Improving Customer Experience with AI: Insights from Ashok Kartham on The Florida Tech & Growth Podcast

In the latest episode of Tiro Partners’ Florida Tech & Growth podcast, Paul Church interviewed Ashok Kartham, Circuitry.ai’s Founder and CEO, about how utilizing technological transformations and AI can enable businesses to better serve their customers and improve the customer experience.

Here are our key takeaways from the episode.

Focus on what’s not changing

While technologies and trends may shift, certain core customer needs never change. For instance, your customers will always want to deliver better value with their products, improve customer experiences, and simplify their customers' lives. These fundamental goals are unlikely to change, no matter how much the technology around them does. Ashok believes businesses can better navigate technological changes by identifying these customer needs.

 The key is to figure out how you can use new technologies like AI to keep improving in those areas. By doing this, you stay focused on what really matters, ensuring that your business keeps delivering what customers need, even as the world around you changes.

Prioritize customer-centric mindsets

Ashok believes that hiring customer-centric employees is crucial because they bring a deep understanding of what truly matters: delivering value to the customer. He advises that by prioritizing a customer-centric mindset, your team will stay focused on the end goal—making the customer’s experience better. This approach will help you build better products, foster stronger relationships with clients, and ultimately lead to better business outcomes.

Expose your teams to customer feedback

Ashok believes that exposing teams to customer feedback is vital because it keeps them grounded and aligned with what truly matters—how the products are being used and perceived by the customers. When your teams directly hear from customers, they gain a clearer understanding of the impact their work has on the end users.

For Ashok, this direct connection between the team and the customer is key to creating products that genuinely enhance the customer experience and deliver meaningful results.

Getting your customer base

One of the major hurdles for startups, as Ashok points out, is gaining an early customer base, especially when competing against larger, established companies. His strategy? Zero in on a specific problem that your target customers face. By offering a unique solution that directly addresses this issue, you can demonstrate your value even as a smaller, newer company.

You can also leverage your existing network. Whether it’s previous clients, partners, or industry contacts, these relationships can be invaluable in gaining those first customers.

 Check out Paul and Ashok’s episode: Improving Customer Experience with AI with Ashok Kartham, Founder & CEO at Circuitry.ai. You can also read the full transcript below.

Transcript

Paul Church: Hello there, and welcome to Florida Tech & Growth, presented by Tiro Partners. I'm your host, Paul Church. Today, we're joined by Ashok Kartham, the CEO and founder of a business called Circuitry.ai. Ashok is another serial entrepreneur and has plenty of experience in building successful companies and using technology to create true innovations.

In this episode, you'll learn how Ashok has leveraged technological transformations and applied AI, mobile, and the internet to solve real business problems. You'll also find out how he has built successful startups and the challenges he has faced and overcome. And also, we'll find out about his exciting business and their vision at Circuitry.ai. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Ashok, What experiences have shaped your approach to entrepreneurship and innovation?

Ashok Kartham: Sure. First, my journey started when I arrived from India to work on systems for John Deere. They are a great company and one of the leaders in the farm equipment side. Even though I have a computer science background, that experience gave me a better understanding of manufacturers. I worked on a lot of their product support and customer service systems, so I was able to learn about the domain and how the companies in the U.S., especially, approach their customer relationships. So that's one of what I would call, key experiences that helped me be an expert in that area, learn more about the customers, how they use the systems, versus more the technology side.

And then, obviously, over the last 25-plus years, we have been through amazing and transformative changes in the digital and information technologies. We've been through, the internet, the mobile phone, as well as currently now, AI. I feel like one of the things that shaped my entrepreneurship journey is how we are able to take these transformative changes and apply them to the business. Being able to order the first book on Amazon, use the iPhone, or use autonomous car driving in Tesla, I feel like we've been through amazing times, and I've always wanted to look at how we apply those technology innovations to solve real business problems, right? That shaped how I approach my companies.

Paul: And of course, you've built a few companies now. And of course, I suppose, apart from keeping up with the changes of the times like the internet and AI, what else have been some common challenges that you've had to overcome when building successful businesses?

Ashok: I think one main challenge all startups face in the beginning is how do you build this early customer base? As you are building the product, customers are not sure if this product works, if they should take the risk with a smaller company compared to the number of larger enterprise software companies they might work with. Because all the companies focused on more enterprise software than consumer technologies, which is sometimes challenging to get the initial customer base.

I think to overcome this, we leveraged on having a very focused approach. How we solve a specific problem, take a specific use case, and then provide a unique solution to the customers so they can see that even as a newer and a smaller company, that we could provide better solutions than other larger players in the space. That, I think, is very important for all startups. And I think that has worked well for me.

