Marketing Darwinism is please to announce some exciting news shared with us in AI …

Applications and Experiences company Advaiya launched a consortium “PeripheralAutomation.org” to help organizations standardize and accelerate their adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital-led innovation. Launch partners include ExoFusion, arrowWebs, Nexsys, Ashby & Gabriel, and Passionfruit.

Advaiya developed Peripheral Automation to address a growing customer need: leveraging AI and automation for increased productivity without the disruption of overhauling existing systems. This approach allows organizations to gradually integrate innovation and automation into peripheral systems, minimizing risk and providing valuable insights before scaling to core processes to build a core-AI.

Advaiya CEO and creator of Peripheral Automation Manish Godha said, “Organizational leaders must think of short-term continuity and long-term disruption simultaneously.  Advancing a disruptive technology agenda too quickly or without the requisite context and culture to manage the change is hasty and wreaks havoc. That is where Peripheral Automation as an approach comes in.”

AI has taken the world by storm. Analysts suggest that Enterprise AI will grow 50% YoY between 2024 and 2029, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars spent. Still, executives are charry of the results to date, suggesting that many current AI investments have not either produced ROI or delved deeply into vertical and scenario-based contexts.

According to ExoFusion CEO Romi Mahajan, an early adopter of Peripheral Automation, “We must distinguish between real and rhetorical AI. With Peripheral Automation, we can start to gain the benefits of AI in the ‘periphery’ of our business without taking a wrecking ball to existing systems. Once we get the hang of it, we then can move AI into the core. In areas like Fusion Energy, where ExoFusion focuses, adopting AI without context and a plan is dangerously hasty.”

Mahajan and Godha will discuss Peripheral Automation at Informa’s AI Summit in New York Dec 11th. The session can be found here – https://newyork.theaisummit.com/the-ai-summit-new-york-2024/peripheral-automation-entry-point-ai

About Advaiya

Advaiya Solutions is a leading technology company that empowers businesses to thrive in the digital age. Advaiya specializes in delivering innovative solutions to help organizations in their technology needs around work and operations, customer engagement, and leveraging data.

Advaiya helps organizations enhance customer engagement, streamline operations, and drive growth through tailored solutions while understanding business context and needs. Advaiya is the creator of Peripheral Automation; this framework allows businesses to incrementally adopt AI and automation by focusing on tasks and processes surrounding core business data, minimizing disruption, and maximizing efficiency.

With a team of experienced professionals and a customer-centric approach, Advaiya leverages cutting-edge technologies, including its expertise as a Microsoft Solutions Partner and Sitecore specialist, to provide tailored solutions that meet the unique needs of each client. Committed to excellence and innovation, Advaiya Solutions has established itself as a trusted partner for businesses seeking to achieve their digital transformation goals.

Press Contact: Dharmesh Godha, President Advaiya
[email protected]

Hot off the presses here is an interview with Victoria Cote the conference producer of AI Summit in New York

SPOILER ALERT I will be speaking there with my dear friend Romi Mahajan!

Q:  Informa’s AI Summit has become an important conference on the AI circuit. Can you tell us a bit about your role and what your vision for the Conference is?

As the Conference Producer for The AI Summit series, my role centers on curating and developing content that captures the most urgent and innovative developments in AI today. I’m responsible for producing the Practitioners, VisionAIres, and Solution Center stages at our flagship events in New York and London, while also anchoring The AI Summit Cape Town within the Africa Tech Festival, which has been a cornerstone of the industry for 27 years. My goal is to create a platform that not only showcases groundbreaking advancements but also connects AI leaders across different sectors, influencing impactful partnerships and actionable insights.

Specifically for Cape Town, my aim is to ensure the summit addresses Africa’s unique challenges and opportunities by bringing in global leaders like Google, HPE, and Meta to share their insights. Through this addition, we’ll also provide attendees with access to a broader, more diverse audience, creating unique opportunities for global collaborations. My ultimate vision is to make The AI Summit Cape Town and Africa Tech Festival the must-attend AI event on the continent, where industry leaders, innovators, and decision-makers converge to shape the future of AI in Africa.

Q: What is the VisionAIres program, and how does it enhance the AI community?

