Priorities’ Paradigm Shift: Going for the Gain Before the Pain w/ Pulin Kumar, Pyxtech

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (00:11): Hello, good morning, good evening, wherever you’re joining us from. I am Gerardo Pelayo, Chief Research Officer at Service Council, and I want to welcome you to another edition of our In Service podcast. Today we have a very interesting conversation. We’re going to be talking about high priorities, priorities, paradigm shift going forward, the gain before the pain. And I’m really glad to have Pulin Kumar, CEO and co founder at Pyxtech, formerly a lifetime ago colleague of mine as well, to help me walk and navigate through this very necessary conversation, I believe. Thank you for joining us.

Pulin Kumar (00:51): Thank you, Gerardo. And I like the comment of knowing from previous organization.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (01:00): Of course, of course I benefited from that interaction greatly. So before we get into the conversation itself, I want to talk a little bit about why we felt that this was important. And we run our service agendas those familiar with the podcast are aware of every year. And one of the specific questions that I’m always curious to track is our technology investments going up, going down, steady. Almost three in five of the service leaders that responded say that they’re planning to significantly increase their spend in technology and the remainder, practically all of them plan to keep it at the same level as last year. So it’s not something that is slowing down. And there’s a combination of factors. There’s perhaps a little bit of a fear of missing out, of being left behind.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (01:56): There’s the excitement as well with all these possibilities and hey, I want to be part of that. And within this, it’s not hard to fall into the trap of the shiny object or things that are really good, but might not be the best fit for what is most urgent in the organization right now. And that question of how do we align the capabilities that are out there, the possibilities that are being presented to us to the most urgent needs that are going to deliver, the impact that we have, that are going to align with the strategic objectives that we are pursuing is a conversation that I feel has been to an extent underserved and it’s really where we want to get into today. How do we address that?

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (02:43): Where is the gap in the analysis and the way in which many of these investments are being looked at? And especially how can we do better along those decisions. A little bit of housekeeping before we start learning more from Pulin, but a reminder that today’s podcast is being recorded so that you can go back and revisit it. Share it with your colleagues, available anywhere that you listen to your podcast, as well as all of our of our social media, the website, the the LinkedIn profile. And last but not least to our LinkedIn listening audience, we love you to be when you’re also a participating audience. So if you have additional questions for for us, if you have comments, agreements or disagreements, please let us know in the comments and we’ll do our best to embed them into the conversation.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (03:46): Pulin has agreed to think on his feet and be a good sport in that aspect, so we do look forward to your interaction. With all of that behind us. Pulin as I said, I’ve known you for a long time, but many in our audience have not had the pleasure yet. Do you mind sharing a little bit about yourself, your background and also what is it that BigStack does in the world of service?

Pulin Kumar (04:19): Thanks Radu. Thanks for welcoming me here and in the interest of time, I’ll try and keep it as short as I can. Just a little bit on my background. I’ve been in the industry for over 25 years with software development, programming, program management, did MBA finance and worked with supply chain and a lot of large organizations. One of the things that has always happened is whatever I was doing, I would always interact with customers and the base question is whatever they’re doing, why they’re doing that has been the constant question I’ve always asked. And also because of the finance background swing, what’s the roi? What do you get out of it? And why I say that is it’s relevant in today’s world with where the conversation is going in the organizations and in companies.

Pulin Kumar (05:20): And a lot of times companies have just done the work because they’re getting the money and somebody’s paying for it. And let me just do that. And that is what was the paradigm shift was starting pyxtech is how do we put customers and outcome first. So most people, when I quit the job and start the company, most people thought I was one man. But my co founder who’s based in India, she said it was a great idea and I started this company back in 2018. The whole idea was how do we put outcomes and customers first and how do we drive business where they can drive that value? And then from there we built a great referenceable customer base and also a product that we have of our own in the industry.

Pulin Kumar (06:15): So it has been a great journey. I’ll tell you, there was a plan of starting a business and there was reality. I can tell you so many stories, all of them pretty exciting. But it panned out well.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (06:30): I’m sure, I’m sure and those stories are going to inform today’s Conversation, I’m sure I’ll also point out, usually I like to describe my role here at Service Council as connecting the possible with the relevant. So here you describe the motivation to start Big Stack. It shows a little bit of a similar school of thought, I believe. So you can see the influence there as well, for sure. And picking up on some of the things that you started saying, which is we want to achieve those customer outcomes, I want to start with, well, what are the things that are getting in the way of that and, and that make the decision of what makes sense from a technological perspective, and all these smart investments, responsible investments, why is that decision a complex one?

