Executive Summary:
Ready to future-proof your business - or risk
becoming the next Kodak? In this must-see episode
of The Enterprise Edge, founder Mark Vigoroso sits
down with Sunil Ranka, Silicon Valley entrepreneur,
TEDx speaker, and founder of Predikly, to discuss
the urgent reality of agentic AI and automation.
Sunil pulls no punches: companies waiting on the sidelines for their competitors to adopt AI are already falling behind. With jaw-dropping examples - like a three-person team generating $30 million in annual revenue - he reveals how AI agents and automation are collapsing traditional business models and creating unprecedented opportunities for lean, high-revenue operations. Whether you're an executive navigating digital transformation or an entrepreneur eager to understand how AI is rewriting the rules of scale, this conversation delivers actionable insights on speed-to-market, avoiding costly implementation mistakes, and why embracing AI now isn't optional - it's survival. Don't miss this energizing look at the future of work, productivity, and innovation. Stream it now, and be sure to LIKE, SHARE and COMMENT!
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Transcript:​
Mark Vigoroso (00:01.655)
Greetings all. Welcome to another edition of the Enterprise Edge podcast. My name is Mark Vigoroso, founder and CEO of the Enterprise Edge. I am pleased to be with you this afternoon or this morning, whenever it is that you are tuning in. We have a tremendous conversation planned today across a wide range of automation and digital transformation topics. We are joined by Sunil Ranca, currently is a founder of a company called Predictly.
very interesting background. He's come to us from India about 25 years ago, settling in Silicon Valley, where he joins us from now. man, man, he's invested in over 20 startups. He's worked with fortune 500 companies on all types of automation and transformation. company that he's now founded back in 2017, 18 timeframe is a automation solutions company, focused on RPA and AI and
digital transformation services across a lot of different industries that many of you are from finance, healthcare, manufacturing, high tech. And he's partnered up with companies like automation anywhere and UI path, very well known leaders, historic historical leaders in RPA and now in agentic AI. And to top it off, he is a Ted X speaker as well. So with that, let's give Sunil a proper welcome Sunil. Thank you for being with us.
Sunil S Ranka (01:31.986)
Yeah, thank you so much. My pleasure Mark to spend some this afternoon with you.
Mark Vigoroso (01:37.731)
Great, thank you for taking the time. As it is our custom, we're going to get to know Sunil a little bit with some icebreaker warmup questions. And then we're gonna get into the meat of the matter. But let's start with, I mentioned Automation Anywhere as a partner. I believe you're a winner of one of their partner awards. And I think...
you're probably pretty familiar with their solution and their portfolio and where they've innovated various capabilities. And I'm curious, you've got quite an entrepreneurial pedigree and I'm curious, is there anything that automation anywhere has in its intellectual property that you wish you'd invented?
Sunil S Ranka (02:31.086)
Yeah, I mean, automation anywhere been a breakthrough innovation from. They've been in the business for literally over the last 15 to 18 years, as far as I remember. Then they are not a new kid on the block. They've been somebody who, you waited or contributed heavily into the RPA world. They took some of the learnings from the BPM side of the world.
They started as a testing company, innovated, and the latest acquisition of AI, Sarah, and their investment into building the agentic solution framework, which is the next generation of agentic apps. And you will see soon that this is going to change the world where how people need to start thinking of how agentic apps needs to be built or how AI agent needs to be built. And this is
something like an innovation and we are very proud that we are part of that solution building journey for them, right from the building the platform to building the solution. So we are very excited about that journey. So yeah, mean, every founder has a dream to contribute in same shape or form and we are very excited that we are able to contribute in their AI journey.
Mark Vigoroso (03:56.491)
That's great. It's a great, it's a great ecosystem. Great to be a part of. So we mentioned, your journey to Silicon Valley. obviously is sort of the quintessential startup culture, the hub of technology startups. And ever since then, there have been cities around the country that had been known as the Silicon Valley of the South, the North, the Southeast, whatever, but Silicon Valley is
definitely has some folklore associated with it with regards to innovation in enterprise tech. And I'm curious from your vantage, are there any changes that you've seen in sort of American startup culture over the past generation over the past 25 years?
Sunil S Ranka (04:44.654)
I mean, I can speak to the last 15 year translation. I had an opportunity to invest through Y Combinator. And we started our journey somewhere in 2015 or 2016, about 10 years back. And nothing much has changed from the entrepreneurial spirit perspective, know, set of people coming together, an idea, investment, know, GTM.
