Freshworks' Girish Mathrubootham calls AI 'Monster Wave', similar to web browser era

Girish Mathrubootham, the cofounder and CEO of Nasdaq listed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) firm F.reshworks

Girish Mathrubootham, the co-founder and CEO of Nasdaq-listed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) firm Freshworks, compared the advent of the rising Artificial Intelligence wave to the the launch of web browser back in the 1990s which disrupted several businesses and paved the way to newer companies.

"There are three waves that I would describe as Monster waves like Web Browser, Iphone and now AI...Web browser disrupted physical retail, with internet we saw OTTs emerging, Iphone completely destroyed many industries. And now AI is in the list, " Mathrubootham said while delivering a key note address during SaaSBoomi Annual event on March 7th.

SaaSBoomi was founded in 2015 as an informal group of SaaS founders looking to network and learn from each other. The community now hosts more than 1500 companies. The theme of this year was Artificial Intelligence and SaaS.

Monster waves create massive disruption and massive opportunity for businesses, he added.

Mathrubootham urged startups to integrate and upgrade their products with AI to stay relevant.

"We want every enterprise startup to adapt AI, if not you are already late... As founders, we have to rethink our strategy. Throw away your roadmap if you haven't put AI into every feature that you've built. That's what we are doing at Freshworks, " he said.

Freshworks was among the few top companies to adopt AI quickly and offer it to its customers.

Last year, Freshworks launched two Gen AI capabilities for its enterprise customers, Freddy Self Service and Freddy Insights.  Freddy Self-Service offloads monotonous work to bots to scale support and promises to deliver better customer experiences.

Freshworks recorded a 20 percent year-on-year increase in consolidated revenue from operations, reaching $596.4 million for the full year 2023. In 2022, Freshworks reported a consolidated revenue from operations of $498 million, a growth of around 34 percent year-on-year.

In an earlier interaction, Mathrubootham said that integrating AI helped the firm close some prominent deals.

"The Freddy Self Service, we started monetising late last year in the second half. Freddy CoPilot was in beta mode.  A lot of customers, when they saw and used the beta version, they were excited, and it helped us in closing some of the deals in Q4, " he said earlier.