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (07:21): And we asked this, our community, again, for their perspective. The number one response that we been hearing this year is there’s too many competing priorities that are slowing down the progress on the things that matter. And one of the things that came second in that was legacy systems and technical debt. So the scar tissue from the past, the baggage that you’re carrying, and that makes it harder to justify any new idea, direction that we want to move in, it is something that organizations are struggling with. So as you take from the experiences that you’ve had with your customers, your prospects, the industry in general, leaders try to value their data investment.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (08:13): Do you think there’s a gap in the way in which they’re prioritizing their attention and their budget and from the way that they are doing it to the way that they should be looking at it?

Pulin Kumar (08:27): Very interesting point. So I would say there is a gap, but that gap is, I want to qualify that. And the first thing is in the era we are in, and the way I look at it is pre AI era and post AI era, it’s like the, when the Industrial Revolution or all the different eras in the past we’ve had, this is one such error. The big difference is the speed at which people need to adopt it and get used to it, which is coming at a speed we have not seen before. In the pre AI era, the decisions and all the conversations were around what’s my biggest fight, what’s the biggest pain, what can I solve today?

Pulin Kumar (09:24): And the whole big adage of if ain’t broke, don’t fix has always been with the limited resources, with the bandwidth, with the budget, what do I need to address and fix first? Post AI era, that completely changes the conversations need to happen as not what you can fix, but what you can achieve and what you can get and where you can go. Look at this. We are living in an exciting age of AI and I Feel fortunate that it’s in my lifetime. We’ve got a trillionaire in the world and all of that is happening by conversations shifting to what can we achieve with what we have. We’ve got a great, I would say, framework in the conversations around competing priorities. And I keep that having with our customers.

Pulin Kumar (10:24): And we keep having that is, you know, the whole, I would categorize it in three broad buckets, build versus buy. And that is one such conversation. Then what is mission critical, what is not? Then what is the time to value? And how do you drive your efficiencies? So far all the conversations in the past has been what do I like I said, what do I fix? But look at it and now, new paradigm, what all can be achieved? So what do we build so that those five, ten things that we need to fix can be fixed as a platform or as a structure rather than each incident in its own. And that is where leaders work.

Pulin Kumar (11:12): What happens is people are tuned to thinking, fixed mindset, but when they are talking about organization wide, then the discussions bubble up. Does the middle level management team can decide on what do they do organization wide or does it need to go higher up to the top level or the leadership, what do they need to do organization wise? Traditionally, everybody’s worked what’s good for my organization within the company, my department within the company. Now people are talking about what do they do across the organization. And that is where all the decisions and priorities and competing priorities like you talked about are being kind of challenged and held. And that creates a blockage of what do I do? And then that creates the fomo because everybody thinks things can be solved, but where do you start?

Pulin Kumar (12:13): So a lot of customers that we work with, they work with us. I would say initially, before, again, pre AI age, it was what we called as discovery session. You tell us what you want to do, we structure it, go fix it. Now I term it as AI consulting or business consulting, where we do that, but we ask the questions of if you were to reimagine business, how would you do it? What are your top priorities? What do you need to solve and where do you need to get? So those are the conversations now that we have with the customers and suddenly answers are different, thoughts are different. That’s how I see that.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (13:01): Yeah, no, a lot to unpack there. Early on I knew you were bringing the muscle with you. A couple of things that I want to pull the thread a little bit further because I agree that this part about a pain driven focus has dominated. And before we even get into the AI conversation, you brought up something interesting, the concept of firefighting. Right. And in service in particular, sometimes firefighting in the field can even be seen as a badge of honor. And it’s hey, I have the ability to react on the spot, to be the hero at the moment of truth and rise to the occasion. The problem as you started laying out is that that firefighting mindset doesn’t translate so well at the strategic level. Right.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (13:57): And I think that’s a little bit of the I fixed this and then I fixed that and all of a sudden you have to three months, six months, a year from now fix an even bigger problem because you were doing some of the band aids. You talked about the shift from an intra organization to looking across the, the implications as one of those directions. Can you talk maybe a little bit deeper or share a couple of examples on why is it that having a pain driven approach is not the right path in the environment that we’re at today?

Pulin Kumar (14:41): So when you were talking about that, I was smiling because I have done that always. I mean in whichever companies and whatever environment I worked with, I have been wanting to be that hero that who comes in and saves the day or solves the problem. And that has been pretty much the mode. And I’m not saying it’s the wrong mode, it’s. It’s just the way how we react as people. Let me fix that in what needs to shift conversation across organization.

