In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Shanker Trivedi, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Business at NVIDIA, and Umesh Sachdev, CEO of Uniphore, shared their insights into the transformative journey of their companies and the broader AI landscape.
Trivedi highlighted how generative AI has become a pivotal application in their platform, with years of collaboration with developers, research labs, and startups. He added that substantial groundwork laid over decades is now coming to fruition with significant adoption across sectors like healthcare, financial services, and telecom.
Sachdev highlighted that strategic partnerships with companies like NVIDIA that have bolstered Uniphore’s capabilities, enabling it to engage with larger clients and penetrate deeper into the AI market. This collaborative ecosystem, according to Sachdev, is crucial for driving innovation and sustaining long-term growth in the AI industry
Despite the challenging conditions for tech IPOs, Sachdev remains optimistic about Uniphore’s accelerated growth trajectory, driven by the increasing demand for AI solutions and the expanding collaboration with large-scale customers and partners.
Below are the edited excerpts from the interview.
Shereen: I have to start by talking to you about NVIDIA’s shock and awe story. Shankar. I mean, today, the most valuable company in the world. For most of us, the big breakthrough moment as far as generative AI was the ChatGPT moment. But for you and for the folks at NVIDIA, when did you start to think that this was on the verge of an explosion?
Trivedi: The valuation is just the score. We are all about playing the game. And our game is accelerated computing and building a platform. So, for us, generative AI is the killer application among other applications for accelerated computing. And so, we’ve been doing deep learning since 2012. Jensen presented the first DGX to OpenAI in 2016. So that’s very, very long and deep involvement with the ecosystem associated with generative AI.
Shereen: To the layperson, I mean, it’s just a phenomenal story that’s taken shape in the public perception over the last few years. But a lot of work has gone in over the past two decades in building it out to be what it is today.
Trivedi: Yeah, we’ve been working on this for many years. We always work with all the developers and all the research laboratories and universities, all the startups, you know, small startups, as well as midsize and large startups, and all of the, global research centres, global capability centres, and, major ISVs (independent software vendors). It takes a long time to build a market.
Shereen: You were talking about the early adopters of AI as well. Where are you seeing the most traction today?
Trivedi: So I mean, obviously, healthcare is a huge area. Accelerated computing and generative AI can help you screen molecules and discover personalised treatments embedded in medical instruments. Of course, the cycle is long, in terms of the consumer experience or the patient experience. But obviously, the flywheel is going very, very quickly. In financial services, we are seeing a huge amount of AI adoption. Because in payment processing the challenges around fraud, KYC, can be better detected using generative AI. Even though they’re very secretive, financial trading companies use generative AI in their trading strategies. So financial services. Telecom, which is also, a huge contact centre. The cost of running a call centre is very, very high. Generative AI can do the work of multiple call centre agents. So, these are some of the really compelling use cases. Almost all of them, all of them that I’m mentioning, are in production. And we’re seeing a lot of momentum.
Shereen: When we talk about sovereign AI and you talked about digital public infrastructure and we’ve got that layer done in India, what else will it take to be able to build this out in the way that you just spoke of?
Trivedi: In India, there are two things. One is India for India. So use the India stack to drive local implementation, and local startups, both addressing the large consumer market and the huge business side of things. Then there’s a second piece, which is India for the world. And you think about, all of our global systems integrators like TCS, Infosys, etc, as well as the global capability centers. I think that there are 800 of them that we’re involved in. All of them are creating value in India for the world. Startups and companies like Umesh’s Uniphore, are also addressing that. India has a huge base of intellectual capital, and technical skills capability, and the skills are growing exponentially. And we’ve been training over 1,00,000 people in India just since I was last there. So it’s an explosion of skills being imparted to this large body of engineering talent which can enable India for the world.
Shereen: So from an NVIDIA perspective, you spoke about talent. You’ve got four centres in India already. You’re talking to the Tata’s and Infosys and Reliances of the world. But the role and relevance of India as we enter this AI era, what do you see the role that India will play outside of just providing talent?
Trivedi: The old model was that you bill by the hour. Now you’re going to bill for the output of the AI factory. That’s the key point. So people will automate, and enhance a process using AI, and you’ll export that process. I’m pretty sure the business models in terms of how customers are going to pay for it are actually going to change over time. Because once you’re in a factory model, you can actually bill by the unit volume instead of billing for the hour. And imagine if your employee is so much more productive, how could you possibly have a low hourly rate? It makes no sense. So, a whole bunch of business models are going to change as a result of this new way of doing business with an AI factory. Now it does require one thing, and that is really good AI infrastructure locally.
