Every firm, regardless of industry, is on its way to becoming an AI company: Tredence’s Sumit Mehra

AI and analytics firm Tredence launched Milky Way, a group of AI agents bundled together to cater to enterprise needs. According to the San Jose-headquartered firm, it uses autonomous AI agents that can work like digital co-workers. They can analyse information, solve problems, and suggest actions across different areas of business without waiting for continuous supervision. 

In an interview with TechCircle, following closely with the launch of the platform, Sumit Mehra, the chief technology officer at Tredence, said that the aim is to position Milky Way as a ‘constellation’ of multi-functional agents that serve industry-specific applications, particularly in supply chain and customer marketing solutions. 

“Within this framework, some agents play a foundational role, called anchor or director agents. They provide oversight and guide the system. Others are functional agents that handle specific tasks, interpret requests, and relay outcomes back to the anchor agents, which then determine the final course of action. This constellation creates a powerful, coordinated system rather than a monolithic, one-size-fits-all agent,” Mehra explained. 

Demand for AI solutions

Mehra said that Milky Way is the next natural step in the evolution of their AI offerings. In the past, Tredence introduced IRIS, a chatbot that helps human agents in better decision-making. IRIS is now integrated within Atom AI, an end-to-end ecosystem of AI/ML accelerators from Tredence.

“Today, we have a strong portfolio of prebuilt agents and generative AI solutions spanning industries, from banking and travel to hospitality, retail, and consumer goods. Each solution is designed to address specific business problems through agents that operate on prebuilt data models.”

Mehra says that the demand for these AI solutions from their clients has increased in the last two years. 

“Last year, we saw customers beginning to realise tangible value from proof-of-concepts. Now, demand has exploded, and companies are no longer asking for small pilots but for large-scale deployments.

A POC used to mean a free trial or, at most, a $100,000 investment. Today, we are seeing multi-million-dollar projects kicking off, with direct involvement from boardrooms that now clearly see the business case for generative AI,” Mehra added. 

Tredence derives most of its demand from North America, followed by Europe and the Middle East (particularly Dubai). Industry-wise, its core strengths remain retail and consumer goods, but Tredence is also seeing significant traction in banking and financial services, healthcare, and life sciences. 

Need for talent

While client demand is surging, Tredence is faced with a new challenge. The talent available for these newer skills is not sufficient to meet the exploding demand. 

“Until recently, most customers were asking for business intelligence engineers or data scientists who could code. That demand still exists, but the profile has shifted dramatically toward Generative AI architects. This is where the challenge lies; generative AI and agentic AI are so new that no one in the market has experience, given that it is only 2-3 years old technology, and everyone is still learning. There simply isn’t a ready-made talent pool to hire from,” Mehra noted. 

To this end, Tredence is putting a great emphasis on training talent in-house. “We firmly believe consulting companies like ours have a responsibility to develop the next generation of talent the industry needs. The real demand now is for Generative AI architects, agentic AI architects, and solution architects.”

Tredence, which recently announced that it will be hiring 1,500 people in India, follows a hire-and-train framework. Here, Tredence hires engineers with strong core skills, even if they don’t yet have deep technical expertise in generative AI. They are then put through intensive training programs for a few months to upgrade them into generative AI architects. Once they’ve completed training, they get deployed into live projects.

Road ahead

Last week, Fractal Analytics, a boutique analytics firm operating in the same domain as Tredence, filed for an IPO. Another analytics firm, Latent View, went public in 2021.

“I am delighted and genuinely excited about the news coming out of Fractal. Yes, we compete with them, but they’re also good friends and part of the same ecosystem. Their move to go public validates the need and demand for next-gen AI companies like ours. It proves that every company, regardless of industry, is on its way to becoming an AI company,” Mehra opined. 

Tredence raised private equity capital about two and a half years ago, and such cycles typically run five years, said Mehra. “While we are not looking to raise immediately, we will eventually need to provide an exit for our PE partners. For now, however, our focus is entirely on execution: meeting the surging demand, hiring aggressively, and upskilling talent.”

He added that at the start of the year, the demand environment looked uncertain for the company because of tariffs, inflation concerns, and geopolitical risks. “Yet despite that, we have seen an explosion in demand as enterprises rush to get on the AI bandwagon. We have already surpassed our projections for the first two quarters, which is an exciting shift,” Mehra concluded.