What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Telecom/5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Transforming Process Automation: Nintex's AI Innovations, Real-World Success, and Future Strategy Insights
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Discover how Nintex is transforming businesses with cutting-edge automation and workflow solutions in our latest episode featuring insights from Nintex's product and engineering lead. We'll uncover how AI and generative AI are redefining process automation, making sophisticated software creation accessible to everyone, even those with no coding experience. Hear real-world success stories from industries like banking, healthcare, and public services, where automated processes are driving major ROI. Whether it’s streamlining loan applications or speeding up customer onboarding, you’ll learn how Nintex’s platform is making an impact.
Explore the unique advantages that set Nintex apart in the mid-market automation landscape. We’ll highlight advanced features like AI-driven user action capture, seamless orchestration, and modern UX tools that simplify and enhance user experiences. Additionally, we'll give you an exclusive look at Nintex’s future roadmap, focusing on how the integration of diverse capabilities will create a unified platform. From digital form builders to contract automation, discover how Nintex is continuously innovating to stay ahead of industry demands. Tune in for an insightful conversation that’s perfect for business leaders and tech enthusiasts alike.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, today we're diving into the fascinating world of automation and workflow management with a true innovator in the field at Nintex Naranjan. How are you? I'm doing well? Great to meet you, evan, good to see you. I'm fascinated by your work. Maybe start with that with some introductions. What's the big idea behind Nintex and the mission?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm happy to do that. So, just as a quick introduction, I lead product and engineering at Nintex. Nintex is a low-code, no-code process intelligence and automation platform. What that means is customers use our platforms to build software applications and process automation. So if you are a mid-sized bank and you want to automate your loan application process, you can build portals for application for approvals, bring out the approval workflow, create documents. All the processes from all the way from application to authorization of their own, can be built natively on the platform using low-code, no-code tools, which means you're mostly dragging and dropping defining. It's very declarative in nature and the intent behind is to enable companies not to have to leverage deep software development experience but also build sophisticated applications to serve their business needs. So that's kind of the. That's what the platform does. We have 8,000 plus customers over 90 different countries pretty global business.
Speaker 2:The big idea is, I think if you've sort of heard IDC Gartner, all these like there's, I think if you've sort of heard IDC Gartner, all these like there's a lot of businesses that have a ton of potential with automation. We are still scratching the surface of how much of work is actually automated. Idc came out with a report that says there's about a billion apps to be built in the next three to four years, and so the big idea is that how do we make this easy for businesses to do and govern? And then, as we are in the advent of AI, like, how do we provide a platform where they can actually infuse AI as part of this automation journey? And so the entire mission for us is enable businesses to build complex business critical solutions quickly, easily manage them, govern them such that they derive value from these efficiencies and also improve engagement with their customers. So that's where we are going our entire platform and service of that mission, and there's a lot of innovation to be had in the next few years.
Speaker 1:Sounds like it and sounds like a great time to be focused on this space, as more and more companies jump in, not just large enterprises, as we've seen with RPA, but companies of different sizes, maybe new industries untouched by a lot of these opportunities and the emergence of AI and Gen AI. Maybe talk about the role of AI, gen AI in your process automation suite.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So AI is very, by design, very native to the automation space. The intent of AI is to automate, but, as we often say, ai and automation platforms are fairly intertwined. You cannot actually derive value from AI unless you have an automation framework underneath, and so we almost see ourselves as a prerequisite to actually deriving value from AI. And for us, as we think about how our platform helps our customers, there's essentially three vectors for AI to play a role. Number one is we are a build platform, so we are an abstraction on top of code. People use us to build software applications, automate processes, and so there's a lot of role for generative AI and even, like traditional conventional AI, to make this process easier and easier. So the Nirvana state here would be can I inject a prompt that says build me a loan application process, and the platform can spit out the right application pages, it can build out the right workflow, et cetera, very seamlessly. So how can we make the design time experience easier and shorter? So that's kind of the one vector for how we are looking at AI.
Speaker 2:The second piece is, once you build these applications, there are actual business users and end customers interacting with these applications on a day-to-day basis, and AI can benefit them too, with these applications on a day-to-day basis. And AI can benefit them too, if you think about agents like sentiment analysis or document summarization, and there's so many of them. If you're in a medical industry, maybe there's a claims processor that is AI-based, and this is what we call runtime AI. And how do we enable our platform to ingest some of these runtime agents and make it easy for the experience that our customers are trying to deliver to their end customers, so that the end users also benefit from the power of AI? So that's kind of the second vector, which is essentially a library of agents that our customers can use as they're building applications.
