Latest news with #JayBhatty
Fast Company
7 days ago
- Business
- Fast Company
4 strategies for launching a successful global capability center
Global capability centers are expanding the specialized operations and expertise of companies in diverse sectors. Many companies started using GCCs as a way to outsource a specific function, such as medical billing or invoicing, to an overseas facility to improve cost savings and efficiency. But over time, leaders have realized that GCCs can provide greater business value when they are designed as 'centers of excellence' staffed by highly skilled talent. 'A GCC is a recent business concept; it's basically a wholly owned subsidiary of a large corporation,' explains Jay Bhatty, CEO and founder of an automation software company serving the oil and gas industry. 'A decade ago, the main goal was cost arbitrage. Companies in the U.S. would create a GCC like a call center to outsource individual functions. But now they are using them for entire groups of functions. IT services, finance, and HR can all operate in one global capability center. GCCs are becoming more common in oil and gas, but they were already popularized in many other industries; for example, banking and technology.' India is home to the majority of GCCs, and the country's footprint is expected to grow in the coming years. By 2030, the market size of India's GCCs is projected to reach $100 billion by 2030, with 2400 GCCs employing over 4.5 million people, a jump from around 1.9 million in 2023. India is a top source of tech talent worldwide, offering a talent pool with both breadth and depth. Companies are using GCCs to support core business functions, led by finance, HR, data management and analytics, and IT, but they are also starting to expand their reach to include areas such as marketing, legal, customer service, and energy, research, and development. Subscribe to the Daily newsletter. Fast Company's trending stories delivered to you every day Privacy Policy | Fast Company Newsletters Bhatty's company operates a GCC in Delhi dedicated to AI research. Around 75 GCC employees focus on how to incorporate AI into suite of client products. 'The labor costs are low, currency exchange rates are favorable, and technology knowledge and labor availability are high,' says Bhatty. 'All of these factors come together. Some companies have even started creating innovation hubs in their GCCs. As visa restrictions in the U.S. have been growing, there is a shortage of skilled talent. A lot of developers come from countries in South Asia, so it helps to source the labor locally, instead of trying to get a visa and getting them to come to the U.S. Setting up innovation hubs in India is also easier because the environment is very business-friendly with incentives for foreign investments.' 4 EXPERT TIPS FOR ESTABLISHING A GCC 1. Define your operating model. Identify your business needs to determine your GCC's focus area. Get clear on what you want the GCC to do for your business and how you will measure success. 'Have a good idea of what your operating model will be,' says Bhatty. 'Is it focused on innovation or software development or R&D? Or do you want it to do all your back-office processing? You may have your U.S. employees doing administrative tasks when they can be done better, cheaper, faster in a GCC. You can set up a GCC in one country for all your business units, and it can serve all of your offices all over the world in one centralized place.' advertisement 2. Be aware of the challenges. Creating an effective extension of your organization—with a new office in a new country—is no small feat. Research the geographic area and business function area extensively before getting too far into the project. Talk to other leaders who have started GCCs in the same region. Understand the common obstacles you're likely to encounter. 'While the Indian regulatory system is favorable, and there's a lot of labor available, there are still issues to deal with when you're running a business unit outside of your country,' says Bhatty. 'Compliance complexities, language barriers, company registration. All of that is time consuming. Talent retention is also a challenge because, as more GCCs are set up, you are competing with other companies for the same workers.' 3. Enlist local expertise. The DIY approach might seem more cost-effective at first glance, but it's crucial to calculate the total costs—time and money—of setting up a GCC. Consider working with a local service provider that can help your company find an office space, navigate bureaucracy, and recruit talent. 'Setting up our GCC was a bigger challenge than I expected,' says Bhatty. 'A lesson learned is that trying to do it yourself might take longer and be more costly in the long run. Local service companies are very knowledgeable about the area and can advise you on where to site your GCC—location is so important in choosing real estate. They will expedite paperwork, secure furniture and supplies, and get your internet connection set up. Some of the government regulations are cumbersome, and you may not be familiar with them. There may also be cultural and language barriers. These people can help you find English-speaking talent or translators.' 4. Prioritize people management. A GCC is only as effective as the people who operate it. Make people management your top priority. Put the right people in place to recruit, train, develop, and lead your GCC team. Create service-level agreements that formalize expectations for tasks and timelines. For example, you may require your GCC employees in India to send deliverables by 9 a.m. Eastern time for the team working out of your U.S. headquarters. 'Managing a GCC is like managing a separate company,' says Bhatty. 'Hiring, retention, and training can be challenging because many employees aren't initially well-versed on how business is done by American corporations. But after COVID, the workforce really became global. Companies figured out that people can work from other countries with people in different countries, despite the time difference. GCCs are proving that this model works, and that's why it's accelerating.'
