Behind every great software lies a simple question: are people really able to use it to its maximum potential?
For Vara Kumar Namburu, Whatfix Co-founder and Head of R&D, this question sparked the idea of “userization” — designing technology around people, not processes. In this conversation, he reflects on that journey, from early lessons in customer adoption to building AI-powered tools that reshape how enterprises work, learn, and scale.
After earning my Master of Computer Applications from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in 2001, I began my career at Huawei Technologies. Over the years, I advanced to the role of System Architect, and it was during this time that I met Khadim Batti, who would later become my co-founder and long-time partner.
Together, Khadim and I launched SearchEnabler, a SaaS-based SEO platform for small and mid-sized enterprises. While we engineered a strong product, we underestimated the importance of customer engagement. Many users struggled to unlock the full potential of the platform, and despite introducing a “Fix It” button to guide them, it became clear that the real need extended far beyond SEO; it was about enabling customers to use technology effectively. That lesson, coupled with our growing conviction that customer feedback should drive innovation, became the foundation of Whatfix.
We co-founded Whatfix in 2014 with a vision to empower organizations and individuals by ensuring technology adapts to the user, not the other way around. We coined this approach “userization”, making software intuitive, driving adoption, and maximizing impact. More than half of our product pipeline today is shaped directly by customer feedback, which keeps us grounded in the real-world challenges enterprises face. This close collaboration ensures every solution we deliver is not just technologically advanced but also deeply aligned with customer priorities and outcomes.
Guided by this philosophy, Whatfix has grown from an idea into a global leader trusted by Fortune 500 companies. Beyond building products, I remain committed to mentoring entrepreneurs and contributing to the wider startup ecosystem, with the belief that true success lies not just in company growth but in empowering people and organizations to adapt, grow, and thrive in a digital-first world.
Whatfix’s philosophy of “userization” centers on adapting technology to the unique needs of users rather than expecting people to become more tech-savvy. We put customers at the heart of every decision, striving to understand their needs, exceed expectations, and deliver measurable value. This customer-first approach creates inclusive, integrated software experiences that maximize ROI on technology investments.
Guided by this philosophy, Whatfix leverages AI-powered solutions to provide personalized, context-aware guidance and self-help, dynamically adapting content to user roles and application context. Our proprietary AI technology, ScreenSense, interprets both the application context (what a user is doing) and user intent (the outcome they want to achieve). By combining context and intent, ScreenSense recommends the next best action in real time, helping enterprises streamline processes, reduce learning curves, and boost productivity.
Our platform suite, including Digital Adoption Platform (DAP), Product Analytics, and Mirror, enables scalable technology adoption by leveraging data-driven insights to accelerate both software and AI rollouts. AI capabilities such as natural language-driven analytics and sentiment-based triggers are integrated across the platform to help businesses understand user behavior, optimize adoption strategies, and unlock measurable outcomes.
Today, Whatfix supports more than 700 enterprises worldwide, including 85 of the Fortune 500, across industries such as healthcare, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and government. Customers have achieved tangible gains such as 30–40% faster content authoring (on track to 70%), 3–4x faster decision-making, and 2–3x higher adoption and engagement. These outcomes demonstrate how userization transforms technology adoption into lasting business value.
Our journey into AI began in 2019 with the acquisition of Airim, and today, every Whatfix product is AI-powered. For customers, this isn’t just a technology upgrade; it’s a practical shift in how work gets done.
The launch of our three AI agents: Authoring, Insights, and Guidance, is our vision to bring AI directly into the flow of work.
The Authoring Agent cuts content creation effort by up to 40% today and will reach 70% automation soon. The Insights Agent puts analytics in the hands of business leaders, turning a two/three day turnaround into instant, prescriptive insights. And our Guidance Agent proactively recommends next-best actions, doubling or tripling adoption and engagement. Already, more than 300 Whatfix customers are using these AI Agents in live environments, making technology adapt to them, streamlining processes, accelerating decisions, and driving measurable ROI on their digital transformation initiatives.
Looking ahead, Whatfix is building on its leadership in Digital Adoption to expand into AI-first products that deliver measurable business impact. We are advancing our philosophy of Userization, putting technology in service of the user, through intelligent automation, real-time discovery, and adaptive training. These innovations are designed to create a unified, AI-powered experience where every user can succeed, no matter how fast enterprise systems evolve.
