Madhup Mishra Of SmartBear On the Future of Artificial Intelligence

An Interview With David Leichner

Self-driving technology: The first thing that excites me about this technology is the “self-driving” potential of technology. Be it self-driving cars that revolutionize our transportation system or self-driving software programming systems that will help power the next wave of software development efforts, there is so much more that this technology has to offer.

As a part of our series about the future of Artificial Intelligence, I had the pleasure of interviewing Madhup Mishra.

Madhup Mishra is Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at SmartBear, a leading provider of software development and visibility tools. At SmartBear, Madhup leads a team that drives the product and solutions GTM, including messaging, positioning, product launches, and sales enablement. He deeply understands SmartBear’s core developer and development team audience and can strategically communicate the impact of its products throughout the software development lifecycle. With over two decades of technology experience at companies like Hitachi Vantara, Volt Active Data, HPE SimpliVity, Dell, and Dell-EMC, Madhup has held a variety of roles in product management, sales engineering, and product marketing. He has a passion for how artificial intelligence is changing the world.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you share with us the ‘backstory” of how you decided to pursue this career path in AI?

With two degrees in computer science, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has always fascinated me right from academia. But, the true promise of it has been elusive up until now. During my time at a prior company called SimpliVity, I decided to implement our very first AI model a decade ago. We were a small startup shipping mission-critical hardware appliance for IT data centers. The use case was born out of the necessity to predict failures of computer hard drives in IT server appliances running in wind-farms, cruise ships, armored vehicles, and more. If that system went down, the results would be catastrophic. The cost of sending someone out in the middle of nowhere was prohibitive. So, we ended up creating predictive and prescriptive AI models that predicted hardware failures up to two days before they actually failed. The results were millions of dollars saved through continuous application upsite and avoiding last minute service costs.

AI has evolved to where it is becoming part of everyone’s job. There is an interesting quote, “AI is not coming for your job; the people who know AI are coming for your job.” There are many discussions going on about the upsides and downsides of AI. Ultimately, AI is a tool that can be harnessed for productivity and efficiency, but individuals who possess the knowledge and skills to work with AI are the ones who will shape the future.

What lessons can others learn from your story?

The biggest lesson I want to offer organizations is this. We always start with the technology in mind and try to find its application second. It’s like starting with the hammer first and looking for nails. We need to flip our thinking. Start with the business outcomes you are looking to achieve. You want to reduce failures in your operations. How can AI help with that? You do not have the budget for new marketing nurture campaigns. How can AI help with that? Starting with the outcome helps you to find targeted use cases and gets to quicker return on investment (ROI) on AI projects. As you expand uses of AI within your organization, you would need to worry about setting up a governance policy and program that sets up the right do’s and don’ts for scaling AI use across your company. Lastly, start with projects where AI can replace future headcount and tools rather than eliminating existing jobs in your environment.

Can you tell our readers about the most interesting projects you are working on now?

I’m happy to highlight a few of the interesting projects we are engaged in right now. We are instituting an automated content lifecycle program at SmartBear that leverages gen-AI to update older content. In any product marketing organization, the focus is always to build new content all the time. We often ignore what we produced last year or the year before. While the team is focused on new content, I am looking to offload hundreds of older articles and blogs to be updated using generative AI. The content owners always have the action to accept or reject the copy written by AI. We are always looking to keep our web content current and focused on what our audiences truly need and care to read.

Another interesting use case is around automating meeting minutes for calls within the company. SmartBear is a hybrid work environment where there are many Zoom calls and where a substantial number of discussions occur. With the latest remote-meeting software like Zoom and Microsoft teams offering transaction services, we are using generative AI software to automate the meeting minutes for record keeping and pull summaries for those who did not attend the call.

SmartBear operates in highly crowded markets where competitors are always releasing software and constantly updating positioning, pricing, and public facing content. Manually keeping up with all the changes is not possible. Generative AI can also open doors to do live competitive analysis for us by keeping track of all the competitive changes across dozens of competitors across all the products we offer.