Speaker 2:And the third piece is optimization. So as customers start using these applications, as end users start interacting with these, the system is getting constant feedback on how it is going. Is it actually meeting the experience expectations of the end customers? Is it actually meeting the efficiency goals of our customers? And the ability for AI to A understand context and B correct the processes and optimize the processes on the go is the third vector. So build is one. Second is runtime experience and the third is just constant optimization such that businesses derive value from automation. So those are the three areas where we are innovating. There's a lot of capabilities that came out last year. We are continuing to push the envelope, as is everyone else, to make this experience better and better, because, ultimately, the goal is that businesses have to get value from automation. Ai is one of the enablers to do it, and we need to make that more and more seamless for them.
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic Mission. And I see on your website you have hundreds of different use cases where you're delivering significant ROI. You know everything from. You know help desk support to customer onboarding and public records request. I mean it's almost limitless. But are there any common use cases? You see again and again where you're really helping customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think our spikes I mean, as you mentioned, we are fairly industry agnostic, like there's many industries that use us to automate processes and build applications for their end users, but commonly what we see as financial services is a spike. There's just a lot of a benefit from automation in that space. Public sector, historically not a highly automated space we see a lot of interest there. Manufacturing is another. Again, the things that you would think are not very automated and can benefit are all the usual suspects. So that's where we see the bulk of our activity. But the spread is pretty wide and our job is to build abstractions that anybody can use in a consistent manner, and a good example of that is case management. Case management type use cases exist in almost every industry and our job is to bring that abstraction out so that it becomes easy for them to customize for their specific use cases and be up and running quickly.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, so it's a huge market opportunity. As you point out, it's also a very complex landscape lots of competitors, solutions, lots of different approaches. Yes, what sets Nintex apart from your competitors out there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. It is a little bit of a red ocean in terms of and especially with AI. There's a lot of startups coming up with. We can automate a lot of stuff. It's very hard for customers to discern.
Speaker 2:The one thing is because we've been in this space for a while. There's a lot of brand equity as well as customer affinity that we have built and the three things that set us apart, which I consistently hear from partners as well as customers. Number one is ease of use. We are very easy to use compared to the usual suspects in the market, and that very uniquely stands out in every customer conversation, which is why customers love using us. It's because they can be up and running quickly.
Speaker 2:The second piece is the completeness of the platform. So we address all the way from the early discovery side of things, which is, if an organization is trying to understand what is happening in the organization, they need a tool to document it, govern it, and so we start way up front. And then we have automation capabilities, we have engagement capabilities, and so we span the breadth, and so the completeness of the capability set is the second piece. And the third piece is, if you put these two together the total cost of ownership of an automation suite with Nintex is far lower than what customers end up getting from other providers. So those are the three things I would say broadly. That kind of sets us apart in the mid-market. So primarily our focus is in the mid-market segment and these three things resonate pretty well.
Speaker 1:Oh well, done Well. Mid-market is historically underserved, so it's great to see you focus there and maybe talk about some of the advanced capabilities as well. I see you have an analytics capability that gives folks actionable insights into business processes. What other more advanced features do you think can really drive transformation in those industries?
Speaker 2:So, if you go back to the journey that I talked about, we identify our value proposition in these three buckets Identification of the problem, which we feel is very important before you start automating, the orchestration of automation itself, and then driving engagement with that automation, which is like modernized UX tools and engagement and apps, etc. Some of the more sophisticated capabilities, if I start on the identification side, are how do we capture user actions that are happening in an organization and distill it down to a process that people can understand and govern, and so a lot of complex computer vision goes on. A lot of AI is leveraged there to actually understand how people are interacting with their systems today, as is, and then distill down what is actually happening in the organization, such that somebody who wants to drive efficiency in the organization can then identify where to actually focus automation efforts on, and so that's one piece of technology where we are spending a lot of energy behind. It also helps people manage auditing, governance, et cetera. Once you have this clearly documented, the second piece is obviously around the core orchestration capability set, which is how do we stitch all these capabilities in a manner that all kinds of work can happen seamlessly? So if you have a task automation, you may want to use an RPA tool, but it needs to be designable from a single canvas, such that you're defining a workflow, an RPA action is happening at a node of it, maybe a document generation process is happening, then making this highly agentic where you can make a declarative statement, and all of these get set up based on what the intent of the user is.
Speaker 2:Again, ai plus a lot of core platform capabilities going into the design part of it.
Speaker 2:And then, once you design it, the second piece is how do you test and validate that the things that you've designed are working the way you want?
Speaker 2:So, if you think about a multi-product capability set that is driving automation, building testing tools on top of it that allows builders to test what they have built, both functionally as well as for performance, it's the second piece where we are leveraging both platform expertise as well as AI capabilities to drive efficiency for the builders.