Fast Company
18-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
How the energy as a service model is disrupting industrial energy procurement
The subscription business model, software as a service (SaaS), has become the norm for organizations of all sizes to manage everything from accounting and finance to communication and collaboration. Energy as a service (EaaS), however, is a new framework that is transforming traditional utility models and offering businesses a way to purchase energy without an upfront equipment investment. 'For a lot of mom-and-pop businesses, or even medium-sized businesses, the old utility model has been the only option,' says Jay Bhatty, CEO and founder of a company that builds automation software for clients in the oil and gas industry. 'If you move to a city, you go to the utility, apply for an electricity or natural gas connection, pay the utility, and buy necessary equipment. But with the new model, you don't need to buy the equipment yourself.' THE UPSIDES AND DOWNSIDES OF ENERGY AS A SERVICE Bhatty gives an example to illustrate the differences between the two models. With the traditional approach, if a dairy farmer in Texas needs a heat pump, they have to buy the pump and hook it up to a natural gas or electricity connection to generate heat for the business' daily operations. With the new EaaS model, the farmer works with a vendor that provides and installs the heat pump, sets up the connection, and charges the farmer only for the monthly energy service. 'A dairy farmer's core business is milk; it's not heat pumps or energy,' says Bhatty. 'They don't know enough about that business to know if they're choosing the best solution. They may not have the most environmentally efficient equipment. They may not be paying the lowest price for electricity or natural gas. And they are responsible for maintaining the pump. But if they work with a vendor that is a heat pump expert, they're just paying for the heat as energy as a service. They can ask the vendor for an environmentally friendly heat pump that runs on solar or wind or a cheaper option that runs on natural gas. They can determine their carbon footprint, and the vendor will take care of it.' Larger companies in the oil and gas industry are already using EaaS. Oil drilling rigs, for example, are composed of multiple components that are heavy, complex, and expensive. Each piece of equipment requires consistent maintenance from highly skilled professionals. Energy producers outsource this part of their business, partnering with drilling companies to install and maintain rigs and leasing them through long-term contracts. offers products that allow oil and gas industry clients to lease storage on transport space on pipelines instead of buying it. The company's software identifies these opportunities for them in the market, connecting buyers that need space and sellers that have excess capacity. 'You see this model in other industries as well,' says Bhatty. 'In real estate, when you rent an apartment, you don't have to buy the appliances. You don't know what the carbon footprint is of the appliances or the cost of electricity. You're renting an apartment as a service, in the same way that businesses use energy as a service. When you call an Uber, you don't have to worry about the maintenance of the car. And in the future, ride-sharing companies might offer more specific options: If you want to lower your carbon footprint, you can call an electric vehicle. Or if you want a cheaper price, you can call a gasoline-powered vehicle.' The main challenge of EaaS is risk mitigation, explains Bhatty. Businesses need a guarantee that working with a vendor is more cost-effective than taking a DIY approach. 'Let's say I commit to a one-year contract for energy as a service,' says Bhatty. 'But what happens if my costs are not as low as what I could do myself? Then I'm stuck with this contract. I want a vendor to say: Give me your monthly heat pump bill. If you go with our service, we guarantee you 10% below your monthly bill or else you don't pay us. There are some risk mitigation factors that you have to build into your contract to protect your business.' EVALUATING THE BUSINESS VALUE OF EEAS Bhatty encourages business leaders interested in exploring EaaS to take the following steps. • Do your due diligence: 'Do your homework to select the right vendor. It's the traditional own versus rent model that depends on what's good for your business. Figure out the factors that matter most to you: optimal system performance, efficiency, environmental benefits, cost savings, reduced risk.' • Identify measurable cost savings: 'Know your monthly costs. When you are evaluating vendors, build it into the contract that whatever is being offered is guaranteed and measurable. The cost savings should be demonstrable. Otherwise, you end up paying more for a service you could have done yourself. Keep in mind that contracts are usually at least a minimum of a year because this is heavy equipment that has to be installed on site.' • Find your reason why: 'This model is picking up steam, and it will continue to do so the more efficient it becomes. Find the driving factor for your business to adopt EaaS. In some states, like California, it might be environmental concerns. In others, like Texas, it might be cost savings. Understand what you're trying to achieve, and how energy as a service can help you get there.'
