Artificial Intelligence or AI is driving organizations across industries to reimagine their customer engagement strategies for better business success and outcomes. Sunil Mittal, EVP & Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, CSS Corp, explains to CXOToday how we are moving towards a conversational economy where a few spoken words can accomplish a business transaction.

CXOToday: Artificial Intelligence is a huge topic. What are some of the areas that you find are most exciting and have an immense opportunity in the near term?

Sunil Mittal: Demand for personalized consumer experiences across different industries is fueling the explosion of AI. Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today we have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will transform in the next several years. We are moving towards a conversational economy where the voice is the new frontier. A few spoken words to a smart virtual assistant can help accomplish a seemingly complex business transaction. As AI technology matures, forward-thinking businesses are plugging in conversational AI in their strategic investment roadmaps to leverage it for their customer service function.

Today, voice assistants and social messaging have given birth to the intelligent experience economy and made the customer experience more conversational than transactional. For example, you can ask Apple’s voice assistant – Siri – to get you weather updates, find out and help you buy specific movies, play your favorite songs and a gamut of other specific activities. Amazon’s Alexa can help you perform several tasks for you like booking a doctor’s appointment; sports scores and game times; important event dates, hear the latest news; tracking traffic; manage calendars, to-do list and shopping list, set alarms and timers; read Kindle books and play audio books; make purchases; control smart home devices, etc.

Also, the new trend has given rise to Conversational commerce that refers to real-time customer communication through different messaging applications and chatbots. These platforms empower businesses to generate a sense of need for their products to potential customers, they also act as personal shopping assistants to customers. Many B2C businesses are using conversational intelligence with bots as a platform for offering customer support.  We offer tech support services with this new conversational model that would field customers’ questions and help get more real-time access to resolutions. This boosts overall business efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

At CSS Corp, we have embarked on a new journey in AI to disrupt the customer experience ecosystem with a new model called “Conversational” that aims at simplifying and personalizing customer engagements through AI based Voice platforms. We offer AI-based solutions that enable customers to have powerful, impactful conversations with brands and helps them with insights and a new radical vision to solve a challenge. Our focus and investments in AI are helping enterprises adopt the right customer engagement and support strategy and help move from traditional models to new age service models that help them identify new revenue streams.

CXOToday: Gartner Says AI Technologies will be in almost every new software product by 2020. How are businesses using AI? What are some of the transformational benefits from AI?

Sunil Mittal: The human and AI relationship is evolving fast and making forecasts in today’s dynamic world. AI-fueled automation and predictive models have augmented human intelligence and helped many businesses drive revenue through predictability capabilities. Regardless of their customer base and business model, organizations in B2B and B2C are adopting AI capabilities that help to predict customer/system behavior, drive revenue and bring businesses closer to their customers and also streamline the operations thereby ramping up the productivity and flexibility through its adoption.

From a B2B environment, AI boosts predictive maintenance that allows for better prediction and avoidance of machine failure in industrial sectors. This, in turn, increases asset productivity and cuts down maintenance costs considerably. For instance, for a railroad and locomotive company, CSS Corp has deployed our AI based solution for predictive intelligence capabilities to pre-empt equipment failures, optimize daily operations and field resources. We constantly monitor customer’s sensor-based IoT devices and enable ideal failure prediction analysis with the use of real-time intelligence, image data analysis, acoustics data analysis, and operational intelligence.

From a B2C environment, AI is transforming the customer service space today with Virtual Customer Assistant (VCA). As per Gartner, VCAs yield phenomenal results like a 70% reduction in call and/or email inquiries, increased customer satisfaction, and a 33% saving per voice engagement. Organizations are positioning AI-powered VCAs at the center of their customer engagement strategy. CSS Corp has built Cognitive CX Platform an intelligent Virtual Assistant platform that aims at bringing together various technologies like AI, automation, and analytics with pre-built vertical assets, 360-degree customer context, intelligent process guidance, and actionable insights that enhance customer interactions.

CXOToday: What suggestions do you have for CEOs, CIOs, and other CXOs who have just started exploring the implications of AI for their business?

