- Sri Ambati moderated a fireside chat between H2O AI and Bill.com covering AI adoption, engineering teams, and SMB recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- A Salesforce Research report cited in the chat surveyed more than 2,300 small and medium business owners about the pandemic's impact on their operations.
- Bill.com's Vinay Pai said his team chose H2O Driverless AI after an internal bake-off against a competing tool, then trained early adopters alongside engineers.
- Manasa Murthy said adopting H2O Driverless AI cut Bill.com's model building time from months to days and let the team expand into new use cases.
- Prakruthi Narasimha said Bill.com's AI functionality captures about 90 percent of the important information from an uploaded bill, reducing manual data entry to verification.
The current global pandemic crisis presents various challenges to businesses in all industries, including financial services institutions, who are monitoring and dealing with the effects of COVID-19 across the world. At a time of a pandemic, it is important that teams get together to share their insights and experience, with the goal of inspiring and helping to contain and mitigate the negative impact.
With this in mind, H2O.ai hosted a virtual fireside chat with Bill.com , where business leaders from both companies discussed the latest in AI, key factors to building and recruiting an AI-first engineering team, the impact of COVID-19 for SMBs, and the lessons learned from the pandemic in the finance industry.
Check out the key takeaways from Sri Ambati’s conversation with Vinay Pai, SVP of Engineering at Bill.com , Manasa Murthy, VP of Engineering at Bill.com , and Prakruthi Narasimha, Senior Accountant at H2O.ai, on how to thrive during challenging times and the role of AI in shaping the future for the best.
1. The State of SMB
Sri Ambati kicked off the fireside chat by offering a deeper look into the state of Small and Medium Business (SMB) with data gathered from a Salesforce Research report that analyzed the responses of more than 2,300 small and medium business (SMB) owners and leaders around the world to determine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the role of digital transformation in terms of enhancing business resiliency, and how SMB leaders are planning for recovery and growth post-pandemic.
According to the report , the world of SMBs radically changed in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With a significant reduction in revenue, most SMB leaders say they are struggling to keep their businesses afloat, and businesses that the consumed-focused and micro-businesses were the most affected. Also, besides the challenge of getting access to capital and cash-flow, SMBs are seeing a reduced customer demand, supply chain disruptions, and challenges with public health mandates.