on the document side, just relating it with your analogy. Yeah, that’s how we found ways and I’m sure we’ll keep getting improved in future.

Rishi Srivastava (25:11)
Yeah, having fun during the journey is so important. A lot of times, Isha, we think, OK, the goal is the most important thing. No, I mean, it’s a journey. Journey is just as important.

Isha (25:20)
Yeah.

100 % agreed.

Rishi Srivastava (25:24)
⁓

As a founder, how do you prioritize product roadmap versus customer feedback versus investor expectations?

Isha (25:35)
Wow. I think customer above everything else, Rishi, for sure. So Rishi, earlier when you were building this as a freshby we would just start building everything we hear from the customers.

Although we do value our customers feedback a lot, we would still see certain recurring patterns today as to how many times a bunch of customers have asked for the same feature. How many times have they asked us to add a new functionality? Right, so that’s how we now make decisions when it comes to customer feedback versus building the product.

At the same time, Rishi, a happy realization that has come along is that with AI, building a product is not difficult anymore, right? Because earlier, you would invest n number of people, n number of hours, PRDs and plans and roadmaps and whatnot. But today it’s like, okay, AI is anyway going to do like 70 % of my coding and…

the rest 10 % is gonna be my team, rest of 20 % is repetitive, so I’m good, I mean, I can do this in a lot lesser time, right? So now the question really is whether this feedback is adding value to the entire journey and how many customers is it resonating with? And then we don’t think a lot before putting that effort. So yeah, definitely we see how reckoning the customer feedback is.

and then we go straight out to build. With investors, Rishi, I think they wouldn’t know about the business more than us, about our specific business, but they do have great generic advice to give. So we value our investors that way a lot, where they would tell us stories where other startups floundered or they couldn’t succeed as much or the mistakes that other people did. So I think learning from their experience has been a great, great advantage for us.

But at the same time when it comes to customers, think we just listen to the customers and we build out the product. That’s what we do.

Rishi Srivastava (27:33)
Yeah, customer is definitely important. Jeff Bezos says that in any team meeting you’re having, you got to have one empty chair for the customer.

Isha (27:42)
Yeah,

for sure.

Rishi Srivastava (27:43)
How do you measure success at ContraVault AI beyond just revenue? What are the metrics or signals matter to you?

Isha (27:51)
your customers need to be happy. If your product has to shine brighter through word of mouth, your customers have to be happy, right? So customer feedback is another. Employee happiness is another where we know that even if we’re not having

good months at a particular period of time. We know for a fact that our employees will stick with us. They will help us. They will, all of us will help each other come out of that, you know, less revenue or no revenue zone. So definitely other than revenue, customer satisfaction is one, employee happiness is another. And yeah, I think in general product analytics where

we would still love to understand even if we’re not making revenue or how good our product is performing. So in general, those metrics would be really important for us.

Rishi Srivastava (28:40)
Last section here, Isha, is on lessons and advice for leaders. Looking back, what’s one failure or near miss that taught you a lesson you still apply today?

Isha (28:50)
I think.

I think I would, the one advice that I would give to all leaders, especially women out there who want to be entrepreneurs, founders, before taking this big plunge of leaving my job and leaving my security net and jumping right into a startup which was not able to pay me anything, which is ContraVault I questioned myself a lot. I always used to think,

my God, okay, let’s do one more month. Let’s take one more salary. Maybe I’ll be better placed. But because of that, I was not able to devote enough time to ContraVault which, I mean, if I were to go back and undo that, I would like save months of time and put them back right into ContraVault and possibly do much better. So if you see any kind of, even the smallest of traction,

with your idea, with your startup in the beginning. Just never doubt yourself and just take the plunge because you can always go back to the corporate world, you know, with a good salary, but this spark will not, you know, it will not keep burning if you don’t fuel it well. So fuel it as early as possible. Don’t doubt yourself a lot.

net. So yeah, that’s the one thing we should.

Rishi Srivastava (29:57)
Yeah,

great point. And even myself, it took me like a year before I took the plunge. was like, let’s go one more month. Let’s go one more month. Let’s go one more month. What advice would you give to CFOs and COOs in construction who are considering adopting AI powered tools for the first time?

Isha (30:08)
That makes sense.

I think the one request I would make to them is that they should start allocating budget for technology. I see a lot of construction companies who have budgets for everything, for employee satisfaction, for material, for new equipment, for, you know, I mean, they do all kinds of things, but it’s sometimes sad to see that they don’t have any budget allocated for technology.

So they should start doing that and they would see beautiful magical changes in their journeys once they start adopting AI. So even if they can, you know, park 0.5 to 1 % of their revenues towards technology, which would only help them better,

Rishi Srivastava (30:58)
The issue is a lot times the CFOs don’t even know how to evaluate your technology. So how do they judge whether it’s a good product for them or not?

Isha (31:07)
Rishi with our product, think the best part is that we always ask for their RFPs and then show the demo to them. that aha moment, if it has to come, it comes right in the demo stage. and thankfully 95 % of the cases, the aha moment has always come in. So that’s the one good thing that we do, that we request them, okay, you don’t have to believe us. You don’t have to believe a dummy document and its analysis.

you give us the hardest RFP that you’ve ever gone through and they very happily extend that to us and then we show the demo to them and then they’re like, yeah, this AI has something in it. Yeah, I want to trust it now. So yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (31:44)
Yeah, if you can show it to them on their document, definitely you got their attention.

Isha (31:50)
100%.

Rishi Srivastava (31:51)
The last question here is,

if you had to predict the future of enterprise decision making five years from now, what role do you think generative AI will play?

Isha (32:02)
I think I don’t see the management being replaced by AI at all because like we were discussing, every AI process has to end with a human being in the loop. But I do see that the AI has great capability in terms of bringing the right analytics to the management, helping them or aiding them in better decision-making. And at the same time,

making teams leaner because not really. I these many people are not required for manual jobs that we that we spend the manual effort on. So I think we can progress towards leaner teams with better decision making capabilities and better analytics data at hand. Because AI is changing the shape of the world and for the better. So I see that.

All of us and people who are coming fresh out of college, the young talent, they would naturally start upgrading themselves towards AI and learning how they can use AI and then find better jobs. yeah, think the world is going to be smarter and better placed five years from now, for sure.

Rishi Srivastava (33:11)
Yeah, yeah. You know, some people say that AI is making us dumber you know, we don’t even think about a lot of things. just ask chat, you pretty, you know, and it drives or like another LLM and it just writes the replies now.

Isha (33:21)
Yeah.

What do you think about this Rishi?

Rishi Srivastava (33:26)
Actually, I’m kind of not very good at writing emails and talking to people. So I write something really crude and the AI comes back with very good response. I feel like it’s not making me dumber I feel like because I’ve already been through the part where you’re learning the language and you’re learning how to articulate yourself. the new generation, maybe we were there in their teens, they

Isha (33:36)
Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (33:50)
haven’t developed those skills. Those you know creative analytical writing skills or thinking creatively and they suddenly started using AI and they themselves may not develop those you know benchmark skills that you and I take for granted.

Isha (33:54)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think EdTech, the world of EdTech should come up with something which allows kids to still retain their creativity. I hope that happens because that’s very important for sure.

Rishi Srivastava (34:15)
Yeah. Yeah. Isha thank you so much for your time. I enjoyed this conversation.

Isha (34:19)
Thank you Rishi, likewise.

Rishi Srivastava (34:21)
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