Sunil Mittal: Today’s digitally empowered, adventurous and experimental customer is the fundamental driver of all the business and technological changes. CEOs, CIOs and CXOs are facing some basic but tough questions and to what extent they need to go to:

(a)   Get closer to the customer

(b)   Deliver the simplest customer experiences to diverse customer segments across multiple products

In 2017, many new CIOs and CXOs have been facing a “deer in the headlights” moment since the subject of AI is so vast that they feel clueless as to where and how to start with AI. That it is a powerful and disruptive technology is a no-brainer but CIOs and CXOs need to collaborate with CEOs closely to make them understand the clear business case for AI and not take an immediate headlong plunge into the AI stream immediately.

Eventually, AI will be ubiquitous. The technology landscape is inundated with choices – from machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to Chatbots and recommendation engines. But the moot question is, are all businesses yet ready to adopt it? The CIOs and CXOs new to AI revolution must work out the business strategy part first and how it would get augmented if blended with AI. They must evaluate on how a good investment in machine learning will add a competitive edge to their product/service and whether adding AI to the business strategy will help in inching closer towards the customer with good service.  They must try to understand if it will boost employees’ productivity, simplify customer experience and help them make better purchase decisions and monetize the business.

CXOToday: Given how quickly AI is rising, and skills shortage becoming a big issue, what suggestions do you have for filling in this gap?

Sunil Mittal: The benefits of the new age technology like AI are irresistible; however, this is hemmed in by lack of qualified talent to exploit it to its full potential.  According to a survey by Tech Pro Research, only 28% of companies have some experience with AI or machine learning, and over 40% said their enterprise lack the skills required to implement and support AI and machine learning. In our opinion, it’s been a long time now that the industry has been fretting over the topics of “skill gap”. It becomes more pertinent in the age of AI. Though AI is increasingly acing the number of roles and tasks, we’re still a long time away from human jobs completely fading away from the scene. We can bridge this yawning skill gap by helping our workforce adapt to the jobs of the future through education. And, both the corporate and the governments need to participate and invest equally in imparting technical learning.

AI can also be used to fix this skill gap as it can provide personalized help to learners and identify successful teaching patterns. We, at CSS Corp, have developed a Digital Career Progression Framework called “Reimagine” which has been specifically built to fast-track employee reskilling initiatives within the organization. Our framework facilitates an innovative approach to employee up-skilling and cross-skilling in new age digital technologies. Nearly 30%- 40% of mid-level managers at CSS Corp are engaged in reskilling through this initiative, in niche digital technologies including AI, autonomics, augmented reality (AR), cloud, IoT, deep learning, and cognitive computing. The framework brings in greater personalization in employee learning, wherein employees can learn anytime, anywhere, and on any device through Virtual University, Massive open online course (MOOCs) and JAM (a collaborative tool). It has also created more career and growth opportunities for employees while seeing an overall drop in attrition. We recently won the NASSCOM Digital Skills 2017 award for having one of the best digital reskilling platforms in the Indian IT industry.

CXOToday: What are the top capabilities that are important in an AI solution that drives customer adoption?

Sunil Mittal: AI is proving to be one of the fastest-growing technology segments in 2017, and is being rapidly adopted by organizations, big or small. However, the top three capabilities in an AI solution that drive customer adoption are 1. Does the AI solution have good predictive capabilities? AI solutions are self-learning systems. Banks and financial institutions are widely using AI solutions based on machine learning models to detect credit frauds by analyzing customer’s past spending patterns and predict the transactions that the customer is likely to make and flag unusual activity if any. If we talk at the consumer level, Google Now is a great example of a self-learning application. This personal assistant tracks its user’s activities and interactions to collate and put together relevant information for the user on the smartphone. This application constantly improves based on the feedback it keeps getting from the user and its own learning algorithm.

