We’ve sharpened our focus as a company, concentrating on the three pillars of EX, CX, and AI: Sheldon Rego, Freshworks – CRN

In a recent interaction with CRN India, Sheldon Rego, Vice President and Managing Director-India, Freshworks, discusses the company’s performance over the past year and its evolving focus on AI. He highlights India’s rapid tech adoption and Freshworks’ role in democratising AI through its tools and solutions. Rego also shares insights into how AI is transforming customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX), the impact of the company’s AI focus on its workforce, and India’s crucial role in Freshworks’ global operations.

Please talk about how the business has been in India in the last one year.

India has been an incredibly vibrant market over the past year, with tech adoption at an all-time high. I believe India is on its way to becoming an AI-first market in the coming years. At Freshworks, we’re playing a key role in democratising AI through our tools and technologies. It’s an exciting time to be here, with a thriving developer community and strong interest in technology. We’re at a pivotal moment, merging our expertise in CX and EX with AI to meet the growing demand in India.

There are several other notable players in this space like Salesforce, Zendesk and HubSpot. How do you differentiate yourself from them?

There are a few key areas where we differentiate ourselves. First, we’re an extremely customer-focused organisation, and it’s not just a buzzword, it’s our strategy. When solving any problem, we always prioritise how it will benefit the customer, not us. Understanding our customers’ needs and solving their pain points is at the core of everything we do.

Second, we co-create with our customers. Instead of working in silos and then implementing solutions, we collaborate with customers during product development. This approach gives us valuable insights and helps guide our product innovation, something most companies don’t do.

Lastly, we’ve been ahead of the curve in AI. We started working on GenAI sometime in 2019, launching Freddy AI as one of the first products in the market. Now, with 68,000 customers worldwide, we have the scale and experience to drive AI adoption at a global level, allowing us to share insights across industries and help customers learn from each other.

How do you see AI transforming both EC and CX, and what specific impact do you anticipate in these areas?

Let’s start with employee experience (EX). Imagine a future where AI takes over certain tasks. For example, if there’s downtime in an IT organisation, instead of taking hours to diagnose whether it’s a network, application, or OS issue, AI will be able to provide those answers in seconds or even milliseconds. We see generative AI significantly impacting how IT dependencies are understood and resolved. In this future, a reliability engineer would simply receive an RCA (Root Cause Analysis) report saying, “You had downtime, it’s been fixed.” That’s the future we envision for EX.

As for customer experience (CX), there’s still a lot of human intervention today in handling customer queries, which leads to a loss in productivity for agents. Many of the tasks agents handle can be automated with AI. Our AI, trained on around 200 million tickets from past experiences, is highly effective at distinguishing which tickets can be managed automatically and which need human attention. This not only boosts agent productivity but also enhances customer experience by providing faster solutions. These are the two key areas where we see AI making a major impact, and we are continuously working to make this a reality.

How has the company’s shift in focus towards AI impacted both your workforce and your ability to meet customer needs?

We’ve sharpened our focus as a company, heavily concentrating on the three pillars of EX, CX, and AI. This shift led to the difficult decision of reducing our workforce by about 30%, but it has allowed us to better focus on what truly matters to our customers. As a company, we need to be agile, responding to the changing needs of our customers and their adoption of new technologies. Obsolescence in tech is real, so we’ve adjusted our strategy accordingly. Looking ahead, AI will play a key role in upskilling and transforming jobs. Many roles that exist today didn’t exist a decade ago, and similarly, new ones will emerge. While AI brings change, including shifts in how people work, it’s a necessary evolution.

India plays a critical role in Freshworks’ operations and talent strategy. How does Freshworks India contribute to the global vision?

We have a large engineering, support, and sales organisation in India, with nearly 4,000 employees. This gives us a unique advantage, as we started in India and have since grown into a global company. Our strong asset base and access to talent in India enable us to contribute significantly to our global strategy and build solutions for the world. This distinct position is one of our key strengths as a company.

As Freshworks navigates market challenges and prepares for the future, What’s there next in your pipeline?

Innovation is key for us, and you’ll hear more about our product developments soon. The three pillars I mentioned—EX, CX, and AI—will remain central, and you’ll see significant innovation in these areas.