Does It Really Need AI?

Hey everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong TV. My next guest is an author, but he's also Principal Director AI and Innovation over at a large bank. His name is Gautham Palapa, and let's welcome him to Techstrong TV.

Gautham, how are you? I'm doing good, Alan. Thank you for having me.

It's great to be here. Absolutely. You know, Gautham, we were talking off camera.

You haven't been here with us on Techstrong since 2021, 2022, like COVID times, if you will. Yeah. No.

I think that's how the world kind of describes those times now. We say COVID times and you know what that means. We're all working from home, and we were doing a lot of this, but we still do a lot of this.

Yeah. " They probably don't remember. But give people a refresher, a little bit about yourself if you don't mind.

Yeah, sure. Happy to. So I've been in the industry for about over two decades now.

Mostly in the application, the cloud native development space, and now in the AI and data space. I'm a developer at heart. I grew up through the ranks.

I've worked in product. I've led products for a long time. I've been an executive advisor.

I've had the fortune when I was working at VMware and Pivotal to work with Fortune 500 companies and their executives and help transform them, especially during the COVID times, because that was a very new way of working for all of us and also to find ways by which we can virtually and remotely deliver value. And so a lot of organizations were struggling at that time, and so I was fortunate enough to help work with them. Now I work in a bit of a large financial organization, helping transform the entire organization and the way that we interact with data and AI.

I love it. And you weren't talking about AI in 2021, were you? Well, I was talking a little bit about AI.

So I'm one of those few people who probably have been talking about AI since 2007. My PhD was in artificial intelligence. Really?

I'm one of the outliers. But yeah. Yeah, certainly.

So that brings up a whole another line of questioning we're going to have to explore here. Yeah. So when you thought about AI that early, how did it turn out versus how you thought about it?

Is it happening faster? Did you think it would be this impactful? What did you think?

So when we were working in 2007, 2008, we were really excited because the aspect of using artificial intelligence to improve human quality of life was very appealing, and that's truly what we use technology for. It's to improve- Sure ... human quality of life.

So when I was working on my PhD, and we were implementing smart home and heuristic algorithms and machine learning algorithms, it was more focused on that. Just recently, I want to say like a month and a half ago, I was at one of these AI competitions held by the Outstanding Teenager Leadership Forum here in the Greater Toronto area, high school kids, and they were pitching their entrepreneurial idea on how to use AI and how to bring social benefits. And two out of the six that were competing were implementing things that we were thinking of and trying to build when I was doing my PhD.

And I was like, oh my God, the world has changed so much that high school students are able to monetize it and make this a venture of their own and create prototypes and actually help people with this. So it's so fascinating that AI, all the hype and the buzz aside, I'm very excited about how things are going because it really will help us evolve as humans and make us focus on high-value activities and let all the low-value activities be handled by systems. Fair.

I don't disagree with you at all. As a matter of fact, I have a very similar sort of world outlook these days, though probably not as informed as you with having been involved in it this long. Gautham, if you don't mind, I want to pivot a little bit.

You just recently released a book. Yeah. " I'm in the middle of writing a book myself.

A lot of people out here are always in the middle of writing something. But even with AI, writing a book is not easy as one would think. A lot of work, a lot of hours, a lot of thinking, a lot of research.

It's not something you do lightly, right? What drove you? What drove you here to say, "I want to write this book"?

Yeah. So I've been working with my co-author on this book for over two and a half years. So how it happened is, as an executive advisor and a global CTO, I've been working with all these executives and trying to help them organize their team structures and the flow within their organizations to ensure that there's high amount of value that can be delivered quickly.

So This book is a culmination of over 600 plus workshop hours with the executives, and then over 400 plus conversations that we've had with them. We've been doing these workshops and these interactions to help leaders get their business value faster and better. And what we've started realizing is that there's no one single way by which you can get a 360-degree view of how to deliver this.

And so we found a need that there's a framework that can be created, and that's what actually helped us, could build this thing called the Value Transform as a framework, and that's the entire anchor for the book. Hmm. So, writing the book, this book is actually like a field guide or a handbook for executives and for tactical folks to operationalize and get to the value.

The whole theme is based on an octopus. It has eight arms. There's a lot of things about an octopus, super smart creatures.

Each arm is actually individually coordinating, and it can sense by itself. So it's autonomous that way, but it has a central brain as well that helps facilitate. So it's the right- Analogy ...

imagery that we can use for the book. And so the value transform, which we call the octopus, actually has eight different domains that gives a 360-degree value for vision and focus on how to deliver the value. Got it.

