Papa Murphy's

But you can see here, what we're actually trying to get to is an understanding of how often do we come up and how does that compare against our competitors? If we're looking at this graph, right, we all want to be Salesforce.

We might accept being HubSpot in this situation, but if we're Freshworks, like how many of us have heard of Freshworks? then we know, okay, there's a lot of work to do.

But don't be disheartened if you are Zoho, Monday, Pipedrive, the fresh works of your industry, because there is everything to play for and it can all change.

But we know like from a graph like this, we can see 45% of share of voice and AI going to one brand, going to Salesforce.

Welcome to CIO Classified, where you'll find candid conversations with the world's leading CIOs.

This week, we are joined by Ashwin Bilal, Chief Information Officer at Freshworks.

Ashwin's path is anything but conventional.

He trained as a material scientist before being handed the CIO title at KLA.

And from there, worked at KLA Tincor, Medallia through its public to private transformation, and now Freshworks, where he's not just running IT, he's shaping the product roadmap as the company's own best customer.

In this conversation, Yusuf and Ashwin dig into where AI is really delivering results, why Ashwin thinks most organizations are still forcing AI into workflows built for humans.

And what keeps them up at night when it comes to agents, privileged access, and the next wave of shadow IT? Now, here is your host, Yusuf Khan.

And that has culminated in you being part of the C-suite as the Chief Information Officer, Chief Data Officer at KL8 and Core.

Or in India, there is never too many franchises that breeded growth stage investors, right? Like today, a number of funds are getting started.

Ultimately, Flipkart gave a bunch of entrepreneurs, Freshwork gave a bunch of SaaS entrepreneurs to India.

Early stage funds have given a lot of early stage VCs I think there are not too many dedicated franchises on growth stage.

So even the new funds that started, most of them started actually people who were from the private equity background and which meant that they remained very conservative in their approach.

He talked about in his last appearance, which he's moved on from because they didn't have the momentum he wanted.

So let's get Ryan to explain briefly why he moved away from three names, Freshworks, Alchemy Technology and Genius

Sports.

Long story short on these names is the narrative changed and the momentum changed with it.

So like for us guys, CX Chronicles, we, we, um, we're partnered with, with some of the, the world's leading CX software providers.

So HubSpot, Intercom, Zendesk, Freshworks, um, some of those types of companies, right? All of them, um, are now bringing their solutions into this.

So like just a super interesting time for people that never really,

like wouldn't consider themselves

and

so you were you were in in the corporate game for like really long 13 years you were with Amazon and then you had a small stop at Freshworks and then you started started Nuito tell us about that journey you know what what was it like for being in a corporate for more than a decade and then what made you take the switch

sure so I started my career in TCS long back, 2006, not 16.

Wow.

It took me a very long time to accept that it was happening.

Right.

Freshworks, I... that didn't really matter.

One, it had happened once for me.

and that could drive a lot of different things so for example data reels was from israel so obviously their alignment was from different industries where israel is doing well any products that are coming from israel if they are doing well then there would be a lot of ecosystem alignment integration etc sometimes private equity alignment is also there because of the regional differences for drivetrain drivetrain is coming from india And India has had a lot of success in many different products, I would say.

So the philosophy is going to be very driven and compliant with what Zoho has done or what Freshworks have done.

because 90% of the teams are coming from there.

These are probably the most successful enterprise software products, I would say, from India.

So they drive a lot of things.

A lot of team members are leaving, let's say Zoho or Freshworks, and they are creating newer products.

So DriveFrame is a very similar story from India.

And we'll talk about some of the cultural alignment and design alignment as well based on that.

So Mu Sigma investment happened, you know, 2004, and Myntra happened 2006, Flipkart happened 2007, right? So within two, three years we were now looking at completely internet-driven, driven businesses as opposed to services businesses.

Then, uh, three years from that, 2011, 2010, 2011 is when, uh, Freshworks happened.

So from internet-driven consumer businesses, we had moved to internet-driven, uh, B2B businesses.

Then, you know, uh, another three years later we did, uh, Moglix and, uh, some of these Zetwerk and some of these B2B platforms.