THE BUSINESS CHIEF INTERVIEW
responsibility to the communities the firm operates in,“ one of the reasons that excited me to join UST, and it continues to be an inspirational moment”. A man who joined a company for a set of written principles now makes his living insisting other companies write theirs down. UST’ s answer is what Praveen calls the capability layer, four foundations it insists on before any client gets near an agent. First comes the business capability model, the architecture of what a business actually does. Then knowledge graphs, which surface the context a machine needs to reason with. Then value streams, where his frustration shows.“ Everybody says that they don’ t want to digitise what is as-is. But they end up doing that, because nobody has taken the effort to look at what the actual as-is value stream looks like today.” Last is the reference architecture, the rules of conduct for AI inside the business: what it may touch, what it may decide and the point past which it does not proceed without a human. Consultants can build all four and frequently do, though a company that never takes possession of them has purchased its place among the 95 % of corporate AI pilots that show no measurable return.“ These four capabilities are core to a customer’ s ways of working,” Praveen says.“ You cannot outsource your IP here.”
There could be highs and lows. But at the end of the day, the skills of the future are going to be here
Praveen Prabhakaran COO UST
The humility extends to the first phone call.“ We don’ t advocate anyone to go and pitch to customers saying we can solve your AI problem,” he says.“ We first try to understand what their objectives actually are.” In a market where every vendor promises a miracle, An integrator that opens with questions rather than a pitch is close to a novelty act.
Machine, method, manpower In February 2024, Klarna announced that its AI assistant was handling two-thirds of customer-service chats and doing the work of 700 full-time agents, a figure the company translated into roughly US $ 40m in improved profit.
60 September 2026