Freshworks Refresh 2025 | Jason Aloia, Freshworks & Ali Chitsaz, TaylorMade

Clips
More from Freshworks Refresh 2025

Jason Aloia

VP of Product Management, Freshservice

Freshworks

Ali Chitsaz

AI Implementation Leader

TaylorMade

play_circle_outline Introduction of guests Bob Laliberte, Jason Aloia, and Ali Chitsaz at Freshworks Refresh '25.

play_circle_outline Freshworks experiencing significant momentum and growth in the IT and FreshService domains.

play_circle_outline Ongoing partnership with Freshworks has improved collaboration and communication among global teams.

play_circle_outline Freddy AI rebranded as Caddy to streamline service requests and knowledge access for employees.

Info
Transcript

Jason Aloia, Freshworks & Ali Chitsaz, TaylorMade

Jason Aloia

VP of Product Management, Freshservice Freshworks

Ali Chitsaz

AI Implementation Leader TaylorMade

In this Refresh North America 2025 segment, theCUBE’s Bob Laliberte sits down with Jason Aloia, vice president of product management at Freshworks, and Ali Chitsaz, AI implementation leader at TaylorMade Golf Company, to unpack how Freshservice is helping “uncomplicate” IT service delivery and employee experience. Chitsaz shares TaylorMade’s seven-year transformation journey from legacy, on-prem ITSM to an agile, cloud-based platform that empowers lean teams to build workflows in real time, cut out heavy professional services and keep employees focused on wha... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What event is being covered, and who are the guests featured in the discussion? add

What factors contributed to the speaker's attraction to Freshworks? add

What are the benefits of using FreshServices for managing business processes across global teams? add

What innovations has TaylorMade implemented to enhance their services? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Jason Aloia, Freshworks & Ali Chitsaz, TaylorMade

search

Bob Laliberte

>> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Freshworks Refresh '25. We're here at Oracle Park in San Francisco. I'm Bob Laliberte and I am joined by Jason Aloia, who is the VP of product management at Freshworks, and Ali Chitsaz, the associate director of Global ITSM and Digital Workspace. And you're also on the AI Center of Excellence Board of Member at TaylorMade, but as you said, basically you're responsible for having great employee experiences.

Ali Chitsaz

>> Exactly.

Bob Laliberte

>> Awesome. Very good. So welcome, gentlemen. It's great to have you onto theCUBE. I know, Jason-

Jason Aloia

>> Thanks, Bob....

Bob Laliberte

>> you're a CUBE alumni, so you've been here before.

Jason Aloia

>> I've been here before. Yes.

Bob Laliberte

>> Welcome, Ali, for your first time-

Ali Chitsaz

>> Thank you....

Bob Laliberte

>> on here with us.

Ali Chitsaz

>> Great to be here.

Bob Laliberte

>> The one thing that's become clear, sitting here this morning, seeing all the energy and the buzz, people walking around, Freshworks has a lot of momentum going forward, a lot of growth happening. A lot of people I'm talking to have only been here for four months, five months as the company continues to grow. Can you tell the audience a little bit more about the momentum that you are seeing with IT and with FreshService?

Ali Chitsaz

>> Absolutely. So the momentum that Freshworks has generated recently is really what attracted me to the company. I've been here for a number of months, but previously to that, I've working in ITSM, ITOM space for many, many years. The momentum is very real. I think that we can attribute all that momentum to it being really just focused on helping our customers like TaylorMade help them grow and advance their practices. And so we've been really just following our customer's lead and that's been earning more of their trust and also attracting more customers to Freshworks.

Bob Laliberte

>> Excellent. Now that sounds great. Now, head of employee experience, what exactly does that mean at TaylorMade? And maybe you could tell us a little bit more about like your day-to-day responsibilities and your team and what you're focused on in trying to achieve for TaylorMade?

