Learn from Srikrishnan Ganesan, Co-Founder and CEO of Rocketlane, as he shares insights on AI’s impact on professional services in this FinTech interview.
Srikrishnan, it’s great to have you with us. Can you start by sharing a bit about your professional journey and what led you to co-found Rocketlane?
I did my bachelor’s in Computer Science & Engineering and went to one of India’s top B-schools – IIM Bangalore from 2005 to 2007. Post that I’ve been in in product companies – first building product, and later building the business. I’m a techie at heart and started my career in B2C products – across Verizon, Rediff.com, and a start-up called Jigsee. It was 2012 when I started my first start-up with a couple of close friends, and my B2B SaaS journey started with that venture. We were lucky to be acquired by Freshworks in 2015, and learned a lot about building and running a SaaS business in the 4 and a half years we spent there post-acquisition. Inspired by the success and impact I saw at Freshworks, I started Rocketlane in 2020 with the same co-founders – Vignesh and Deepak.
How does Rocketlane plan to utilize the Series B funding to advance its AI integration in the professional services sector?
We’re integrating advanced AI capabilities to revolutionize project delivery, governance, and operations with copilot experiences, automations, forecasting, insights, and recommendations.
What specific inefficiencies in customer onboarding and project management does Rocketlane aim to address with its AI-driven approach?
In our previous roles at Freshworks, we noticed that the customer onboarding phase was under-serviced, crucial for gaining customer confidence but plagued by gaps in collaboration and visibility, making value demonstration challenging. Existing tools failed to provide cohesive visibility or enforce our playbook, leading to siloed work streams and inevitable escalations. Realizing the opportunity, we spoke to other companies facing similar issues and decided to create Rocketlane—a product designed specifically for customer onboarding and client project delivery, ensuring the right visibility and experience throughout the client delivery journey.
What strategic advantages does Rocketlane foresee by integrating AI into operations, project delivery, governance, and insights?
Rocketlane is able to make better governance, increased automation and efficiency available out-of-the-box for its customers through AI vs. having to set up elaborate rules and integrations to accomplish the same. This means more customers will use the intelligent capabilities and leverage the full power of a PSA solution. This ultimately means Rocketlane customers will see more success with the platform and be happy advocates.
In what ways does Rocketlane differentiate itself from traditional PSA software in terms of enhancing client satisfaction and project success rates?
Rocketlane is purpose-built for professional services delivery. It combines project management, resource management, communication and collaboration, reporting and analytics, financial management, and project automation capabilities into one sleek platform. Our customers do not need to switch tabs and flit between spreadsheets to keep track of projects.
How do real-time insights play a role in Rocketlane’s strategy for enhancing team collaboration and decision-making?
Real-time insights on our customers’ usage of Rocketlane help us understand how our product UX and flows impact adoption of various impactful capabilities we build for customers. The data and insights help us come up with new hypotheses, as well as validate existing ones, especially when we are able to slice and dice the data by cohort, industry, use case, etc.
How does Rocketlane ensure data privacy, accuracy, and consistency through AI automation, and what impact does this have on service quality?
Rocketlane takes the security and privacy of its customers seriously. Our services are tested automatically on every SDLC lifecycle. Thousands of tests ensure that the quality of the software we release to our customers meets our stringent guidelines. All customer data is physically or logically separated from each other and encrypted at rest and in transit. These and other controls we’ve implemented ensure we can meet compliance standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA while maintaining a service SLA of 99.9% or higher.
How does Rocketlane balance automation with maintaining a personalized client experience in professional services?
Rocketlane’s automation and intelligent capabilities focus on providing the right alerts and insights in a timely manner, nudging users on actions, or providing an automated starting point for a personalized engagement. Customers use these automations, templates, and more as a nudge or an initial draft that they can work on top of to then personalize the experience – which also could be aided by AI.
Srikrishnan, what personal strategies do you employ to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving tech landscape?
- Spend deliberate time brainstorming with customers, partners, and internal team members to see what interesting and high impact ideas they have, and where they are seeing success with new products and technologies.
- Thought exercises around what kind of new product or technology can disrupt Rocketlane today.
- Part of the product/tech team is always experimenting with new technology and showcasing the experiments in weekly demos for the rest of the company to riff off on.
- Innovation seldom occurs in isolation. Watching out for innovation in other industries can carry very important clues for what can work in your own space. So, following the media to track innovation in adjacent spaces or parallels from other industries.
Finally, do you have any parting thoughts or advice for our readers about the future of AI in professional services and project management?
AI is going to aid services and project delivery professionals in a big way – increase our efficiency, identify risks, and help us codify our ways of working better.Embrace it and enable it by ensuring the data going into these AI enabled PSA and PM systems is maintained accurately at all times. By letting AI do its part – summarization, alerts, insights, document or email generation, etc., we can focus on the “human” aspects of client project delivery, and on developing the right plays to react to the insights, warnings, and inputs from AI.
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