The VisionAIres program is designed to elevate the AI Summit experience by bringing together senior-level executives and thought leaders who are at the forefront of AI innovation. It’s more than just a networking opportunity; it’s a space where industry leaders can engage in deep, strategic conversations about the future of AI. Peer-to-peer connections, knowledge sharing, and networking are at the heart of this program, and they are more imperative now than ever as the AI market evolves so rapidly. What sets VisionAIres apart is that it’s not limited to our live events—it’s an active community that connects members on a monthly basis through virtual roundtables, ensuring ongoing engagement and collaboration. By focusing on both global perspectives and local challenges, especially in regions like Africa, the program enhances the AI community by driving high-impact discussions that lead to tangible outcomes. This is essential in bridging the gap between different markets and nurturing relationships that have the potential to make a significant impact on a global scale.

Q: What role do events play in the overall marketing landscape?

Events like The AI Summit are crucial in today’s marketing landscape because they offer a unique opportunity for brands to connect with their target audience in a meaningful way. Unlike other marketing channels, events provide an immersive experience where brands can showcase their innovations and interact directly with industry leaders and decision-makers. This is particularly true in the context of Africa, where The AI Summit Cape Town, offers more access to a diverse and rapidly growing market. By participating in these events, brands can build strong relationships, gain insights into emerging trends, and position themselves as leaders in the AI space.

Q: What are some of the AI trends you are seeing, and what do we need to look out for?

AI is moving at lightning speed, and several key trends are really shaping its future across the globe. A major focus right now is on Responsible Innovation and Ethical AI, ensuring that as we push the boundaries of what’s possible, we’re also managing AI’s impact thoughtfully to promote sustainable and equitable growth. AI Governance is another hot topic, with ongoing discussions about creating policy frameworks that strike the right balance between innovation and societal needs.

We’re also seeing a big push for AI-driven Economic Growth, especially in areas like agriculture and healthcare, where AI can make a huge difference. Generative AI is another exciting trend—it’s making technology more accessible to non-experts, which is helping more people get involved in the digital economy.

Another pressing trend is the focus on addressing the AI skills gap, which is crucial as the demand for AI expertise outpaces the current supply. Upskilling initiatives are becoming essential to equip the workforce with the necessary skills to thrive in an AI-driven world.

Q: What is the best message to AI marketers for sponsoring or connecting to the AI Summit?

For marketers, The AI Summit offers a unique opportunity to connect with a diverse and influential audience. The key message for sponsors should focus on the value your brand brings to the technology ecosystem, especially in addressing specific challenges and opportunities within emerging markets. By aligning with The AI Summit, you’re not just gaining visibility—you’re positioning your brand as a leader in a market ready for significant growth. It’s about creating meaningful connections and contributing to the broader conversation on how technology can be leveraged for sustainable development.

Marketing Darwinism caught up recently with Brian Neirby CEO and Founder of Red Dragonfly VC

1. Brian, tell us about Red Dragonfly’s thesis? What are you looking to do differently in the world of investment?

We believe the VC space has been watered down by funders that lack any operating expertise. Funding can be a commodity; what really drives value is deep context and domain expertise. Our North Star at Red Dragonfly is bringing a constant and objective source of value-addition to our entrepreneurs. Our experience comes from doing the work in the roles of many of our portco executives. We would never ask any of our partners to do something we wouldn’t do ourselves.

2. You have a sectoral approach. What sectors and what are you looking for in investment targets?

We are excited, animated even, by four sectors at this point-

· Sports and Entertainment

· FinTech

· AI and Vertical ML

· Blockchain

3. Team RDF has a great deal of experience in many sectors. All of you have amazing backgrounds. How is RDF more than just the sum of the founders?

Our team members (present and future) have built our own business in some form. We’ve succeeded, failed, and trifled, and those experiences are tools for our entrepreneurs to tap into. We understand that both we and our entrepreneurs are human beings.

As a team we are inherently collaborative. We bring no egos to the table, just friendship and a desire for success. Being generous of spirit makes our team larger than life.

4. What are you looking for in the entrepreneurs you support?

Disruption, Humility, Honesty, Leadership, Culture, and Realism. We want a combination of gut-feel and data-driven companies. We call it conviction with humility.

5. What are you most excited about, as we lean into 2025?

The incredible entrepreneurship in our ecosystem. We are so fortunate to have a view into emerging business on a global scale. Whether in the United States, Canada, Italy, Cyprus, Singapore, UK or India. We are excited about how we will each benefit on a global scale from the growth of entrepreneurship and the assumption of risk (and reward) that is part of the culture in so many geographies.

