How Locale.ai is Redefining Operational Efficiency

In this interview, Aditi Sinha, co-founder of Locale.ai, discusses how her platform revolutionizes operations management by offering a comprehensive, user-friendly solution. She highlights Locale.ai’s unique features, its impact on client efficiency, and the integration of AI and ML for future enhancements. Aditi also shares valuable insights for entrepreneurs venturing into tech solutions for operational challenges.

Inspiration Behind Locale.ai

SBS – What inspired the creation of Locale.ai, and what gap in the market does it address?

Aditi – We have been working in the operations space for a long time. We realized that all the teams have specialized tools to manage and automate their day-to-day workflows. Only the operations team was still relying on rudimentary systems such as Excel & Dashboards, due to which their issues were distributed all over the place between Slack, WhatsApp, emails, etc., and resolving them was a complex task. With Locale, we are trying to build a single source of truth for all operations issues, similar to how Hubspot and Jira cater to sales and engineering teams, respectively.

Unique Positioning

SBS – How does Locale.ai differentiate itself from other operations automation and issue-tracking platforms?

Aditi – We don’t have a direct competitor. Some companies offer small parts of the total system needed for the operations team, but no companies apart from Locale are offering a suite of solutions for all operations needs, right from reporting, alerting, issue creation, cross-channel collaboration, escalation, and issue resolution. Moreover, unlike most of the tools in the market, Locale is built on a self-serve system that users can sign up for and start using on their own without needing any engineering bandwidth for huge installation or setup.

Success Stories

SBS – Can you share a success story of a business that significantly improved its operations using Locale.ai?

Aditi – Locale has helped operations teams from various industries to become proactive and efficient in their processes. Here are some of the examples

• Apollo 24/7, India’s largest multi-channel digital healthcare platform, slashed TAT breaches by 23% as they move away from manually monitoring through dashboards (Read More)
• Wakefit, an e-commerce giant, has reached Zero Inventory Stockout Instances with Locale.ai (Read More)
• ShareChat, a leading social media platform, manages operations around the clock of 160+ million MAUs with Locale.ai (Read More)

Development Challenges

SBS – What challenges did you face in developing a platform that integrates with various business operations?

Aditi – Business operations vary for different companies; hence, there might be an opinion that this would be service-driven and need a lot of customizations. However, Locale is a self-serve product where as long as companies have data in place and the issues they want to track, they can easily integrate Locale with their data sources, whether it is a database, sheets, or SaaS tools, to create reporting, alerting, and issue tracking with either our pre-built templates or SQL to build custom logics/complex use cases.

Commitment to Security

SBS – How does Locale.ai ensure the security and privacy of its users’ data?

Aditi – The data security of our customers is our top priority. We’re proud to be SOC-II and GDPR compliant, and we also ensure stringent measures to protect information and maintain customer trust.

Key Features

SBS – What are the key features of Locale.ai that you believe are most beneficial for businesses?

Aditi – Locale is a complete suite of solutions that completely tracks and resolves operational issues. Following are the few key features that make us different:

• Automatic incident creation — Many alerting tools can give basic alerts about an issue but don’t help you know what happens to the issue after the alerts. Locale automatically creates an incident and dynamically assigns it to the right individual, which brings accountability and allows you to track what is happening on each issue.
• Dynamic notification and assignment — A lot of alerts are as bad as no alerts. This creates unnecessary noise, which keeps issues from being identified in the huge alert traffic. To cut down alert noise, Locale’s dynamic notification sends notifications to only the required person by dynamically choosing based on the data.
• Multi-level escalation — Locale’s automatic escalation brings accountability, ensuring the issue is being worked on and the loop is closed. Locale has multi-level escalation, which automatically escalates the issue if it is not worked on within a defined time.
• Auto incident closure — Since Locale.ai continuously monitors, it can define whether the issue has been successfully resolved. It automatically marked the issue resolved from the data.

Efficient Alert System

SBS – How does Locale.ai’s alert system work, and how does it ensure that the right person is notified?

Aditi – Locale automatically monitors data sources based on the rules set by the users. Once an anomaly is detected, it notifies the right individual on their preferred communication platform, such as Slack, WhatsApp, email, etc. It automatically creates an incident and assigns it to the user. Locale also has dynamic notification functionality, which notify users based on different parameters such as city, vertical, etc.

Boosting Efficiency

SBS – Can you explain how Locale.ai contributes to reducing manual work and improving efficiency?

Aditi – With Locale, all business issues are tracked automatically through data. Hence, no one has to sit in front of dashboards for hours or jiggle with Excel reports daily to identify what’s going wrong. It saves a lot of redundant manual work and optimizes efficiency by ensuring no issues slip through the cracks. Moreover, automatic task creation and escalation bring accountability to the team and ensure the issues are worked on.

With Locale, Boult Audio, one of the leading e-commerce companies, has reduced the manual work by 50% and has significantly improved efficiency. (Read More)

The Role of AI and ML

SBS – How do you see artificial intelligence and machine learning playing a role in the future development of Locale.ai?

Aditi – The integration of AI and ML is pivotal in Locale’s future journey. We envision Locale beyond just an issue-tracking platform. It’s a platform where we also harness data to be able to do predictive analysis to give users actionable insights such as threshold recommendations, detect outliers, etc. As we will have a lot of large-scale data from a variety of industries, we believe we can help companies set up and manage their operations in an auto-pilot mode.

Client Feedback and Platform Evolution

SBS – What feedback have you received from clients, and how has it shaped the evolution of the platform?

Aditi – At Locale, we believe in a customer-centric approach. We work very closely with our customers and co-build the product with customers’ feedback. A lot of product direction comes from our vision of the product, along with our customers’ specific needs. We try to prioritize features that our customers want or enhance their workflows if they also match our future roadmap of the product.

Future Plans

SBS – What are your plans for Locale.ai, any upcoming features or expansions?

Aditi – We are constantly expanding our universe of integration, which allows teams to connect their tools and set up alerting and automation on top of their data source. This would allow them to not necessarily need the data to be in the data source or data warehouse.

Also, we are building a net step of automation that allows users to not only get notified but also take action directly from Locale to resolve the issues, such as automatic credit cashback or reordering when inventory is below the threshold, etc.

Since many real-world operations data is not properly collected anywhere, we are also building manual incident logs through which users can log incidents manually to track and resolve issues.

Entrepreneurial Insights

SBS – What advice would you give other entrepreneurs looking to create tech solutions for operational challenges in businesses?

Aditi – Any business should have multiple metrics of success. To ensure that the company is aligned, choosing one north start metric is important, even if it comes at the cost of any other metric. Prioritize that metric and align the whole team towards it.

All the teams, such as the engineering, sales, marketing, etc., need to be on the same page. It’s important to make a combined GTM plan for the business.

Have a real-time analytics system to track all the different metrics to make more informed decisions. In the early stages, visit it weekly to ensure you are moving towards your goals.