This trajectory is already being recognized in the industry. Whatfix won the 2025 AI Breakthrough Award as “Overall AI-based Analytics Solution of the Year” and has been shortlisted for the AI Awards for “Best Use of AI for Learning,” with winners to be announced in September.
The future of AI at Whatfix is about building human-centric systems that learn, reason, and act at scale—helping enterprises not just adopt AI, but truly harness it to transform work and unlock outcomes.
Enterprises face two big challenges. The first is overload. Most large organizations already run thousands of applications, and now every app comes with its own AI agent. This creates confusion for employees, who are unsure which tool to use, which in turn slows adoption and undermines ROI. The second is trust. CIOs and IT leaders want confidence that AI is secure, compliant, and free from bias. Concerns around data leakage, hallucinations, and governance often hold back scaling.
The most effective way to overcome these challenges is to bring AI into the flow of work. Our proprietary ScreenSense technology understands the user’s context and intent, and our Guidance Agent uses this to recommend the next best action across systems. This reduces friction, doubles or triples adoption, and ensures employees see immediate value. On the trust side, we’ve embedded strong guardrails in our AI stack: Azure OpenAI with strict data residency, SOC/ISO/GDPR compliance, and automatic PII scrubbing. We’ve also implemented safeguards to validate outputs and eliminate bias.
AI that is seamlessly embedded and responsibly governed is what gives enterprises the confidence to scale adoption and realize measurable ROI.
Whatfix’s new innovative AI Agents are now embedded across its product suite. The Whatfix AI Agents, Authoring, Insights, and Guidance, transform how enterprises create, analyze, and guide in-app experiences. Powered by ScreenSense, they interpret application context and user intent in real time to deliver precise, high-value actions that accelerate work.
The AI Authoring Agent works by transforming simple natural language prompts into fully configured in-app user experiences without requiring any technical expertise. When users describe what they want in plain speak — such as "make a tip appear when users land on a new dashboard" — the agent automatically generates the appropriate content, applies the necessary targeting logic to determine when and where it should appear, and handles all the styling and formatting. This streamlined process enables training teams, product owners, and other non-technical stakeholders to create sophisticated in-app guidance like pop-ups, walkthroughs, and contextual tips at scale, effectively removing the traditional friction and technical barriers from the content creation workflow.
The AI Insights Agent serves as a conversational interface that allows users to query their product analytics data using natural language instead of complex technical tools. When stakeholders ask questions — such as "How is the new workflow performing?" — the agent processes the request, analyzes the underlying analytics data, and returns comprehensive insights within seconds. It automatically generates clear visual summaries of the data, identifies specific friction points or drop-off patterns in user behavior, and provides actionable recommendations for next steps. This approach enables product owners and cross-functional team members to quickly uncover valuable insights about user behavior and product performance without needing specialized analytics expertise, ultimately helping them identify which product features require enhancements or need better user adoption strategies.
The Guidance Agent works by providing instant, AI-generated answers directly within users' workflow, eliminating the need to leave their current application or search through lengthy documents. When users need information — such as searching for "return policy exceptions" while working in an order management system — the agent immediately surfaces concise, contextual summaries drawn from internal documentation and knowledge bases, delivering these answers right within the interface they're already using. This approach transforms information access for enterprise users by dramatically reducing time-to-answer and minimizing dependencies on support teams, allowing them to get the clarity they need without context switching, reading through extensive materials, or escalating issues, ultimately keeping them focused and productive in their flow of work.
We see the future as a blended workforce where AI agents augment human talent instead of replacing it. The philosophy at Whatfix has always been human-first, and our agents are designed to remove friction from work so people can focus on higher-value activities. The Authoring Agent automates repetitive content creation, the Insights Agent democratizes access to analytics, and the Guidance Agent proactively helps employees in the flow of work. Together, they allow humans to shift from manual execution to strategy, creativity, and judgment.
This shift also changes how enterprises think about skills. As AI takes over data-heavy and routine tasks, soft skills like empathy, creativity, and problem-solving become the hard skills that differentiate human talent. At the same time, enterprises need new roles such as “human-in-the-loop” supervisors who ensure AI systems are accurate, fair, and continuously improving. The focus moves from knowledge work to what we call wisdom work, applying insights, making nuanced decisions, and providing ethical accountability.