Forbes
01-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Preparing For The Agentic Revolution: The Future Of Software
Jay Bhatty is the CEO and founder of Over the last two decades, software as a service (SaaS) has changed how we do business. Now we're on the edge of another major transformation as agentic software gains traction in our personal and professional lives. When you use a traditional SaaS application, you interact with what's called a CRUD database—a framework that enables you to create, request, update and delete data. As a user, you don't need to understand how the complex database works in the background. You only need to know how to manage content within the app, whether you're watching your favorite show on a streaming service or revising a lead in your CRM. Agentic software will simplify these interactions. Each application you use has its own foundational database that you currently have to query individually. Agentic Software In Action For example, if you're planning a trip, you first need to research and book your air travel on one application. Then you can compare prices and book your hotel room or vacation rental on another application. Once you have your airfare and lodging in place, you can begin building your itinerary—looking at travel magazines for sightseeing recommendations or booking dinners on a restaurant reservation app. But you're bound by the time constraints of your everyday life and the upcoming trip. Airfare prices may drop early on a Tuesday morning when you're not available to buy tickets, and you could miss your window for the best prices. With agentic software, you will soon be able to set up an AI agent to do each of these steps for you in the most optimized way. You can give your agent logins to each relevant account, along with specific instructions on the task you want completed. For instance: "If the price on this flight drops below $300, buy it." If the best price pops up in the middle of the night, no problem, your AI agent is on it. Then you can give it further instructions on organizing the rest of your trip: "After you've booked my flight, find me a hotel room within this budget range in this neighborhood. Then reserve a table at an Italian restaurant downtown for Saturday night, compile a list of sightseeing highlights for the city and email me my itinerary." Generative AI assistants, such as ChatGPT and Copilot, are already managing many of these tasks. A GenAI chatbot can immediately generate a three-day sightseeing itinerary in Los Angeles for you, based on places you like. Agentive software will build on these existing capabilities. Instead of having to log in to multiple accounts and manually complete multiple tasks, you can assign one AI agent to move across different applications and execute functions within set parameters. My company is starting to incorporate AI agents into all of our datasets. Our clients in the oil and gas industry have historically had to visit multiple pipeline websites every day to aggregate, synthesize, cleanse and standardize data. AI agents can now follow a precise set of instructions to automate these tedious tasks and give employees back time to do more interesting strategic work. We plan to expand this service to offer individualized agents that digest and analyze data based on each client's specific needs. I predict that agentic software will disrupt and replace traditional SaaS applications within the next few years. Soon, you won't be interacting with just one AI agent but swarms of agents. You'll have one agent for work tasks, one for chores and errands, one for travel and leisure planning and so on. Strategies To Prepare For An Agentic Future Agentic software is advancing quickly. Here are my top three recommendations for getting ready for this shift. It's important to understand that we are on the verge of a major software transformation. Whether you build or use SaaS models, your business—and how your employees and customers interact with software—is going to change. If you get stuck in the old way of doing business, your business might be at risk. Look at the positive aspects of agentic software. We all want simplicity and ease. Unless you're a software developer, you don't want to write a SQL or Python query to extract data. You can save an enormous amount of time by giving an AI agent verbal or written instructions and letting it do the rest. As AI agents become ubiquitous online, companies need to build safety mechanisms into their actions. Intellectual property will be even more valuable, and paywalls are likely to become widespread. Educate your users on best practices for setting parameters and implementing AI agents. Help them shift their mindset and get comfortable using an unfamiliar technology while still protecting their sensitive data. They likely already have their credit card information saved on shopping websites or have automatic bill payment set up for their utilities. Once they see that AI agents can effectively manage buy-sell decisions on a small scale, they'll feel more at ease moving on to bigger ticket items. A question I hear a lot on panels and in presentations is: If AI agents are going to do all of this work, then what are humans going to do? The answer isn't that humans will end up jobless while machines do all the work. AI agents will take over the tasks that are boring, repetitive and time-consuming—and what employees end up doing with that time is full of possibilities. Think about all the time you would free up if you didn't have to spend time scraping data from websites or trying to find the best rate on a flight. We will open up hours of time for people to work on more mentally challenging tasks—from expanding quantum computing to building faster airplanes. There are limitless conquests that humans can make. AI agents aren't here to take human jobs; they're here to give us time to tackle the higher-order problems that agents aren't able to solve. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Fast Company
