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Savant Labs - Empowering Business Analysts in Finance, Tax, Accounting, HR, and Operations to Build Workflows using their Generative AI Powered, No-Code Automation Platform
Chitrang Shah
CEO and Co-Founder
Savant Labs
https://savantlabs.io/
Contact:
info@savantlabs.io
Follow us on:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/savant-labs/
https://www.facebook.com/savantlabs
YouTube: @savantlabs
X: @Savant_Labs
Interview conducted by:
Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor
CEOCFO Magazine
Published – March 10, 2025
CEOCFO: Mr. Shah, what is the idea behind Savant Labs?
Mr. Shah: We founded Savant to empower business analysts in finance, tax, accounting, HR, and operations functions who today spend more than half of their day manually sourcing data, performing difficult analytics, and building reports in Excel or Google spreadsheets. We help them completely automate all the manual or complex functions they do very easily.
CEOCFO: How do you do this?
Mr. Shah: We have a Generative AI powered, no-code automation platform that these analysts use to build workflows, pulling data from any system their company has including databases, data lakes, Excel files sitting on SharePoint, CRMs like Salesforce, ERPs like NetSuite and hundreds more. They can then manipulate the data using our set of no-code and Gen AI tools. We have an intuitive, spreadsheet-like interface so they can work in the product as if they are working in a spreadsheet – reducing any learning curve. The platform instantly and automatically turns that into a step-by-step workflow, and they can then deliver the resulting data however they wish to consume or deliver it. They could put it back into visualization dashboards like Tableau or PowerBI, deliver back to Salesforce, NetSuite or another app, or send the reports via email or Slack.
CEOCFO: Are potential clients looking to make the change now?
Mr. Shah: Yes absolutely. We believe there is a tremendous supply and demand disconnect that is driving the customers to make this change. What I mean by “supply and demand disconnect” is that today, the volume of data is exploding within organizations - and to drive better business decisions - they need to analyze this data much faster. The people who can perform the analytics are fewer and far between. When you look at the solutions and tools on the market today available that to perform analytics, these tools require technical skills to analyze data, and as a result, companies must hire data engineers and skilled programmers to automate analytics. That is where the supply challenge starts, because there are simply not enough engineers out there to automate analytics.
On the other hand, a lot of great analysts are out there who can analyze data and find signal from the noise, but they are just not programmers. Our platform empowers these analysts to build and automate analytics that the engineers would do, but without writing code - and that is very appealing to enterprises. Our platform allows them to do this with ease and speed, and it enables service with centralized governance and control - which all CFOs, CIOs and CEOs want. We believe in and listen to our customers; our base has been doubling year over year, so this attests to the value of our platform. Based on the huge surge in interest, we see a massive appetite for the adoption of analytics automation.
CEOCFO: How did you know when the solution was ready?
Mr. Shah: Software is an iterative process, requiring continual innovation, improvement and refinement. When we see our customers building more use cases with the platform, expanding into other departments, adding more users, sharing continuous feedback and publishing nice reviews, we know our offering is ready to expand in the broader market. That being said, the needs of customers are always evolving so you are never really “done” building your product. We must continuously listen to our customers’ requests, and we must, and do, continuously innovate.
CEOCFO: What have you learned from customers as more people are using Savant; what have you changed or tweaked?
Mr. Shah: The biggest thing we’ve learned is you don’t always have to be first to solve a problem better or best. There are several first-generation self-service analytics tools that are out there: tools like Tableau Prep, Alteryx, and Power Query helped define the space and have been around for decades. But the challenge they run into is that they are still not easy to use by an average analyst. These platforms also become very expensive, very quickly, particularly if companies try to scale from ten users to hundreds of users: the cost dramatically increases on per user models, and that is not something any enterprise would want. These first-generation platforms are also difficult to govern because they are built on older architectures - some of them still on-premises. In today's cloud-first day and age, customers want greater agility, cost efficiencies, and centralized governance. Savant’s new modern cloud-first platform goes beyond what first-gen self-service analytics solutions offer, and we have attractive consumption models that help enterprise both control costs and data governance.
So, we have studied the market, learned from customers using first-generation self-service platforms, and have released to market a modern, innovative, next-generation AI analytics platform that customers find valuable. We have reinvigorated the analytics market and moving forward extremely quickly.
CEOCFO: Would you tell us about some of the industries you have worked with and some examples of a typical engagement?
Mr. Shah: We have several Fortune 500 customers across several industries. One customer in the commercial real estate sector has used a first-generation self-service analytics platform with some success but have hit some scale and cost obstacles. They have about 400 analysts in their organization using the platform for self-service analytics needs, but they wanted to scale up to 2000+ users. They found the cost structure for this platform became budgetarily infeasible because the per-seat license model meant over 1600 licenses at a fixed cost per seat. We all know that in every organization, you have some heavy power users as well as intermittent users who leverage the tools occasionally – but the company has to pay a per user license fee regardless. This model doesn't make economic sense, so Savant provides a consumption “use as you go” model, where every user can be granted access to the tools to use as much or as little – as well as allow leaders to manage to budget limits.