Pulin Kumar (15:17): And before I say that that firefighting mode has led to silos, companies have done or people have done what worked for them, for each department and what created silos or in other way I can say band aid solutions or structure, which is, we were talking earlier, which was like a patchwork structure because it was put together through these firefighting stages. And they were right when they were there. And now what has transformed is it’s not about what can I fix or what can I optimize. Because in a way, if you look at it, that’s a race to the bottom on cost, what conversations need to happen and that that can still happen at its own level. But organization wise, what the conversations need to happen is what can we achieve, where all can we get?

Pulin Kumar (16:19): And that is where companies are starting to ask those kind of questions. And that is where a lot of companies that we work with, they’ve set up the AI center of Excellence and how do they look at data, how do they look at information across different departments within a company, how do they look at it within the different organizations so that the data can talk across different organizations within the same company. And that kind of conversation enables where can we get rather than what can I fix for my organization or my department or my team right now? Because it’s, and that is where the difficult conversations and what I call the reimagining business kind of consulting approach is.

Pulin Kumar (17:12): If you were to reimagine your business and if you were to have your, I say the second chance or second life kind of solution, how would you do it? How would you have those conversations where data and processes cut across the organization or departments, not just stay localized? Yeah.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (17:37): And I think part of the message there that I’m reading between the lines is in the shift from pain driven and firefighting to, to this, well, what can I achieve? There’s also a shift in the, in the time horizon that we’re considering as service leaders because it’s not the immediate gains only and did I solve the problem today for a while, but it’s actually thinking more connected to the strategy as service leaders try to get that seat at the table and we try to solidify the perception of service as an engine for growth, as a key driver of the, of the company’s performance. I, I do agree wholeheartedly that, that we need to translate that approach into the way which we are prioritizing our investments. And, and you.

Pulin Kumar (18:32): That is where exactly what you said, it’s a long term value. It is your. So I don’t know what your next point is, but just one thing. How you transform or I’ll let you ask the question. I’ll come, come to that thought later.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (18:47): No, I wanted to go back to one of the things that you’ve been pointing towards and the audience is probably expecting, which is the role of AI in all this conversation. I mean over 90% of the service leaders we interview, they expect to increase the role that it will have enabling their service organization. And quite often the elements that fit into that decision are what’s the composition of the engine, the algorithms, the UI that is engaged, the build versus buy trade that you called out earlier as well is modernization, which is something that you mentioned that in the introduction. Taking a step back and thinking about modernization of the entire ecosystem, is that somewhat of a hidden roadblock perhaps that could even limit the ways in which you can take advantage of AI to begin with? Yeah.

Pulin Kumar (19:54): So some of the examples, and I’ll tell you, one of the companies that we’ve worked with and it’s a pretty large global company and where we started working with them was exactly there was a pain where they didn’t have visibility across their vendor network in, I mean I think in all three regions around 15 countries or so. And it was all emails, Excel sheets and very, very manual process. What we started is okay, let’s bring that all together on a platform, but over a period of time where that drove is, it was not anymore here addressing the pain. How do we drive efficiencies? How do we drive CSAT for customers? How do we drive proactiveness for the customer?

Pulin Kumar (20:55): And that solution which was just pointing one pinpoint has become a whole platform where now all their partners are connected globally and they’re driving future decisions rather than looking at rear view mirror and reacting. Because that is what the power of that reimagination comes in. And I think that is where a lot of companies that you guys would have talked to would have probably had the same problems. And I think that is, that is one such example where how do you drive that mindset from just fixing the pain to actually driving the business over across the globe?

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (21:48): Yeah. And I mean the way you described it, it reminds me of when I first moved to Texas. Water is very heavy over here. For those that, that are less familiar with the, with the region, I was one of those less familiar with the, with this fact. And it turns out that if you don’t do the proper maintenance and all after a while it starts to create a, to clog, for example, your shower. Right. And now the pressure is not, it’s not coming out because a lot of it is getting blocked. I could have the best pressure, I could have a really fancy shower equipment and it’s not going to fly.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (22:27): And I think that’s a very, if perhaps a little bit simple but, but a fair analogy to how we might think about AI and the underlying system that we have that connection across the organization, the data, the systems, how much of the way in which it is configured and which is not the focus today, actually blocking what you can achieve with something really powerful like AI. And the same could be said about other solutions.