Those all haven't changed much, but I think what has changed is speed to the market. Whatever it used to take about a year or two to do right from prototyping to GTM, because of the AI coding standards or because of the availability of the AI tool, everything has shrunk. I mean, we have worked on some of the projects which we are able to generate so much of
production quality information or the product in eight weeks time, which would have taken us at least, if not less, a year with 30 people team. Now we have, it has shaken down to like maybe less than 10 people team or 12 people team. The point here is the amount of tooling available to build a product is among us. So an idea has a value.
execution has an equal value, but I think the GTM is going to be far more important. And that's the one key breaker what we have seen where you don't need a technology team to do the proof of concept or MVP, so to speak, but all you need is a right mindset and few people to just put their head down and use Claude or Codex or any of those tooling assistance. That's a differential change.
Mark Vigoroso (06:43.149)
Yeah, for sure. As expected. It's it's it really is unprecedented. mean, I've I've been in technology around technology for almost 30 years and it certainly is. feels unprecedented in terms of the pace of innovation and product introduction, new product introduction, and things like that. So, certainly exciting times to be involved. okay, good. So, let's let's talk a little bit about
your journey and you certainly have unique perspectives on where we are in this agentic AI journey. And, you know, I think, you know, in the social sphere, you've recently been vocal about this thing you've called the Kodak moment. I think we all know the people that are old enough know that Kodak is famous for basically sleeping through the transition to digital photography and, you know, kind of went
went the way of the dodo bird. And, and, uh, and you've went, you've used that analogy to say, you know what, um, let's be cautious. Let's, let's be vigilant in the world of agentic AI for companies that do not embrace, uh, AI agents and the supporting technology. Um, this, know, you could suffer through a Kodak moment, right? Sort of a blind spot, right? So I guess the question in that context is.
What are some of the blind spots in the world of automation that you see executives now at established companies either missing or they're in danger of missing? because it's not just one thing. There's many layers, as you know, of, technology and, and different paces of maturity across the various flavors of AI, whether it's predictive AI or agentic AI or generative AI.
So the question is, you see, do you see executives and organizations that are in danger of missing or actually missing certain blind spots, as a pattern, or is it sort of just hit or miss?
Sunil S Ranka (08:57.21)
I think great question and I think one of the biggest refusal of acceptance or denial in illusion. People are still refusing to believe that AI is going to solve their problem. Some of them are still sitting on the sideline. And if you look at the bell curve.
early adopters and innovators are only like 13 % of the overall 100 % of the population. Which means the 13 % are going to latch onto, pick onto, and then they're going to not only going to survive but thrive. And the legards are the people who are going to say, OK, you somebody else has done it. Let me just take it up, and so on and so forth. I think this is the first time in the innovation of the technology the innovators and early adopters are going to get a huge leg up.
because the laggards are going to be dependent or the later adopters are going to just depend, if my industry has picked up, then I'm going to do it. I keep giving a simple analogy that you never had your hiring decisions based on your competitor or your closest competitor or your industry that, hey, if my industry is hiring, then only I'm going to hire. You always hired in anticipation. You always hired.
to ensure you are not bottlenecked because of the human resources. And this is where the AI agent behavior or generative AI comes into the play. This is more like a productivity tool. You don't need to wait till you realize that you need it. You always need it. You don't even know how to use it. So my only recommendation or the suggestion would be embrace it in any shape or form. And the people who are not going to do it and going to wait for others to embrace it,
there will be forehead. It's like bringing your own mindset and mental barrier into the play, which means when you bring an agent to AI, it's not about just you're bringing your technology, but you're bringing a culture and mindset of innovation. But along with that, you're trying to build.
Sunil S Ranka (11:10.702)
a persona which has your business context. And we all know that experience comes through a time period and you can't collapse the time period. And I think that is what you need AI agent to bring in earlier so that AI agent can continue to learn your context and can be more beneficial. So to cut the conversation short, my recommendation would be
If you are not bringing it, you are going to lose it. If you're bringing it later, you're going to lose it. So the timing is right, which is right.
