CxO of the Week: Mahi de Silva, CEO and co-founder, Amplify.ai

Mahi de Silva is one of the leading voices in the application of mobile technology and a Silicon Valley veteran with a strong track record for building businesses that have had $1B+ exits. He currently serves as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Amplify.ai.

Your top priority while making decisions to improve tech infra in your organisation?

As a company focused on delivering the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to enterprises around the world, everything we do is about scale, because every interaction we process today helps deliver a better interaction tomorrow.

Challenges you face in driving digital transformation?

The world is clearly embracing digital. At the turn of the millennium, a vast majority of 2-way interactions with a brand were between a consumer and a human representative of the company, without regard to it being in-person, via phone call or e-mail. Today, a majority of these interactions are digital, over the internet via the web, a mobile app, SMS or now services like WeChat or Whatsapp - created a massive self-service economy. But even in a digital world, many consumers still expect to interact with a human on the other side of digital interaction. This is largely influenced by poor quality machine-driven interactions like the phone IVR (interactive voice response) systems, that tried to service consumer’s needs with simple touch-tones or voice prompts and a very limited set of solutions. Today, we are capable of very sophisticated machine-driven interactions with the full power of the multi-media internet. We have to educate both enterprises and consumers that machine-driven interactions can be rewarding.

Do you feel that freshers in the industry come with only basic knowledge but don’t have the right skills to fulfil job requirements? If yes, your suggestion to students and colleges?

No, today, we find young candidates that are well educated, embrace the possibility of artificial intelligence and understand that we are at an early inflection point of fundamentally changing the world. Yes, they have to be willing to work hard, learn and adapt, because new breakthroughs happen every day. This revolution in AI is not dissimilar to the impact of low-cost computing on dramatically expanding the field of engineering.

What’s your mantra to become successful in life?

Iterate, Adapt and Iterate. Every journey starts with a step and it’s very rarely a straight line from point A to point B.

What would you like to give back to the society?

Help give more people access to education.

Your favourite book and what are you reading now?

"Nineteen Eight-Four" by George Orwell, because so much of what was deemed science fiction has come to be true. I’m currently reading "Social Physics" by Alex Pentland, a professor at MIT.

What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

Spending time with my Family and playing tennis

Achievements (Awards & Recognitions)

Author of seven U.S. patents in Image Processing, Object-Oriented Programming, Security, Electronic Payments, Advertising, Messaging and Artificial Intelligence.

Named number 12 on a list of the 29 most important people in mobile advertising by Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/most-important-people-in-mobile-advertising-2013-6

Experience

Mahi de Silva has a strong track record for building businesses that have had $1B+ exits. Prior to Amplify.ai, he served as Chairman of the Board of Directors at Noventis Inc. acquired in 2019 by WEX (NYSE) for $330M. Mr. de Silva was also a strategic advisor to Opera Software, ASA, acquired by Qihoo 360 in 2016. Formerly, he was the Chief Executive Officer of Opera Mediaworks Inc., the largest subsidiary of Opera Software. Mr. de Silva also served on the leadership team at VeriSign (VRSN) for ten years, from startup to successful IPO and leading the acquisition and integration of 21 companies during his tenure. Mr. de Silva started his career in Silicon valley with seven formative years at Apple.

First Job - Engineer at NCR Corporation.

Education - BSE, Computer Science