Analytics, automation startups gain as firms look to cut costs due to covid hit

In the past four years, about 90% of enterprises have experienced a turn that upset normal operations, and organisations with a higher adoption rate of contemporary technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) will have a competitive advantage, a Gartner report has said. Despite analytics including AI being part of "discretionary spend", there has been an increase in demand for such solutions during the current downturn. "This was not the case during the recession of 2008-09," said Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder and group chief executive, Fractal Analytics. "AI is still discretionary but most of our clients in the last three months have come up to us and said that though it is discretionary, it is mission critical. It is super important to us and we are actually going to expand," said Velamakanni.