An Interview with Manish Godha, CEO Advaiya

What is Peripheral Automation and why is it important to enterprises?

Manish: Peripheral Automation refers to an approach to enterprise architecture that views the automation in an enterprise as layers—with standard and robust core applications and databases as the base and vibrant interfaces and experiences at the top meeting the business’s unique process and information needs. It recognizes that the need for permanence is the highest at the base and innovation most rapid at the periphery. It can be contrasted with a monolithic architectural approach where unique contexts are addressed via fully custom-built applications or through deep customization of standard applications. This approach prioritizes agility along with reliability. Peripheral Automation is not a one-time endeavor but a series of strategic initiatives and experiments. This incremental approach minimizes disruption and allows for confident scaling, laying the groundwork for ever more comprehensive digital initiatives.

Whether through data automation, process automation, or leveraging intelligence with AI and ML, Peripheral Automation drives transformative experiences and effectiveness within a robust enterprise architecture. It allows robust core systems of records to support an enormous constellation of stakeholders, partners, users, devices, and platforms in an agile manner.

For an enterprise, the Peripheral Automation approach helps to stay competitive and responsive to evolving market demands. It allows organizations to enhance productivity, streamline operations, and optimize resource allocation while leveraging existing systems and investments. Peripheral Automation enables organizations to navigate complexity with precision and confidently drive innovation. This approach not only fosters agility and adaptability but also enables differentiation and strategy execution while leveraging robust, time-tested systems of records, retaining reliability and continuity.

What problems does it solve and why is it the best path to “getting there?”

Manish: Technology is a great enabler of businesses and at the same time a source of their frustrations. The promise of technology is often juxtaposed with costly and lengthy deployments and lack of flexibility. As businesses build their enterprise IT architecture, they often choose reliable, time-tested solutions which can often be generic, feel stale or be limiting. The alternative can be effort intensive customizations which can require not so easily available talent to build and run without having prior evidence of being sufficiently reliable. Thus the challenge is how to provide differentiated and ever-evolving experiences while maintaining a robust core which can be relied on for continuity and coherence. In dynamic business environments (which most businesses face today), architecture has to ensure that while being robust and reliable, it also allows for rapid changes and innovation.

Peripheral Automation recognizes that businesses rely on core systems of records—information assets relating to their customers, employees, products, transactions, and so on. These systems have to support operations and strategy execution in a dynamic environment where changing contexts have to be responded with rapidly rolling out novel interactions and experiences. The Peripheral Automation approach ensures that it is easy and natural for businesses to do that.

As you break systems into systems of record and systems of engagements, what role does PA play?

Manish: Peripheral Automation entails careful identification of core databases, business processes, and stakeholder needs. It enables aligning them in a flexible manner while creating required data links to consistently enrich data through the process.

Specific interactions and experiences are then mapped onto this core—built of key processes and databases. In general, Peripheral Automation supports building the core by leveraging time-tested, highly available, and supported data and business application platforms. These business applications, thus, serve as systems of records, enabling constellations of services, apps, interfaces, and customizations, enabling stakeholders to achieve their goals. These are built to be modular, specific, and disposable—thus, businesses can rapidly and flexibly modify their stakeholder experiences and engagements as per strategic needs.

Is Peripheral Automation being accelerated with AI?

Manish: AI is clearly a force multiplier for Peripheral Automation. AI accelerates and makes Peripheral Automation exponentially more effective. The enterprise architecture perspective enabled by Peripheral Automation allows embedding AI at every level. AI models built with core records are very much a part of the core systems and can be leveraged by process automations and can power the interactions. AI based data enrichment and consolidation can mean that myriad disparate business systems can rapidly and reliably serve as core systems of records. At the same time AI tools now allow newer multi-modal enagements to be built quickly, powered by the same core systems of records augmented by core models. AI tools speed up the development and refinement of data and process automations, thus enabling rapid experimentation and evolution of systems of experiences and engagements.

What is the role that Advaiya plays with customers in using PA for successful outcomes?

Manish: Our approach is guided by the principles of care, competence, and context. We recognize that technology is only effective when it is tailored to the specific needs and challenges of each business. By the leveraging Peripheral Automation approach, we provide robust and dependable core platforms, databases, and models, enabling agile interactions and engagement.