Ali Chitsaz

>> Yeah. And so employee experience for us is, we have customers that buy our products and then we have our employees. And so the entire employee experience is what I'm responsible for and what I like to say is the single throat to choke for the entire experience from your network experience from clients and all the way through and including ITSM tools.

Bob Laliberte

>> Okay. That sounds great. So why don't you tell us a little bit about TaylorMade's journey that they've had for their transformation journey, that is? And what did it really help uncomplicate, right? That's been the big theme here, is uncomplicate.

Ali Chitsaz

>> Sure.

Bob Laliberte

>> So what was it that you were looking to uncomplicate and how did Freshworks and FreshService accelerate that?

Ali Chitsaz

>> Well, what's funny is I think everyone's just coming on board to what we learned around seven years ago. We've been with Freshworks for quite some time now. And we went through an RFP right when I came on board to try to find a new ITSM tool. We have been around since 1979 and had some legacy systems and we wanted to find something that was more modern and ready for what we wanted to do. The timing was great because it was pre-pandemic and we went in and surprisingly came out of FreshService after a lengthy RFP process and learned about it during that time and then was quickly able to get it up and running and transfer from our on-premise legacy system that was not accessible, required VPN, and was very archaic to a very easy to deploy, easy to update system that once the pandemic came and we had to quickly move to being in the cloud in a way, we were ready to go because we had a cloud-based system that was already fully deployed and ready, whereas if we had our legacy system before, we would've been in bad shape.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. And that's a huge thing, that ability to transform quickly. And obviously having it in the cloud enabled you to do that. No lengthy deployments, just be able to turn it up and get going.

Ali Chitsaz

>> Yeah. And doing it in a way where I can have my app owners and business owners come into a room, and rather than give me a scope, do a literal workshop with me right there and get their workflows built out when they walk out of the room. So we could literally go from person to person and rather than taking in a huge scope and saying, "Oh, now I got to go work with professional services and work through all these things to get these things out," it's like, "No, I actually built out the workflows right with you. My team is right there, and as you walk out you're ready to go." So that was hugely impactful for us in getting us up and running.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. I would think so. Just that platform that enables that simplicity to be able to do things like that yourself without having to get professional services engaged, mapping out the processes, move quickly, deliver value quickly.

Ali Chitsaz

>> Yeah. And at our levels, right? I'm not a developer.

Bob Laliberte

>> Right.

Ali Chitsaz

>> And so I mean I can be somewhat dangerous. But to be able to be in a room and be with an app owner and the stakeholders and have conversations with them and quickly put that into a workflow that works for them on day one was hugely impactful for us. And once one or two services got on board and they saw the value, it was easy to get everyone else on board as well because they saw the value with it.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, that's great. That extensibility. Jason, I'm going to turn back to you.

Jason Aloia

>> Sure.

Bob Laliberte

>> Clearly sitting through the keynote this morning, that uncomplicated is a big theme here again, right, at Refresh. Are you seeing complexity as a major issue with all the customers that you're going to talk to today, especially as we move into this AI era, things are more distributed?

Jason Aloia

>> Absolutely. So I mean it's the nature of technology is that it grows in complexity and there's usually more and more point solutions that come into an ecosystem over time. So that is very much a theme that we see with a lot of our customers and really the value that Freshworks is really effective at delivering his customers like Ali and TaylorMade who had real-world challenges but needed enterprise-grade outcomes, but without the enterprise cost and complexity. And that's the way we like to think of it as delivering a fully enterprise-grade platform for IT, unified with all of the capabilities you would expect, but keeping that ethos of an uncomplicated quick time to value that doesn't require an army of consultants. You can get it up and running with yourself or your modest team.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. And apparently, it's working because it's been a customer for seven years now. And I was curious if you could walk us through, obviously, you said you've been around since 79, you're one of the most esteemed brands in golf, right? But because you've been there for a long time, that also means you probably got a lot of technical debt. So I'm wondering if you could maybe walk us through your tech stack and what were some of those big critical problems, the critical processes, that you needed to solve that you were doing with Freshworks?

