Meet Hiren Kotak, the CEO of Hyper-Botz, helping clients adopt intelligent business process automation, so their employees don’t have to work on repetitive manual tasks, which their digital assistants can do.
After completing his Computer Science and Electronics Engineering, Hiren started his career as an IT programmer. Within a few years, he was promoted to Technical Lead and Manager. He eventually found his true calling in his managerial responsibilities and completed his MBA, and started working on developing business strategies using statistics and data analytics. In this role, Hiren successfully managed a team of developers, architects, operations analysts, project managers, process engineers, and product managers, which helped him deliver business value worth millions of dollars through revenue growth, cost efficiency, and customer service improvements.
Nearly half a decade ago, Hiren decided to explore Robotic Process Automation (RPA), to help a commercial bank grow efficiently. RPA enables faster, low-cost, high-return, non-invasive, low-code no-code automation and offered his organization the much-needed ability to quickly automate tasks that were resistant to automation via the traditional technology for several reasons.
As an RPA Evangelist, Hiren decided to help others achieve their automation dreams and manage the technology effectively to realize their desired results. For that, initially, he joined some well-known global technology service providers. With his MBA training, strategic mindset, and business background, he contributed significantly to the overall business performance of these companies and their clients.
After building significant experience as an automation consultant in the professional services industry, he finally decided to create his own company to help companies of every shape and size reap all the benefits of RPA.
“Having worked on two sides of customer and vendor relationships, I witnessed some opportunities that prevent clients from fully utilizing the vendor capabilities and some challenges that prevent vendors from being effective partners for their clients. At Hyper-Botz, we fully align our goals to our clients’ goals to maximize our contribution to their success.” – states Hiren.
Increasing Productivity
Hyper-Botz’s primary mission is to boost global productivity using Intelligent Business Process Automation. Even after making such huge progress with digital technologies and computers, there’s still a lot of non-value-adding manual work in several sectors. Many of those administrative, tedious, repetitive, and transactional work is usually performed in business operations and horizontal services organizations like Finance and Accounting, HR, Procurement, IT, and Customer Service, which results in a loss of human intellect, productivity, and creativity. So, Hyper-Botz’s vision is to empower all humans to work like humans, not robots.
Using AI and RPA, Hyper-Botz enables its clients to attain greater speed, efficiency, and growth irrespective of their business domain.
“This type of automation, irrespective of your business processes and systems, can help you empower your employees, strengthen your customer relationships, and open new ways to innovate and expand your business.“- Says Hiren.
Hyper-Botz’s experienced practitioners partner with clients to maximize their automation potential and ROI. It helps its clients develop their automation strategy and roadmap, establish governance and operating model, identify automation opportunities, and develop, test, implement, and maintain bots. Under Hiren’s leadership, Hyper-Botz also provides Automation-as-a-Service to minimize upfront investment from its clients and eliminate their ongoing maintenance and support headaches.
Present Business Environment
“The current business environment is very interesting. During the Covid-19 shutdown, the US government pumped billions of dollars into the economy to keep it going. Once the vaccines became available, we became more comfortable living our normal lives,” Hiren explained, “as a result, business and consumer demand spiked. However, production and supply chains have not kept up with the resulting demand and inflation, leading to the Fed’s decision to raise interest rates again to contain the inflation. In the last couple of years, we have seen major swings up and down, and now most economists agree on one thing – economic uncertainty in the near term!”
For digital transformation and automation businesses, the situation is much more interesting. Thanks to the pandemic-induced shutdown, businesses worldwide realized the value and importance of automation and went for it, creating massive demands. However, with rising interest rates, inflation, and economic uncertainty, businesses are playing cautious with new investments and sometimes slowing some of their IT initiatives. Hyper-Botz has worked with several organizations to mitigate this issue in various ways. Thankfully as Business Process Automation requires very less upfront investment and provides huge ROI within the same quarter, Hyper-Botz hasn’t witnessed a major impact in this sector. Additionally, with its managed service offerings, Hyper-Botz eliminates any upfront capital expenditure and makes it easier for its customers to adopt intelligent automation throughout their companies.
Keeping the Team Motivated
Hiren believes in hiring talented people with good work ethics and can-do attitudes and then letting them do their jobs. His team members have the full autonomy to perform their jobs and deliver the output they are chosen to deliver.
Hiren encourages his team to take charge of their professional development and support them financially. He has also started a quarterly reward program to recognize their exceptional achievement, value delivery, and teamwork.
Tackling the Gender Pay Gap
Hiren believes there are two types of gender pay gaps; the first gap comes from women taking low-income jobs in low-income industries, government entities, and the service sector. While this could be a matter of choice as many women opt for stability, flexibility, or convenient hours for better work-life balance. These, in most cases, are personal choices without any external or negative pressure.
On the other hand, the second type of gap comes from women not being promoted or paid equally even after doing the same job as their male peers, which is a widespread problem that also affects people of color and needs immediate attention fixing. However, Hiren and his colleagues at Hyper-Botz encourage ‘women in technology’ during and after recruitment. With its diverse employees, Hyper-Botz has a strong culture of equality, transparency, and inclusiveness. It values the unique ideas, perspectives, and qualities women employees bring to the table.
Picture of the Future
At Hyper-Botz, Hiren and his team continue training their employees on the latest technological innovations and practical applications. He believes the world now needs its smartest people focused on solving problems like climate change, food and water issues, infrastructure and transportation hurdles, and growing health & safety concerns.
In the long run, Hiren would like his company to contribute to solving these global challenges.
He says, “We could simply use AI to maximize crop output, find efficient ways to generate, distribute, and store power, or explore optimal ways to utilize water and other natural resources. AI could help us be better prepared for containing the next pandemic or help us eliminate many fatal diseases. I think of this as – we all rent or lease a place in this world for a few years during our lifetime and it is our duty to leave it nice and clean, fully stocked, for the next set of tenants. My future goal is to help raise awareness and drive some of the restoration efforts in any way I can.“
