Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

When Ashwin Ballal was first asked to become a CIO, he wondered what he’d done wrong. Six months later, he called it the best job he’d ever had. Now CIO of Freshworks, Ashwin brings an unconventional perspective to IT leadership, shaped by a career spanning engineering, product, marketing, and operations.

Support inboxes aren't just filled with customer requests. They're also flooded with spam, promotional emails, automated notifications, and other non-support conversations that distract agents from customers who actually need help. Freshdesk's Email AI Agent clears that noise out on its own, auto-closing the spam and non-support stuff, and flagging anything it's unsure about for a human to check. Your team gets to focus on the customers who actually need them.

Automate high-volume customer service emails with Freshdesk's AI agent that resolves repetitive queries, maintains context across follow-ups, and escalates only when human intervention is needed. See Freshdesk's Email AI Agent in action. What is an AI agent in customer service? An AI agent is software that independently understands customer queries, retrieves answers from a knowledge base, and responds conversationally, without needing a human agent for every interaction.

AI doesn't fail because of the technology. It fails because organizations underestimate the debt hiding beneath their processes. As Agentic AI, Copilots, and intelligent automation become mainstream, many organizations discover that poor data, inconsistent processes, and outdated knowledge prevent AI from delivering value. In this video, we explore what it takes to become AI ready. Key takeaways: Business First IT requires AI that amplifies people, removes complexity, and drives measurable business value.

In this episode of The Modern Tech POV, Dennis Woodside, CEO at Freshworks, sits down with Igor Collell, CIO at Seqens, a social housing provider in the Paris region that manages homes for more than 230,000 people across 310 municipalities. Seqens was formed in 2019 from a six-company merger and a simultaneous demerger — leaving Igor's team with something most CIOs never get: no legacy IT estate to drag forward. Most leaders in that situation talk about consolidation and harmonization. Igor's team destroyed their IT and rebuilt it.

In this episode of The Modern Tech POV, Dennis Woodside, CEO at Freshworks, sits down with Brent Westerkamp, Director of IT Services at Vermeer, an industrial and agricultural equipment manufacturer serving customers in over 60 countries. Vermeer took its IT team from 11 to 165 people but the real story isn’t in the headcount. It’s how IT transformed from a cost center into now a strategic driver of the business in one of the most challenging operating environments. In manufacturing, the line doesn’t pause for technology problems.

In this episode of The Modern Tech POV, Dennis Woodside, CEO at Freshworks, sits down with Dan Keyworth, Executive Director of Performance Technology and Systems at McLaren Racing, the reigning Formula One Constructors' Champions. McLaren runs one of the most demanding technology operations in the world. 26 race weekends a year. A new network built from scratch at every circuit. 100,000 telemetry parameters per second. And zero margin for error.