Sanjay Srivastava of Genpact argues that AI success depends on culture, not just technology. His company flips the automation mindset: start with 100% automation as the baseline, treat any human step as a defect to fix. This AI-first culture, borrowed from software development practices, is what separates winners from the rest.
Chapters
What parts of a company's culture are going to affect its ability to harness AI? Actually, it's amazing that you started with that question, because it really is the more important, the most important part of this entire journey. We all get caught up in technology and large language models and the next and the latest thing and so on and so forth. But the reality is tech is never the long pole in the tent anymore. It is right down to culture. It's around people, it's around process, it's around design and experience that actually drives success. And you pick the right one to start with, which is culture. Because fundamentally, this is about people and this is about getting enterprises behind it. I'll give you our example. What we do for a living is we take business processes and we drive it for our clients and across the Fortune 500. And in so doing, we'll take our business process, we'll put data and tech and AI and sort of operationalize it. We'll make it much more efficient. We'll redesign it to the latest benchmarks in the industry, and then we'll run it on behalf of our clients. We get paid on a transaction basis. They benefit from really, you know, focus on their job, number one, and we do the best job we can at this. Now, if you think about our company, we've gone through a process of saying, what is it? What is it that we need to do about our culture and our mindset, actually? And the mindset change is what's really critical. So we've decided we're an AI first company. But what does that really mean? And for us, what it means, and we've spent some time thinking through this, is we're saying we used to work in the following fashion. We take a business process. We'd automate as much of it as possible, and then we'd manually drive the rest. And every single year, we'd actually increase the amount of automation up by five points, 10 points, whatever made sense for that year, we felt really good about it. And we're in this continual process of increasing it so we can get the process eventually fully automated. We've decided that our mindset change has to be that we invert it. That when we take a business process, when we run it, our goal, our absolute norm, is 100% automated, completely, no touch. Now, we don't. We're not there today. We just don't. We're not at that point. So let's say we're 70% automated, and it still has to be 30% manual touch. We call that a defect. Every time we touch a transaction, it's actually a defect. We label it, we get the metadata around it, and we will continually strive to automate it using machine learning. And so in many ways, it's an inversion of a business model. It was that we would put productivity into it, we'd automate it, and then we keep increasing every single year. The baseline is what it is, and the increment is how you improve it. We've thrown that out of the window. We're saying the baseline is 100% automated. Anything that doesn't get us to the baseline is a defect. And I'm using software terminology over here. And so just like a software company would, we have scrum lists and bug lists, and we actually spend time on sort of working down those bugs. And it's, you know, you might say, hey, Sanjay, you're doing the same thing. I mean, you're really just, you know, putting more and more AI and automation into it. And I'd say, no, it's not. Our fundamental mindset is different. It's the way our culture is designed is very different. And I think that's super important. And I just put that as an example. But all of the companies that I work with, that actually get the culture right, get AI right.