Ali Chitsaz

>> That's a great question. I mean, we are very proprietary. Golf is a very unique business. How you build a golf ball or a golf club is very unique. And for us, it's, we want to focus our efforts on the things that are proprietary to us. And things that have been perfected out in the world like ITSM and other tools is this kind of build versus buy methodology, right? And so we are able to go out. And in finding something like Fresh, we're able to focus our energies on the things that actually matter to us and our customers. And then let teams like Freshworks worry on improving the ITSM experience and making it so every day, every year that we're getting new capabilities in there. And so things like approvals and going through these areas, things that were very shoulder-tappy in the past are now things that happen as part of the process, very easy to do and being able to create agility for our teams and having people focus on things that actually matter to us and focus on the game of golf rather than things like ITSM workflows, right? We would way rather working on how we make you a better golfer and making you a happier golfer rather than worrying about building out an ITSM tool.

Bob Laliberte

>> Got it. That makes a lot of sense. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your partnership with Freshworks, it hasn't gone back seven years now, and maybe illustrate some of the ways that it's enabled organization, your organization to collaborate better, to be able to maybe support the business better and your business units better.

Ali Chitsaz

>> Yeah, I mean what's great about FreshServices, and Freshworks as a company, is we haven't had to use professional services. We have a relationship with the company. And the tool is so easy to use that we can get guidance to be able to quickly get our visions out into the platform. And that's been hugely impactful. So when we have changes that are happening and being able to put that into a process right away and get that out and going is huge. And now with the addition of new business units and other things in FreshService, we're able to get way faster results and turnaround, especially with our global teams. So when someone asks for something far away, when you have good automations and good workflows in place, the time to turn around is way, way faster. And so things about not having to wait around time zones and things like that have been hugely impactful for the global team and keeping people aligned on what they should actually be working on.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. And I think it's great. It sounds like, and I've saw some of the demos this morning, that a lot of the software is very much intuitively obvious as to how to build, how to create, how to collaborate, which obviously, especially when you're dealing across multiple different countries and so forth, that really helps expedite the process.

Ali Chitsaz

>> For sure. And it's been great being such a great partner of theirs. So they take our feedback to heart. And we've seen a lot of the requests that we've made over the years quickly make it to the product. So that level of partnership has been great for us.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, that's always fantastic. Now it's hard to have any conversation today without talking about AI. And it just naturally comes up because that's what everyone's talking about.

Jason Aloia

>> I've heard of it.

Bob Laliberte

>> Have you heard of it, this new thing?

Jason Aloia

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Bob Laliberte

>> I don't know.

Jason Aloia

>> Artificial... Yeah.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, exactly. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your AI strategy and maybe how Freddy AI has helped TaylorMade change.

Ali Chitsaz

>> Yeah. So TaylorMade believes in innovation at its core. We always try to be the most innovative company in golf and have the highest-performing products. And because of that, we believe strongly in what's best out there. And AI obviously right now is something that every company is looking at and we're no different. When it comes to ITSM and Freddy AI, we have rebranded Freddy AI and our tool as Caddy. And so people can go to Caddy and ask whatever question they want and either get service requests and items or access to knowledge. And it helps deflect basic tier one questions from our service desk to an area and also keeps people from having to walk down to the service desk or try to jump in front of a line or these kind of things. It's been hugely impactful. And then our agents as well are able to utilize Freddy Copilot to be able to look at summaries and really helps on the language barrier between different areas and reach out. And so from someone at Korea asked a question to us over here, we can respond and do it quickly, knowing that they're going to get their response in natural language as well in their local language. So it's been super helpful and having us have streamlined good communications, good summaries, and really helps our agents get to the next ticket faster and keep tickets from reopening.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, that sounds fantastic. And it sounds like the best thing is they don't have to tip their Caddy when they're done using it.

Ali Chitsaz

>> They do in surveys.

