Every successful organization has a story of the values, the people, and the vision that shaped it. Today, we step into the story of a company that has quietly powered the world's biggest industries in insurance, banking, healthcare, retail using the force of data, analytics, and AI. Exl with one small team, and a big ambition to help businesses make decisions powered by intelligence, not instinct. 26 years later, that ambition has scaled into a global force. 63,000 employees, six continents, and hundreds of Fortune clients. Today, EXL is listed on the NASDAQ with a market cap of over $6 billion. Today, we step inside this engine of intelligence with a man leading its evolution. Rohit Kapoor, chairman and CEO of EXL. This is Beyond the Boardroom with EXL powered by Amazon Web Services.
Hi Karishma. How are you?
So nice to meet you and thank you for having me here today.
Thank you for joining me.
Yes, I'm very excited for our chat and to see the office, to see everything that you've been building.
Wonderful. Welcome to Delhi and we're looking forward to spending some time with you.
Yes, absolutely. So I'm going to ask you something that I was when I was deep diving and doing a lot of research on you that didn't come up. I'm going to ask you a little bit about your time before IIT Delhi. How was your childhood? What were you like? What did you want to become? The age-old question, what do you want to be when you grow up? Tell me a little bit about that.
So my childhood was a very pleasant growing up experience. I actually studied in a boarding school. I went to Doon School. Out there I was exposed to the academic side but also a lot of extracurricular activities and I really got to experience life pretty much at its fullest. The school allowed you to pick up things which you are passionate about and really become good at those things. One of the things which I enjoyed the most was to play squash. I started to play squash, pretty much self-taught, and then just became very good at it. Ultimately when I graduated from school and from college, I became the junior national squash champion. So that was really great and fun.
How amazing. So what would you answer if somebody asked you, what do you want to become when you grow up?
At that point of time I think I was very confused because the natural pathway was you sit for the joint entrance exam for getting into IIT, and once you get into IIT your future was made. I did precisely that. I studied very hard to get into IIT. I got in there. I remember the very first class that I took at IIT, I was wondering what am I doing here, because what was being taught, and I studied mechanical engineering, I just could not relate to it emotionally, intellectually, and I felt I was not making a productive use of my time. So four years at IIT were a complete party time for me. I was just basically having fun. I did not want to attend too many classes. The goal was just to graduate somehow and then move on to the next chapter. I made a pivot out there where I went into an MBA program. I went to IIM Ahmedabad and that I really loved. I loved learning about business, about finance, about marketing, HR. Those things interested me a lot more than engineering. I enjoyed that. Once I graduated from there, I was ready for the corporate world.
Wow. And you started out in 1999 and it's scaled tremendously. You've seen the entire movie right from starting up to listing on NASDAQ to just last year I believe that EY awarded you the Entrepreneur of the Year. Congratulations. What would you say this journey has been about truly? You've seen the movie so for those watching and they're wondering how can I possibly do that, how can I scale, how can I list, how can I be the pinnacle of success? What would you say to them?
I would say that EXL's journey has been a journey of evolution. If you take a look at 1999 when we first started the company, that was the height of the dotcom boom days and a number of dotcom startups were being created just like a number of AI startups are being created today. We felt that what we wanted to do is provide services to these companies and help them become successful. We started out with that initial promise but very quickly realized that in order to help these companies we actually need to invest a lot more in understanding their business, the domain, the process and workflow. So we started to move in that direction and we made a pivot. We then realized that it's no longer good enough to just be handling the operation of our clients and helping them run their business better. You really need to apply some intelligence into it. So we gravitated towards analytics and started to learn about analytics and started to really force the use of analytics into the workflow and in operations. In hindsight today it feels like a very simple thing. Why would you not have intelligence in an operation? But actually the skill set of people who were running data analytics were data scientists and people running operations were people who were just focused on managing the process with high service levels and consistency of service delivery quality. Putting these two teams together was a big cultural nightmare and a big mindset shift that you had to create. So we made that pivot. We then made a pivot into data because we felt data would be very important and the insights that you can draw from data are going to be far more valuable than just using pure analytical models. Then finally when AI came along we were ready for it and we jumped onto the AI bandwagon and made that pivot very quickly so that we can help our clients embed AI into the workflow. The whole journey of the last 26 years has been a journey of constant pivots and constant evolution and I think that's probably the most important element for why we've been so successful. Why don't you show me some of your favorite spots or some memory that you have attached to a particular space?
Sure. Come, let's go take a look at the office and we'll show you our creativity lounge, which I think is wonderful because it's a space that we've created that encourages people to come up with new ideas and new ways of doing things.
Awesome. We'll go check it out.
So this is our creativity lounge. This is basically an open space that we've created out here. You could go and sit on the bar, you could go and sit on the couch or whatever. And then what we've done is put up some of these very interesting frames out here. This is about the history of film over the last 100 years and the different genres as to which one was most popular at which time and then how this evolved and how the social needs for some of these genres evolved. Whether it was drama or family time, and today of course there should be a lot more on animation to be here.
Absolutely. This is so interesting. When you take a time frame which is over a hundred years, that sparks thinking in your mind because then you can think, I'm not trying to create something just for tomorrow or for the next month, I'm going to build something that's going to be everlasting. These kinds of things might sound like they're just pretty paintings or posters on a wall, but actually they will spark some thought or insight within an individual.
Yeah. Like you're creating a legacy. You're not here on a tactical front. You're contributing to something much larger than yourself.
So are we in the funnest part of the office now, which is food and recreation?
Yeah. What more do you want? Have great food, watch some television, play carrom or play pool, and get the competitive juices going.
I'm assuming people hang out here a lot.
Yes. I'm surprised that this table is empty right now.
Maybe we had something to do with it. But tell me, obviously you're handling so many high-stake things that fall into multiple categories. How do you as an entrepreneur, as a founder, truly decompress?
Decompress. I try and bucket things into different segments. I have to deal with the board, that's in one category; deal with clients, that's a different category; our colleagues and employees in a different category; investors in a different category. You have to be able to relate to the segment that you are talking to. Putting on that hat and switching seamlessly is an important thing to do and it comes by practice. I've been CEO since 2008, so I've been doing this for 17 years. It comes a little bit easier to me now than it used to before.
Okay. What is one GenAI trend that you foresee in the upcoming 5 years?
I think today if you think about GenAI, most of the models are being trained using the transformer technology or the transformer model. I think that's going to change completely.
What's easier to crack, people or an algorithm?
Oh, an algorithm any day. People is very difficult to crack. You might think you've cracked people but things can change very quickly. An algorithm at least you know what you're dealing with and what it can do and what it won't do.
I've spent almost half my living life in Delhi and half of it in New York. I've got to say at this stage New York is my favorite city.
Okay. What about food? What's your favorite cuisine?
For me, sushi is definitely a favorite cuisine. It's healthy, it's very tasty, and it's now available in pretty much any city and any country.
Okay. If you had to describe EXL in one word, what would it be?
