Raj K. Gopalakrishnan is the co-founder and CEO of KOGO Tech Labs, Bengaluru, which brings over three decades of expertise in innovation and leadership. His career began in advertising and live entertainment with Firefly Entertainment and expanded to include ventures like Blue Mango Films, Zeppelin Design, Yellout Tech Labs, and Dreamwood Estates.

Raj K. Gopalakrishnan and his team developed KOGO AI, which began as an AI-based travel expert platform. With the travel platform’s success, the company’s founders decided to create an AI operating system — KOGO OS. It is a human-like AI OS that can understand human intent and complete complex tasks with simple conversations. 

With over thirty years of experience, Raj has a proven track record of transforming start-ups into thriving corporate brands. 

INDIAai interviewed Raj K. Gopalakrishnan to get his perspective on AI.

As an MBA graduate, what motivates you to pursue AI? 

I studied computer science in school, which was a big deal back in the day. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, computer science was offered in very few places. And technology would be very transformative, like what we used to see at that time or the science fiction there. 

I am a nerd from a science fiction point of view. Whether it is Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Star Trek, or Star Wars, there shouldn't be a big deal about all of these futuristic technologies existing in our lifetime. And so, somewhere, inherently, I was always driven towards wanting to create technology that could change the world. 

What inspired you to start KOGO? What is the core mission that KOGO aims to achieve? 

Our stated goal today, which we have genuinely believed for the last two years, is that maybe we are the guys, who will usher in proper work-life balance. The world has been harping about this for over half a century. We are slaves to our work. We could usher in a three-day week; what you do with the rest of the four days is up to you. So, if we can make you earn double the amount of money in half the amount of time, spend the rest of the time with your family, pursue a hobby, learn how to knit, chop wood, or whatever you want. That's what AI can do, inspiring us to help people do more in less time and provide a work-life balance. That is our stated mission and goal. 

In what ways does KOGO's AI agent perform real-world tasks more effectively than existing ones, like other AI solutions?  

The problem is not what; the problem is how. How do you create faster and cheaper AI agents to make your life more accessible? What we've created is a base platform where anybody can come and develop agents much quicker and take them to market much faster, at a far lesser cost with no knowledge or expertise, with none of the pains of LLM operations, hallucinations, management, or model creation. So, we've taken all that out and made it simple for anybody to create an AI agent. That is what our product, or our platform, is. 

Regardless of scale or ability, we want to give everybody this superpower of AI agents. Hence, we want to create accessibility so that AI can be all-pervasive. 

What were some of the biggest challenges you have faced while developing KOGO OS, and how did you overcome them?  

The challenge is that the rate of change is very high right now. Our challenge was to understand and create this no-code, low-code interface, take in all of that production framework that somebody needed, and build it into the platform. How did we overcome it? Well, it was just trial and error, and perseverance. It helps that you are not a bootstrapped company.  

You need money to build a runway and an innovation lab. So, R&D was the only way to overcome the challenge of creating a great product.  

What advice would you give to other business leaders or entrepreneurs looking to leverage AI?  

Don't do it if you're not having fun because you'll do a lousy job. It's as simple as that. The day it stops being fun, you will start doing a terrible job. 

Many students and employees have other disciplinary backgrounds, such as no computer science or coding knowledge, but they wish to transfer their careers to technologies, especially artificial intelligence. So, what is your advice for them? 

But that's the beauty. As Jensen Hyung said, you don't need to know the code now. If you want to get into this field and have a non-AI-related multidisciplinary background, it's to your advantage because it's about solving business problems. You can get somebody to apply AI to it. If you have a logical mind and understand business problems and how they must be solved, that is your greatest asset. So, if you have no background in technology or AI, that's great.  

Come over to the dark side and join the side of technology because it will help. Because technologists traditionally need a multidisciplinary background to understand business problems,that's why many people who are successful in technology are not technologists but people who come from different disciplines; they know the business's issues.