AWS Financial Services Symposium | Frank Palermo

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Frank Palermo

Executive Vice President & Head of Technology

Virtusa

Virtusa Helio: Pioneering AI-driven transformation for intelligent enterprises

As artificial intelligence advances to become the new operating system for enterprises, Virtusa Helio emerges as a pivotal player in this transformation.Addressing the growing demand for end-to-end automation and efficiency, Virtusa Helio aims to pave the way for AI at scale, facilitating the creation of intelligent enterprises where real-time analytics and decision-making are seamlessly integrated, according to Frank Palermo (pictured), executive vice president and head of technology at Virtusa Corp.Virtusa’s Frank Palermo talks with theCUBE about the importance of Virtusa Helio in the AI field

play_circle_outline Virtusa's partnership with AWS and early adoption of cloud services

play_circle_outline Introduction of Helio, Virtusa's new offering in the AI market

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Frank Palermo | Virtusa

Frank Palermo

Executive Vice President & Head of Technology Virtusa

>> The AWS Financial Services Symposium, presented by theCUBE.

>> Good afternoon, nerd fam, and welcome back to our power-packed coverage here at AWS Financial Services Symposium. My name's Savannah Peterson here in New York City for theCUBE. Very excited for our next segment with my new friend, Frank. Frank, welcome to the stage.

Frank Palermo

>> Thank you, Samantha. How are you today?

Frank Palermo

>> I am awesome. I'm having a great day. And I love when I was doing my homework on you before you walked up today, you said that you are an energetic leader, and I can tell that that is very true.

Frank Palermo

>> Super. Super.

>> You've been at Virtusa for a long time or a little while at least.

Frank Palermo

>> Two years.

>> Yeah. So, tell us about the company, tell us about the evolution, and then we'll get into some of the products that you recently-

Frank Palermo

>> Sure, sure. Well, today, Virtusa is a global SI, really focused on engineering services. We're across the globe, 35,000 people operating in 50 different offices, so we have global reach. Financial services is one of our biggest sectors. We also work in healthcare, life sciences, telco, and some of the other industries. But I think what's really special is this engineering platform and capability that we built is really surrounded by a keen eye for design and end user experience, as well as a very deep domain understanding. So, we're really focused around the business problems and outcomes in these industries. And it seems very creative, I think, in how they think about these end-to-end solutions for our clients.

>> Oh, that's awesome. So, you seem like a great partner for AWS. How do you two pair together to help people with these transformations?

Frank Palermo

>> Yeah, it's interesting. We were one of the early adopters. I think one of the things we make is pretty smart bets around the future of where technology is. And as AWS was really launching their whole cloud services, we were one of the first really to partner with them and in the early days worked through some of the most complicated migrations for application and data payloads. And this was back in the days when there wasn't a lot of infrastructure and best practices. And so, we were, I would say, kind of a pioneering partner with them. And now, we've focused on creating a lot of centers of excellence and factories. So, these are basically just proven tools and methods to really help accelerate that journey from on-prem into the cloud. And I see an increasing focus on data payloads now and really as the foundational element of AI. So, it's been pretty exciting. It is our largest hyperscaler relationship, and we've been great partners and we're very proud of the work we've done with them.

>> Yeah, I can see why not surprising. You just brought up a buzzword, an acronym I haven't heard at all today, AI.

Frank Palermo

>> Oh, okay.

>> Kidding.

Frank Palermo

>> Are we an AI show?

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every show is an AI show now at this point for sure. You guys just announced a new offering, Helio, in April. Tell me about that.

Frank Palermo

>> Sure, sure. So, what's funny is the market, it feels like we've been at this AI market now for over 20 years, right? Everybody's claiming, "We have all these assets, all these experiences." I think we were very thoughtful coming out of the gate not to go in and make announcements and AI wash a bunch of the work we had done historically. So, we spent time, I would say, and 2023 was a year of learning and experimentation with our clients. I think we had over 300 conversations, did about 60 proof-of-concepts and ended up with about nine production use cases, so not bad. But I think what we learned during the processes is just a set of both internal processes we use, tools that we developed, best practices, kind of the front-end advisory, and we've put all of this in a package called Helio, which actually is short for the sun, which is kind of an interesting thing in terms of helping our clients see the light in the direction around where AI should be going. But we're still very much in the early innings of this. I think somebody today was speaking of the S-curve, and most people think because of this hype that we're in that middle of that and we're about to peak. And our belief is we're still very much at the bottom and we're just making that new leap to this new... So, there's a lot of opportunity ahead of us for sure, and what this market's going to bring. And I think Helio is an amazing framework to harness both, not just gen AI, but the powers of analytical AI and the full, what I would say what it takes to become an intelligent enterprise is really in the box there.

>> What is an intelligent enterprise? What does that mean? I like that phrase.