The second thing is to leverage the relationships in terms of existing customers or previous customers to give you a chance in the beginning. That's one main challenge.

I started my first company in Moline, Illinois, which is a 50,000 people city where John Deere was first headquartered. The second company in Tampa, again, not known for the high-tech innovation and all that, but being able to work at those locations where there may not be as much investment capital or even the team that's available. So, part of the challenge was, how do we build a great team? How do we build investment partners to grow the company?

I feel like overcoming those challenges, being capital efficient, and being able to build a global team that we can build over time. These are some of the things I have to do to be successful at these companies.

Paul: And that takes us to now where, of course, you're scaling and running Circuitry.ai. So, tell us about the mission and the vision for your latest business.

Ashok: Sure, for Circuitry, our vision and mission is, how do we use decisions powered by AI, which we call decision intelligence, to analyze, augment, and automate impactful decisions for companies so they can realize better business outcomes. For example, if we take one of the things we are doing is Product AIdvisor. As the products get more complicated, the information overload is there; AI can help the customers or the salespeople and the channel partners make better decisions on which products are right based on a particular user’s needs.

We’re applying the same thing on the service side. How can a technician make the right decisions when there is a problem with the product? So, we are taking these impactable, repeatable decisions in this life cycle and improving them through AI so we can generate better outcomes more productively and scale globally. That's our vision of using the power of AI to enable manufacturers to better serve their customers.

Paul: How do you see the role of AI playing in the future of manufacturing and customer service?

Ashok: We think AI will play a significant, critical role in enabling the manufacturers in all the processes from supply chain management to production, and obviously, our focus, which is more on the customer-facing areas like marketing, sales, and the customer service side of it. Because of global competition, manufacturers are always under pressure on their margins. We think AI can help improve productivity and improve the profitability on the customer service side. Even though on the production side, manufacturers have significantly improved, using automation from starting with the assembly line with the current robotic automation side, when it comes to customer service and customer side, they rely on independent third parties, like a dealer network or independent service professionals, and there is a huge knowledge gap between them.

So, part of our goal is to apply AI to bridge this knowledge gap and help them make better decisions as customer channel partners and manufacturers so they can improve productivity and improve product uptime. So, our customers’ customers can continue to realize better value from the products.

Paul: With everything moving so quickly and unprecedented scale with AI, how do you make sure your solutions remain relevant and effective in this evolving tech landscape?

Ashok: That question reminds me of one time I think Jeff Bezos talked about rooting the business strategy on what's not going to change in the next 10 years. Actually, that will help you to be able to deal with the changes and innovations a lot better. For example, if you ask the question, what's not going to change in the next 10 years, or even in a longer term, is our customers want to continue to deliver better value with their products. They want to provide a better customer experience. They want to make their customers’ lives simpler and make it more productive. That's not going to change.

So, part of what we are asking is, how do we apply these AI and other technology changes to make sure that that goes on a continuous path and improves over time? Then we can apply AI technologies, to say, how do we make the experience better? How do we make sure our customers’ products are delivering better value? That will keep us continuing to innovate and continuing to apply the technologies to deliver on that vision.

Paul: Jeff Bezos is a very smart guy, and yeah, that's a really clever approach; of course, look for what is not going to change rather than trying to guess what is going to change. So yeah, love that. Well, with your experience of scaling businesses, including Circuitry.ai, you must have learned along the way what types of people work for your business in a positive way. So, what key qualities do you look for when you're hiring new team members?

Ashok: Sure, even though there are a number of qualities that you look for, on the experience and technical side, I would say maybe I will mention, like three key things that we look for.

One, I think it's very important to have that customer-centricity when we look for people. We are looking at what their technical capabilities are and what they’ve accomplished versus could they explain what they have accomplished in terms of the value delivered to the customer? In terms of the better experience they have delivered? So, as we look at these qualities, I look for that customer-centricity and that customer focus.

And then, as an entrepreneur and smaller company, we also look for people that are more focused on getting things done. My pet peeve is we don't want people that can complain about being short on resources or challenges when they could be creative and figure out a way to get things done despite these challenges and constraints on resources.

And then the third one, I would say, is more that learning and coachability. Are they willing to learn new things? Because we are working, as you said, in an industry, where technology changes frequently, where there are new things coming up, so we need to be always constantly learning and be open to doing new things.

So, along with other things, those are the key things that I look for, customer-centricity, the ability to get things done despite constraints, and then learning continuously.

Paul: Yeah, love that. That sounds like a successful makeup of a human being. So, solution-focused, customer-centric, and, I suppose, curious. I suppose with that, with those types of people, then you must foster a culture of innovation and continuous improvement within your team. So how do you do that for those people who have got those traits?

