Ruban Phukan, Co-founder and CEO of GoodGist Inc. He has over two decades of pioneering work in AI, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Search, Visualization, and Conversational User Interfaces. He is driven by a quest for problem-solution-fit in the enterprise and consumer world, believing deeply in the importance of understanding hard problems thoroughly to devise fitting solutions, regardless of their complexity.
Check out more interviews with entrepreneurs here.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET FEATURED?
All interviews are 100% FREE OF CHARGE
Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Ruban Phukan: I have been working in the field of AI and Machine Learning for 20+ years, focusing on solving human-scale problems in both consumer and business technology space. I started my career at Yahoo as a member of the company’s first data science team and had the amazing opportunity to work closely with co-founder David Filo. I started Bixee, a machine-learning-powered vertical search company that helped consumers get relevant results on jobs, vacation-travel deals, and shopping recommendations based on their interest profile. Bixee Travel evolved into Goibibo, which became the number #2 travel destination in India and was later acquired by the #1 travel destination – MakeMyTrip. I then started DataRPM, one of the pioneers in Enterprise AI for Industrial IoT, working with customers like GE, Samsung, Siemens, Jaguar Landrover, and many others.
Can you share with us your journey towards integrating AI into your business operations?
Ruban Phukan: My current startup is GoodGist, where we use Agentic AI to provide an autonomous knowledge management platform for software companies for their partner, customer, and employee enablement. This delivers personalized learning paths, use-case-centric research, and instant answers to software-related questions to empower the right stakeholder, with the right knowledge, at the right time.
The idea of GoodGist came from the personal experiences of all the founders. We all have encountered the need to constantly upskill ourselves on software tools, platforms, and methodologies in the ever-changing technology world. The traditional approach of just doing a web search for just-in-time information is no longer scalable, as professionals are hard-pressed for time and attention span today. The rate at which technology evolves today needs a completely different approach to managing knowledge to keep pace.
What specific areas of your business have been most impacted by AI, and how?
Ruban Phukan: We use AI end-to-end in our organization, from research and development to sales, marketing, customer support, and partner support. We leverage GoodGist, our autonomous knowledge management platform, to enable our own employees, customers, and partners.
The results we have seen are phenomenal, starting with an almost 3x increase in our team’s productivity, a 45% reduction in onboarding time, a 35% reduction in support costs, and a 55% increase in engagements with the use of AI.
What advice would you give to other CEOs looking to integrate AI into their business?
Ruban Phukan: The most important thing is to determine which problems in the organization are not solvable by traditional means and where AI is required to solve them better and more efficiently. Not all problems need to be solved using AI, and often, force-fitting AI may actually make them more expensive to solve. Typically, human-scale problems are best solved using AI.
The second, after identifying the problem space, is to find the right solution. There is always the decision of build vs buy. The build looks tempting as it feels easy with the rich set of AI tools and APIs available. However, there are always hidden costs in the build approach that are not evident at the beginning. The most important one of them is the technical debt in expanding and maintaining the solution. Unless the solution is something that the business is also offering to their customers and can generate revenue from it, most build projects remain as experiments.
The third area is the right alignment and skills development in the organization to adopt AI the right way. There are many misconceptions and incorrect expectations about AI. These mindset problems often lead to failure. So, ensuring the right knowledge in every business function of what AI means for them and how they can prepare for AI adoption is essential.
How do you see AI evolving in your industry over the next 5 years?
Ruban Phukan: Every few decades, the business world undergoes a significant technological transformation. The advent of computers, the internet, the cloud, mobility, and digitization transformed the industry, and now we are at the beginning of AI transformation. AI will have far-reaching effects.
The most important one is that it will solve human-scale problems, things that were impossible to do and scale manually. This will enable businesses that adopt AI the right way into their business processes to deliver at an unprecedented scale. This also means that we will see a lot of Blockbuster vs Netflix stories as well, in other words, businesses who fail to keep pace with this transformation fade out from their peak leadership position.
For professionals, knowledge of AI applications and the ability to leverage AI for work productivity will become the most essential skills they need to develop to stay relevant and competitive.
The big evolution that we will see in the next five years is in AI Agents and Agentic AI frameworks. AI Agents will evolve to become the equivalent of web apps or mobile apps, and the focus will shift to skills in building AI Agents leveraging the various Agentic AI Frameworks.
What does “success” in 2024 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Ruban Phukan: We are measuring our business success in 2024 by the number of companies we are able to help successfully transform and scale their customer enablement, partner enablement, and employee enablement programs, leveraging AI for autonomous knowledge management. The metrics that we look at are the performance gain, cost savings, and revenue growth that we deliver by ensuring the right knowledge, to the right stakeholder, at the right time.
All enablement programs in organizations today face human-scale issues. These programs are limited by the number of resources they have available, and the support costs and time grow exponentially by the number of stakeholders (customers, partners, or employees) that they need to serve. Often, organizations deliver a lot of one-size-fits-all content to everyone, which causes information overload problems and impacts decision-making. These lead to not just frustrations but serious bottlenecks to revenue generation and growth.
AI is well suited to delivering autonomous knowledge management at scale and cost-effectively. At GoodGist, we are looking to bring this transformation and impact into the business world in 2024 with precise, personalized, and just-in-time knowledge and information that is dynamically tailored to the individual role, needs, and proficiency, making it highly relevant and actionable.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Ruban Phukan for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Ruban Phukan or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.