Mark Vigoroso (11:50.029)
Yeah, it makes sense. It makes sense. I think there's so much noise. mean, the reality is that there's a bit of an overcorrection, right? It's almost like there's this urgency coming from boards, boards of directors and advisors that says, you know what? This AI ship is sailing. We better get on it. No matter how we get on it, let's just get on it. And so there's been, and I think that's part of the reason we've seen some of those
I guess you could say alarming stats coming out of institutions like MIT that say, know, the initial wave of AI investments really haven't, haven't paid off, right in, in material terms, financial terms, right. Potentially, because there's this sort of like, just get on the boat. Doesn't matter what seat you have, just get on the boat. It's, leaving type of thing. Yeah.
Sunil S Ranka (12:40.842)
That's correct and I think that's the beauty of early investment because an AI is not new, it's more than a decade old technology. I I remember in my, when I graduated about 25 years back people talked about artificial intelligence. The notion of artificial intelligence has changed over the years.
Mark Vigoroso (12:45.667)
Yeah.
Sunil S Ranka (13:01.932)
And thanks to Chet GPT, it became a household name to an extent that where my 14 year old son and my 19 year old daughter is able to get larger help in their schoolwork and a day to day life. AI has taken to the new X extent, is they've taken a leap of technological advancement. So it's no longer a pet project. The beauty is
Mark Vigoroso (13:10.88)
You
Sunil S Ranka (13:31.042)
This is the first time in the history SMBs can afford AI. Earlier it was more like companies who could throw bigger money to the smartest folk in the world. I mean today you can hire best of the best Silicon Valley engineers who can code for you for $200 a month which was never heard of. So if I'm an SMB company why would I
not latch onto that offer to bring in that culture of innovation. I think that's where you need somebody who understand it and who can hold you as part of the journey. So yeah, it's an exciting time and people have to just adapt it, take a leap of faith and the results are gonna be immensely surprising.
Mark Vigoroso (14:24.803)
That's good times. Yeah, it's rapid, rapid learning going on right now, certainly. Well, there's an interesting topic that weaves in around agentic AI and the transformation that it entails.
And that's all about business process, right? If you think about the various use cases for agentic AI, they're all resident within business workflows and business processes, whether they're finance or supply chain or customer support or manufacturing, HR, right? And there used to be an old term,
back in the sort of the original enterprise application days where you're deploying ERP systems. And there used to be a phrase that was, be careful about paving over cow paths, which was basically be careful about just sort of automating bad processes. And so the question again, rears its head in this day and age with agentic AI. And as we're defining
AI agents and we're building agents to reason, to make decisions, to adapt and adjust within parameters. You're still sort of girded by business process engineering, right? And sort of an engineering mindset to workflows and business processes. I'm like the question against all that backdrop is, should, should companies either in parallel,
or before technology selection and deployment, should they really do an audit on process health and potentially redefine, re-engineer business processes before just automating the mess that they have, or they just start over again? I mean, what's the way to handle business process management in this age of the of the agentic enterprise?
Sunil S Ranka (16:34.839)
Great question actually. There's a huge need for relooking the way we used to do the work. If you look at where the AI plays, importantly is, if you look at the human pyramid, right, or the talent pyramid in any company, the base, as you go up, the intellect level of the individual or the group or the people.
increases and then you got one person at the hem, which is the CEO, the founder or set of founders who are leading the vision. Now, earlier in the days, right, what rule-based automation did was it kept automating the rule-based behavior. And this is the first time where human thinking can be automated as well, which means we are moving up the
supply chain of the human pyramid where lot of intellect which was a common sense can be automated as part of the human thinking. What it means is there is a fundamental different way we have to start looking at it. There is a famous saying which is a bad process if you automate it you are automating inefficiency 100x times. Now we always have lived into the
Mark Vigoroso (17:55.755)
Yep.
Sunil S Ranka (17:59.608)
world of workflow, which says, you you, go at a certain stage and then you make a decision, you bifurcate, you have subflows and all these things. With AI, there is a need for something called linear, the way you have human interaction. When we, you and I, are having a human interaction, we are not drawing those workflows. What we are doing is we are doing the design thinking. Mark, when you, if the invoice doesn't have the person appropriate vendor name,
go and do that. But in the past, to design that, there were like a branching statements. But with AI, those decisions could be made without branch. So there's a linear way of doing the work needs it. And that could be something very, very efficiently done. Think of a stream. A river has a stream and the water takes its own path.
based on the situation, you don't put the water into different canals based on the decision tree. I think that is one fundamental difference people have to start thinking that workflows have to be linear. They don't need to be a branching. And those branching decisions can be made using LLM. And it's a difficult concept for people to understand.