2.  Is it enterprise class? AI solution must fit in seamlessly, non-intrusively into the technology environment of the business. It must be a traceable solution that can undergo complete auditability. The AI solution must be fast, flexible, extensible and responsive. It should be able to adapt quickly to the changes. The AI solution under consideration must be able to address all the concerns of an enterprise such as growth, cost, compliance, and responsiveness. It should be able to bring in automation of high variability processes and legacy modernization into the business and tech environment, and trigger operational efficiency, which in turn will boost productivity and consequently drive revenue.

3. Does it offer a smooth customer experience? A good AI solution acts like a great customer service channel that provides a customer experience in which customers feel the same comfort interacting with a machine as they feel with a human. The solution must understand the content as well as the context of the customer’s feedback, questions or requests. Never-sleeping chatbots offer cost-effective, powerful customer support and never make the customers wait to get their problems resolved. The AI solution must be able to collect customer data from support interactions and analyze the same to offer personalized customer experience.

CXOToday: According to you what are the top three barriers of AI Adoption in an enterprise set up in India?

Sunil Mittal: As AI accelerates up the hype cycle, its adoption in an enterprise set up in India is still relatively low. We see the following top 3 barriers of AI adoption in India:

1.  Lack of differentiation: With an increasing number of startups entering the AI space, enterprises are finding it tough to differentiate between one AI solution and another. With hundreds of AI vendors in the industry today claiming to be providing best-in-class AI solutions, enterprises are immensely confused about the true and clear AI capabilities of these vendors and what business problems these solutions will solve for them.

2. The disconnect between the current curriculum and the work skills in demand: Success of an AI engagement depends on the people that program the systems and the data being fed. Identifying and sourcing the right people and skill set from the market for AI engagements is key to any AI engagement. AI projects require people with specialized skill-sets who can apply AI techniques across business processes in real time. The synergy between the current sequential education system and the work demands in the enterprise set seems to be missing. For India to maximally benefit from the AI revolution, the challenge of talent shortage looming large on the industry needs to be addressed faster. Many Indian firms are grappling to scale resources for the new AI challenge. The lack of adequate AI talent to meet the growing demands is a matter of huge concern in India.

3. Unpredictability and uncertainty of resources required: AI systems can behave unpredictably. A badly implemented AI system can lead to objectionable consequences, including a privacy breach. Companies must carefully evaluate the business processes and system for AI adoption and take into consideration legal, regulatory and ethical implications.

Understanding the cost, time and effort involved to get an AI-powered system up and running is one of the most important factors that enterprises should think while building or evaluating AI solutions. Based on the maturity level of processes, the accuracy of data sets and knowledge base, the success of AI engagements varies between months to several years

Enterprises face challenges during AI adoption in identifying the right use cases, data sets, and business processes and while mapping it with customer benefits in terms of revenue, convenience and experience

CXOToday:  What’s CSS Corp ’s future roadmap on AI?

Sunil Mittal: CSS Corp has built two AI Platforms in the last 12 months: 1) Cognitive CX Platform to manage customer support engagements and 2) Contelli to simplify and modernize IT Operations. Our AI platforms understand behavioral aspects and relationships between customer, business processes and systems. Our solutions provide end-to-end customer clustering and deeper insights into customer sentiments, buying behavior and satisfaction-levels, to drive business success.

Despite the hype, adoption, and investments in newer technologies like AI, enterprises are finding it challenging to manage IT operations and customer support operations as they mostly carry baggage of legacy systems, infrastructure and software stacks that are aging. This significantly contributes to the complex support landscape, making life extremely painful for customers. We understood, perfecting customer support operations requires rigorous planning, focused technology investments, strategic roadmap, and execution, as it is linked to the overall productivity and efficiency of an organization.

Our AI solution enables enterprises in managing their complex IT and Customer support operations and introduces relevant frameworks, providing enterprises agility, speed and flexibility. AI is at the epicenter of all our customer engagement programs. Today as we speak we are integrating AI as a part of all our new age platforms and we will continue to encourage our customers to embrace AI solutions. We’re committed to our mission of embedding intelligence across different functions of the enterprises and help each of them innovate, grow and compete.

