Why Responsible AI is a Top Priority for Freshworks?

In an exclusive interaction with Express Computer, Shelton Rego, Vice President – India Business, and Sreedhar Gade, Vice President – Engineering & Responsible AI at Freshworks, outline how India plays a pivotal role in the company’s global AI and SaaS strategy. As the company deepens its roots in India, the leaders delve into the rise of agentic frameworks, the need for responsible AI, and their laser focus on simplifying enterprise software for both SMBs and large organisations. With high-profile use cases like Zepto and a leading fintech player in India, Freshworks is helping India scale intuitive, intelligent support solutions while maintaining ethical data practices.

You have been at the forefront of delivering intuitive, modern SaaS solutions for businesses globally. How would you describe your current vision and priorities in India, especially as digital transformation and AI adoption accelerate across sectors?

Shelton Rego: If you look at India as a market, it’s very strategic for us for a couple of reasons. We have a rich history here, a large number of employees, and significant access to talent. There’s a similar moment happening in India now, an inflection point in internet adoption, after which all the good stuff happens. We expect massive AI adoption in India over the next 5 to 10 years. We’re already seeing early signs across industries. We’re confident that we are building for the right market, and India is going to be important for us.

More importantly, the talent base in India is unmatched. I read recently that most of the GitHub repository nodes are contributed by developers from India. So you not only have scale, but also a highly engaged developer ecosystem. We believe this combination will be a key advantage, and we are very confident about our foray into the Indian market.

Sreedhar Gade: AI has levelled the playing field. Whether it’s ServiceNow, Salesforce, or Atlassian, despite their scale, we are now at par. In fact, we believe we have started ahead in some ways, particularly in terms of feature innovation and safety. We’ve built native agents that will offer capabilities superior to many others in the market. India, with its early adopter mindset, will be one of the first ecosystems to embrace this transformation. And Freshworks is ready for it.

With the evolving digital economy in India, how do you think it is adding to Freshworks’ growth story?

Shelton Rego: Growth happens in different pockets. There are early adopters and late adopters, fast movers and stragglers. If we look at the Indian industry overall, certain sectors are growing much faster than others.

Digital natives such as ride-hailing, e-commerce, edtech, OTT platforms, and media are cloud-native by design. Their adoption curve is far steeper compared to traditional industries like manufacturing, supply chain, or banking. That said, we do see consistent growth across all sectors. We are in a unique position because our technology can be used by virtually any company with employees or customers—and all companies have either or both.

We’re particularly seeing growth from non-regulated sectors. In traditional banking, regulation can slow innovation, but the ecosystem is opening up gradually. Government support for AI and initiatives like Sarvam AI are encouraging. Innovation is always a few steps ahead of regulation, and that’s the natural dynamic.

Sreedhar Gade: I’ve been closely watching the startup ecosystem in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad. In the past six months, there have been 400–500 startups in the AI/ML space alone. That indicates a solid market. We’re seeing activity across defence, space tech, and even traditional sectors like agriculture and education, not just digital natives. It’s becoming a truly pan-sectoral movement.

Could you share how Indian enterprises are leveraging Freshworks’ solutions to simplify operations and enhance customer engagement?

Shelton Rego: Absolutely. One relevant example from the customer experience (CX) space is a leading fintech player in India. They’ve been a fantastic partner and a real innovator. They began using Freshworks a while ago and adopted our tech very quickly. Their key challenge was handling the enormous volume of support tickets, about 100,000 daily, due to UPI transactions, payment issues, or service gaps.

With that scale, hiring agents alone wasn’t viable. We solved this with Freddy, our AI platform. It enabled first-level ticket deflection using generative AI. They moved from 20% to 30%, then 40%, and today they deflect over 90% of tickets. So now, out of 100,000 tickets, only 10,000 reach a human agent. That’s a powerful, real-world use case of GenAI.

Sreedhar Gade: India has always been strong in support use cases. Much of the tech economy here started with back-office operations like BPOs and customer care for global companies. Today, with the rise of quick commerce platforms like Zepto and Rapido, the bar for customer support has skyrocketed.

