Deepak Arora: Turning AI Platforms Into Real-World Outcomes

Deepak Arora
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[00:00:05] Deepak Arora: ​Traditionally most of our solutions on Marketplace were professional services plus solution accelerators bundling together. And I think we are seeing with these announcement, we are seeing that a transition into more product and activation play, where if I have a product that I want to sell it to our customers, it should be plug and play, right?

[00:00:27] Should be activated, bought, purchased, and provisioned from the Marketplace. So I'm very excited about these changes, right? So the marketplace positioning will become end to end and makes it easy for our customers, make it, makes it easy for AWS and makes it easy for ourselves as well.

[00:00:44] Chip Rodgers: In your role, how what, how do you think of that whole life cycle of working with AWS in your case?

[00:00:50] Deepak Arora: Yeah. You briefly touched upon that. It starts with co-build side of the thing.

[00:00:53]

[00:00:57] Chip Rodgers: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another [00:01:00] episode of Inside Partnering. We Are Here. I guess this is officially day one. I'm not sure. Yeah. 'cause Matt's keynote was this morning, so I think it's Tuesday. Anyway,

[00:01:09] Deepak Arora: It's, yeah, yesterday was more of a preparation. So today things are much more in action, so yeah.

[00:01:14] We can say day one. Yeah,

[00:01:15] Chip Rodgers: that's true. The the show floor only opened up today. It wasn't open yesterday yeah. Yeah. Alright. It's day one. Yesterday was Day zero.

[00:01:22] Deepak Arora: Yes. Day zero, the preempting part of the big action, yeah.

[00:01:28] Chip Rodgers: Great. So I'm so excited to be joined by Deepak Arora. Deepak is global CTO of AWS Solutions, also Group Vice President part of your role as well as me engineering lead for MENA region, which is so you got a lot on your plate.

[00:01:44] Deepak Arora: Yes. Yeah. So I am based out of London. I. Keep traveling between UK and Middle East. My AWS role is global in nature, so I talk to North American clients and customers, and when I'm in Middle East, I'm focused on delivering the AWS solutions to our Middle East clients. [00:02:00]

[00:02:00] Chip Rodgers: That's terrific. So first of all, welcome.

[00:02:02] Welcome. Yeah.

[00:02:04] Deepak Arora: Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you and it's exciting time. I love the vibe and the energy here. It's

[00:02:10] Chip Rodgers: great. It's there's nothing like it. It's just, when things open up and it's like there's a crush of everybody. Coming in.

[00:02:16] Deepak Arora: Yes. I this morning I saw two kilometers long queue for the keynote and people were standing in middle of the casino to get into the keynote.

[00:02:24] It is interesting mix yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's funny. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:02:29] Chip Rodgers: Good. Deepak, maybe we could start just tell us a little bit about your role and what you and your team work on these days.

[00:02:36] Deepak Arora: Yeah. So before I focus on myself, so I want to spend a few minutes talking about who we are.

[00:02:41] We are Publicis Sapient. We are a products and consulting company focused on digital business transformation for our customers. In terms of our AWS partnership, we are the premier partner for AWS. We are both Gen AI and agentic AI accredited. We have around 15 [00:03:00] solutions on AWS marketplace, and majority of these are backed by AI and data.

[00:03:07] So that's what we do in my role as the global CTO for AWS solutions. So I think about what kind of solutions and products our customer are looking for in the digital business transformation space. I work with AWS team closely in designing and architecting those solutions, implementing those products on AWS stack.

[00:03:28] And then we take it jointly to the market.

[00:03:32] Chip Rodgers: That's really interesting role. I think there, there are so many capabilities that I, partnering is, it's going to market together, but it's also building solutions together, which I think is is really interesting and creating that the capabilities, the joint capabilities, talking about the sort of the better together story and all those things.

[00:03:49] In your role, how what, how do you think of those, you know that whole sort of life cycle of working with AWS in your case?

[00:03:55] Deepak Arora: Yeah. You briefly touched upon that. It starts with co-build side of the thing. So [00:04:00] what we do is we work with AWS solution, architects and leads, and think about what kind of technologies and solutions we need to take to our customers.

[00:04:10] And at times we take a horizontal angle to this, right? What are the solutions that apply to all industries and also industry angle to it. So we, from a co build perspective, we design our solutions together. We go through a vetting process which is the process followed by market followed by AWS for marketplace listing.

[00:04:30] And then we come up with a a solution that works best for our clients. At times it is a mix of open source technologies and AWS native technologies. We, from a PS perspective have our AI products that we have deployed on AWS. So we, based on those products, we create solution offerings that work for our customers.

