Sramana Mitra: I think the distribution is going to be an interesting point, which is one of the reasons why I find the Agentforce announcement exciting. The same way that a lot of SaaS companies were able to distribute through app exchange, a lot of agent companies will be able to distribute through Agentexchange, and
The people who understand those enterprise systems the best are in the best position to build those agents. Is there going to be a big opportunity to build agents that are from entrepreneurs? How do you think about it?
Sramana Mitra: Yes. In all our discussions last year on AI, human centric AI was front and center. AI is in enterprises, AI is in small businesses, but it’s either a human using AI as whether it’s a co-pilot or an assistant, whatever; but it’s the human making the decisions. It’s the human using the
Sramana Mitra: Interesting. My thesis also is that the defensible businesses are domain knowledge heavy in AI. The layers of abstraction to some extent are already in place, and there’s going to be more. Just to give you a feel for my framework, I look a lot at the parallel with the cloud computing infrastructure
Sramana Mitra: I think what you’re saying is, the entrepreneur team’s domain knowledge is really what you’re putting the premium on to build something that is intense in workflow or domain-related value add. The AI is an enabler of that value add but not the critical piece. The AI technology itself is not the big
SM: Can you give me a sense of the process you use to choose the areas of your research? PB: I can tell you a bit about the new way that we are running HP Labs. My vision and decision was to focus on 20 to 30 big-bet projects that would really make a difference
SM: Earlier you explained how you made a transition from your core business to a much wider variety of businesses. One area that seems like an obvious opportunity for you is in the software-as-a-service business. SaaS does carter to a lot of small businesses with various solutions, including email marketing and CRMs. Have you considered
SM: What is your current operating margin? RK: Our net profit after tax is about 10%. Our EBIDTA is about 23%. Our operating profit is in the teens.