The second challenge this real estate company faced was actual adoption: out of this large group of people, only twenty percent of the users adopted the solution very well, yet the others struggled to learn even after weeks of training. As a result, they began to seek an alternative analytics platform that is easier to use and adopt. Finally, and most importantly, every organization we engage with must have data governance. Like many of our customers, this company did not want confidential data resting on somebody's laptop. They did not want to have this black box where the central team doesn't know how the data is manipulated, if the user has the right data, and what they are doing with it (and where). They want to have governance oversight on their users and workflows, which was possible with the first-generation analytics on-prem solution. When they discovered Savant, we fit their criteria for flexibly licensing model, cost efficiencies, fast time-to-value adoption, and we have solved for precision data governance.
They piloted the solution with 20 users: some were existing users of their first-gen platform, some had never used an analytics platform and came from an Excel world. They all loved the Savant solution across several teams: the analysts loved the zero-learning curve and were instantly up and running; and the IT team could manage everything centrally with just a few clicks. In addition, because Savant is a consumption driven licensing model, the company had the freedom to add as many users as possible to our platform without having to worry about the cost. The ease, governance, flexibility and cost efficiencies are the top reasons why they chose to work with us. The company is accelerating its use of Savant and is now moving heavily towards an agentic AI strategy, which we are at the forefront of in the marketplace. We have several differentiating Generative AI capabilities that keep an organization's data safe. With our Savant platform, a company can build what we call a “Knowledge Graph” and use that internal knowledge along with their LLM to build out agents. We love working with pioneering, innovative companies – and this is just the beginning. It’s something I am personally very excited about.
CEOCFO: How do you reach out to prospective customers?
Mr. Shah: We’ve gone from a small start-up to now enjoying some broader brand recognition in the enterprise space, due in part to our terrific customers who tell our story for us. We also offer free trials, very personalized demos and proof-of-concepts upon request – making it very easy to see and try before buying. Before companies decide to engage with us, they can visit our website; try the free and fully feature-complete version of our platform, and even trial integrations and workflows – so we’ve seen opportunities coming from our trial and demo requests. We also participate heavily in CFO and CIO events, so the word is getting out.
CEOCFO: What is your global reach?
Mr. Shah: At the moment, most of our clients are US-headquartered, but many utilize our platform across their global footprint, so we have hundreds of users around the world. In fact, we have users in four different continents, and roughly half of our customers have global data workflows that span across multiple departments and countries.
CEOCFO: Are there nuances that someone using the system in Singapore for example, might need to look at in a different way than in the US, and how do you accommodate that in your product?
Mr. Shah: That is the power of Savant: we make everything transparent to the organization, and the data is all fully separated. Savant runs globally in multiple different regions in our cloud. We have a cloud that is running here in the US, Europe, and Asia, but all of that is auto managed, so the customer does not have to manage on their end. It is all transparent to them.
CEOCFO: How is business?
Mr. Shah: Business is booming. We tripled last year, and we are looking to do the same this year.
CEOCFO: What is involved in implementing the system?
Mr. Shah: Because Savant is a Software-as-as-Service cloud platform, there is nothing to install, configure, or implement. Our deployment is live on day one. The only activity the customer typically manages or decides are the data sources their business teams wish to work with. Once those workflows are determined, the organization can easily configure the connections with Savant platform – very simple point-and-click configurations for hundreds of connectors to ERPs, CRMs, data lakes, data warehouses and other business apps. This quick access to data sources and destinations helps the business users build out analytic workflows far more quickly, rather than waiting for data engineering teams to do the configuration for them. From that standpoint, the value delivery is almost instant.
CEOCFO: Are there industries where you are not getting the traction you would like, or industries where you haven't worked with yet where you see possibilities?
Mr. Shah: Our platform has been well adopted across many industries, with particularly high interest in high tech, oil-gas-energy, life sciences, supply chain, manufacturing, CPG, retail, and financial services to name a few. We have not approached the government sector or the public sector as of yet. However, we are working on getting the federal certification, and once we have that, we will be ready with the appropriate go to market initiatives.
CEOCFO: What if anything might someone looking at Savant miss that they should know about the company and the product?
Mr. Shah: One of the major misconceptions when they first look at Savant is that they may think is this is another, what they call, ETL tool for data engineers – but that is not the case. We are not designed for the engineers; we are purposefully built for a line of business analysts, that is, the business user. That is one thing I would like anyone looking at Savant to keep in mind. This is a platform purpose-built for business users.
CEOCFO: What is the takeaway for our readers?
Mr. Shah: The biggest takeaway is that everybody is struggling with what I call the “pendulum swing”. The first generation of tools came in and enabled self-service, but there was a lot of mess that IT and central teams had to deal with in terms of cost and governance, and five years ago, there was a trend to lock it all down. I think most customers now realize that is not a scalable approach, you need to find a balance between the centralized analytics and self-service analytics. That is what I would say is the one thing that every data leader should think about when they look at their go-forward data strategy.
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