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ITechnology Interview with Borya Shakhnovich, CEO at airSlate

ITechnology Interview with Borya Shakhnovich, CEO at airSlate

“Intelligent Automation Powered by Pragmatic AI and No-Code Development Is Going to Become the Next Major Driver of Business Efficiency.”

Hi, please tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at airSlate?

I’m the CEO and co-founder of airSlate, a global SaaS technology company that serves tens of millions of innovators worldwide with our no-code workflow automation, electronic signature, and document management solutions. At airSlate, we are passionate about empowering teams and individuals to be more productive and efficient in their roles, while reducing time-to-value, with innovative and intuitive business solutions.

What is airSlate and what are your current offering and solutions? 

airSlate is at the forefront of building solutions that accelerate digital transformation for innovators on teams of all sizes, across SMBs to enterprise. Our PDF editing, electronic signature, and workflow automation solutions empower anyone to become an entrepreneur within their team, and create, innovate, and automate to digitally transform their organizations to run faster and easier. airSlate’s no-code ethos accelerates time-to-value for its solutions and enables any team member to focus on more valuable tasks to have an immediate impact on the bottom line and deliver a superior customer experience.

airSlate, pdfFiller, signNow, and USLegal make up our portfolio of award-winning products, and we recently released a new feature, Flow Creator, to enable our airSlate users to automate and visualize their tasks with unprecedented ease. Our solutions integrate smoothly with existing tools and are infinitely configurable for no-code developers to unlock their limitless creativity to transform the digital experience.

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Tell us more about how airSlate was born? What are the core principles driving the company culture? 

airSlate was founded in 2008 with the goal of solving a simple problem that originally had nothing to do with workflows: how to create fillable and editable forms and documents from PDF files. Today, the product that came from that original effort – pdfFiller – is used by millions of people around the globe.

Since then, we have expanded our solutions to electronic signature and workflow automation to empower anyone – even non-technical users – to digitally transform their workflows, such as employee and customer onboarding, sales and ordering workflows, contracts and payments, and much more.

We are a fast-growing company on a mission to not only offer best-in-class solutions to our large customer base, but also to foster an environment of innovation among our staff of technologists, designers, marketers, and educators. Ultimately, we believe in giving everyone the opportunity and power to focus on doing what they love, while bringing teams, partners, and customers closer together in the process, starting with staff and extending out to customers.

Could you tell us the differences between ‘no code’ and low code from a computing POV? When should a company invest in low code platform?

Low-code and no-code solutions are often grouped under the same ‘low-code’ category, but there are significant differences between the two. Low-code requires basic technical skills and some knowledge of coding, while no-code solutions do not require any technical skills. With no-code, anyone in an organization can tailor an app to fit their needs, without touching a single line of code.

With the massive shift to remote or hybrid-remote work over the past year, more companies have been implementing workflow automation solutions to streamline processes and that trend will only continue to grow. These no-code solutions are empowering workers to spend more time on tasks that require critical thinking and less time on the more mundane, tedious tasks of their jobs. We’ve seen these solutions prove to be successful across a wide range of industries, including education, construction, and healthcare to name a few, and it’s expected that even more industries will show interest in adopting no-code solutions in the immediate future.

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What kind of barriers exist in adoption of no code software management platforms? How does airSlate simplify these challenges? 

One of the major barriers to adoption is that many of the low-code or no-code solutions out there are only point-based solutions, which means customers have to bring together multiple disparate systems to meet their workflow goals. That can be especially daunting for companies when evaluating whether to spend the time and money to bring all of these solutions together to meet their needs.

airSlate offers a significant differentiator for teams from what’s currently available in the market. We’ve eliminated the headache and need for all of these disparate solutions, offering up the first-of-its-kind, end-to-end workflow automation solution for teams.

How do you see AIOps and Auto ML capabilities further improving no code platforms?

AI will remain at the forefront of digital transformation and play a major role in workflow automation processes. By collecting, aggregating, and analyzing data from documents and processes, AI can be used to then build correlations that are used to predict outcomes, advise and trigger next steps. Intelligent automation powered by pragmatic AI and no-code development is going to become the next major driver of business efficiency.

Your prediction on the future of No code – how do you see ‘Flow Creator’ getting customer attention in the coming weeks?

Remote workforces have been a main driver of growth over the past year and. As more companies enter into hybrid-remote work models in the coming year, no-code solutions will continue to play a critical role in keeping employees connected and efficient while working from different locations. We’ll see no-code solutions evolve to become applicable for more use cases. Industries like healthcare, education, government and legal that have been traditionally in-person and have been slower to move online will increasingly embrace no-code.

It’s satisfying to see the customer excitement build around our latest feature, Flow Creator, which enables our airSlate users to automate and visualize their tasks easier than ever before. It reduces the time employees spend on manual, routine tasks and instead allows them to focus on driving strategic, high-value business goals. There’s never been a more important time to use no-code workflow automation as a growing number of remote employees look to access and use data without the immediate support of an IT department.

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Your prediction on the “future of cloud computing strategies” – what kind of talent / skills are you looking to hire at airSlate?

Here at airSlate we are growing quickly and we see a really exciting future ahead for the cloud space and for no-code specifically. We are always looking for passionate technologists, designers, marketers, and educators who are eager to help our customers transform their organizations to run faster and easier.

Thank you, Borya! That was fun and we hope to see you back on itechnologyseries.com soon.

[To participate in our interview series, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com]

Borya created the vision for our easy-to-use, automated, end-to-end document workflow solution. He is passionate about airSlate’s products and ensuring that they meet the needs of our vibrant community of users.

He has 20 years experience developing and applying algorithms and models to drive business results and academic insights. Prior to joining airSlate, he founded Orwick, an online community for scientific research. He also was a professor of Bioinformatics at Boston University and a fellow in Systems Biology at Harvard University. He has published many research papers, including ones on the evolution of genetic structures, which he adapted to create airSlate’s exceptional growth model.

Borya received a BS in Computational Biophysics from University of Illinois, a PhD in Bioinformatics from Boston University.

airSlate logo

airSlate is a global SaaS technology company that serves tens of millions of users worldwide with its no-code business process automation and document management solutions. The company’s PDF editing, e-signature workflow, and business process automation solutions empower users to digitally transform their businesses to run faster and easier.airSlate, pdfFiller, signNow, and USLegal make up the company’s portfolio of award-winning products.

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