Transcript
A (0:02)
Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, we're exploring AI employees and the future of work with Surajit Chatterjee, former product leader at Coinbase and Google and now founder of Emma. He joins Mike Mace to explore how AI employees are changing everything from day to day workflows to how entire companies are structured. If you're curious about what it really means to build with AI at the center, and this one's for you. Enjoy the show.
B (0:32)
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
A (0:51)
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, principal content marketing manager at UserTesting, and joining us today as host is Mike Mace, an executive business strategist at Usertesting. He's a longtime tech industry veteran and one of the areas he works on at UserTesting is helping companies build effective AI products. Welcome, Mike.
C (1:14)
Hey, everybody.
A (1:15)
And our guest today is Surajit Chatterjee. Surajit is the founder and CEO of Emma. Previously, he guided Coinbase through a successful IPO as its Chief Product Officer and scaled Google Mobile ads and Google Shopping into multi billion dollar businesses as the VP and head of product. He also holds 40 US patents. Welcome to the show, Surajit.
D (1:40)
Thank you, Nathan. And hey Mike.
C (1:43)
Hey. And thank you, Nathan. So Surajit, this is cool. I've been looking forward to talking with you. You've got this really cool background. You've led product and strategy and at big tech companies, you know, Google, Coinbase, Flipkart, and now you're building out. Emma, take a minute to take us through your journey. And how did you get inspired to start a company that's creating a universal AI employee?
D (2:12)
Cool. Awesome. Love that question. Look, my journey started as a computer scientist. I studied computer science, bachelor's masters, was an engineer for a number of years. I wrote a lot of software, actually early part of my career, then went to Google and built products, built mobile advertising products that happened to make like more than half of Google's revenue today. Google Shopping, again, very, very large, multi $10 billion product. And then Coinbase where I built product and also was responsible for revenue and so on. Through my journey, two things kind of stand out. Stood out really? First, how quickly technology kind of moved and how much we could do with tech and particularly AI. We used AI in everything at Google, even at Coinbase. And of course now with generative AI, we are seeing a whole New set of possibilities. Number two, in spite of all the advancement in tech and everything, the average employee still spends more than half of their time in mundane work, quote unquote, kind of soul crushing work. If you ask an engineer, if you ask anybody in any role, a finance person, HR or sales, they're like, okay, I love the part where I'm talking to customers and selling, but then I have to fill out all these forms and update all these documents and do all this other stuff that I wish was just done automatically. I wish there was more help. And that's the premise or hypothesis of our company, that in the future we'll have human employees and AI employees working together. And lot of this heavy lifting, a lot of this stuff that takes time but can be delegated, will be delegated to AI employees. And that was the genesis of thinking, what if we could build a universal AI employee that could take any kind of form or any avatar, not in the sense of a visual avatar, but any form in the, in the enterprise, any function, and can perform roles of not just one human, like multiple humans, and take, take a lot of that mundane work, soul crushing work away.