But this is where the world is moving and this is going to be the fundamental differential in terms of how the future of automation, how the future of AI agents needs to be done. And I think you will see that very shortly. And the companies are going to do that. They're going to be a clear winner for that.
Mark Vigoroso (19:51.971)
That's fascinating. No, that's great. you know, I mentioned a moment ago, the amount of learning and knowledge acquisition that's going on at such a rapid pace. And you had a, I thought a really interesting perspective that you shared recently in the social network. You came up with this term unlearning and how unlearning is becoming key.
to traveling up that learning curve for automation, specifically agentic AI enabled automation. you you've been, you've been, you've been around, I mean, you've been with everyone from Oracle to building early stage and investing in early stage. What, what do you think are some of those well-entrenched beliefs about productivity or work or structure or to your point earlier about
process structure that needs to be unlearned in order to make room for the way things are going to be. And I think you just sort of answered with one example would be your last answer, but I thought I I would I would offer that up once again to give to get your thoughts on.
Sunil S Ranka (21:00.398)
I think.
I'm sure people have done a lot more work than we've been able to do, but we've been very fortunate to be on the bleeding edge of technology. The biggest aha moment for me was when I looked at crew AI or when I looked at length chain and it was fascinating that in the past life, what I call it,
Like when we call functions, we have to make the functions a call. But in the era of tooling, machine is making the decision for you. And very, very efficiently, they're making the decision. Now,
We evolved from linear thinking in programming to a structured thinking in programming. And then we moved from structured thinking in programming to an object-oriented thinking in programming. Automation needs to go through the similar mind shift, where we started thinking of automation as a specific task to be automated by cobbling a few scripts together.
Then we went to the extent where we said, okay, certain user behavior can be automated. Now we are at a point which is a combination of everything what we did in the past plus human thinking. And I think that is where the differential is gonna be.
Sunil S Ranka (22:42.828)
That is how you need to start approaching the problem statement. And that is how the next generation of automation and agent automation will come to the fruition.
Mark Vigoroso (22:43.235)
I
Mark Vigoroso (22:55.651)
Yeah, I love that. That makes sense. Makes sense. So Sunil, know, we could go on, but we've got limited time, but this has been tremendous. So, you know, I've got a few questions to round us out here that sort of key off some of the topics that we've raised. Albeit we've only scratched the surface, but that's okay. We can always come back around for round two at some point.
Sunil S Ranka (23:23.822)
Let's see how this round one goes and how people adapt to this.
Mark Vigoroso (23:24.641)
You know, there's lots.
Yeah, let's see. I can tell you the people in our community are very interested in what you're talking about and your perspectives are very much valued and appreciated. So thank you for sharing your experience. And speaking of which, over the years ago, you and I both worked for a company called Oracle. You were before me. I was there many years after you were there.
But you left after five years. I think you even picked up a patent while you were there to join a three person startup. And I wonder if you look back, would you change anything about that decision?
Sunil S Ranka (24:06.336)
Never. Best decision ever.
Mark Vigoroso (24:07.521)
No? Best decision of your life.
Sunil S Ranka (24:12.554)
Yes, that was the best decision ever. If I would have not made that change, my mindset would have not changed. It's all about the entrepreneurial journey or any journey in your life is about mindset. How do you think about yourself is matter the most. And that gave me a confidence that, when I can leave like 70,000 people company and join a three people team and we can help them grow, I think the sky's the limit.
Mark Vigoroso (24:30.157)
Yep. Yep.
Mark Vigoroso (24:43.519)
Absolutely. So that was a look back. Let's look forward for a second and let's look forward to the year. I don't know. Twenty thirty. do you think that the C-suite C-level execs are are they are they going to sort of still look like kind of what they do today where they're managing layers of humans or are they going to be sort of conducting
this sort of symphony of AI agents, i.e. the digital workforce with still humans, but the humans are playing different roles, maybe supporting roles. Just wondering what that senior management role is going to look like in five years. Do you have a thought on that?
Sunil S Ranka (25:32.898)
can tell you one thing, everyone can make up something, a story for next five years, but based on my experience, what has happened in last 18 months, things which were relevant three months back are not relevant anymore. But all I can tell you is, people who are not adapting the change today, there will be a Kodak moment. Five years from now, we will have companies
Mark Vigoroso (25:39.297)
Yeah.