[00:04:53] So there is a heavy part of co build and then there is a co-market side of the things [00:05:00] where we obviously marketplace as a tool to market our solutions. Like I mentioned, we have 15 solutions on the marketplace. Those are vetted by AWS experts in their respective areas. We do a lot of marketing, thought leadership, working with AWS technical and product teams technical point of views.

[00:05:21] We host webinars together around our offerings. And then market our solutions for our customers. And then obviously there is a co-sell part of this. And the co-sell, we take our industry led approach which is similar to how AWS is structured. I

[00:05:36] Chip Rodgers: was gonna say they've Yeah, they that then that's been a big shift over the last couple of years.

[00:05:41] Deepak Arora: Exactly. So AWS sales team at the industry level work with our industry sales team, and then jointly we take our solutions and product. For our to the market for our customers. We do industry spin planning with AWS very closely. The sales team, we look at our top customers [00:06:00] and the problems they are facing, we use that information and then feed into our product and solutions thinking as well.

[00:06:07] So I think it's the whole loop, right? So from co build to co-market and co-sell, and then learnings from that has fit into the build. Yeah,

[00:06:15] Chip Rodgers: I love that Deepak. Yeah. One of the things that we talked about a little bit earlier is that you're involved in your role in MENA, you're involved actually in delivery as well.

[00:06:25] So the, you have an engineering team that is, is helping to build and deliver solutions for customers. So you're also bringing that direct customer experience back into that sort of co build process.

[00:06:40] Deepak Arora: Exactly. So me and my team look at the entire cycle. So starting from pre-sales where we pitch our solutions and offerings to our customers, and then we end up mobilizing the team that is required for our success, for our customer.

[00:06:55] And then I, in my role, oversee the technical implementation. And [00:07:00] that's the most important part, I believe, because in that role, I get to learn what is working on production, what is actually creating the impact for our customers

[00:07:10] Chip Rodgers: On the ground. And like really it's gotta work

[00:07:14] Deepak Arora: Yeah. On the ground and then feed that back into the solution thinking.

[00:07:18] Because without that, your solutions can be very theoretical and that's obviously we tend to avoid.

[00:07:24] Chip Rodgers: Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. And those are solu again, going back to the, those are, those could be solutions that are. Very industry specific. Could be very industry specific use cases, or could be something that's horizontal or a mix of the two.

[00:07:39] Deepak Arora: Yeah, it's a mix of two. Our primary offerings are horizontal offerings. So we have a AI SDLC platform, we call it Slingshot that's designed and implemented to look at the entire software development lifecycle end to end. And we bring in efficiencies in circa of 50 to 60% in terms of time to market and in terms of [00:08:00] the productivity and efficiency across the software development life cycle.

[00:08:04] So starting from how people think about requirements and how they do business and tech design to the software development and then take it live and then sustain it on the production. So that's our primary platform and that's a horizontal platform. The other primary product we have is Bodhi, which is a enterprise agentic platform that facilitates agent creation on AWS.

[00:08:28] So we take into account business problems at the industry level, and then we take, we create agents, business agents specific to the industries leveraging our horizontal, Bothi platform. So it's a mix of both. The thinking that is done on our primary products. Slingshot and Bothi is more horizontal in in, in view.

[00:08:50] But the manifestation and the implementation is done at the industry level. So it's use case driven common problems, travel and hospitality or banking and [00:09:00] FS or retail is facing. So we tend to take a blend of both. We, in addition to having our horizontal products and platforms, we have few industry specific solutions as well.

[00:09:11] As an example we have a solution called Dealer GPT, which optimize the sales and the operations in for a automotive client in across their dealership network. So it's a mix of both, but primary orientation is horizontal products, which are Slingshot and Bothi based.

[00:09:31] Chip Rodgers: Are those solutions? It's interesting just 'cause over the evolution of technology companies and partnering and all that, that that there are some, you have the traditional categories of ISV, SI, MSP, all those.

[00:09:43] But what you're talking about is Publicis Sapient is clearly an SI, but you're creating products. And are those are those products that you are. Really productizing and selling to customers? Or do they, are they more sort of things, accelerators, if you will, [00:10:00] for that? You your pro services and engineering teams work on?

[00:10:04] Deepak Arora: Yeah. So our primary products, Slingshot and Bothi these are, we are transitioning from just a people based or consulting based organization to people plus product organization. So the. The product Slingshot and Bothi are commercial products and we are actively selling those to our customers.