In this context, CSS Corp has invested significantly in AI and has plans to scale up our solutions that can help companies understand their customer’s next best action and drive additional revenue. We will continue to focus on customer support engagements and as well build AI solutions to solve unique business challenges in TMT, Healthcare, and Manufacturing.

Forrester recently recognized our AI capabilities in their Forrester Wave for Customer Analytics, we recently won the Stevie Silver Award for our AI Platform, Cognitive CX Platform. Most importantly our existing customers and prospects have shown utmost interest and enthusiasm to implement our AI solutions. Our customers feel that our technology is far superior as compared to any AI solution offered by other leading players in the IT Industry.

All of us at CSS Corp is excited to explore new frontiers with AI that harnesses the power of customer centricity and build an ecosystem that fuels unprecedented growth and innovation for our customers.

Leader session by: Brijesh Balakrishnan | SVP, Global Head – Talent Fulfilment CSS Corp

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The Partners group entered CSS Corp, a mid-tier software and testing company in June 2013. After sailing along with the existing management, the investors pressed for change and brought in Manish Tandon from Infosys in August 2016. Occupying the corner office since, Tandon has sewn up a new CSS Corp which is growing faster than ever before. In a free wheeling chat, Tandon tells TOI that by March 2018, the company will cross $150 million in revenues. Excerpts:

What was the mandate given to you by The Partners Group?
With the evolution happening in the environment, the company had to transform in sync with the needs of tomorrow. Partners Group was keen to align the company with the market expectations and drive growth. They were looking for some fresh thinking to bring the organization back on the growth track. We have started turning around and I am expecting better quarters ahead. I think that Partners group would like to give it 3 to 5 years to maximize their ROI.

What has been the progress?
The new management has been aggressively working towards creating an impact in the market. There were some underinvested areas which have been strengthened. We have expanded our service line focus to be able to deliver a broader range to our customers. We have invested heavily in our Innovation Labs to produce solutions of the future, and to enable us to drive solution-led differentiation. We have boosted our sales and marketing machinery for better engagement with our clients and prospects.

These measures are beginning to bear fruit. Our service propositions are resonating strongly in the market. For the past two quarters we have been growing sequentially at 3% q-o-q and we expect this to further improve in the next couple of quarters. That would put us at a run rate of 15% yearly growth. At the existing growth rate we plan to close at around $155 million for fiscal ending March 2018.

The amount of growth witnessed in the past three quarters is more than what happened in the past three years.

When do you think you have crossed the hump?
After I joined, the first two quarters went significantly on fire fighting and setting things in order. We have really taken off in the last two quarters and expect this trend to continue. I think the hump of inertia is behind us.

What is the realistic estimate for a CSS Corp IPO?
All PE-owned firms need to have an exit path. Some PE invested companies go through an IPO or are acquired by strategic buyers or bought over by other PE firms. When CSS Corp’s organic revenue crosses $200 million, we could potentially do an IPO. All depends on the valuation we get. We estimate to reach this point in 3 to 4 years of time.

It’s a no brainer – cyber security is a critical issue.

But top leadership teams at many organizations had been overestimating their strategic cyber security capabilities until the COVID-19 crisis hit the world.

The global pandemic, exacting a terrible economic toll worldwide, caught most businesses off guard and has had a downstream effect on security teams of most organizations.

It exposed that only a few companies worldwide had strong cyber security preparedness to combat the increasing number of cyber attacks, triggered by the rapid shift in work patterns on an extremely abbreviated timeline and operating model. Companies are today exposed to an exponentially higher number of threat surfaces and vectors resulting from remote delivery of work.

According to Atlas VPN, the number of breached records in the first quarter of 2020 hit an all-time high of 8.4 billion, a 273% surge from the same period in 2019.

Just Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) or Current Reality?

COVID-19 has accelerated businesses’ transition to a digital future with data moving to cloud. Many global business leaders at World Economic Forum, held in July this year, warned looming of a potentially dangerous cyber pandemic that is likely to result due to rapid and unplanned move.