Ashok: For people to be continuously improving and having an innovation culture is that we have a compelling vision. What we set for the company, or even previous companies, or with Circuitry.ai., is our vision is not something that we can deliver in a day or a year, that it's actually very challenging for us to achieve, what we call this fully autonomous business process, how do we apply AI and the improvement in decision making to achieve that? Which means that may be very hard to achieve. It may take multiple years to do it. I think people having an understanding of that vision helps them to continuously look for ways to achieve that.

That's the first thing. Secondly, internally, we use, I think it's now common in the software industry, but we want to use it in all aspects of the business, is how do we apply an Agile model? We are trying to deliver in increments, and that we are continuously reviewing it and seeing how we can improve things and deliver results. I think that also encourages people to say, not that we are thinking of doing something over a six-month or a year period, that we need to deliver quickly, get the feedback, and be able to innovate on it.

And then I would say the final thing, especially in software or a technology engineering, you could go off track and not focused as much on customers. We tend to expose our team to more customer feedback on how customers are using our products, what their experience is. That grounds them in being able to say how we can continue to improve our products.

Paul: Love that. And so what are the future plans for Circuitry.ai., over the next few years? What have you got, kind of as those, those milestones you're looking to reach?

Ashok: Sure, I think we talked about our decision intelligence platform and applications to analyze, augment, and automate decisions; I think is a lot of vision. So, we have a roadmap, a long-term roadmap on how we can deliver a better platform for decision intelligence, and how we can actually address various use cases. As we look at the impactful, repeatable decisions, there are probably hundreds of decisions, that our customers can apply our platform and applications to.  So, the first thing is, we want to continue to innovate and be the leader in that space.

Two, the technology isn’t used unless we have the customer base. So, we have plans for how we expand our customer base globally. Even though we are starting with discrete, durable goods manufacturers, this can apply to other businesses. So, over the next years, we’ll focus on innovating our products, growing our customer base, and also as a team, that we are bringing the right skills, applying all the latest developments, for example, for the automation we need, agentic technology that's evolving fast. So there are plans in the roadmap to say, how do we innovate and apply these technologies for these business problems.

Paul: What advice would you give to businesses who are looking to leverage AI to drive their growth and innovation?

Ashok: We are also internal consumers of AI, first thing, because it's software, actually one of the best use cases for generative AI has been code generation. So, we have enabled all of our teams, for example, to use GitHub Copilot, or Microsoft Copilot, to generate code or to validate code, to generate test cases and things like that. So that's one way we are applying AI.

The same way we are taking other business process areas, just like we are telling our customers how we can leverage AI in customer relationship management, it's marketing and the sales side, it's content generation, responding to the customers, how our salespeople have the right knowledge about our products. So, we are applying AI for that. The number of tools we have chosen for operations and other things, too, we are looking for AI capabilities. We have provided access to ChatGPT, and other tools for our whole team. We obviously are very strong believers in the ability of AI to make whole teams more productive, being able to do things with fewer resources, which is what startups and entrepreneurs are about. So yeah, we look at every aspect of business and how we apply AI there.

Paul: Love that. Final question, what advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs? I guess, if I reframe that, if you think of all the lessons you've learned throughout your career, what is the Ashok of today telling the Ashok who's about to set up his first business, in terms of advice? What would you say?

Ashok: I know we touched upon some of these things. For me, I always look at maybe two or three key things that every entrepreneur needs. First is being customer-focused, our customer centricity. It's not about the technology and the product we are building. It's about the value our products deliver to our target customers, businesses understand the value more than the technology, anyway.

So, I would say to entrepreneurs to look at that aspect of it, not just get excited about a technical feature versus the value we can deliver to the customers. I think we forget sometimes we need to always keep that.

And the second thing is, even though it's difficult to build a team as a smaller company, as a startup, the team plays a very critical, important role, everyone talks about it. So the ability to build the right team, as employees, even as investors, as partners, or other people that are advising the company. I think I made a number of mistakes in that area, too. I think that's another thing that we cannot emphasize enough in terms of building the right culture, the right team to deliver on goals.

And then I think the last one, I would say, too, as again, it's an obvious thing, is we are most of the time competing with the bigger players in any of the space, especially in the technology industry, whether they have capabilities or not, some of them can act as a platform to do it. So, as entrepreneurs, we need to focus on the value, the differentiation, and how we could deliver solutions to customers in the specific use cases first to get those early adapters. So, I would say those are the things, customer-centricity, strong team having that focus, differentiation. I think those are critical to succeed as an entrepreneur, and as a startup.

Paul: Love it. Thank you so much. Well, look absolutely routing for you, and Circuitry.ai, I have no doubt it's going to be a huge success for you, and yeah, we'll be following your journey. But thank you so much for being a part of Florida Tech & Growth.