On the product side, SmartBear offers comprehensive solutions that give software development teams visibility and actionable insights across the software development lifecycle to accelerate delivery with confidence, making each release better than the last. Earlier this year, we released VisualTest, an AI-powered automated regression testing tool that allows developers to easily catch visual defects and quickly confirm their website looks as designed. SmartBear is incorporating AI into its software development tools wherever it makes sense, including automating repetitive tasks, optimizing code, and ultimately streamlining the software development process, leading to more efficient and robust software solutions.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

This has been a long time in the making. Through my academic days, I have followed the research on AI Neural Networks that was pioneered by Dr. Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto along with Yann LeCun, a professor at New York University, and Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal. This research has been ongoing for over 50 years around modeling around the human minds as a network of neurons that created the modern day AI. The three professors, Doctors Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio won the Alan Turing Award for their contributions to AI in 2019.

What are the 5 things that most excite you about the AI industry? Why?

Even with everything that’s happening on this front, the potential of AI is still untapped to a large extent. Five things that excite me the most around the AI industry are:

1. Self-driving technology: The first thing that excites me about this technology is the “self-driving” potential of technology. Be it self-driving cars that revolutionize our transportation system or self-driving software programming systems that will help power the next wave of software development efforts, there is so much more that this technology has to offer.
2. Automate boring tasks: AI has this capability of automating stuff that humans are not good at. Whether it is tagging lots of data for analytical purposes or automating manual quality tests, some tasks we humans were never good at. Being able to automate the boring stuff is super exciting in terms of possibilities.
3. Creative content creation: The idea of a system that can create content (audio, video, text, and images) from scratch is a very exciting use of AI for creative purposes. I don’t claim that AI can replace the most authentic creative content writers amongst us. However, it certainly can automate the 80% of derived content that doesn’t need to be fundamentally creative.
4. Massive ROI: As adopting AI-powered tools increases, businesses will see huge efficiencies through time saved, reduced expenses, and improved revenue generation leading to big return on investments (ROI) on their AI initiatives that will further fuel its growth.
5. Digital customer experience: AI poses a huge opportunity to improve customer experience. Be it leveraging AI in products to learn customer behavior, AI assistants that help you operate tools easier, or chatbots to improve your customer service experience, users and customers will see a dramatic improvement in their digital experiences. This will help them become more efficient in tasks they have struggled with in the past. Or, get their questions answered in seconds instead of hours.

What are the 5 things that concern you about the AI industry? Why?

With all the existing conversations around AI, there are quite a few things to watch out for as well:

1. Copyright issues: With content created by generative AI that is trained on third party content created by someone else, who truly owns the copyright? How different is this AI-generated content from someone else’s contribution that it learned from? There are many copyright and legal issues that need to be sorted out before this becomes mainstream.
2. Ethics: Since AI software is built by humans, it’s quite common for those human biases to bleed into algorithmic bias. We often hear AI-driven facial recognition software getting in hot water because of this.
3. Privacy: AI feeds off data and learns from whatever data you throw at it. With everything becoming more AI centric, companies (and even governments) will likely store increasing amounts of data about people to be able to predict things about them for monetary and government purposes. This is a slippery slope and can come in the way of individual privacy that people are being asked to part ways with.
4. Talent shortage: The biggest Achilles’ heel of AI for the next decade is the lack of talent to take advantage of what AI has to offer. Whether it’s the AI programmers, prompt engineers, or governance teams within our organizations, this makes an existing staffing shortage in this field worse. There would not be enough high quality talent to be able to build and deliver everything we’d want this technology to do over the next decade. This would be the single most friction point in the adoption of AI in the industry.
5. Hardware costs: There is a huge barrier to entry for large language models (LLMs) where the computational power it takes to do a single crank through model training effort is exorbitantly expensive. This will likely come down as cloud costs for expensive computing technology, such as GPU powered servers, comes down. But that will take a while. Till such time, generative AI will not be current in terms of its recommendations. While not massive, it does provide a barrier to adoption if AI is not up-to-date on what’s currently going on in the world.

As you know, there is an ongoing debate between prominent scientists, (personified as a debate between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg,) about whether advanced AI poses an existential danger to humanity. What is your position about this?