Frank Palermo

>> Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. So, I think, listen, there's been a lot of work, especially in FSI around automation, but I think the true orchestration of the complicated processes and the organizational functions, I think as you begin to traverse those and think about end-to-end efficiency and end-to-end automation, to me, that's when the enterprise becomes more autonomous and more productive. So, I think AI in the future really may become the new operating system for enterprises. So, all applications will now be built with AI built in as an infrastructure, in this operating infrastructure. I think there's work to be done with safeguards, controls, policies, governance and all of that, but that'll mature over time. But the intelligent enterprise in my mind is one that's really much more productive than it is today, much more real-time in its analytics and decision-making, and really, is thinking about their customers, kind of an end-to-end fashion.

>> Absolutely. I love it. I'm going to steal that phrase from you, I'll give you credit. I'll always give you credit, Frank, but I like it a lot. It's a good one. What are the steps, how do they get started on that journey? Because we've talked to a lot of people, and general consensus, and I suspect you're seeing this as well, companies are excited, they're also a little overwhelmed. There's a lot happening right now and it's moving faster than ever. So, how do you get them started on that track? I imagine there's a bit of handholding.

Frank Palermo

>> Yeah, it's interesting. I refer to a lot of experimentation that went on last year, and it's still going on. And I think this journey of what I call from education to research, proof-of-concept to production, I think one of the mistakes that was made is the proof-of-concepts were not necessarily governed by the real business context of these use cases. And what that means is they're taking a lot longer to go from pilot into a production environment. So, one of the things we look to do in our advisory service is to create what we call a business canvas and a business canvas is really a palette to really define what are the business outcomes we're looking? What is the technology, what is the data we need? What are all the process and compliance steps that are going to be needed to fully take this ideation to what we think about as realization of this idea? And that's not an easy process and being, "Well, this is not a flip of the switch." I think people are underestimating what that journey looks like. And there's still some industry things that have to be answered around how are models trained?

Frank Palermo

>> How do we know that they're fair? How do we know-

Frank Palermo

>> Hallucinations and all these things, I'm not biased and all of these things.

>> And what does that even mean? Yeah, I mean there's a lot of layers to that.

Frank Palermo

>> But yeah, we feel like we're in Helio, we're providing this both advisory component that helps people think about how to get to production, as well as the technology components about how do we build it? And then, on that journey from a worker productivity, how do we do it in the most efficient way possible?

>> I know you touch a couple different industries, not just financial services. Are any of the verticals you're interacting with adopting faster than the others? Is it everybody all kind of running towards what we were kind of considering as the start line really?

Frank Palermo

>> Yeah, in some ways it's like one of these neck-and-neck, like the photo finish at the Preakness or a horse race, but I think there's weight, so I think financial services tends to be out of the gate quick, but because they run into compliance and regulatory issues, it tends to be a slower machinery. So, investing in tech very early on, but then I think it takes a while to get out. I think some of the other industries, like I would say maybe media, possibly telecommunications are I think moving faster, less regulated. Healthcare runs into the same issues. But all industries now, I think the tide is raising for all industries, so they're all in the same phase where they've done fair amount of experimentation and they're starting to really define those use cases.

>> And those production use cases, you mentioned you had nine use cases that got to production.

Frank Palermo

>> Yeah.

>> Can you give us some samples from that?

Frank Palermo

>> So, a lot of shifting of applications. So, when you think about in a large investment bank that we work with, we took a lot of their data payloads that were stored in on-prem, about 44 Oracle databases, and they really wanted to now move that into an agile environment to enable AI. So, we used our data migration factory, which has a lot of proven templates to accelerate that movement. And then, also the backend process consists of how do you know everything moved correctly? The referential integrity. How do you know that the data quality matched up?

>> That trust is huge.

Frank Palermo

>> The trust, right? So, there's a lot of scripts we also put in there. But the end result was really a significant cost savings, but really, business agility right now and enabling the organization to kind of manipulate their data, train their own models very differently and really begin now to build those applications on top of this data asset that they've amassed.

>> Yeah, absolutely. These processes are not cheap and I can imagine companies want to see value immediately. What are some of the places in which you're seeing specific value creation from these programs implemented that you're helping them out with?

Frank Palermo

>> Sure, sure. In the second wave that I was referring to, I think things like customer experience has a lot of opportunity. We heard today just around this orchestration of adjacencies. So, I think Visa was talking about, "Hey, we're more than just a payments company. We now have the intelligence to think about your end-to-end experience. From if you're buying a sports ticket, how do you think about the transportation? How do you think about what do you want to buy at the event? How do you think about the event? And then, obviously how do you pay and procure the event?" But this end-to-end. If you're in the market for say a home loan, what about helping you with realtor services, home inspection services? If you're buying an auto, right? So, all of these got to end to end journeys that can now get orchestrated from within, I think is in this customer experience umbrella. I think from origination and lending, thinking differently about traditional underwriting rules to now, I mean gen AI is perfectly positioned to really look at a much wider document asset around individuals, and maybe that changes the way you think about your underwriting policies, which means maybe you're capturing some of that market that you're letting go to competition because of some historically-conservative rules around this. And then, operations in general. I think while RPA robotic process automation has been around a while in financial services, I think it was really doing basic remedial tasks in the back office. I don't think it was really orchestrating front, middle, and back office, and I think that's this intelligence around data and process can really get those productivity gains that we're looking for, right? Which enables the workers at organizations to go on and do higher-value tasks, which is this idea of powered by AI, not replaced by AI, right?