At Whatfix, we are preparing for this future on two levels. First, we are embedding AI into every part of our business: sales teams use AI tools to enrich prospect data, our own intelligent search agent connects employees to fragmented internal knowledge bases, and product teams leverage AI agents as co-pilots in workflows. Second, we are upskilling our workforce at scale. Every software engineer is trained to think like an AI engineer, guided by our AI Labs and a framework we call Zero-Click, which encourages teams to automate routine tasks and focus on higher-value outcomes.
In practice, this means AI takes care of the routine and data-heavy work, while humans provide the creativity, empathy, and strategic direction. That balance is how enterprises will see real value from AI—through augmentation, not replacement.
Whatfix solutions are application- and industry-agnostic, designed to work seamlessly across the enterprise technology stack. DAP deployments often span multiple systems, from CRM and ERP to industry-specific applications. At the same time, we’ve developed deeper specialization in verticals such as financial services, life sciences, insurance, and the public sector.
In financial services, Whatfix helps institutions maximize ROI by embedding real-time, contextual guidance within mission-critical platforms like core banking, policy and claims systems, wealth management, CRM, and compliance tools. This enables faster onboarding, streamlined execution of critical workflows, and stronger compliance across regulatory processes. More broadly, we see our role as helping financial services leaders move beyond fragmented point tools toward unified, intelligent execution that drives measurable results.
In the public sector, we address the challenge of modernizing legacy systems and processes. Agencies often invest in modern platforms but fail to realize their potential due to low adoption and complex interfaces. By delivering real-time, in-app guidance, Whatfix reduces user error, supports compliance, and shortens service delivery timelines. This is especially critical for taxpayer-funded initiatives, where technology investments must deliver clear value. With Whatfix, public sector organizations can optimize onboarding, accelerate cloud and AI adoption, and deliver more efficient services to citizens.
Across industries, Whatfix addresses challenges throughout the life of an application. In the pre-go-live phase, our simulation platform (Mirror) enables employees to learn workflows in a safe environment before rollout, reducing resistance and errors. During deployment, our Digital Adoption Platform provides real-time, in-app guidance to ensure smooth adoption and compliance. Post-go-live, our Product Analytics and Insights Agent deliver visibility into how applications are used, highlighting gaps and providing prescriptive recommendations to optimize processes. This end-to-end approach ensures enterprises realize maximum ROI across every stage of their technology investments.
Over the next five years, our biggest milestone is to establish Whatfix as the world’s leading AI platform for userization of enterprise technology.
That means three things in practice:
Ultimately, the milestone is simple yet ambitious: to put human-centric, context- and intent-aware AI in the hands of every enterprise user. If, in five years, millions of users across industries are working smarter, faster, and with less friction because of Whatfix, we will have achieved what we set out to do.
Vara Kumar Namburu is the Co-founder and Head of R&D at Whatfix, driving innovation and strategic growth for the company. He co-founded Whatfix with Khadim Batti in 2014 with the vision of empowering individuals and organizations to work symbiotically with technology to maximize their potential. Based in the US, Vara leads the company’s multiproduct strategy and vision for product development and adoptions, technology development, and innovation, helping accelerate successful integrations for customers and partners.
Under Vara’s leadership, the company has pioneered ‘userization,’ a groundbreaking approach that shifts the focus to making technology adapt to users, rather than requiring users to adapt to the technology. He is passionate about building technology that users love.
More about Vara Kumar: 
Whatfix is an AI platform advancing the “userization” of enterprise applications—empowering companies to maximize the ROI of their digital investments. Powered by a proprietary AI engine ScreenSense, Whatfix continuously interprets "Application Workflow Context" and "User Intent" to boost user productivity, ensure process compliance, and elevate user experience across applications. The product portfolio includes a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP), Mirror simulated application environments for hands-on training, and Product Analytics for no-code insights. With seven offices across the US, India, UK, Germany, Singapore, and Australia, Whatfix supports 700+ enterprises, including 80+ Fortune 500s like Shell, Schneider Electric, and UPS Supply Chain Solutions. Backed by investors such as Warburg Pincus, Softbank Vision Fund 2, Dragoneer, Peak XV Partners, Eight Roads, and Cisco Investments, software clicks with Whatfix.
For more information, visit the Whatfix website.
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