Rocketlane CEO Srikrishnan Ganesan on agentic AI and the rise of Intelligent Delivery Organizations.
Welcome to Business Insight Journal, Srikrishnan. We’re delighted to have you. To begin, could you share a bit about your professional journey and what inspired you to co-found Rocketlane?
Rocketlane is my second startup with the same co-founders. We previously built a B2B messaging product (2012 to 2015) and got acquired by Freshworks. We spent 4 and a half years building the business within Freshworks, which is a special company from India – the first SaaS company from India to list on the NASDAQ. We learnt a lot about building a B2B tech business on this journey. We also witnessed the problems an implementation and professional services team had firsthand – the hero-driven culture, anxiety for customers and internal teams on meeting launch dates, repeated delays and escalations, etc. This inspired us to start Rocketlane after we spoke to 60-70 more businesses to validate our thoughts about the space.
Agentic AI is being hailed as one of the most transformative innovations of 2025. In your view, how does this new wave of AI differ from traditional generative AI, and what unique value does it bring to professional services teams?
The first wave of genAI was more about content creation in different forms and providing answers to questions. This year, we’ve had great progress in reasoning and design patterns that are helping with explainability, accuracy, and agentic actions – including computer use or browser use models. All of this comes together in ways that make it possible to entirely replace human labor in some kinds of work tasks or use cases.
For professional services teams, we can think of how the actual services delivery work can be done agentically, along with the project management and communication work. For example, for a team that does tech implementations, the documentation, configuration, and testing can all have agents doing the heavy lifting and humans overseeing/guiding the efforts.
Many organizations are still unsure how to integrate AI into their operations due to concerns about data accuracy, security, and governance. How can companies overcome these challenges to responsibly implement agentic AI?
There are many new design patterns for AI implementations – like the separation of planning and execution, or thinking through actions for different confidence levels, etc., that help in being careful about data accuracy and governance. Security and access are legitimate concerns, and there are new products emerging to solve these problems.
You’ve spoken about businesses evolving into Intelligent Delivery Organizations. Can you explain what this concept means and how it redefines efficiency and performance in the professional services space?
Professional Services, by definition, means services offered and delivered by professionals. It also means that in a new era of AI agents, the old name of PS no longer makes sense. If humans are working alongside AI agents to deliver the outcomes the customers want, it is services delivered by professionals AND AI agents.
The way we think about it, every team needs to start thinking about how they will evolve their services to make it less about humans delivering and more about using automation and AI, to get customers to outcomes faster, and with huge efficiency gains. When your delivery team operates smarter, faster, and radically efficient, the org becomes an “intelligent delivery organization”.
The shift from user-driven to autonomous AI has significant implications for workflow management. How can agentic AI transform decision-making processes, project tracking, and customer interactions?
Our view is that human consultants will have a team of AI agents working alongside them, giving them superpowers:
- AI will propose the solutions/decisions.
- Draft the content – emails, decks, documents needed.
- Do the assigned activities (building solutions, configuring tools, creating assets, testing, analysis, data transformations, or whatever the services work involves).
- Follow up with internal or external parties/customers as needed to align on decisions or approvals.
- Keep project documentation, plans, etc., automatically up to date, including capturing project health
In this new future, humans are delegating work to AI and collaboratively delivering on their services for customers. Workflow software will be built accounting for work being assigned to agents, and agents operating the software as well.
An “Intelligent Delivery Organization” model embraces AI, agility, and automation, creating an adaptive, data-driven ecosystem. The key lies in a more intentional focus on where teams spend their time and which activities can be automated or augmented with AI, particularly through human-in-the-loop approaches.
As AI begins to handle more micro-tasks in project management and resource allocation, how do you ensure that human oversight remains integral to maintaining alignment with business goals and client outcomes?
AI will inform, seek permissions as needed through the process of actioning on tasks. The confidence levels and criticality will determine the mode of operation. There is always the human in the loop to guide and oversee AI.
Rocketlane’s platform has been at the forefront of integrating AI into service delivery. Could you share some of the most impactful results you’ve seen from businesses adopting these intelligent automation capabilities?
Great documentation is foundational for AI to do more magic in the future. We have managed to automate documentation, email writing, meeting notes, and a lot of content drafting that serves as a great starting point for services teams on the journey towards more automation. We have been able to save consultants over 8 hours per week in some cases, which typically goes into busy work after meetings and document drafting, thus saving thousands of hours each week for large teams.
As a founder and tech leader, what personal strategy or mindset has helped you balance rapid innovation with responsible AI development and implementation?
My approach has been to focus on evolving our ambition on a regular basis to grow our vision for what we do for our customers, and take measured steps in terms of innovation we roll out to customers. We always pilot these new capabilities with a limited set of customers before we decide how to take them to our entire user base.
What advice would you offer to business and technology leaders who want to adopt agentic AI but are unsure where to start—or fear disrupting existing workflows?
This is the time to disrupt and make radical shifts. Find the right vendor for solving problems in your space, and bring them in to work hand-in-hand and solve problems with agentic AI. No solution is fully built, but it makes sense to partner with forward-thinking vendors and enable them to succeed in your environment. Aim to be their best case study :).
Finally, Srikrishnan, as AI continues to reshape the professional services industry, what are your final thoughts on the future of Intelligent Delivery Organizations and how they will define the next era of business growth?
This is a big shift that every services industry leader needs to pay attention to. If you aren’t working on evolving into an Intelligent Delivery Organization, your competitor is. This means you will compete with teams that will deliver on work/projects faster, at a lower cost, at a higher quality, thus making themselves much more attractive as a proposition to customers. It is the era of Services-Led-Growth, and how you optimize your services will make you the hero or villain of your company’s growth story. All eyes on the professional services leaders!
Srikrishnan Ganesan
Co-founder and CEO of Rocketlane
Srikrishnan Ganesan is the Co-founder and CEO of Rocketlane, a purpose-built PSA and client onboarding platform that helps businesses deliver predictable outcomes, accelerate time-to-value, and improve team utilization and project profitability. Sri has a strong passion for customer experience (CX) and startups. His professional journey includes founding and scaling SaaS businesses over the last decade. Prior to Rocketlane, he co-founded Konotor, a mobile-first user engagement platform that was acquired by Freshworks in 2015. This acquisition turned out to be a significant growth vector for Freshworks, with the product evolving into what is now known as Freshchat. For a comprehensive understanding of Rocketlane’s offerings and impact, please visit their website https://rocketlane.com/.
