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Shelton Rego, VP of India Business, Freshworks
Late last year cloud software firm Freshworks had announced a 13 per cent reduction in its global workforce to streamline operations and costs. However its hiring plans are still intact according to its India Business VP Shelton Rego.
“We are not seeing too much of a pause in hiring. We are doubling down on our efforts worldwide, hiring in key areas like engineering and Go-To-Market,” he told businessline in an interaction.
He also spoke about the focus on cloud-born verticals like e-commerce and OTT to improve customer and employee experience.
You slashed your headcount by about 13 per cent recently. In terms of talent acquisition, what is your plan?
We are actively hiring at the moment. We are not seeing too much of a pause in hiring. We are doubling down on our efforts worldwide, hiring in key areas like engineering and Go-To-Market. Bringing talent into the company is probably our most strategic asset. It’s our most competitive advantage as well. We think that we are able to attract pretty good talent. We obviously had some areas where we had to reduce our headcount and reimagine the way we ran the company. That was one of the reasons why we did the layoff as well.
Regarding your plans and hopes for the next 10 years, for the short term, for the next 2-3 years, what are the plans of the companies?
What we are going to do in the next few years is going to be doubling down on our agentic platform that is safe for people, tested, ethical, takes the right decisions and do things that a human agent cannot do. So you will see a lot of more innovation coming out. I don’t want to spill the beans right now, but stay tuned over the next few weeks. We will have very, very big announcements happening in that area.
During the event, you said SaaS is the new light bulb. Why are you so confident in SaaS when people like Satya Nadella had dismissed the service?
He has vested interest because he runs a hyperscaler. Azure is an extremely famous hyperscaler who has billions over billions of dollars in revenue. So it obviously makes sense to speak about your own industry well and diss everything else. So it’s very natural to me. But my team and I talk to customers all the time. More customers ask us about improving agent productivity, cost optimisation. They want to know how many customers are facing the same problems as them, not about platform, technology, stack and LLM. They want to focus more on use cases, ROI. They want to understand when they can get their money back once they make the investment. So conversations around technology are changing fundamentally.
And what is Freshworks’ response in terms of ROI?
We are seeing some really good numbers across the board, with deflection rates of about 40-50 per cent for support requests. Productivity improvements upwards of 20 per cent for the agents to be able to get work done. But every customer is different.
Any particular vertical that you are thinking of focusing on more?
There are adoption curves for every single customer as well. So edtech, e-commerce, quick commerce, OTT, any company that is digital native or born in the cloud will show demand.
So what are the concerns or challenges that you have to navigate from the customer side?
There are customers who sit with a lot of ‘technical debt,’ which is a core basis that is 20 years old and need to be changed and refactored into the cloud. Another challenge is that most customers across APAC are still on-premise. Then there are some regulatory challenges: regulated industries like insurance or banking or health care stay ahead in innovation compared to regulation. Some industries are overregulated. Whether it’s compliance and HIPAA for health care, GDPR in Europe, or some regulators out there causing a hurdle for customers to innovate fast thanks to AI and the cloud, the cost of failure is now extremely low.
What is Freshworks’ vision for the next year?
We’re focusing on IT service management and asset management. We’ll also talk a lot about IT operations management. As a company, most of the interest in AI is in customer support. You will have employees wanting a better experience. You will have customers wanting a better experience. You will have AI disrupting the world. So those are the three broad pillars that we continue to focus on.
Published on May 23, 2025
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