Bespectacled, 170cm tall and with tousled hair, a backpack over his shoulder, it is easy to look past Rohan Narayana Murty when he enters a room, or jogs by on the street.
After the late Marvin Minsky, considered the father of artificial intelligence , Mr Murty was only the second from the field of computer science to get elected to Harvard’s Society of Fellows – possibly his proudest achievement – rubbing shoulders at weekly dinners that began at 6pm and ended at 4am the next day with the likes of Nobel laureates Amartya Sen and Wally Gilbert, and other luminaries such as the science historian Peter Galison.
“My PhD was earned,” he responded, alluding to the fact that his father’s various doctorates were bestowed by universities. “I come from a family which deeply values scholarship; my maternal uncle is Shrinivas Kulkarni and my father would have done a PhD himself if family circumstances had not forced him to seek work when his father died.”
“Of course, you can hire consultants to do the same thing but we have turned it into a data problem,” he says, speaking to me on the sidelines of the recent Forbes Global CEO conference in Singapore.Scout, its flagship product launched 3½ years ago, uses AI to “discover” workflows that teams are executing across software systems, documents, spreadsheets and so forth. It does this by generating a map of how the team gets work done. This map is called the “work graph”.
He argued that in the post-Covid-19, work-from-home era, monitoring individual employees isn’t the way to boost productivity. Not only is it oppressive and intrusive if done from inside the home or inside offices, such monitoring is often a poor proxy for actual productivity. Hence, the smart questions should be whether inefficient process design is causing the team to do the same work in multiple ways, where does the team need training or mentoring to serve customers better, and is bad user interface experience frustrating and slowing the team’s response to customers, and suchlike.
Mr Murty also will not reveal revenue figures, beyond stating: “Suffice it to say that we have not raised external capital so far.” Neither does he consider going to the private equity market, or for a public share sale, likely in the near future.