Pulin Kumar (23:01): Yeah. So into the point, you’re making one of the other examples that we are working for. And this is something that we see in a lot of companies. Everybody wants to get to that AI solution, but a lot of it is how ready our organizations for it. A lot of times it is not really AI, it’s just fixing the data automating stuff. And it can lie from just data correction up to agentic view or and anywhere in between. So one of the example, one of the efforts we are doing with another large organization is how do we get their data across different organizations within their company. AI ready as in each organization has created their own data what fit what worked for them. But that doesn’t talk to any other organization organization.

Pulin Kumar (24:04): So the first task is how do you get that fragmented data ready for AI? How do you get that data current? Because you don’t want to work on stale data. How do you build all of that? And we have talked about earlier on the headless state. Essentially every company right now or all the programs are driven for human interaction at some point do companies want to stay that dashboard where humans are clicking analogy I can give you for human driven cars versus autonomous cars. You don’t need in autonomous cars you don’t need dashboard and you don’t need humans to react. That’s where businesses and AI is eventually going that how do you have AI agents drive your business processes for that you have to have the framework ready.

Pulin Kumar (25:04): And that is where when I talked about consultative approach what we help with companies, what are the end business visions and then how do we build that block at a time or and based on the size of the company and where they are in their whole modernization journey we can come in right at the beginning or anywhere along the way because that’s, that’s where the conversations become business driven rather than just one department driven if that makes sense.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (25:39): Yeah, no indeed. And well I get my next question ready. So this, this is a long comment. I’ll actually had it. But I I wanted to point out many of these things resonate from the webinar that we did together with mvva, your customer which is how do we think differently about the way in which we’ve always done business and how can we leverage the data and the systems in an entirely different way. And productivity. Right. Productivity is still there. An interesting data point that from that survey I mentioned earlier is that the focus and the way in which cost oriented targets are increasing is no different for those who are prioritizing efficiency versus those who are prioritizing growth.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (26:34): But the targets for revenue and for margin over twice as growing twice as rapidly for for those who are prioritizing growth. So being efficient it is for everybody. But if all you’re doing is being efficient I think you described it very well. It’s a race to the bottom and it’s not connecting to that long term value.

Pulin Kumar (26:59): In one example I’ll give you a just close home which is in our own company since we have a car till last year we had a roadmap which now since We’ve transformed completely to AI way of working. One year’s roadmap we were able to achieve in two months. And it’s not with the same people, but it’s not so much driven towards how efficient we are. What that drove as a customer growth, what that drove as a revenue growth. And that is where we are in that growth stage, where if we eat our own dog food like they say, you know, we’ve tested ourselves, that drives us towards the growth. And that is where I think the age is for all organizations to start thinking how and where they can get rather than what they can fix.

Pulin Kumar (27:53): Because fix and if you keep fixing, that’s a lifelong job. But where you can get that’s a transformation.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (28:04): So I want to pick your brain a bit more on that point. I’m glad. By the way, the comment on hard water resonated. I see Sacksmith reactions. Thank you for your participation. Yes, like daily life, it matches sometimes surprisingly to business. But we’ve been talking about this shift to gain driven investments and what can I get? Is there any advice, any lessons learned pitfalls to avoid that you’ve noticed as organizations make this leap from a pain driven organization to how does gain driven endpoint investment actually look like in practice?

Pulin Kumar (28:57): Don’t get caught like a deer in a headlight in the sense with so much of expectation and AI Because I’ll tell you, fixing a pain driven problem is pretty much a subconscious memory, muscle memory you can say. But rethinking what can I get is new thinking. And that is a lot of customers that we work with. Those are the same kind of questions that okay, what do I get started? Where do I get started? So where we have seen things work for customers that we work with is let’s build this, let’s work from where do you want your business to get to? And it could be a department and it could be a whole company.

Pulin Kumar (29:49): And that’s where I seen some of the companies where decisions bubble up because it has to get to the top leadership because it’s company wide. But what needs, what is important is taking an action, taking a decision, taking a consultative approach in the companies that venture into that are already taking the first step towards gain driven approach rather than pain driven approach. And I think that is the first start is let’s have a conversation, let’s talk about that. Because the questions need to be if you have to redo the business or redo the organization and start from scratch, what is, is your visionist? What do you want to do? Technology will solve it and we’ve done that for a lot of customers at different levels.

