Kiran Kuchimanchi: Leading Teams To Find A Simple Route To Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is fundamentally changing how businesses function and deliver value to customers. It is also a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure. Organizations that have embarked on the digital transformation journey are reaping benefits while those that are procrastinating this shift have fallen behind. The process of digital transformation is itself multi-fold and complex. To help businesses make the right choices, RoundSqr demystifies the digital transformation journey into small chunks of initiatives, making it agile and iterative, while delivering business benefits rapidly.

To understand more about the company, and the leader behind RoundSqr, here is an exclusive interview with Kiran Kuchimanchi, the CEO, who talks about the need for innovation and what it takes to build a successful organization.

About RoundSqr

RoundSqr was setup with a vision to solve customer problems through digital solutions leveraging emerging technologies like Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & Blockchain. Headquartered in Hyderabad, the company has offices worldwide.

According to Kiran, RoundSqr services its global clients across three broad segments:

• Consulting services using a Proof-of-Concept driven approach to identify solutions to unidentified and unarticulated problems. As an example of this service, Kiran says "For a large manufacturing firm, we leveraged computer vision to digitally fingerprint the equipment from their manufacturing lines. This was not possible using traditional methods due to the extreme conditions involved in the manufacturing process. The potential for this solution is immense, in improving the customer experience of the business as well as run the manufacturing lines very efficiently. Another example is the solution we are building to identify gender bias (and then automatically replace text to mitigate it) in the content that is published by a global publishing house. In most cases, when we start discussing such problems, we are not sure that these can be solved using existing technology. It calls for a deep understanding of the domain, tech know-how at the highest end of the spectrum, and extensive research to be able to come up with a viable solution. We are thrilled to be working in such areas and hope to build IP-led solutions for some of these problems in the future"
• The second area involves providing digital services to help customers translate ideas into products. This is sort of a de-facto "CTO + Technology Team" role. RoundSqr helps customers right through the process of brainstorming requirements, finalizing technology & infrastructure, deciding on the MVP features, and iteratively enhancing the product based on market feedback. For a healthcare firm, RoundSqr helped launch multiple solutions to improve the efficiency and experience of the users – Patients, Doctors & Nurses. The success of this initiative has prompted the firm to create a new stream of revenue by offering these solutions to other businesses similar to them.
• The third areas involves helping customers expand their delivery capability by building strategic teams based on the customer's specific needs. By hiring & grooming digital talent and providing the right processes & framework, RoundSqr is able to deliver continuous value to its customers. A prime example of this is the multiple AI/ML+Data initiatives being taken up for a mid-sized Bank in North America.

Past experience

Kiran Kuchimanchi, has over two decades of experience in the IT services and digital space. He has played multiple roles in both Technology and Business settings. He has headed Country operations as well as Global Delivery. He has been instrumental in setting up a digital division encompassing Big Data, Cloud, Mobility, and Analytics. Late in 2018, Kiran setup RoundSqr along with a few friends, who also believe that AI / ML will fundamentally transform the way businesses operate in the future.

Experiences That Built the Mindset 

When asked about the experiences that shaped him, Kiran said, "Take responsibility for everything. Never shy away from new challenges. Believe that anything can be learned." He also says that it is not very difficult to find a solution if one gets to the crux of the problem and takes a common sense approach to responding to situations. Being a part of a tech company,  Kiran always had to be abreast with the latest tech. However, the exposure to the intermingling of business and technology has stood him in good stead at all times.

Overcoming Challenges to Succeed 

Kiran's CEO role started with believing in the potential of the company. According to him, it is even more critical in a start-up context when one is unsure of where the first revenue Dollar is going to come from. This personal belief had to be articulated into a vision to the rest of the company. Kiran adds that using this vision to rally everyone around and shifting focus to identify business opportunities was the most challenging phase.

At RoundSqr, Kiran and his team were fortunate on three counts. First, a set of like-minded founders came together who were friends and shared the same passion to build an organization. Second, the initial group of customers that saw the company's potential and came forward to work with them, and third, the colleagues who took a leap of faith and joined RoundSqr.

Kiran believes that one has to take strategic punts when building a company. While some of them pay off, others don't. Balancing the risk while constantly experimenting is crucial to the success of any organization.

Another aspect of his role is to engage with potential investors and to convince them that the organization's vision can translate into fiscal success. In a nutshell, Kiran explains that keeping the intent always correct by looking after the long-term benefits of the customer, his team, and investors is his success mantra.

Aids to better decision making

According to Kiran, having clarity of purpose is essential. The goal has to be universal and should not be limited to one's personal benefits only. In his opinion, a leader should look through the clutter without getting distracted and find the optimal path in line with the organization's vision. He advises that one should start with a broader view and narrow it down progressively to the issue that needs attention. Kiran adds that people should combine analysis & instinct to make decisions on things that matter and have the strength to deal with failure.

Leveraging the Capabilities of Disruptive Technologies 

"Technology is evolving at a breath-taking pace. Humans have evolved in about 6-7 million years to what we are today. Just in the past 100 years, advancements in technology have accelerated our quality of life manifold.  A combination of data mining, computing power and the advancements in Machine Learning & Robotics will help us cross frontiers that we have not imagined before. We have partnered with a major hospital chain to use Machine Learning techniques to help doctors make better decisions about disease progression that the doctors cannot achieve manually. For another customer, we have been able to use historical data to identify the right kind of programs for juvenile kids, the very first time, resulting in far higher success rate of their rehabilitation. These are examples of use cases that have tremendous benefits to our society. In the near future, a section of our elite think that we can upload our brains into a cloud that can evolve to possess far superior capabilities!", explains Kiran Kuchimanchi.

Plans for the growth of RoundSqr

Despite the pandemic, we have doubled our team size. As the markets open up, we plan to expand our presence across the US and Europe. We are looking at relocating one of our senior colleagues to Australia as soon as travel permits. We plan to have our senior team travel frequently to have facetime with our customers and prospects.

We have also ramped up our efforts to bring on board Architects and digital consultants. We plan to aggressively engage reputed colleges from where we can hire talent to meet our growing demands.

We expect to double our revenues y-o-y for the next 2-3 years. The journey should be exciting, given the high-end problems we are solving, and the resultant impact on our clients.

Shaping Future CEOs

As a piece of advice to emerging CEOs, Kiran says that they should think from the first Principles-based approach, have the right intent, work hard, build trust and long-term relations.