Dave Bartoletti, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester says: “In general, we expect companies to expand their use of public cloud, contract their spending on building private clouds and shift their hybrid balance to be greater on the public cloud side. This shift was already underway; the pandemic will accelerate it.”

Where Should Businesses Prioritize?

The COVID-19 crisis has refocused strategic priorities of businesses towards the value of cloud delivered security and operational tools.

A solid cloud security plan is central in protecting an organization’s assets and reputation. Security and risk management leaders must now commit to new, emerging cloud security trends to optimize business value and eliminate risks.

• Review the Security Needs of Your Remote Workforce: It is recommended that you evaluate your unique business needs and the data and applications usage of your workforce to assess if any security measures need to be prioritized.

• Eliminate Mundane Tasks with Security Process Automation: It automates security operations tasks based on predefined rules and templates and performs tasks faster and at scale. It saves significant time for businesses to focus on more critical security projects.

• AI to Augment Human Decision Making for Driving Digital Business Initiatives: As more companies adopt cloud computing, many struggle to handle the increasingly complex environment – constituted by the sheer volume of devices, users, and applications.

AI/ML technologies can be integrated into cloud access and application security and network and gateway security to protect digital business systems, improve security defense, and enable automated investigations and accelerated reactions. These technologies build an air-tight system that can take businesses’ cloud security game to the next level.

• Risk-based vulnerability management: It’s recommended that businesses focus on automating infrastructure build out first to significantly reduce the scope of security errors, continually checking instances across the environment and leveraging threat intelligence and asset criticality to prepare a 360-degree view of risks organizations are vulnerable to and a mitigation plan.

The Borderless Enterprise is Here to Stay

We are over 9 months into the COVID-era now. Many businesses are still playing catch up to optimize their remote work experience, according to Infoblox.

Over 90% of decision-makers consider digital transformation and cloud-managed services a priority. Organizations can deploy cloud in multiple ways for communications, brand building, reducing costs and increasing customer acquisition.

A trusted cloud services advisor has the expertise to enable enterprises to take a proactive step towards ensuring safe and secure cloud computing environments while maximizing their ROI and brand image through a managed services model.

Top cloud services organizations today are shepherding many Fortune 500 companies through the process of cloud consulting or cloud migration, and building IaaS and PaaS solutions which can co-exist, on-premise or on the cloud enabling greater operational flexibility.

It is critical to choose a DevSecOps partner, that can help organizations go-to-market faster, improve team productivity and efficiency, detect defects in early stages and build highly stable and secure products.

AI-driven, multi-spoke cloud operations can have businesses covered from provisioning through disaster recovery, giving them lowered TCO, higher ROI, agility, real-time scale, and availability.

In these times, it is important for organizations to have a Zero Trust framework that moves each of their perimeters to every network, user, and device within and outside their company to prevent leaks of their protected data and reducing the risk of increasing cyber attacks.

It is important to act now than regret later.

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The Indian IT services sector is in the midst of a huge transformation, and automation is completely changing the way IT services are delivered and consumed. Manish Tandon, CEO, CSS Corp, tells Express Computer, how his firm is preparing itself for a new world where automation is the norm

How do you see the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on the IT services industry?
While Automation has been around in some shape or form for ages, Artificial Intelligence is pushing the envelope on what machines are capable of doing and bringing in an entirely new wave of automation. Till yesterday automation was focused more on reducing “manual labor”. Today, with the advent of AI, it is focused more on reducing “intellectual labor”. Therein lies the crux of the fear, anxiety, angst that this combination is causing in the society today. It is changing the way we live in fundamental ways.

I believe AI and automation are unlocking and amplifying human potential, not replacing it. People will be able to focus much more on value-added work and less on tedious and repeatable work. They will be able to unleash their creative potential better. The challenge for businesses is not to ignore or deny the impact of this technology but to provide a more robust, customized and engaging way in dealing with their customers.AI and automation have created the path for companies to increase productivity (which has been stagnant in the developed world for some time) and enhance end-user experience.

