Prashant Mahajan, CEO at Zeda.io: “While many leading companies have prioritised AI, they’ve done so out of a fear of being left behind”

You’re a product manager who has worked on hugely successful launches. Products that have become case studies at Harford and Yale. In 2020, as the pandemic hits, you find yourself out of a job. What do you do? Simple: lay the foundations for the next case study, this time by launching your own company. Which is precisely what Prashant Mahajan, CEO at Zeda.io, did.

We’re delighted to welcome Prashant to our series of interviews with customer experience leaders, CX Today because he is a man with much to say about one of this year’s hot topics. Mostly positive, but he has words of warning too.

“As great as it is, AI isn’t a magic fix,” he says. “One of the biggest challenges CX leaders will face in 2024 will be how to include AI in their strategy, as while many leading companies have prioritised AI, they’ve done so out of a fear of being left behind, and don’t have a clear vision of the ROI to expect.”

No one can accuse Prashant of failing to have a clear vision. For instance, he sees one obvious way that AI will be used in the coming year. “Coupled with natural language processing, AI will begin to derive meaningful insights from vast amounts of unstructured data like customer reviews, social media chatter and customer support tickets, surfacing issues that might otherwise be overlooked.”

In short, if you’re thinking of using AI in your business this year – whether for CX or marketing – then you need to read this interview.

Related reading: Omotenashi in digital customer engagement: openness and sincerity through first-party data

Could you please introduce yourself to our audience? What motivated you to pursue a career in customer experience, and how did you embark on your journey in this field?

My name is Prashant Mahajan and I’m a veteran product manager-turned-entrepreneur, and now the founder of Zeda.io. As a product manager focused on producing the best, most customer-centric products, I’ve worked across many countries globally, and during this journey, I’ve had the opportunity to build unique products and high-achieving product teams from scratch. Some of the products my teams built helped companies acquire more than 200 million customers and over 100 million dollars in revenue. A few of the products that I’ve worked on, including Paytm QR code and Tokopedia, were covered as case studies at Harvard and Google.

In 2020, I lost my job due to the pandemic. While I was courted by many multinationals as I considered new roles, I began Zeda.io as a side project. Zeda.io is an AI-powered product discovery and strategy software solution that helps product teams uncover problems that matter to customers, to build the best possible quality products to delight their customers.

I quickly realised how important the platform was for the future of product management and the evolution of customer experience, to formally launch the company, and to dedicate myself to it full-time.

What are your thoughts on the escalating integration of AI in customer experience and its potential influence on the future of customer service at large?

The biggest shift I’m seeing in customer experience is the infusion of AI in personalising the product experience, which is enabling companies to customise their products for different personas. Ultimately, this personalisation won’t just create faster onboarding, a more tailored experience, better support and improved customer satisfaction – it will create an entirely different customer journey based on each person and their specific use case. 

AI is also changing how people interact with products, making them more interactive. We’re already seeing this happen with interactive dashboard products like Google Analytics, which uses AI and machine learning to deliver to marketers reports with specific key insights that matter to them surrounding user behaviour, preferences and trends. We’re entering a future where AI will shape customer experience to move beyond just standard customer support, becoming an interface between customer and product. 

How do you ready yourself for an AI-driven landscape as a customer experience leader? What new skills do you need?

Customer experience leaders should work pragmatically to understand how AI can help them to strategically gather and analyse massive amounts of data to better understand consumer behaviour, market trends and company growth trajectories. AI is already a critical differentiator between those who can now make data-driven decisions based on real-time data instead of relying on their intuition, and it is now also commonplace to use AI-powered predictive modelling to analyse past data to predict future customer demands and behaviour.

Customer experience leaders can also use AI to emphasise and complement their human skills. Data analysis and predictive modelling can help them to learn and understand the true pain points of their users and customers inside out. This can help to segment customers based on their behavioural patterns and trends and to determine the preferences of users to improve products accordingly.

Related reading: Harnessing data to shape the brand experience in a post-cookie world

Do you anticipate any significant disruptions in customer experience technology for 2024? If so, what are those disruptions and why?

AI is going to help us understand the customer’s problem better. AI can assist customer experience managers in gaining a deeper understanding of customer needs and challenges, and sentiment analysis, a key AI feature, will begin to help decipher the emotion behind customer communications.

In general, AI will help CX leaders to understand exactly what customers are saying and how they actually feel. Coupled with natural language processing, AI will begin to derive meaningful insights from vast amounts of unstructured data like customer reviews, social media chatter and customer support tickets, surfacing issues that might otherwise be overlooked.

Could you share some of your most noteworthy accomplishments that you take particular pride in?

I’m extremely proud of my team, and for their efforts both in building an exceptional product, and for coming along on this journey as we navigate the exciting and sometimes intimidating startup journey.

Today we have around 25 employees, with teams in both India and the US. In 2021, we launched and raised a pre-seed round of $550K and had a valuation of $5.3 million. In 2022, we launched our product publicly, secured our first paid customer and raised a further $1.2 million. Following this, our most recent fundraising was $2.1 million, reflecting growing investor confidence in our platform. We’ve been steadily adding customers since then, and plan to hit profitability in the next year. 

What piece of advice would you offer to fellow customer experience professionals that has been particularly beneficial to you personally?

As great as it is, AI isn’t a magic fix. One of the biggest challenges CX leaders will face in 2024 will be how to include AI in their strategy, as while many leading companies have prioritised AI, they’ve done so out of a fear of being left behind, and don’t have a clear vision of the ROI to expect. Like any tool, it’s all about how we use AI.

What we expect to see in 2024 is companies rushing to do their due diligence with AI by investing in AI skills and talent, so that they’ve got the right people to utilise AI effectively from a CX point of view. 

Are there any startups in the customer experience industry that have piqued your interest lately?

Thena.ai is an interesting product. The company is enabling customer success on Slack and we have been using it and finding it valuable.