This approach allows efficiencies to be achieved with business applications that are built on core records with standard and time-tested automation based on industry best practices. Further productivity and differentiation is achieved via tailored and unique interactions and experiences built in alignment with business strategy and differentiation. For instance, with Peripheral Automation, a customer relationship management solution not only builds centralized customer data sets, but also enables independent automation for specific customer interactions allowing personalized engagement and fostering long-term customer relationships, thereby driving revenue growth and market differentiation.

Second in our “AssetTech” Series

By Romi Mahajan President Pepper
and Pulak Sinha, CEO Pepper

The Financial Services sector is every-changing and frenetic. As conditions change, markets change, as consumer behavior changes, markets change, and as new paths for ROI are created, markets change. That’s the name of the game in FinServ.

Couple this rapidity of change with the sheer size of the market and the results are epochal. One sliver of the market- the world of professional Asset Management- breaks the tape at $120 trillion AUM world-wide, a staggering number that exceeds global GDP. With a $120 trillion river running its course, even tributaries can be huge and powerful.

Enter the world of “private credit,” a fast-growing marketplace that now exceeds $1.5 trillion in investment with annualized deal-size in excess of $35 billion. As companies and other entities seek new sources of funding and as investors seek new forms of ROI generation and liquidity, the private credit market has burgeoned. New funds are minted daily.

For all investment types and asset classes, data is central to the story, but even more so with regard to non-public assets. Here, data and its connection to proprietary methodologies, valuation methods, and calculation is paramount. Further, ensuring that all parts of the organization are using the same data and the same methods to evaluate, value, invest, track, and report on deals is key to success. The lack of the proper platforms and controls is a sure-fire way to create internal friction and to slip-up in the marketplace. In private credit, data is the watchword.

As we mentioned before, private credit is a huge asset class, but very few companies build technology platforms and solutions specifically for this –and adjacent- industries. This is a huge miss in the technology industry as a whole. The private credit industry deserves better.

The data opportunity in this space is enormous. Even industry-watchers would have been challenged to notice the space even two years ago. Now it has emerged as a colossus. That’s why “AssetTech” – technology platforms that are innately and natively responsive to the needs of Asset Management- matters; the size and importance of the marketplace is unmatched.

The private credit data opportunity is real. We are eager to discuss it with you.

Part One in a Three-Part Series on “AssetTech”

by Romi Mahajan- President, Pepper

Business coins portmanteau words liberally.  As an example, combine “Finance” and “Technology” and you get “FinTech.”  Similarly if you combine “Assets” with “Technology,” you get “AssetTech.”  While the first is part of the everyday vocabulary in the industry, the latter is hardly understood.

This is curious, given the sheer size and importance of the industry.

World-wide, formal Asset Managers have over $120 trillion in” Assets under Management (AUM).”  This number is staggering- it exceeds World GDP.  The larger firms in the space themselves manage amounts measured in the trillions.  It is not uncommon for the tallies of “deals” –even just in the US economy-exceeding $250 billion in a month.  Again, these numbers suggest the importance of the industry as a whole.

Importance implies both opportunity and complexity.  With the rise in numbers and valences of asset classes and the intermingling of private and public assets- and that too across geographies- the opportunities to generate ROI where it was “invisible” before have increased substantially.  With this increase, the attendant increase in compliance, data, security, and governance needs come part-n-parcel.  In addition, investors are calling for transparency, where opacity ruled the day before.

Practitioners understand that the best tool-set to manage the forests of data and to derive insights and actions is Artificial Intelligence.  AI cuts across data, knowledge, decision-making, and pattern recognition.  AI is by its very nature dynamic, just like the markets being harnessed and understood.

Investors and Asset Managers have yet another convergence of interests with regard to AI. Both are looking for a step-up in a competitive game and both are looking for potential ROI being converted into kinetic.

For this reason, AI has to be native in AssetTech.  An AI-powered chassis is necessary for meaningful AssetTech platforms.

Here, distinguishing between rhetorical AI and real AI is key.  Kicking the tires is essential.  Furthermore, AI has to be at play at any entry point into the platform, from whatever workload you begin with.

Because of this, Marketing Darwinism and Pepper are together opening an industry dialogue and issuing an industry challenge.

Doesn’t Asset Management deserve its own technology and doesn’t that technology have to be the best we can offer?  Isn’t it time we go get it?