Excellent. You know what, I don't know if you mentioned your co-author, I didn't hear the name, but we might as well. Their co-author.

Yeah. My co-author is Asanka Abayasinghe. He is the CTO for WSO2.

It's a really large cloud organization which helps connect- Sure ... various systems and various technologies, and we've been working for a very long time together. Excellent.

I love it. So what's interesting, even though you're Principal Director, AI and Innovation, I don't see AI in the title, and I didn't hear you mention AI a lot in describing it. For someone who has their PhD in Artificial Intelligence in 2007, I would expect to see AI front and center, perhaps at this stage.

What's the story? So, it's interesting, right? So, there's a lot of buzz and hype around AI, especially generative AI and agentic AI.

We do have a chapter dedicated on AI in the book. But where we are starting with is actually to understand what value means for us. You don't need AI to understand what is valuable for us as humans, and to define that and understand what success means.

You can accelerate getting to it, but it doesn't mean that you need to rely solely on that. And one of the things that I tell my teams, even today, is the fundamental question we have to ask is, does it really need AI? Because there are a lot of things that does not require artificial intelligence.

You can do a lot with robot process automation. You can do a lot with improving the flow, process improvement, process re-engineering. There's a lot that can be done.

Throwing AI into everything is probably not the right approach, and that's why we have certain questions that we ask before we even want to go into AI. And then when we say, okay, yes, we probably can benefit and get value by using artificial intelligence, the next question is, what kind of AI? Are we using the traditional methods of machine learning or artificial neural networks?

Are we using generative AI? Are we using agentic AI? What are we trying to do?

So while it's very exciting and I've been in the Bay Area, so before I moved here, I used to be in the Bay Area. Everything is a hype cycle, it's a bubble, it's a buzzword. We do a lot of it to ourselves.

Mm-hmm. So AI has become that panacea for every problem. And so almost every product and every vendor uses it, but I try to focus more on what is valuable and what outcomes mean for us, and then decide how we are going to get to the value.

Excellent. I get it. And you're so right about living.

I just had this discussion with a friend of mine who's from Italy, and he was here in New York. They put on a PlatformCon, platform engineering show last week, and he was talking about the difference in attendees, let's say from London or Amsterdam versus New York or San Francisco. Yeah.

And there's a big difference, right? I don't know how to explain it to him. But there's just a different attitude, right?

It's a little bit cooler, but it's not that they don't... It's just we're so used to going from one wave to the next. Yes.

It's like you're at the beach, and there's just boom, every wave. And after a while, it's just another wave. Yeah.

Right? And we ride the wave, and then when we're going to ride the next wave. Where I think in other places, they think it's the wave, right?

And that everything is just that wave. So there's definitely in there. Gautam, I got to assume at this point, the book's available on your usual book outlets, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, what have you Yeah, it's mostly on Amazon.

So, it's interesting. We ran a social experiment. We decided to self-publish this book.

And so- As many people are ... yeah. It's on Amazon for the most part, available almost anywhere.

It's in hardcover, paperback, and e-book. The good thing about this is every chapter, at the end of it, you do have workshop topics and questions that you can ask and how you can get to it. You don't have to read this book sequentially.

You can pick and choose a topic that is important for you and dive right in. But the best way is actually to go through and develop the entire value transform for your organization. So we wrote it in such a way because we are also executives, and we know that everyone's hard-pressed on time.

And so we wanted to get the right information to people quickly. And so this is laid out in a way where you can do it sequentially if you're at the starting of the journey. If you're already somewhere there and you're stuck somewhere, you can dive right into that chapter.

But at the end of it, you will have a comprehensive 360-degree view of the problem you're trying to solve, the value you're trying to deliver, how you know you're successful, and how can you continuously ensure that you're delivering value. I love it. Hey, Gautam, thanks for coming up here on Techstrong TV.

Don't wait for another four or five years to come back, okay? Yeah. Thank you for having me, Alan.

It's always great to be here. It's always my pleasure. It's part of what we do here.

There's always the people from IBM or Microsoft or Google or Meta or whoever, but we try to cover what's really going on in the tech space and give people like you a chance to get the word out. So I appreciate you coming on. Gautam Palapa, Principal Director, AI and Innovation, here on his new book called "Invaluable: To Find Value, Align Execution, Deliver Outcomes," available at a bookseller near you, mostly Amazon.

You're watching Techstrong TV. We'll be back in a moment.