Freshworks claims to take a people-first approach to AI and product innovation. In an exclusive interaction with Rajneesh De of CXO Media and APAC Media, Sreedhar Gade, VP, Engineering, Freshworks, elucidates their strategy balancing global scale with the India advantage. Shelton Rego, VP, India Business, Freshworks, highlights their AI-powered enterprise-grade solutions, coming at half the total cost and deployable in a fraction of the time.
How is AI disrupting the traditional SaaS business and how enterprises draw their agentic roadmap today?
SaaS in its current form is evolving to its next major phase. With AI, especially generative and agentic models, we are seeing software that does not just support workflows but actively participates in them. This means products will become more conversational, predictive, and autonomous.
For tech leaders, the focus is shifting to building an agentic roadmap, where AI agents handle routine tasks, surface insights, and collaborate across systems. It is not disruption for the sake of it, but a natural progression of SaaS towards building an uncomplicated experience through the power of AI.
What are the use cases of solutions like Freshdesk, Freshchat, Freshsales, Freshservice and Freshmarket in the Indian market?
At Freshworks, we build uncomplicated service software that delivers exceptional customer and employee experiences. Our enterprise-grade solutions are easy to implement, use, and configure, so enterprises can focus on delivering exceptional service. In India, our customer experience products (Freshdesk, Freshdesk Omni, Freshchat, Freshsales, and Freshmarketer) are very popular with businesses striving to deliver world-class customer experiences at scale.
Freshservice, with its enterprise-grade ITSM and ITAM capabilities, is winning because companies are fed up with overpriced and overcomplicated legacy software from the likes of ServiceNow. Our AI-powered solutions deliver enterprise-grade capabilities at half the total cost and deploy in a fraction of the time.
How does Freshworks build AI features responsibly?
Freddy AI filters harmful content, protects personal data, enforces access controls, ensures AI transparency, and encrypts data end-to-end. It’s how we make AI not just powerful, but trustworthy.
What are the dynamics of Freshworks’ different partnerships with T-Hub, Google, AWS or ScyllaDB?
Our partnership with Google and AWS ensures seamless cloud performance, security, and AI integration across our products. We are cloud technology agnostic and prefer working with the vendor that solves a particular problem for us.
With ScyllaDB, we optimise data infrastructure for high-performance and low-latency workloads, which helps us deliver real-time customer experiences. With the likes of T-Hub and SaaSBoomi, we’re engaging India’s startup ecosystem, mentoring engineers and supporting early-stage startups.
How is Freshworks looking to balance its global success with the Indian advantage?
We are proud to be a global SaaS company with deep Indian roots. Our strategy balances global scale with the India advantage by leveraging the country’s exceptional tech talent and innovation-driven mindset. A vast majority of our product and engineering teams are based in India across Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad, where nearly all our products and code are built. This gives us a unique edge over global peers who only have a fraction of their development teams in India.
India is not just our innovation hub; it is also a key market for us, especially in the customer experience space, where we support businesses with large and complex user bases. By taking a people-first approach to AI and product innovation, we are enabling over 72,000 companies worldwide to empower their employees to be more effective and make organisations more efficient.
