Alessio Alionço, CEO of Pipefy talks about the integration of AI in workflow automation, ethical considerations and compliance with data privacy regulations in AI-driven processes in the Q&A:
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Hi, Alessio. Welcome to the CIO Influence Interview Series. Please share your journey from working as a business consultant to founding Pipefy.
Before founding Pipefy, I worked as a consultant to micro and small businesses and led M&A for national and international companies, most of them in the tech industry. When I was only 21 and still in college, I founded a local e-commerce marketplace (Acessozero) and led product development.
The idea for Pipefy began when Acessozero was acquired by a market leader.
I frequently observed businesses — including my own — struggling to solve a common problem: unstructured and unstandardized workflows were hindering our ability to achieve our revenue targets. The automation tools that were available were code-intensive and expensive. Both in terms of cost and ease-of-use, they were simply not viable.
With Pipefy, I wanted to create a tool that met IT requirements but was easy enough for business teams to use: a tool that would help IT teams conserve their resources and empower business teams. But I also wanted to reduce stack sprawl by making it adaptable for any type of process or workflow. This was the vision behind Pipefy.
In 2015, we founded Pipefy. We presented our product to the 500 Startups accelerator and received rounds of investment for expansion. In 2021, our Series C funding raised $75 million. Today, Pipefy has more than 450 employees and almost 4,000 customers in more than 70 countries.
Also Read: The Dynamic Duo: How CMOs and CIOs Are Shaping the Future of Business
With Pipefy at the forefront of AI-driven workflow automation, could you explain how AI has been integrated to drive this and its impact on your end users?
AI opens a new frontier in no-code workflow automation, where the potential for improving operational efficiency and user experience is astounding. Last year we surveyed executives from U.S. enterprises and found that 79% of C-suite executives expect generative AI to increase the efficiency of their processes by at least 25%. Of these, a third expect those gains to be at least 50%.
To drive these types of efficiency gains, Pipefy AI combines generative AI with automation in three key ways. First, by making it easy for users to submit requests and get answers to their questions. Second, by enhancing no-code automation to reduce or eliminate manual work for more complex tasks and workflows. Finally, by providing a co-pilot that can build optimized workflows and provide fast access to data analytics.
As businesses increasingly embrace AI-driven workflows, what are the key ethical considerations that leaders must prioritize to ensure the responsible and ethical use of AI?
Transparency is paramount here. Trusting an AI solution comes down to understanding security risks, being able to identify and eliminate bias in the algorithms, and having visibility into the impact of AI on the people and processes it serves. All of these require visibility into how the model works and how it uses data. This is especially true for data privacy. Leaders need to ask questions about how the AI interacts with data, what information is being shared or used to train the model, and how it’s being stored.
Considering the growing importance of data privacy, how can Pipefy ensure that its AI-driven processes comply with international data protection regulations for global users?
We are conscious that businesses and IT teams search for solutions they can rely on, as much as they need processes they can trust. For us, earning that trust means reinforcing our software against both known and emerging threats.
Pipefy AI doesn’t share customer data with third parties. The data is only used at the time of interaction. We use a mix of reliable and robust language models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4. We also signed a Data Processing Agreement with OpenAI guaranteeing that there is no retention of data, as well as no data is used for training.
Our effort is to provide teams using Pipefy with the control and features necessary to maintain internal governance and compliance standards. Our platform complies with industry standards and best practices, including SOC2, ISO, GDPR, and LGPD. We also integrated extra precautionary measures into our software, such as multi-level permission management, SSO, and MFA.
Also Read: Top 10 Test Data Management Tools for Clean and Secure Data
What major challenges do businesses face when implementing AI-driven automation, and how can they effectively overcome such obstacles?
AI-driven automation is designed to be as user friendly as possible. That being said, there may be some hesitation or resistance to adoption at first, until users become more familiar with its capabilities and are more willing to trust the AI. Customizing the rollout and CL&I for each team or department can go a long way in facilitating adoption, since users will see exactly how AI automation can be put into service for their workflows and use cases.
It’s also wise to start small, succeed, and then scale. Apply AI-automation to simple workflows and projects at first. As users become more confident in their automations, then it can be applied to more complex use cases. This gives teams using AI room to grow and avoids them becoming overwhelmed by the sudden introduction of a powerful new tool.
Could you highlight the pivotal role of cross-functional collaboration in optimizing AI-driven workflows? How does it contribute to the success of AI initiatives?
Implementing AI requires a dynamic partnership between IT teams and business teams. IT acts as the gatekeeper for security and governance, and provides the technical expertise to manage the integrations and business rules. Business teams, on the other hand, are the experts on their workflows and processes. They understand where improvements are needed and how each process or workflow contributes to the overall strategy and aligns with business goals.
Working together, IT and business teams such as finance, HR, or customer service can optimize existing workflows, build new ones, and deliver better user experiences, internally and externally.
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Alessio Alionço is the founder and chief executive officer of Pipefy, a global leader in AI-driven business process automation solutions. Brazilian-born Alionco is a high-impact global leader, and has grown Pipefy from its founding in 2015 to a company of more than 3,500 customers around the world, including Visa, IBM, Volvo, Santander, and Kraft Heinz. A former mergers and acquisitions consultant, he is an award-winning entrepreneur and regular contributor to Forbes. Alionço has a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt along with a certificate from the Stanford LEAD: Personal Leadership program of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Pipefy delivers a leading business process automation platform that increases team productivity and efficiency, centralizes data, and standardizes processes for teams in IT, Finance, HR, Customer Operations and more. Through its no-code workflow automation and AI framework, Pipefy helps businesses achieve operational efficiency and optimal productivity for every team in every department. With Pipefy, implementation is three times faster than other solutions. Its intuitive, no-code interface accelerates adoption so teams can get up and running quickly. Among its many recognitions, Pipefy was named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™, a ranking of the 500 fastest-growing companies in North America in November, 2022.
