AppliedAI’s Arya Bolurfrushan takes us through how his company addresses AI “pilotitis” and how he uses AI from his own home

Raised in the UAE, trained at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard, and seasoned on Wall Street, Arya Bolurfrushan has watched two technological revolutions reshape the economy: The internet’s rewiring of how we connect and now AI’s bid to manufacture what he thinks is the rarest commodity in the universe — intelligence.

As a veteran entrepreneur with two exits under his belt, he made a call to start his own venture that can help regular people — those on the front lines of industries, from nurses to bank clerks — use AI to actually bring tangible gains for their businesses and help save them time on routine tasks.

That became Opus, AppliedAI’s platform for building, running, and optimizing AI-powered workflows — purpose-built for “high cost of error” environments like banking, ins., healthcare, and industrials. The thesis is simple: AI only matters when it moves the P&L. AppliedAI is now backed by Abu Dhabi AI darling G42, sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, McKinsey, and American software firm Palantir.

Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. This week, we sat down with Arya Bolurfrushan (LinkedIn), founder and CEO of AppliedAI, to talk about his journey building AppliedAI, how it actually helps businesses, and how he uses AI in his day-to-day life to help his own work. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

EnterpriseAM: Tell us about yourself and the story of how you started AppliedAI.

Arya Bolurfrushan (AB): I was born in New York and raised in the UAE. I left when I was sixteen for university. I went to Carnegie Mellon, which at the time was — and still is — the number one university for AI and information systems. It was 2001, at the cusp of the dot-com bubble, and there were a lot of conversations about how the internet would change us.

After that, I started my career at Goldman Sachs in New York and then went to Harvard for business school, and I’ve been an entrepreneur ever since. My first venture wasn’t one I founded, but it was in the oil and gas space, and I took it public in Europe. It was one of the first UAE-founded companies to go public in Europe (and to stay listed).

Fast-forward to five years ago, around Covid-19, I was going down a rabbit hole of what AI and Web3 mean for the world. I was in Dubai and started to think of starting an AI fund that could help companies looking to make AI usable. I couldn’t find a company that did exactly what I wanted — there were either services companies masquerading as product companies, robotic process automation companies masquerading as AI companies, or research firms masquerading as for-[gain] companies. That’s when I created AppliedAI.

E: So how does AppliedAI make AI usable? What does it offer that wasn’t in the market at the time?

AB: We often say AI is everywhere except your bottom line. A lot of enterprises have this problem we call “pilotitis,” where they just do pilots after pilots after pilots, but they still can’t figure out how to actually work AI into everyday production and business processes efficiently.

The problem is not always tech-related. It’s usually human- and adoption-related. What we have tried to build with Opus is a solution to those adoption issues. After thousands of hours on the front line with enterprises, we realized that the person who should own this task is the business process owner, the person who does it every single day — not IT and not management.

So what we've done is we've empowered the business process owner at the front line to be able to build and deploy in a non-technical way, because they're the ones who actually know what's needed. We also do it in a multiplayer fashion where, in discovery — Opus has discover, build, run, and optimize stages — you and your colleagues all go into the same platform, you start mapping out exactly what the requirements are, what the integrations are, and then you build consensus. And then you have two options: either automate the old, most likely broken process, or what we recommend, which is not to automate broken processes but reimagine them altogether. This is part of what we call the Ikea effect. If you build it yourself, you'll value it and use it.

E: Give me an example of a business that has used AppliedAI and has seen solid gains to its bottom line.

AB: A chemical manufacturing plant in the UK owned by big oil companies needed to optimize a mission-critical process that required around three to four hours of human work — that happens thousands of times per day — and we took that process and made it into around two to three minutes. It went from seven human touch points to one human touch point.

We built and deployed that and integrated it into their systems within eight hours. It was a one-day investment on their part, with around a 20x increase in human productivity. It was in vendor onboarding and procurement — we call ourselves the world's most boring AI company for a reason.

E: Why start with the most high-stakes and highly regulated sectors first?

AB: It's like eating the frog first. When a human life is on the line, you can’t afford hallucinations. You have to build really robust systems that can go through that.

There’s also this global friction tax that we all pay on everything we touch, from banking to ins. and hospital bills, and it’s usually due to administrative inefficiencies. So it's actually a big source of suffering, and no one gains from that. For the workers, it’s a soul-crushing aspect of their jobs, and they’re under-resourced, and for the patient or client, it’s a bad experience.

We try to address these pain points, but we strongly believe that the human stays relevant. There needs to be an accountable human in every process that approves the AI recommendation. In this fast-changing world of AI, what will change the least is regulation and law, and that’s where we think humans will be needed most.

E:Take us through your morning routine and what a typical workday looks like.

AB: There’s the target routine and then there's the reality. Ideally, what I like to do is have a cold plunge — I have one outside of my room in the garden — and I try to get sunlight as soon as possible, and do some breathing exercises. The advantage of being in the UAE is that you don't necessarily need a sauna. You just get out of the cold plunge, and your job’s done.

I usually have black coffee in the morning, because I do intermittent fasting, so I don’t eat until around lunch. I’m constantly torn between getting that extra half hour of sleep and sacrificing those morning rituals, because I know that ultimately, sleep is the most important thing.

E:How does AI show up in your own routine? Does it help you with your own workflow?

AB: I've set up a Mac Studio at my house. I have my GPU and six agents running locally that do a lot of my work for me. So when I wake up in the morning, my emails are all answered, my calendars have been optimized, and I have a whole report on how to get the most out of the day. I have one that just tells me all the hard truths — things I don't want to hear that I've been avoiding.

I have one that does research, so what I try to do is keep deep research running in between my normal tasks and have full reports on that. I've also built a command center that links to all of our ERP systems, so it gets all the data from every line of code we write, and the whole thing is visible to me on my own dashboard.

Arya’s favorites

What he reads: The Sovereign Individual is a book I think is a must-read. It was written in the ‘90s by the two macroeconomists who predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it discusses the future of sovereignty and what that means for us as individuals.

What he does in his spare time: Sports, in particular padel. I find it occupies my mind enough to not think about anything else.

Favorite piece of advice: One that I try to remember most is to trust your intuition. It's very hard to do that because it’s human nature to start looking for data to back you up or for people to agree with you. When I look back at the moments when I have trusted my intuition, those are when the business does best, and the moments when I don't are the times when we suffer.