These are Fresh-first customers delivering in five or ten minutes. That speed demands instant, AI-powered customer support. If your support platform is slow, you’ve already missed the SLA. We’re enabling that real-time responsiveness through AI.

Shelton Rego: On the employee experience side, we’re also seeing strong adoption. In IT organisations, ticket allocation is a major pain point. Our platform, specifically GenAI, handles that heavy lifting. Before the agent even touches the ticket, they have contextual data on past queries, similar issues, and solutions. GenAI, even suggests summaries and potential responses, making life easier for agents.

And it goes further, we can identify frequent queries and convert them into knowledge base articles, thereby deflecting future tickets. That’s the lifecycle transformation we’re enabling in ITSM.

You are known for delivering enterprise-grade simplicity. How are you tailoring your offerings for Indian businesses—especially SMBs and mid-market enterprises—while addressing the needs of large enterprises?

Sreedhar Gade: From an engineering standpoint, we’ve built our products to be turnkey, install and go. In contrast, platforms like ServiceNow require months of implementation and training. Our ease of deployment made us popular with thousands of SME customers.

Initially, this simplicity was mistaken by large enterprises as a lack of depth. But once we started engaging with them, they realised we offer enterprise-grade robustness wrapped in simplicity. That’s our edge, we’ve built from the ground up to be both simple and scalable. Today, we are competing head-on with the best in the industry.

AI is moving from pilot projects to delivering real business outcomes. How are you enabling this shift with its AI-assisted solutions?

Shelton Rego: The transformation is already underway. As shared earlier, our work with a leading fintech player in India is a stellar example. Similarly, we’re powering agent experiences in IT departments, automating workflows and contextualising responses through AI. This brings speed and intelligence to customer support and employee workflows.

Sreedhar Gade: Our AI understands not just the ticket but its history, the number of similar tickets, how they were resolved, and summarises all that for the agent. It’s not just identification, it’s real-time learning and guidance.

Most importantly, we recently launched the next generation of Freddy Agentic AI Platform at our flagship Refresh event– a connected, intelligent, continuously learning system of AI agents that don’t just reply to service questions, but can resolve them. Whether it’s processing an insurance claim, updating a payroll record, or booking a new shipment, Freddy AI now takes action across the applications businesses already use.

This is something that is model-neutral and cloud-neutral. It gives us the flexibility to innovate while still leveraging hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google. These agents will soon execute complex actions, make decisions, and resolve problems with minimal human intervention.

With AI adoption rising, concerns around security and responsible AI are also gaining traction. How is Freshworks ensuring ethical AI deployment and safeguarding customer data while continuing to innovate?

Sreedhar Gade: Responsible AI is a top priority for us. Rather than attempting to build every element in isolation, we collaborate with hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. These companies have enormous stakes in ensuring compliance and safety, and this makes them reliable partners as we innovate.

We’ve created a multi-faceted framework that centres around five key pillars. The first is safety, which addresses issues such as bias, hallucination, and harmful content in AI systems. Second is privacy—safeguarding customer data and ensuring it is not used to train public models. The third is traceability; each AI-generated response must be traceable, with clear indications of its origin. The fourth is access control, where we employ role-based mechanisms to ensure that only authorised personnel within Freshworks can access sensitive data. Finally, encryption and auditability ensure that all interactions are securely logged and verifiable.

Importantly, these pillars are not static. We refine them continuously—on a weekly basis in fact. Interestingly, when we present this framework externally, even much larger organisations have expressed interest in adopting aspects of our approach. It shows that innovation in responsible AI is possible even at scale, and we’re proud to be leading that charge.

Any specific tech priorities or focus areas to conclude with for this year?

Shelton Rego: The next few quarters will be about refining our agentic platform. AI needs to be controlled, predictable, and compliant. We’re working hard to build a platform that meets these criteria and still remains highly action oriented.

Sreedhar Gade: The future lies in agent-based architecture. We’re not relying solely on out-of-the-box solutions from others. Our framework is cloud-neutral and model-neutral, allowing us to innovate on our own terms. Soon you’ll see autonomous agents executing workflows and resolving complex business problems independently.