Geek of the Week: Bhavin Shah, CEO, and Founder of Moveworks
Businesses, both big and small, depend heavily upon their IT support departments to ensure that their infrastructure works appropriately. Unfortunately, in many companies, the IT department gets swamped with support tickets. This pressure leads to inefficiency of service delivery, with many users with simple problems left waiting in line as the IT techs deal with more complicated issues. Spotting this problem, Bhavin Shah, along with a few close associates, decided to found Moveworks. The company aims to utilize natural language processing (NLP) together with artificial intelligence to decipher and solve everyday IT problems that users may send tickets to resolve.
At the moment, Bhavin’s system manages about one in three tickets, letting the IT team focus on the complicated tasks while dealing with the simple ones through the automated AI bot. This sort of profession should be expected from someone who graduated from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) with a BSc. in Computer Science. However, it was the need that companies expressed to have timelier IT support that led him to work on Moveworks as his priority project. Bhavin is no newcomer to the world of startups, either. His previous project, Refresh.io, automated searches of social media and the internet to connect people based on shared interests and ideas. Refresh was such a success that LinkedIn acquired the company in 2015. Despite his success with Moveworks, however, Bhavin has noted the difficulty in designing complex AI systems to deal with NLP and helpdesk support. He notes that because of the complexity of problems that users are faced with, it may be a long time before the company achieves the level of support that it wants to. Achieving that success may require his team to build and rebuild their existing engine a few times, but he thinks it’s worth the time since this success is more of a marathon than a sprint.
Bhavin’s focus when inventing Moveworks was about providing more efficiency for a business. He contends that IT employees can be a lot more effective if they could focus on solving big problems. Implementation of Bhavin’s system in large companies has seen their IT response times go from a few days to deal with a problem down to a few hours. Because of the AI system, Moveworks’ bot is likely to get even more efficient at delivering IT support as it learns more through its interactions with employees.
Bhavin’s journey into tech began as the Director of New Business Development at Leapfrog, the company best associated with handheld learning games for kids. He then went on to help found Gazillion in 2005 before his successes at Refresh. Bhavin’s vision for Moveworks is to innovate IT support desks to the next level. He wants to free companies from the millstone of having to scale their IT teams unnecessarily. The best way to do this is through automation. Whether he will be able to replicate his successes with Refresh with this new project, only time can reveal. As it stands, however, Moveworks might just be the next big thing for automated enterprise-wide IT support.
