Businesses will always strive to enhance efficiency, driven by their commercial imperative. This pursuit often involves cost-cutting measures, ranging from budget adjustments to more drastic actions like layoffs or hiring freezes.
However, Binny Gill, the co-founder of Kognitos, argues that companies can improve efficiency without resorting to tough choices. Kognitos specializes in automating business processes, offering a solution to eliminate inefficiencies.
Gill highlights the impact of the pandemic on supply chains, leading many organizations to confront resource limitations, rising costs, and restricted work environments. This prompted a reevaluation of existing inefficiencies, with an increasing recognition of the role of new technologies, including AI, in enhancing productivity, agility, and resilience.
The concern arises: doesn’t automation often result in job losses? While it’s true that robotic process automation (RPA) might render some roles redundant, proponents like Gill suggest potential offsets through a retiring older workforce and gains in the gig economy. Furthermore, automation could contribute to improved employee satisfaction and engagement by handling mundane and repetitive tasks, leaving more stimulating work for humans.
Gill, drawing on his experience as a researcher at IBM and CTO of Nutanix, founded Kognitos in 2020. Inspired by his son’s programming endeavors during the pandemic, he envisioned a world where machines understand human language. Kognitos enables business users to automate tasks using plain English, differentiating itself from competitors like UiPath and Automation Anywhere by offering a more sophisticated and intuitive platform.
Kognitos recently secured $20 million in funding, led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Clear Ventures, Engineering Capital, and Wipro Ventures. This brings the total funding for the 35-person company to $30 million. The funds will be directed towards product development and expanding partnerships and integrations with third-party business apps.
The platform’s capabilities span various markets and modalities, including voice transcription, light image editing, QR code scanning, data visualizations, and PDF form completion. Gill emphasizes Kognitos’ accessibility, designed for both business process experts and employees without coding experience. Major companies such as PepsiCo and Wipro are already leveraging Kognitos’ products.
Gill envisions Kognitos as a transformative force in the evolving relationship between humans and technology in business. Despite the ongoing tech sector slowdown, he believes the company’s unique value proposition will propel it into the next era of the technology revolution.