AI is rapidly becoming a global economic engine for new experiences, business models and jobs. Companies that embrace AI will be able to create the modern experiences their customers expect, connect with them on all their devices and be able to anticipate and predict in order to better serve them. With AI and automation, there will be nothing called a “mass market”, there will essentially be micro markets with N->1. AI also plays a key role in enabling productivity, improving customer service and enabling businesses to become more agile. This will trigger a new wave of growth in generating newer jobs. The key for individuals is their ability to be flexible and re-skill to develop and succeed.

According to the MIT Sloan Management Review study, 72% of respondents in the technology, media, and telecommunications industry expect AI to have a significant impact on product offerings in the next five years. In addition, Financial Services, Retail, and CPG industries are expected to benefit from AI-based improvements in Business Process Management (BPM).

In sync with the above trends, the IT services industry is leveraging AI and automation in a big way and will be able to deliver better value and solutions to their customers, which will, in turn, lead to a better customer experience for their end consumers.

How has CSS Corp aligned itself to this new world where automation is the norm (Some details on internal platforms being created, the type of people being recruited would help)
Our vision is to build a new age services company and we have started moving aggressively on that path by adoption and investments in customer-centric technologies like AI, analytics, and digital. We are trying to break the stereotypes in the services industry through the adoption and implementation of new engagement models that would help our clients build better customer intimacy and more revenues.

In this context, we have built automation platforms like Contelli for IT Operations and Cognitive Customer Experience Platform for customer engagement. Our platforms promote symbiotic convergence between AI, analytics and automation at different junctures to drive effortless engagements. These are not generic platforms but contextual platforms built around solving specific problems in customer engagement and productivity.

We are investing heavily in new age technologiesto simplify customer technology ecosystems and bring clarity to chaos. These solutions are helping enterprises to move from traditional models to new age service models that help them identify new revenue streams. We continue to see good traction for these solutions amongst customers and prospects across various industries.

On the talent front, we recently recruited 30+ Data Scientists and Data Engineers to augment our platform capabilities. This team is instrumental in building AI, machine learning and automation solutions.

Our Digital Career Progression Framework, “Reimagine” has been specifically built to fast-track employee reskilling initiatives within the organization. We recently won the NASSCOM Digital Skills 2017 award for having one of the best digital reskilling platforms in the Indian IT industry. The framework facilitates an innovative approach to employee up-skilling and cross-skilling in new age digital technologies.

Can you give us specific examples where automation has made a big impact?
One of the successful use cases is the customer support industry where AI enables the convergence of human and machine intelligence. This results in improved business agility, operational excellence, and resilience, and brings about better customer experience. AI offers personalized and context-driven support, with a human-like interaction. The ability to respond instantaneously and accurately to customers’ questions and helping them in the decision making processes, has made AI an integral part of the brands’ customer experience ecosystem.

To fuel the growing needs of our customers, CSS Corp has built an AI platform Cognitive Customer Experience Platform that aims at bringing together various technologies like AI, automation and analytics, with pre-built vertical assets, 360-degree customer context, intelligent process guidance, and actionable insights that enhances customer interactions. Cognitive Customer Experience Platform integrates with all customer channels like voice, email, chat, and website, and provides a seamless and consistent omnichannel experience. It offers predictive intelligence, automated queuing, routing and channel allocation. Cognitive Customer Experience Platform can offer personalized recommendations based on customer analytics. It can indicate customer emotions, intentions, and other signals during real-time conversations, thus improving customer satisfaction levels.

The other use case that we have implemented using AI and automation is to simplify hybrid IT ecosystems. Early in 2017, we launched Contelli, an intelligent automation platform that combines advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities to prevent problems before they affect the customer. Contelli helps enterprises mitigate hybrid IT challenges with intelligent automation. The solution hyper-charges the enterprise IT operations ecosystem, predicts incidents, threats and business opportunities and assists in faster decisions. This platform, provided with a single-view dashboard, is powered with capabilities that eliminate problems before the environment is impacted.

Every year CSS Corp invests a significant portion of its revenue in building its innovation and research capabilities through our Innovation Labs. We continue to invest in building modular and niche solutions to simplify clients’ complex technology ecosystems.

