INTERVIEW
DEMOCRATISING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RAMPRAKASH RAMAMOORTHY, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH AT MANAGEENGINE, TALKS ABOUT WHY AI IS A GAME-CHANGING TECH TREND.
D
o you think the future of work is going to be hybrid? Yeah, it’s going to be hybrid. If you look it broadly, on the one hand, consumers are going digital the first interaction with your brand will probably be digital. But, on the other, many of your employees are going to be remote. And that opens a lot of opportunities, but at the same time, it also leads to a lot of security and privacy challenges. So, it is important to be well prepared so that you don’t lose your competitive edge. Is AI going to be one of the top trends in IT this year? Yes, AI is definitely going to be the biggest trend, and it is the rubber meets the road moment for AI. We have seen a lot of consumer AI over the last few years in terms of personal assistants, and better social network feeds, etc. In the post-pandemic world, AI will be a crucial component of managing IT because many new variables have come in. For example, it is imperative for customers to interact with your brand only digitally. Your employees are faced with many new security vulnerabilities because data is no longer restricted to only corporate networks. Traditionally, security has been rule-based, and now, AI will change the game by looking at your past behaviour and analyzing patterns from reams of data. AI will help you create ad hoc rules on the fly, identify what is normal for your organisation, and then create a very flexible, non-rule-based system that can make a difference in how you manage security in this increasingly digital-first environment. Can you tell us about know-how in AI? We have been working on AI for the last ten years, and we have shipped a lot of products
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CXO INSIGHT ME
APRIL 2022
across our suite of products, primarily focused on statistical machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. We have made many strides in this, even in the early years of AI. In the last three-four years, we have been specifically focusing on AI with explanation because enterprise AI is something where there are a lot of workflows involved—for example, predicting an outage using my network monitoring solution. If there is a 60 percent chance of an outage, I alert my teams and set the ball rolling to see what is potentially coming. But if there is an 80 percent chance of outage, I will probably have to inform my customers about some service disruption. So there are a lot of workflows that we built around these decisions with AI. We have created an explanation-first, causationfirst AI module across statistical machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. Are you offering any low-code/no-code platforms, given the lack of AI skills? At our recent user conference, we have launched our App Creator solution, which is basically Zoho Creator hosted on-prem. Now, we have a lot of AI features in Zoho
Creator, a low-code platform for building custom apps. Slowly we would see them coming into App Creator as well because they have the same backend. The idea is that when you put a lot of these no-code, low-code power into your developers’ hands, the possibilities are endless. We’re also investing in techniques like transfer learning, few-shot learning, etc., with very limited data. With as little as five to 10 samples, users will be able to customise the AI module. So today, we have our OCR stack or sentiment analysis stack available via Zoho Creator, which will be available to the app creator the on-premise version of the same as well. Your data centre products are built from the ground-up right. Is that a significant differentiator for ManageEngine? Yes, that was possible because of dogfooding all the experiments we did initially. Our data centre runs on ManageEngine, and our business runs on Zoho. So we had a lot of Zoho Corp only releases, which helped us set the ground. In 2014, when we moved from the research into the production phase, it was all very new. People talked about AI in terms of self-driving cars, curing cancer, etc. How do I put this into my everyday work? How can I make an impact and differentiate from the competition? That is when we realised the need for explanation. Our first AI release was insight24/7, which is our network monitoring solution. Even our own ManageEngine users were not able to appreciate it because there were no explanations in it. So when we added an explanation, we saw the usage going up. So definitely, this dogfooding has helped to gain some perspectives on this very emerging tech.