Bob Laliberte

>> They do in surveys. There you go. Perfect. One of the other areas I want to touch upon, there's been a lot of news about AI and how it may be it's not delivering the value that a lot of organizations are expecting. And some of those are about these large language model and so forth, but around AI operations, it seems like it's delivering some real value and having some outcomes. At the keynotes this morning, there was a lot of talk about being able to accelerate that time to a return on your investment, being able to accelerate that impact that it's having. I'm wondering if you could talk about where, you just mentioned some in the prior response, but somewhere you've seen some of the biggest gains with your partnership with Freshworks and any outcomes you've seen as it relates to, again, some kind of response time, satisfaction, customer feedback, things of that nature?

Ali Chitsaz

>> Yeah, I mean, our goal... I'll be honest, for an incident to even happen or a request happen, there's a failure there. And so we want to make sure that technologies are as transparent as possible for you and just helps you work. And so FreshService has been really helpful in that, is to make it uncomplicated and make something easy to request. So if that failure does exist, which in itself is something that I'm working to get away from, we make that failure as short as possible. And so that way you can get back to doing your work. And so AI's been huge in that. And at TaylorMade, we have an AI council that I'm lucky to be a part of. And we review every AI case that comes in. And we try to find use cases that are valuable to us. We're not trying to boil the ocean, so we look out and say, "Hey, so password resets is a perfect use case or onboarding, offboarding." So we get very use case specific. And then with that we get very focused grounded data, which we all know is what's needed to make AI work. And then in that our experience is actually pretty good. So we try to make sure we're very focused. And FreshService has been really great with that is if we go with them with a focus goal, they help us get to the results.

Bob Laliberte

>> Awesome. That sounds great. What's next for the digital transformation journey for TaylorMade?

Ali Chitsaz

>> Every day is new for us. I think what's nice is that we have a leadership team that has empowered us to get the best tools. And so we've gotten great relationships with different AI partners, including Freshworks, and trying to find out how we can every day make ourselves more efficient. Our goal is to have our people work on the things that are most impactful to golf and utilize these AI tools in the commodity worlds where it can help us in areas that are getting perfected by people like FreshService. And so that way we can focus on the things that our customers want us to focus on, which is making their golf game better.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. I wish you could make my golf game better, but I don't think it's going to happen. I appreciate the effort, but my game is lost, but I'll try.

Ali Chitsaz

>> I would love the attempt, right?

Bob Laliberte

>> There you go.

Ali Chitsaz

>> At the end of the day, we want you to have fun out there. And I'm not the greatest golfer in the world.

Bob Laliberte

>> I always have fun.

Ali Chitsaz

>> Yeah. And so-

Bob Laliberte

>> I'm not very good, but I always have fun.

Ali Chitsaz

>> Yeah, for sure.

Bob Laliberte

>> All right.

Ali Chitsaz

>> Excellent.

Bob Laliberte

>> Jason, let's turn back to you as we're looking to wrap up.

Jason Aloia

>> Sure. Yeah.

Bob Laliberte

>> Long time relationship that you've had here with TaylorMade and Freshworks. What's your vision for helping them extend that exceptional employee experience that they're able to deliver?

Jason Aloia

>> Yeah, I mean really our vision for it is going to be a joint vision, right? So TaylorMade, Ali is on our customer advisory board. So we do have a vision for the future, but we're also continuously validating those assumptions with Ali and customers like them. And that's what the great partnership is and great fit, is that Ali and TaylorMade understand the strategic advantage of great employee experience. That's exactly where we want to be as a platform. And so by following the lead of our customers, that sets our roadmap and our vision. And we're just continuously collaborating and making sure we're building the stuff that Ali needs to be successful.

Bob Laliberte

>> Awesome. Well that sounds great. And listen, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you very much. Unfortunately, we're out of time now. So again, Ali, Jason, thank you. And thank all of you for watching this session. And stay tuned for continued coverage of Freshworks Refresh 2025 on theCUBE.