Shereen: We’ve been talking about AI and generative AI specifically as being an accelerant, as being an enabler, but let’s also talk about the disruption that it’s going to cause. I mean, it’s a nice way to put it, efficiency, but at the end of the day, we’re talking about people, we’re talking about jobs. What is it going to mean- if the last big shift of what we saw with the cloud, how different is this going to be?
Trivedi: I mean, every time there’s a new technology wave of innovation, going back to the steam engine or the automobile, obviously people’s time is freed up and, you know, new activity starts to happen in the economy. So if people get more time as a result of AI delivering huge amounts of productivity gains, then it’s extremely likely that that time will be used for creating new economic activities and creating new value and higher GDP for sure.
Shereen: Well, that’s the hope. But, you know, there is a downside as well. I mean, if these bets don’t pay off.
Trivedi: No, I mean, obviously each individual case will be different and obviously some people will face a skills challenge. They’ve got to relearn themselves, and everybody should be a learning person, a learning machine, so that, as things change, you learn new skills. You used to ride a horse cart, now you need to learn how to drive a car. And I think the analogies are very similar in this AI age. We all have to learn new skills. Now, obviously, some people will lose their jobs just as they did in other cycles. And, I think the role of society has to be to look after those people and offer the opportunity for those people who want to re-skill themselves and address new challenges.
Shereen: So how are you seeing competition at this point in time? I mean, clearly, you got over 90% of the market, but there are others who are now looking at getting into the chips business and hopefully bringing down the costs as well so that there is deeper penetration. But how do you see competition?
Trivedi: We partner with everybody. So, even if they want to, in some areas, be competitive, we want to be their partner in a vast, large number of spaces. So that’s our position. And the market, especially at this point in time, is growing.
Shereen: What is your expectation of how large the addressable market could be over the next few years?
Trivedi: I mean, instead of AI being just IT, if you think about it as pervasive everywhere, then it’s the whole global economy. All of the healthcare, all of government, and all of the telecom is addressable using AI. The question is, what’s the business model? Now, notice some companies will address different parts of that ecosystem. And so instead of competing, we want to actually collaborate with more companies in the ecosystem to really build out this AI, this new AI industrial revolution.
Shereen: And that involves also making bets on startups, which is something that you’re looking at.
Trivedi: We love working with startups. I mean, we have, you know, thousands of startups in our programme in India and globally. In fact, we disproportionately put more resources on startups developers and researchers than we do on enterprises.
Shereen: Umesh, let’s talk about the road ahead and the opportunities that you just spoke of. What is that going to mean now in terms of ARR? When we last spoke, you were targeting a billion. You know, what’s the plan on that front? And what about a possible IPO? I know that you’ve always said if the conditions are right, you will consider that possibility. Are the conditions right?
Sachdev: I think with the interest rates being where they are, etc, we are seeing, software multiples, except companies like NVIDIA, and the top five or six companies in S&P, clearly, conditions for tech IPOs aren’t right. That’s why we haven’t seen too many in the last couple of years. As far as Uniphore is concerned, I think in 16 years, I’ve seen times where we were the only ones talking about conversational AI and some, dedicated partners like NVIDIA supporting us. Right now is the most exciting phase. The whole world wants AI. Everyone’s become my competitor. In some deals, we compete with the hyperscalers, and in other deals, we cooperate with them, and they partner with us.
Shereen: So are you excited or are you afraid?
Sachdev: Well, this is a much better phase of company building than being at the lonely end where we were the only ones educating the whole market. We’ve actually seen our growth accelerate in the last couple of years, and we’re continuing to assume that to be true for the foreseeable future. So, speaking of the accelerated ARR journey it is up to a billion, and we are staying the course. In fact, if anything, I’m pushing my team to see if we can get there faster because of this wave. And once again, going public is not the destination. It’s going to be a milestone. On our board, we have people like John Chambers. I want to build this company for a very long period. And so there’ll be a time for that milestone. Once again, it’s market-dependent. There is stuff that we don’t control. But we’re currently working with companies we never could have imagined. We’re working with customers who are, way bigger than us, and they’re bringing us into their boardrooms to make presentations about how we’re going to help them with their AI. We’re working with partners who are willing to go far with us. And people don’t realise this, NVIDIA and we’ve been working for the last five years before the Gen AI wave was hotter. And I’d say it’s partners like NVIDIA who, really put their energy behind supporting companies like Uniphore to become the next generation of Ciscos or Oracles, etc, because they realise if they grow the ecosystem, they grow with us and vice versa.
Watch the accompanying video for the entire conversation.
