Avi Bhagtani: Leading AI-powered Digital Transformation at Digitate

Enterprise technology has transformed the way we work, giving rise to innovative hardware and software solutions that automate every aspect of business and IT operations. The challenge remains that those solutions need to be managed – which can eat up much of the productivity gains they offered in the first place. Digitate has a solution: applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to digital transformation success.

The company is known for providing autonomous enterprise solutions that help IT teams rapidly identify and remediate outages within minutes, shrinking downtime by up to 80 percent and cutting administrative effort and cost in half. These solutions leverage the power of AI to connect business applications, processes, and other tech infrastructures to enable smart decision making.

Enabling 360-Degree Automation

Digitate's flagship product, ignio™, is an award-winning AIOps solution that reimagines enterprise IT and business landscape with its one-of-a-kind closed-loop approach that combines context, insights, and intelligent automation to autonomously predict and prevent issues. Digitate is helping Fortune 500 companies harness the power of AI and automation as they scale to meet the demands of their own customers and ease the ever-increasing workload of their businesses.

Digitate's mission to support enterprise operations with AI has brought a new level of adaptability and resilience to organizations, particularly through the turbulent and unpredictable times of the last two years.

Leading Transformation

Avi Bhagtani is the Chief Marketing Officer of Digitate. Over the last decade, he has focused on the application of Artificial Intelligence and intelligent automation to address real-world problems, thereby helping enterprises through digital transformation. Avi leads a fast-growing marketing organization across four continents. His experience includes managing global product portfolios across enterprise solutions, automation, AI, and cloud organizations.

Over the last decade, Digitate's Chief Marketing Officer, Avi Bhagtani,has focused on the application of AI and intelligent automation to real-world problems, thereby helping enterprises throughdigital transformation. He leads a fast-growing marketing organization across four continents. His experience includes managing global product portfolios across enterprise solutions, automation, AI, and cloud organizations.

Avi is very passionate about the democratization of AI beyond data scientists and power users. Hebelievesit's important to create solutions that are easy to use and deploy, making AI available to everyone.

Converting Experience into Successful Strategies

Prior to Digitate, Avi was at Automation Anywhere, a market leader in robotic process automation(RPA). There he led thego-to-market efforts for intelligent automation solutions combining RPA with AI technology to automate business processes for some of the world's leading enterprises. He created and executed strategies that drove adoption of the company's cutting-edge AI products across finance, healthcare, insurance, and other industries. This role gave Avi the opportunity to become an AI thought leader, industry spokesperson, and an author of many RPA and AI-related articles.

The onset of the COVID pandemic propelled organizations to respond to new business demands and use cases at an accelerated rate. Airline cancellations, patient registrations, loan applications – everything had to be fast-tracked,while the human workforce couldn't keep up. Avi led the product teams at Automation Anywhere to come up with progressive solutions – which required new ways of marketing, deploying, and leveraging AI.

At Digitate, Avi saw the opportunity to continue this journey. "As enterprises move into the post-Covid world, they have to evolve new business practices and technologies that can drive the roadmap of the future," he explains. "That means vendors need to be able to show them how we solve those real-world problems."

Finding Practical Solutions for Critical Challenges

Avi recalls several challenges he faced during the beginning of his journey with AI. First, AI is so often misunderstood and misrepresented. AI encompasses many different technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, and computer vision, so explaining these differences and teaching how to navigate them to guarantee success is quite nuanced.Avi believes that every business aiming to win in AI must nurture and coach its prospective customers about the value of its solutions.

Avi led cross-functional teams hosting internal and external training on intelligent automation, such as webinars, podcasts, and ROI calculators,as well as organize hands-on labs for customers and prospects to become familiar with AI bots in action. These workshops not only helped to speed up buying decisions but also improved the understanding of the technology in general.

Another challenge that Avi faced was the perception that AI deployments will require complex engineering resources and become cumbersome and cost-prohibitive. To overcome these misconceptions, Avi created a focused effort to demonstrate "business-friendly" AI to customers and showcase its long-term benefits.

Vital Attributes of a Leader, as Told by a Leader

AI leaders should be passionate about explaining, educating, and encouraging its benefits. Business leaders in the field of AI should transform themselves into global thought leaders and storytellers of AI successes, explaining them in simple,tangible, and meaningful ways.

It's also important to be practical about the limits of AI and the ethical implications of the technology. While AI can do so much, its power is truly materialized when applied to the right use cases. As leaders, we need to communicate that there is no "one-size-fits-all" AI solution and avoid allowing any bias in the way we apply it.

Innovation in the Service of Business Value

So much attention to the practical uses of AI doesn't mean Digitate is overlooking technical advancements. "Innovation is at the heart of our product and market strategy. We have hundreds of data scientists constantly seeking out improvements in AI, machine learning, and cloud," Avi says."We believe that by leveraging the latest AI technologies and applying them towards business practicality, we can deliver greater value to our customers."

Because Digitate's customers include some of the largest enterprises in the world, the goal is to help them maximize the ROI of their investments in the shortest time possible and future-proof their investments.

Keeping Technology in the Forefront

"AI, Big Data, and cloud are no longer merely investments to be considered 'down the road'; they are here today," states Avi. As the business landscape shifts at a rapid pace, today's leaders are expected to stay ahead of their competitors at every step. This means they need to keep an ear to the ground, learn, adapt, implement, and be proactive in their strategies.

The Road Ahead

"In the last six years, Digitate grew at a record pace. We expect this growth to continue, fueled by the frenzied investments in the digital transformation initiatives," he added.

The AIOps industry is expected to growby more than 25% in the next four years. Though multiple AIOps solutions are emerging, Avi firmly believes that Digitate's closed-loop AI-driven technology will lead the market in creating autonomous IT and business solutions. The company has already been named a market leader in AI Ops and has been recognized via multiple technology and industry awards.

Advice to Grow in the Industry

AI, with its wide-ranging tools and technology, is transforming every walk of life. Avi explains that as an AI leader, you are driven to influence change and make an impact in whichever way you choose. That said, he hopes that any emerging leader will realize that responsibility and nurture AI's power for positive impact. "In AI, patience is key. So, invest your time and resources, learn to navigate the successes and failures (hopefully few!) and enjoy the ride!" Avi concludes.