Editor's note: This is AI Impact, Newsweek's weekly newsletter where each week, we will explore how business leaders are unlocking real value through artificial intelligence. Tap or click here to get this newsletter delivered to your inbox. One line from Balkrishan “BK” Kalra, president and CEO of Genpact, has stuck with me since I reported on the company’s AI pivot: “We are proud engine room people.
We are not the showroom people.” He was talking about the finance, procurement, supply chain, insurance and risk operations Genpact has spent decades running behind the scenes. Kalra’s argument is that knowing where those processes break, where exceptions pile up and where judgment still matters becomes more valuable as AI agents take on more of the execution. The research I wrote about with Genpact and HFS Research, a global research and advisory firm, showed how much companies still have to fix as they put AI deeper into their operations.
Eighty-five percent of leaders said technology, data, process and talent debt is limiting the value they get from AI. Fifty-one percent either had no plan to address those problems or had not yet put one into action, while only 6 percent had established programs, carried them out and measured the results. Genpact’s answer is what it calls agentic operations.
The idea is to redesign processes so agents can do more of the execution while people oversee the system, step in when exceptions arise and remain responsible for the outcome. Kalra sums up the thesis this way: “There is no Artificial Intelligence without Process Intelligence.” On Sept. 17 at 11 a.m. Ranjit Tinaikar will sit down with Kalra for the next installment of our “AI Impact Forum.” I’m especially interested to hear what Genpact has learned from making this change inside its own organization, why some companies are struggling to turn AI investment into value and how Kalra thinks agentic operations could change jobs, workflows and commercial models.
There are just a few weeks to go, I hope you’ll join us. My latest conversation, with FICO’s Nikhil Behl, gets closer to the point where all of that infrastructure produces a real-world outcome: how a model’s output turns into a decision that affects a customer. Read on for my conversation with Behl about what companies need to be able to see and explain when AI moves into production.
Signals from the frontlines of AI adoption FICO President: How Companies Can Keep AI Decisions Explainable A denied loan or false fraud flag can start with the data fed into an AI model and the systems that use its output to decide what happens next. Nikhil Behl, president of software at FICO, an analytics software company best known for its credit scores, said companies need infrastructure connecting the data feeding a model, the model’s output and the business decision that follows, while preserving a record of how that decision was reached. It’s the operational infrastructure that brings together data, models, rules, governance, observability, optimization, and business action,” Behl told Newsweek.
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