Pulin Kumar (30:44): So I would say that’s where you start with is define where you want to get. And you know one of the things, and you mentioned mba, we were talking, I was talking to him and he said, I said, you know the discussion decisions earlier was I need good, fast and cheap service. And I said, now I used to say pick two out of three. He says you do all three. But he says his words, he says I would change that from not good, fast and cheap, good, fast and value driven because the value is being driven and which the value is not saving cost value is driving revenue.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (31:30): Yeah, no, I love that quote. It encapsulates really that necessary direction if we want service to be truly strategic and not just operational. Last thing that I want to get from you because we’ve hinted at the long term value mindset, there’s a role that the quality and the trust in the digital ecosystem plays within all of this and how it connects to thinking about intelligent modernization. Is there any final advice, final example that you’d like to share with the audience about how to drive this achievement, how to translate this into reality that becomes a trusted measurement of long term business value.

Pulin Kumar (32:30): So I’ll tell you, trust is the differentiator and being able to trust in that, establish that trust and transparency in that long term value. And one of the examples I’ll give you this is again a different industry, medical industry, where there are these parts that are so small that you can’t really see the part numbers. And the company was like, we don’t know how to measure it, how to reorder it and that whole supply chain. What we said, we consulted with them and we said what we can do is start imaging it and then use AI and other technology to be able to read it through the system and automate the whole supply chain for them. And all they have to do is take a picture from the phone.

Pulin Kumar (33:36): And these are so micro that it’s difficult to read it in, in with naked eye. And just doing that. We started with that, but at the end doing that, what they drove is they gained the market, they gained the revenue and again it started that I’m having to have five people look at it, look at catalog, look at, do this and it was costing me a lot more. What this turned it around to a revenue center. So I would say the starting point again is let’s have a conversation. It doesn’t need to be, hey, one of the ways that like I said, we started the company is how do we put customers and outcome first? Not, hey, for every conversation, let’s put a bill out there.

Pulin Kumar (34:32): So I think that is where the start is and that we have done ourselves because AI world is relatively new and this is the time to drive that benefit. I always tell our company if we don’t adopt it, we are going the dinosaur way. So I would encourage everybody to start those conversations and start small and build from there.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (35:00): Yeah, no, I like that. Two takeaways for me are, hey, how do we have the conversation to get more value out of the structure, the infrastructure that we already have? And then how do we have the parallel conversation of is the current infrastructure allowing us or blocking us from leveraging the new things that are coming up? Right. So it’s both. Both are necessary. But the connecting thread is this. I want to grow. I want to create that value, customer retention and growth. Thank you.

Pulin Kumar (35:40): I just want to say thank you to John Carroll. I saw some of his messages. Thank you, John. Really appreciate it.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (35:47): Yeah, yeah. Very aligned with, with the direction that we’re talking about. Pulin, I want to thank you for sharing all of this, for taking the time before I let you go. I always like to bring it back to the individual as well. As you’re becoming popular in the community, do you mind leaving the audience with a little bit about yourself? Some passion project that you have coming up, something personal that you’d like to let us in.

Pulin Kumar (36:23): Interesting. Thanks for putting me on the spot, but. Okay. I mean, actually, I can think of two. So I’ll tell you, one has been, and it’s been on the bucket list for some time. I want to do a road trip from North America to South America, tip to dip. And that’s just one thing I want to do with no time limits, no schedules, and just drive that. But long term, what I have always thought of, and I’ve been in small pieces I’ve been involved in, is I want to really contribute to cleaning up the big Pacific garbage patch, if you have heard of it.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (37:05): Yes, I have.

Pulin Kumar (37:06): So that’s something that I have been following for years. And that’s something, at some point, I want to be more involved in.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (37:14): That that’s, that’s, that’s fantastic of yours. I also like that you’re drinking your own Kool Aid and thinking both about the near term and the long term yourself.

Pulin Kumar (37:25): Ask me the conversations we have internally and I’ll just leave it that earlier it used to be, hey, we don’t have bandwidth, we don’t have headache now the teams have transform to, okay, what’s next? And that is the enablement.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (37:42): Indeed. Indeed. Well, you heard it from Pulin Kumar. But once again, thank you for joining us today. To our listening audience, thank you for staying a little bit longer. I believe it was, it was worth it. And a reminder that today’s podcast was recorded and you can go and revisit it anywhere that you usually listen to, to these conversations. Thank you. We’ll see you in our next edition. Have a great rest of the week. Enjoy the summer.

Pulin Kumar (38:13): And Gerardo, thank you very much. And on your side, I’m looking forward to you in next four years with the Mexico win.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (38:22): Yes, yes. It might take a little bit more than four, but we’ll see. We’ll give it our best.

Pulin Kumar (38:26): Awesome. Thank you.

Gerardo Pelayo Rubio (38:27): Thank you, Pulin. Bye.