Speaker 2:And finally, on the engagement side, engagement is quickly moving from web to bots and chat and there's new forms of engagement that are coming up. Interaction mode, such that people and stakeholders who need to interact with automation can scale and start leveraging and benefiting from automation, is becoming a big focus for us and, again, ai is going to play a big role in all of these pursuits for us, and so we are starting to think about how can a prompt generate the best engagement model for a user group, and that might be a mix of web pages, it might be a mix of bots, and there might be a collective user experience between the two. That we need to straddle, and being able to do that in an efficient manner and bring this together is another piece, and then underlying all of that is obviously the analytics piece. All of this needs to feed into a common data pipeline that we can efficiently sell back to our customers to help them understand what is happening in the platform.
Speaker 1:Very cool and you have some interesting modules. I see here on your websites things like forms and mobile. You know digital form builders and you know contract automation. I'd love it the doctor's office to get rid of the clipboard that they hand you with the pen for intake. Maybe that's a use case.
Speaker 2:I've always wondered why this is not automated yet and why I have to say the same things every time I visit. So there's like I mean health care, construction, manufacturing there's just so much opportunity that you and I both perceive, Like, as you are going about our day to day lives, we just see so much opportunity in automating and making the lives of consumers much easier. Ultimately, that's the goal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what a great mission that is. So what's next in terms of the rest of the year? Maybe you can give us a peek into your roadmap or what's on the radar for your next releases. And what's on the radar for your next releases.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what's coming. I would probably distill down into four priorities. First one is, as I mentioned, our power is in the diversity and the completeness of our capability set. We are doing a lot of work to make that into a seamless platform experience, such that there's a single design canvas to build across but then there's common context underneath. So that is key to us. It's key for our customers, so that it becomes easier for them to build and leverage everything that we have.
Speaker 2:Second piece is expanding our ecosystem connectivity. There's going to be a ton of capability sets in the market and customers may build their own AI agents. There might be third parties who might have very specialized AI agents for certain industries, and our ability to sort of plug in those things and bring it to bear in our platform such that our users can use it will be the second. So it's just an expansion of our connector and integration ecosystem such that there's more diversity and options for our customers. The third piece is infusing AI in the three dimensions that we talked about. How do we use AI to improve the design experience? How do we infuse AI to innovate on the runtime experience or the use experience and then drive optimization? So the third piece is just a heavy focus on AI to deliver value, and the fourth piece is just increasing sophistication in our capability set. So we have a fairly robust workflow orchestration engine, but as we sort of look into more complex solutions, there's capabilities that require non-linearity in that, like, how do we do workflow orchestration at runtime definition, make it more event-driven such that customers have finer controls of these?
Speaker 2:Governance is becoming a big topic. Who do you provide access to? Who can change things? Can we govern this centrally across all capability sets, testing capabilities so that you can certify, ratify what you've built and also, when an auditor comes through, you can explain what is happening in the process. And this is, by the way governance is going to become such a big topic with AI, because A you have to make sure AI is being used properly, but also be able to explain what AI did when somebody's I mean this is compliance audits are typically going to ask for it, and our platform to be able to stitch that together and make it easy for customers will become a huge part. So just increasing the sophistication of what our platform has historically done, our capabilities have historically done, and taking it to the more complex levels will be the fourth priority and we'll see a lot of these things line up in the next four quarters Deeper orchestration capabilities, more AI across these work streams, integration of our platform, as well as new ecosystem connections that power our platform.
Speaker 1:Wow, very exciting. Lots on your plate, lots to deliver. So good luck with all of that. We're in the busy run-up to the end of year. What's on your travel itinerary? You must have a lot going on events and meetups and travel.
Speaker 2:Yes, although my wife doesn't like it, there is a lot of travel that I end up doing. Mostly it is. I have teams in five different countries, so just meeting them, making sure this is all about teamwork, right. So the teams have to be energized, they have to be clear about where we are going, and just meeting them on a regular basis takes up a lot of this. And then meeting customers, and so customer travel is another big part of my agenda. That's where we learn, that's where we get feedback, and so there's a constant stream of customers that I keep sort of in touch with. And then the third piece is just learning from the market. So analyst meetings, conferences, where we get to know what the broader market and where it's headed. So there is a lot of travel to balance, but I'm also hoping, and I'm trying my best, to get more of my team involved so that this is more of a balanced effort versus me doing it.
Speaker 1:Oh, great opportunity ahead of you. Thanks so much for sharing just your unique perspective and insights and I learned a lot. Very, very exciting stuff. Thanks, Niranjan. Thanks for joining.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thanks for having me and great to meet you as well.
Speaker 1:Thanks and thanks everyone for watching and listening. Reach out to Nintex. Website's a great resource for education and info on the industry. Take care, everyone, take care Bye-bye.