Cofounder, o9 Solutions

o9 Solutions, CEO & Co-Founder, Chakri Gottemukkala, "How did o9 do it?"

🎥 Mar 22, 2021 📺 o9SolutionsInc ⏱ 3m

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About Chakri Gottemukkala

Chakri Gottemukkala, co-founder and CEO of o9 Solutions, delivered the opening keynote at the company's aim10x digital event in April 2025, where he discussed the role of artificial intelligence in enterprise management. He stated that at the 2025 World Economic Forum in Davos, "AI was in the air" and that CEOs were "very clear that it's going to have a major and transformative impact on every process and function of their businesses." Gottemukkala argued that "dysfunctional and process silos" cause decisions to be "too slow, suboptimal, and poorly synchronized" and that AI-powered platforms can address this by ingesting digitized knowledge. He predicted that "enterprises of the future will compete against each other based on the quality of the digital knowledge models driving their processes" and urged executives to "prioritize AI powered transformation of your management systems." In a 2021 interview, Gottemukkala discussed o9 Solutions' growth, noting that the company had "acquired clients like Walmart, GE, Google, Starbucks, Nike and Estée Lauder." He attributed the company's success to the "pedigree of the o9 team" — whose founders had previously worked at a supply chain software firm in the 1990s and 2000s — and to the platform's differentiation from competitors such as JDA, Oracle, and SAP. He stated that o9 was founded with the mission of "creating huge value for enterprises by building next-generation planning software that aligns demand and supply in real time, drives down inventories, reduces waste and makes organizations much better utilizers of the Earth's resources."

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Chakri Gottemukkala's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (3 segments)

Chakri Gottemukkala0:11

Great ride. We were acquired clients like Walmart, GE, Google, Starbucks, Nike, Estee Lauder, all global companies with a lot of experience in supply chain management. The fact that they have selected us is a great testament to the o9 platform and our people. And also recently been recognized by Gartner in their Sales and Operations Planning Magic Quadrant as a leader, and not just as a leader but as the most visionary among the leaders. And that's a great testament to the company, the team, and the platform they're putting out in the market.

How do we do it? That's an interesting question. I keep getting asked that. A company that in the 90s and 2000s really pioneered a lot of innovations in the supply chain planning space and delivered billions of dollars of audited value to global Fortune 1000 companies. And as a result of that, we are already a known entity to the market. Number two, the differentiation of the o9 platform. When we really started o9, we didn't set the bar as the competition from traditional enterprise software providers like JDA, Oracle, and SAP. One of the key challenges we find in enterprise planning software is, for example, user adoption. A lot of value is lost because systems are not adopted and people keep reverting back to spreadsheets. So we said, how do we solve the problem of user adoption? For example, what are people used to today? Systems like Uber that are doing real-time demand-supply matching and providing me proactive visibility into when a car is going to arrive. The large clients are seeing the differentiation. They're really seeing the o9 platform as the future-ready platform that they can build their next-generation planning and operations capabilities for the digital age, for the next ten years to come.

We saw a huge opportunity in the market. Global corporations are really the largest consumers of the earth's resources, and we saw that as globalization has started, as the Internet age economy has developed, the ability for these corporations to forecast demand, align demand and supply, really synchronize the entire supply chain, creates huge value for enterprises by creating a next-generation planning software that aligns demand and supply in real time, drives down inventories, drives down waste, and makes the organizations much better utilizers of the earth's resources. And that's really gratifying for Sanjeev and me, and that's the reason we founded o9.