How has this focus on automation helped CSS? Can you give us some measurable statistics (For example, productivity improvement of x% due to automation?)

During Contelli’s evolution in the last 9 months from a basic automation engine to its use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for automation, we have been able to help enterprises mitigate their IT Infrastructure challenges effectively through context driven solutions.

For instance, today we manage 4 million networking devices across 85,000 stores for a large retailer through Contelli. We integrate capabilities of AI, machine learning and deep learning to predict network related issues and proactively manage complex ecosystems effortlessly resulting in 40% reduction in TCO, 30% productivity improvements, 97% availability of network connectivity and 98% resolution rate.

For a railroad and locomotive company, CSS Corp deployed predictive intelligence capabilities to pre-empt equipment failures, optimize daily operations and field resources. We constantly monitor the customer’s sensor based IoT devices and enable ideal failure prediction analysis with the use of real-time intelligence, image data analysis, acoustic data analysis, and operational intelligence. The company observed a reduction in operational cost by 30%, improved technician productivity by 18% and an increase in Mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) by 35%.

How do you see the opportunities for your firm in emerging areas such as Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain?
The rapid evolution of AI, machine learning, neural networks, and computational power has ensured that a wide array of activities is in the scope for automation today.
However, we often see organizations struggle to effectively leverage and implement AI capabilities to drive customer experience, efficiency, and productivity improvements. It is about finding the right use-case and reimagining IT with AI support.

Having implemented AI in customer engagements, we have identified the key to the success of any AI program is context. Recently, we engaged with a large networking company to simplifying their network ecosystem through Contelli. We performed an in-depth assessment of the client’s network infrastructure ecosystem and developed an early warning system by integrating NLP and advanced machine learning capabilities. The solution promotes fusion of real-time log data with historical data, identifies recurring patterns and provides automated resolution to resolve complex network related issues.

We at CSS Corp strongly believe that AI is the new electricity for enterprises. We are sitting on a huge amount of data from our customers where we can find patterns in that data, apply those patterns into real-time work, in terms of either benefiting the business process or helping in terms of creating the hyper-personalized experiences for their customers. Use of AI technologies has certainly helped us to predict customer behaviors, transform support operations while reducing costs and meeting customer expectations.

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Hybrid Cloud is the way to go as Indian enterprises intensify their reliance on a hybrid Cloud setup, eyeing substantial cost savings and organisational benefits. To better serve the needs of Indian enterprises and SMBs, most cloud companies have either set up local data centres in India, or are in the process of doing so –

Hybrid Cloud represents the cloud model which orchestrates the mix of on premise Cloud, Private Cloud and Third party Public Cloud models to scale, meet and widen the data deployment options. This model offers several key advantages over using only private/ public cloud, especially for large enterprises that have considerable existing investments in IT infrastructure.

The views of Nishikant Nigam, Chief Delivery Officer at CSS Corp are also somewhat the same. “Cloud is increasingly changing the way business is done,” he observes. “But despite the increased cloud adoption, enterprises are finding it difficult to identify the right cloud strategy and model, and still lack clarity in segmentation and prioritization of applications for cloud migration. Scores of enterprises are still struggling with critical questions such as –

What applications should I move to the cloud?
Which type of cloud is best suited for my requirements – Public? Private? Hybrid?
Which provider can offer me the most flexibility and support?”

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CSS Corp, a new age IT Services and Technology Support company, will be exhibiting at AWS re:Invent 2017 on November 27^th, 2017 in Las Vegas. CSS Corp will be present at booth #1537 at The Venetian, Palazzo and Sands Expo Hall as a Bronze Sponsor.

At the event, CSS Corp will be demonstrating their industrialized cloud migration capabilities and success stories in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

CSS Corp is an Advanced Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network. CSS Corp has developed a complete suite of solutions to shift from a “Program” to “Continuous Delivery” model for AWS cloud adoption. CSS Corp provides world-class cloud migration and management solutions to customers across various industries as they embark on their digital transformation journey. Some of their key cloud customers include the digital marketing division of the world’s leading FMCG company, engineering division of a large tire manufacturer and a learning management company.