[00:10:21] While in addition to that, we work with other ISVs like Salesforce and Adobe and implement software accelerators or solution accelerators on cloud that we can take it to the customers. So it's a mix of both. Bothi and Slingshot is transitioning us to become a product company, and we've been focusing on that for the last two years now.

[00:10:41] And while focusing on the traditional business of ISVs, bringing ISVs capability and take it live on AWS

[00:10:51] Chip Rodgers: So really interesting. And and it's something that's fairly new in the last couple of years.

[00:10:55] Deepak Arora: Yes. Yes it is. And we believe that given Publicis Sapient track record, we've been [00:11:00] doing digital business transformation for two decades.

[00:11:02] Yeah. So we know how to solve business problems at the digital level for our customers. And we've been creating software capabilities again to help our customers. So we took that knowledge knowhow of building digital solutions into our AI platforms that are again, designed and catered for digital business transformation.

[00:11:22] Chip Rodgers: I love that. Yeah. That's great. Again, as a CTO working with a AWS lot of announcements, today and a lot of new capabilities coming out. How do you think of sort of your own internal capabilities and then how you're going to apply AWS capabilities, either to internally or to customer solution?

[00:11:45] Deepak Arora: Yeah, and yeah, I think the, we work backwards from customer outcome, right? What is the good idea? Yeah, exactly. So what is the right thing to do for our customers and come up with a complimentary set of offerings. So I'll give you an example, right? So [00:12:00] AWS has a offering. Transform. And we have Slingshot and we've come up with a unique proposition where if a customer wants end-to-end modernization across the stack, across the AI stack, starting from the infrastructure to the compute, to the data and mod model layer and AI layer.

[00:12:18] So we have a proposition where Slingshot coexist with Transform, where Slingshot focuses on application modernization and we tap into AWS Transform for workload migration. So I think it, it's a, complimentary offerings. Our AI product Slingshot works with bedrock capability.

[00:12:36] It uses the other native capabilities from AWS as well. So it's in best interest for our customers. So we are not competing with AWS offerings in a way.

[00:12:47] Chip Rodgers: Interesting. So I'm curious Deepak some of the announcements. Today and yesterday were around marketplace as well. And one of one was these, multiple products to, to create a [00:13:00] whole solution that can be sold on marketplace, which a lot of times can include services.

[00:13:04] And they've also, AWS has created new services related pricing those kinds of outcome based or, delivery based and things like that. How are you thinking about marketplace for Publicis Sapient for packaging some of your services?

[00:13:19] Deepak Arora: Yeah, so yeah I've been following announcements and I think we've been using Marketplace for the last five to six years.

[00:13:25] I would say roughly speaking, and traditionally mo most of our solutions on marketplace were professional services plus solution accelerators bundling together. And I think we are seeing with these announcement, we are seeing that a transition into more product and activation play, where if I have a product that I want to sell it to our customers, it should be plug and play, right?

[00:13:50] Should be activated, bought, purchased, and provisioned from the marketplace. So I'm very excited about these changes, right? So the marketplace [00:14:00] positioning will become end to end and makes it easy for our customers, make it, makes it easy for AWS and makes it easy for ourselves as well.

[00:14:09] Chip Rodgers: And you can also take advantage of, all the marketplace, transactable, it's, the field gets quota comps and you draw down on pre-commit and things like that.

[00:14:20] Right,

[00:14:20] Deepak Arora: Exactly. This morning, it's interesting. This morning we had we had a meeting with AWS and where we were talking about, okay, how can we make a transition from. Just a professional service listing on the Marketplace to a point where if a customer is interesting in a SaaS offering of our products, it should be bought, provisioned and set up at a click of a button.

[00:14:45] And we need to think about not only the technology part of it, but also the enablement and the commercial side of the things to make this as a end-to-end tool. So it was a very useful discussion this morning with AWS.

[00:14:58] Chip Rodgers: Terrific. Deepak, [00:15:00] thank you. This has been fantastic. I really appreciate you taking some time and sharing your insights in your role at Publicis Sapient overlooking a lot of technology and working with a lot of customers.

[00:15:10] So I really appreciate it.

[00:15:12] Deepak Arora: Thank you for your time and thanks for the opportunity.

[00:15:15] Chip Rodgers: So thank you Deepak. Thank you all for joining. Again, another episode of Inside Partnering and. We will see you next time. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe. Thanks everybody. See you next time.

[00:15:27] Thank you.

[00:15:30]

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