Mark Vigoroso (25:48.866)
Yeah.
Mark Vigoroso (25:58.455)
Yeah. Yeah.
Sunil S Ranka (26:03.522)
which would be operating at the leanest human resources and highest per employee revenue. Experience is gonna be super important, but how many people we would need is gonna be the question of the hour. The goals are gonna change, the responsibilities are gonna change, but there'll be lot of...
Mark Vigoroso (26:13.997)
Yes.
Sunil S Ranka (26:32.798)
agents or digital employees So people will say we are a hundred people team where we've got five human and 95 digital employees And you know people keep claiming that there will be a one person billion dollar company which is going to happen very soon I Happen to talk to a founder their three people team. They do 30 million ARR And this is happening as we speak today
Mark Vigoroso (26:43.063)
Yeah.
Mark Vigoroso (26:51.959)
Yeah.
Mark Vigoroso (27:01.763)
Wow, that's incredible.
Sunil S Ranka (27:02.4)
So for you to make a million dollar a year is gonna be very easy and you will be able to do like four or five of the ventures to come across that number or maybe every venture will get you to that number. So it's gonna be a phenomenal time moving forward and yeah, it's gonna be an exciting time.
Mark Vigoroso (27:24.963)
That's great. It's amazing. That's amazing. Okay. Let's talk about mistakes that you've seen companies make, maybe your own team, maybe a partner, maybe you, what are some of, one or two automation mistakes that people could learn from that are listening? Anything come to mind?
Sunil S Ranka (27:50.062)
I think the first mistake they do is they take too long to acknowledge that automation is needed. The second biggest mistake they do is they want to perfect it on the day one. And my point here is even if a 10 % improvement gets you to a closure to the finish line, start with the 10 % rather than boiling the ocean. So we have come up with a lot of methodologies where we should be able to help companies in two weeks time to know.
whether they're getting an ROI on their investment. because of the red tip, people don't start fast. And the winners are going to be the people who want to start fast.
Mark Vigoroso (28:31.267)
Yeah. Got it. Okay. At the outset, I mentioned the folklore around Silicon Valley and, you know, I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and I currently live in Atlanta, Georgia. Both of those cities have been called the Silicon Valley of the Northeast and the Southeast respectively. And I'm curious what, what, what is, what are some cities and regions in the U S or maybe even in the world?
Sunil S Ranka (28:51.286)
Yeah. Yes.
Mark Vigoroso (28:58.295)
that you think are becoming hubs for innovation around AI and automation.
Mark Vigoroso (29:08.021)
Outside of where you currently are, obviously, Silicon Valley.
Sunil S Ranka (29:14.508)
Yeah. So I don't think so. There's going to be a region defined or definition of the region defined. I think the next innovation or next product could come from Siberia or Nigeria. And the next product innovation is going to come from a non-technical person. Because the the.
the evidence of having a larger technical team is collapsing.
It's going to be very interesting next 18 months how world is going to evolve. Now if you talk about Silicon Valley, you talk about north of Silicon Valley, one of the one of the thing what Silicon Valley provides is the network effect, the money and what we call it, you bring one and an army comes in. I think that's not going to change in foreseeable future.
Silicon Valley is going to remain Silicon Valley. Wherever the money is going to come in is going to remain the hub. But most importantly, the GTM, the go-to market, is going to be super important for anyone and everyone. And that will come from a network effect. And I think people like you are going to be super important who help companies reach out to people and do that B2B marketing lead generation.
are going to be important. So GTM partner is super going to be super important. And I think that's what I believe we are going to invest into the next phase.
Mark Vigoroso (30:59.971)
So Neil, it's been a pleasure. We are out of time. I am just so thankful for your insights and your candor. know I've learned a lot. Our community has learned a lot. I expect to hear from many of them and I will introduce you to the ones who have further questions. But I really do appreciate your experience and your willingness to share. Thank you everybody who is part of this community and takes a time out of your busy day to.
to lend an ear and a bit of your time. Do reach out. If you like what you're hearing, just give us a like, give us a comment. We love to engage. Raise your hand. Just let us know if something resonated with you or if you have contacts, referrals, connections that you think might be helpful to your colleagues. So with that, thank you again for attending. Thank you from all of us at the Enterprise Edge. We will catch you next time on the next episode of the Enterprise Edge. Thanks everyone. Take care.
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