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2019/06/28 | Time to read: 3 min
Dr. Prasad Akella, founder and chairman of the Drishti board, is creating his third massive market category that uses technology to extend human capabilities. In the 1990s, Prasad led the General Motors team that built the world’s first collaborative robots (“cobots,” projected to be a $12B market by 2025). In the early 2000s, as cofounder of the social networking pioneer Spoke, he envisioned and helped build the first massive social graph — a category now worth trillions. Today, at Drishti, he is working to combine the cognition of AI with the flexibility of humans in factories in the form of AI-powered production. Prasad is based in Mountain View, California.
Drishti was recently named a May 2019 “Cool Vendor” in Manufacturing Operations by Gartner. We believe it’s a great recognition, and a testament to the hard work we’re doing to bring human tasks into the factory analytics equation for the first time in history. You can read more about the recognition here.
Gartner Cool Vendor reports include “interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services.” Gartner finds that “manufacturing operations leaders responsible for strategy and performance” should “enable better decisions, not just better processes.”* Further, Gartner states that it’s “definition of a Cool Vendor is a small company offering a technology or service that is: Innovative — Enables users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful — Has or will have a business impact — not just technology for its own sake; [and] Intriguing — Has caught Gartner’s interest during the past six months.”**
We’ll take that definition of “Cool Vendors.” But as I reflect on what makes Drishti unique, and what makes us stand out when it comes to reports of this nature, there’s something more: Drishti provides companies with a solution, not a technology.
Let me explain.
The ubiquitous red squiggly line and other examples
Imagine you’re writing an email to your boss. Or an important business partner. Or your mother. It’s pretty likely that at some point in the communication, you will make a spelling error. Before spell check existed, you would have needed to reread very, very carefully to make sure you didn’t send an embarrassing error. Today, the system puts a red line below the misspelled world, a little tickler to you saying “Check the spelling before you send this.” The system works with you, doing all of the tough work on the backend to suggest to you, the user, how you might improve your work.
The same principle applies with navigation systems, such as Waze. I’m absent-minded and can zone out when I’m driving. If I miss a turn, Waze gently corrects me and tells me where to go. My wife doesn’t need to know that I took seven extra turns to get two blocks, because Waze runs its incredibly complex operations in the background to provide me with a solution that makes my life easier.
Spell check could require you to manually compare your document to its lists. Waze could pump out a whole lot of data about the neighborhood that you’d have to decipher.
Drishti is built on the same idea: We could provide spreadsheets of data that you would need an in-house data scientist to help you read and analyze. That would be a valuable tool for your line. But we took that idea a step further, and we provide a solution. We give you insights. We provide analysis. And that helps everyone from the line operator to the executive office quickly and easily make better decisions.
But – and this is critical – it’s not enough to have the insights. For example, spell check can point out that I made a mistake, but that insight is only valuable if I correct the error. And the same is true for Drishti: Customers have to build workflows to turn the insights we provide into action.
Solving a manufacturing problem that has existed for more than a century is really hard. It requires technology, solutions and workflow adjustments. What I think is really cool is that Drishti is helping our customers with all three.
Drishti is hiring for several roles. Check our Careers page to see if Drishti is a good fit for you.
*Gartner, Cool Vendors in Manufacturing Operations, Rick Franzosa et al., 7 May 2019
**Gartner, Cool Vendors — Action, Not Just Reaction, Is Key to Coolness: A Gartner Trend Insight Report, Daryl Plummer et al., 30 May 2019
Required disclaimer: The GARTNER COOL VENDOR badge is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