18-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
How digital labor as a service can benefit organizations and employees
Artificial intelligence and machine learning tools are becoming nearly ubiquitous in organizations across industries and geographic locations. As AI's capabilities mature and widespread adoption increases, businesses are discovering new strategies to improve their efficiency and productivity. DIGITAL LABOR: THE NEXT WAVE OF AUTOMATION 'Companies are looking for ways to automate,' says Jay Bhatty, CEO and founder of a company that provides automation software to clients in the oil and gas industry. 'People often talk about how automation is affecting job security. Employees are nervous about losing their jobs, but there's actually a subsection of jobs that they do not like doing and they wish were automated away. These repetitive, mind-numbing, manual tasks can take up hours of employee time every week, and they are ideal candidates for automation.' Converting nonstandardized data to standardized data, for example, can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process. Bhatty describes a scenario he's seen repeatedly with clients: A company's accounting department receives a 400-page invoice as a PDF—but before the team can process and pay the invoice, they must first convert it to an Excel spreadsheet with standardized formatting. In the past, employees needed to clean up this data manually or with optical character recognition (OCR) software. 'OCR scans every letter, one by one, but it doesn't understand the content of the document,' explains Bhatty. 'But now you can feed hundreds of documents into a large language model that is built to quickly read a massive document and understand its content. With an LLM, standardizing data in an invoice is very straightforward. It just adjusts a few items—date, line item, tax, total—and that's it. These types of tasks are ripe for automation, especially using LLMs, and employees will happily give them away so they can focus on more mentally challenging, revenue-generating tasks.' began offering digital labor as a service to clients in 2023. In approximately 18 months, Bhatty and his team have built more than 1,000 bots for companies in the oil and gas industry to automate over 2 million hours of human labor. Bots are customized to perform specific tasks and can run concurrently with other bots executing their own independent functions. 'Clients like digital labor because it's a subscription-based service,' says Bhatty. 'It's fast, deployed in seven to 10 days, with a low initial investment. Tomorrow, if they don't need the bot, they can just cancel it or tweak it to do a different task. They don't have to invest millions of dollars up front in a huge monolithic system and hope that it works a year down the road. And because many of our clients are doing similar tasks, we can easily replicate processes to build new bots tailored to each company's needs.' For leaders who are considering implementing digital labor as a service, Bhatty advises starting with these three steps. Be aware of the sensitive information that bots and humans can access. Establish clear privacy and security parameters to protect against breaches. 'Bots can be programmed to deploy so that only certain individuals can see their data,' says Bhatty. 'If you're working with a software partner, make sure you know if anyone on their team can see your data. Our clients run bots in their cloud environment and control all their data—even we don't have access to it.' 2. GO FOR LOW-HANGING FRUIT Bots are ideally suited to low-level automation. Identify straightforward tasks that bots can execute without critical thinking or decision-making. 'There are three main categories of labor: on-site employee labor, outsourced off-site labor, and digital labor,' says Bhatty. 'In this third category, a bot can run anywhere, anytime, without a person actively running the software. AI that can handle more complex decision-making tasks is on the horizon, but it will take time to develop. It's like trusting the technology behind a driverless car. For now, keep it simple.' 3. KEEP PEOPLE IN THE LOOP Digital labor isn't intended to operate independently from humans. You still need people involved in conceptualizing, building, and fine-tuning bots, as well as resolving any problems that arise. Don't make decisions in a vacuum. 'A lot of employees and leaders are anxious about automation leading to job losses,' says Bhatty. 'The biggest eye-opener in launching digital labor as a service was finding the opposite, that a lot of people want a part of their job to be automated. Get input from your employees on the tasks that they dislike and take up a significant amount of their time. Look for opportunities to hand these responsibilities over to bots so your people can focus on more challenging and rewarding jobs.'