The company has deep expertise in migrating large volumes of applications rapidly to the cloud ensuring a risk-free and secure migration. CSS Corp’s cloud transformation services enable enterprises, simplify migration planning and weed out complexities to improve productivity.

CSS Corp’s flagship cloud solutions Cloud Map, Cloud Path and Cloud Drive are designed to migrate and manage AWS workloads seamlessly, deliver exceptional results and maximize the benefits of the cloud. CSS Corp has leveraged the power of AWS to help companies across verticals transform their business operations through seamless cloud migration. The company has been providing large scale migration of apps and data to the cloud to leading Fortune 1000 companies.

To know more, please visit the CSS Corp booth at AWS re:Invent, where you will also get the chance to experience their new age solutions that are designed to reimagine customer engagement.

About CSS Corp

CSS Corp is a new age IT Services and Technology Support company that harnesses the power of AI, automation, analytics, cloud and digital to address customer needs. The company partners with leading enterprises to help realize their strategic business outcomes. Its team of 5,500 technology professionals across 16 global locations are passionate about helping customers differentiate and succeed.

For more information please visit www.csscorp.com

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The term carbon footprint is catching up fast and helps us understand the levels of emissions of gases that cause global warming and impact climate change.

The world is getting digitized, and more and more activities, tasks and functions are becoming dependent on digital content. The concept of digitization, over the last 40 years, has been an outcome of convenience, experience, the need for access to information, saving time and many more possibilities. The world without digitization is unimaginable in multiple dimensions.

The three main assets as part of any digitization setup are hosting centers, networks and devices. The data centers host the content, and transmit this information through the network connections, and finally push the information onto different devices (end-users). Now, it is interesting to note that ‘going digital’ is not carbon-free but more like using ‘very less carbon’. Various studies estimate the contribution of web technologies to the carbon footprint between 2.3 – 3.7 percent of global CO₂ emissions.

The term carbon footprint is catching up fast and helps us understand the levels of emissions of gases that cause global warming and impact climate change. To drive sustainability, it is imperative to understand the underlying contributors of carbon sources, no matter how small their contribution.

A carbon footprint is a measure of the total greenhouse gas emissions caused by an individual, event, organization, service, place or product expressed as a carbon dioxide equivalent. Research from 2018 estimates the information technology sector’s carbon footprint to be 1.4% of overall global emissions, and the sector uses 3.6% of the global electricity for its operation. This sector’s carbon emission comes from user devices, such as phones, tablets, computers and modems, followed by communication networks for both fixed and mobile access, and data centers, including enterprise networks and operator activities.

In India (778 million) and China (988 million) alone there are about 1.76 billion internet users. Now, doing the math of 1 hour internet usage per day and 100 days in a year would lead to an astronomical figure of 200 billion hours of computer/mobile usage in a year. The digital chain for all digital content consumes energy, and has a direct impact on the global CO2 emissions.

As of January 2020, global statistics suggest that there are approximately 1.74 billion websites running on the internet with 4 billion+ estimated daily visitors. There are also 8.9M mobile apps as per a report, and all these add to carbon footprint scores.

There is an increased focus at the consumer as well as corporate level on green and sustainable operations. With organizations committing to net-zero emissions and sustainable development goals, decarbonizing digital assets is gaining significant traction across industries. Reducing the carbon emissions associated with a website boils down to reducing the amount of electricity being used to load, send, and view a web page, and then ensuring the resulting electricity required is from clean, renewable resources.

A study conducted in 2016, showed that data centers across the world consume more than 400 terawatts per year, which is about 3% of global consumption. In the future, internet transaction volumes are expected to continue to grow, partly because a larger share of the global population will be connected, and also due to the expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

This requires a process to study the information flow through web infrastructural components and benchmark the present level of carbon footprint to identify the improvement areas, which are then followed by taking definitive actions and validating the changes as part of continual improvement cycles.

 

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