>> 100%. That's why I always say, "It's not going to take your job, it's just going to make it suck less. We're just not going to have to do all the little admin tasks or things that take up time." I think about even with our expense reports here on these trips, I'm always like, "There has got to be a better way."

Frank Palermo

>> There is certainly. We should start that company.

>> We absolutely should. You heard it here first, folks. No, I love that holistic health though of the customer experience is really what you're talking about.

Frank Palermo

>> That's right.

>> It's not just single touch point, it's particularly on the lending. You brought up an outstanding point there. I mean, I am an entrepreneurial background and a business owner, and I am not the type of person the bank wants to lend money to, ironically, when it comes to buying a house or doing something because I don't don't know what to-

Frank Palermo

>> Yeah, in a traditional profile, you don't make the cut.

>> Exactly. No, I don't make the cut and I've had some interesting conversations with the bank about it too, and none of them made me feel good. I can tell you those financial institutions do not still-

Frank Palermo

>> But yet, your risk profile is probably no worse than the average person.

>> 100%. Yeah.

Frank Palermo

>> That's what we want to unlock, is that deep intelligence about you that we can really now take advantage of, and that's market capture for many organizations.

>> It is cool and I hadn't really thought about that as one of the avenues in which AI is going to help democratize as we like to talk about a lot, almost to nauseam, but it's really going to democratize access to say capital for example. It's not just for tools itself. It's going to give that complete picture of someone's risk profile that's much more inclusive perhaps of a lot of other things and illustrates their consistency. Maybe I can buy a house some day after all as a result of this. All right, one last question for you, Frank. You're a fabulous guest and I suspect we'll have you on the show again.

Frank Palermo

>> Love to come.

>> So, let's say we're at this event a year from now. What do you hope to be able to say when we're back together then that you can't yet say today?

Frank Palermo

>> Yeah, I think it's just really scale of these production use cases and really seeing some more elements of that intelligent enterprise coming together, where you're starting to see very specific use cases now that are coming. I think there's still very much in this pilot and proof-of-concept. So, in a year from now, I think we'll just see a lot more outcomes around AI and the data, the assets that it's supporting.

>> And now, we're here for the outcomes. We're about making it real and you're one of the people doing it, Frank.

Frank Palermo

>> Let's do it. Thanks so much.

>> Thanks so much for being here with me. And thank all of you for tuning into our fantastic 15 segments here at AWS Financial Services Symposium in New York City. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.

Frank Palermo | Virtusa

>> The AWS Financial Services Symposium, presented by theCUBE.

Frank Palermo

>> Thank you, Samantha. How are you today?

Frank Palermo

>> I am awesome. I'm having a great day. And I love when I was doing my homework on you before you walked up today, you said that you are an energetic leader, and I can tell that that is very true.

Frank Palermo

>> Super. Super.

>> You've been at Virtusa for a long time or a little while at least.

Frank Palermo

>> Two years.

>> Yeah. So, tell us about the company, tell us about the evolution, and then we'll get into some of the products that you recently-

Frank Palermo

>> Oh, that's awesome. So, you seem like a great partner for AWS. How do you two pair together to help people with these transformations?

Frank Palermo

>> Yeah, I can see why not surprising. You just brought up a buzzword, an acronym I haven't heard at all today, AI.

Frank Palermo

>> Oh, okay.

>> Kidding.

Frank Palermo

>> Are we an AI show?

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every show is an AI show now at this point for sure. You guys just announced a new offering, Helio, in April. Tell me about that.

Frank Palermo

>> What is an intelligent enterprise? What does that mean? I like that phrase.

Frank Palermo

>> How do we know that they're fair? How do we know-

Frank Palermo

>> Hallucinations and all these things, I'm not biased and all of these things.

>> And what does that even mean? Yeah, I mean there's a lot of layers to that.

Frank Palermo

>> And those production use cases, you mentioned you had nine use cases that got to production.

Frank Palermo

>> Yeah.

>> Can you give us some samples from that?

Frank Palermo

>> That trust is huge.

Frank Palermo

>> There is certainly. We should start that company.

>> We absolutely should. You heard it here first, folks. No, I love that holistic health though of the customer experience is really what you're talking about.

Frank Palermo

>> That's right.

Frank Palermo

>> Yeah, in a traditional profile, you don't make the cut.

Frank Palermo

>> But yet, your risk profile is probably no worse than the average person.

>> 100%. Yeah.

Frank Palermo

>> That's what we want to unlock, is that deep intelligence about you that we can really now take advantage of, and that's market capture for many organizations.

Frank Palermo

>> Love to come.

>> So, let's say we're at this event a year from now. What do you hope to be able to say when we're back together then that you can't yet say today?

Frank Palermo

>> And now, we're here for the outcomes. We're about making it real and you're one of the people doing it, Frank.

Frank Palermo

>> Let's do it. Thanks so much.