All breakthrough innovations come with their own risks. AI is a technology that fundamentally makes human lives much better and does things for us that would otherwise be impossible. While it is important to remain vigilant and address potential AI risks, it’s equally important to acknowledge that the downsides of AI can be mitigated through awareness in society, regulatory governance, and oversight at the government level, and responsible software development. The path to ensuring that AI benefits, rather than harms, humanity involves ongoing efforts in research, regulation, and ethical practices.

What can be done to prevent such concerns from materializing? And what can be done to assure the public that there is nothing to be concerned about?

Much can be done in terms of safe and proper use of AI in our society:

Ethical and legal frameworks: As AI evolves, legal and ethical frameworks need to be developed to ensure responsible AI development and usage, reducing the risk of misuse or unintended consequences.

Research in AI safety: There is a growing field of research dedicated to AI safety. Experts are actively working on developing methods to make AI systems more reliable, transparent, and less prone to harmful behaviors.

Public awareness: A growing public awareness of the potential risks associated with AI is leading to greater scrutiny and accountability. This helps ensure that AI development is carried out with caution and a focus on mitigating risks.

International collaboration: Governments, organizations, and experts are increasingly collaborating on AI policy and regulation, which can help ensure responsible AI development on a global scale.

As you know, there are not that many women in your industry. Can you advise what is needed to engage more women into the AI industry?

A lot of it stems from educational and outreach programs. Much more needs to happen to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education for girls and women from an early age, including AI concepts. Encourage participation in coding clubs, robotics competitions, and science fairs. Create mentorship programs where women in AI can serve as role models. Recognize and reward the achievements through scholarships and awards for women in AI.

What is your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story of how that had relevance to your own life?

I get reminded of this Steve Jobs’s quote as I think about AI. “Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity — not a threat.” This is true for day-to-day ideas we come across in our professional and personal lives. I fundamentally believe in being curious, naively optimistic, and looking to opportunities to innovate in regular things. I try to create a safe space within my organization and enable teams to look for ways to improve things even if we have done it hundreds of times before. This makes all our jobs fun and allows us to learn while becoming bigger, better, and faster with each step.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share a story?

I volunteer for a non-profit organization called Sewa USA, helping with a youth leadership program called LEAD (Leadership Development through Community Engagement). Through this program, I work with local high schoolers on community activities such as local trail cleanups, working in food pantries, and helping in local homeless shelters. Very recently, we started rolling out a pilot project for these local kids to remotely mentor under-privileged kids in rural India on STEM topics. We are partnering with a few schools in India with the curriculum, including providing tablet computers for the remote sessions. My 13-year old son is a participant in the program and is helping me with the details of the program. This would be a wonderful way for us to help those who do not have the same resources and cultivate interest in science and technology and help reduce the global staffing shortage in our field.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I would initiate a global sustainability movement focusing on climate action and sustainable development. The movement would aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, preserve ecosystems, and promote sustainable practices. Education and awareness efforts would empower individuals, while AI-driven innovation and technology deployment drive sustainable solutions. Collaboration, policy advocacy, and resource efficiency would be prioritized. Local community engagement, resource efficiency, and sustainable lifestyles would encourage positive change. The goal would be to create a sustainable world that meets current needs without compromising future generations’ ability to do the same, benefiting billions of people and safeguarding the planet.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

The best way to follow me is through my LinkedIn Profile. https://www.linkedin.com/in/madhupmishra.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

About The Interviewer: David Leichner is a veteran of the Israeli high-tech industry with significant experience in the areas of cyber and security, enterprise software and communications. At Cybellum, a leading provider of Product Security Lifecycle Management, David is responsible for creating and executing the marketing strategy and managing the global marketing team that forms the foundation for Cybellum’s product and market penetration. Prior to Cybellum, David was CMO at SQream and VP Sales and Marketing at endpoint protection vendor, Cynet. David is the Chairman of the Friends of Israel and Member of the Board of Trustees of the Jerusalem Technology College. He holds a BA in Information Systems Management and an MBA in International Business from the City University of New York.