India key to future AI innovation and talent: Pegasystems CEO Alan Trefler

Trefler also reveals how chess shapes his leadership, stressing the need to adapt strategy in a fast-evolving tech world

Alan Trefler, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of US-based technology company Pegasystems (Pega), gained early recognition as a chess Master at 19 and tied for first place in the 1975 World Open Chess Championship. This led to his artificial intelligence (AI) work at Dartmouth College, where he taught computers to play chess. After graduating, he began his career as a software engineer and architect, but his passion for chess remained strong. In a video interview with Peerzada Abrar, Trefler shared how chess has shaped his approach to leadership at Pega, emphasising the need to constantly recalibrate and reassess strategy amid rapidly changing technologies. Trefler said Pega has transformed customer engagement in the past two years using AI, including powerful Generative AI applications to help organisations define automation strategies. He emphasised India's crucial role in innovation and talent for Pega, highlighting his personal engagement with local engineering and design teams. He expressed excitement about the country's energy and its alignment with future AI initiatives. Edited excerpts:

 

How did chess inspire you when founding Pegasystems in 1983, and were there any specific chess strategies that influenced the way you built the company?

 

Chess was instrumental in my understanding and being recruited into computer science. At college, I competed at a large international chess tournament, and based on that, the computer science department recruited me to help them work on computer programs to play chess. That got me very involved in how you teach a machine and try to create the logic, the understanding, the pattern recognition, and the execution in a machine that we take for granted in people. It turned out that the machines were obviously of very different power back then, and the science was also nowhere nearly as developed as it is. But we were still able to create a system that could play chess at a pretty good level, and I found that really instructive and interesting. It set me on my path of getting very involved with computers.

 

How do qualities like adaptability and change in chess influence your approach to leading Pega in the ever-evolving tech industry?

 

When you are a chess player, what's interesting is that the board is completely exposed in front of you. Chess is a game of perfect information, which is unusual because we live in worlds of imperfect information. But in chess, everybody can see the same board at the same instant. Yet the strategies, the decisions, and the approaches of the players can be markedly different. To be able to figure out the best thing to do, whether in a chess game or a business problem, what I try to do is make sure that we always consider several ‘candidate moves’. A candidate move is generally determined by pattern recognition. But the important thing is to enumerate them — to list the ‘candidate moves’ and make sure that, prior to making a decision, you actually go through all of them. You don't just do the first thing that makes sense. You say, “Hey, I'm going to evaluate five different approaches, go through all the way to five”. Sometimes, as you do it, you come up with new steps, but you never cut yourself short. The importance of ‘candidate move’ is very different from the way a lot of people approach their businesses. I think it ensures that we look at the choices that inevitably exist, prior to making an important decision.

 

How has this influenced your perspective on leadership and strategy?

 

You need to re-evaluate the strategy because it changes based on what's going on — on the board, what your opponent is doing, or the quality of your calculations. I think the importance of recalibrating and re-evaluating strategy is one of the great things that businesspeople need to do. That's especially true in these times when the technological underpinnings and the whole basis of the way we do things are changing so radically. There are many businesses that did not properly evaluate strategy and evaluate other ‘candidate moves’ in the face of their challenges, which led to the dereliction of tremendous brands. One of them is a leading photography company that had invented not just photography but even digital photography, yet it could not properly organise its candidates or develop a strategy that allowed it to survive. I look at stories like that and find them very sobering. They remind us to always keep an open mind while looking for ‘candidate moves’.

 

How do you envision Pega evolving over the next decade with the rise of AI and agentic AI?

 

Pega has always aligned with the concept of AI. Even long before the recent buzz and hype around generative AI, for over 15 years we have offered statistical AI or mathematical AI. This AI determines patterns in data and then uses those to figure out what the next best action is. That's been central to what Pega has offered as a product and has been extremely successful. It is used by many companies around the world to drive better decisions and results for their clients. When the new forms of AI, ‘Generative AI’ came in, we immediately saw that it would be something that we could use to make our workflow products and customer engagement tremendously more powerful. We have woven AI deeply into our environment and our systems to make our workflows faster, smarter, better, and design once again to change. Now, 'agent' is the current buzzword, and the trouble with these buzzwords is that, candidly, many businesses use them almost intentionally to confuse people. When we think of agents, what we really think about is workflows. You want to have a level of automation, where a workflow can be done as automated as possible and to the extent that an agent picks a perfect workflow and executes it.

 

Could you share the role India plays in Pega’s global operations and its contribution to driving innovation for the company?

 

India is a source of innovation and talent for us. That's why I am thrilled as my other senior leaders to make sure we come here personally and routinely to engage with the teams. I have already had the pleasure of engaging with 4-5 of our engineering and design teams, and it's very exciting to see how they take the work our clients do and put it together with great innovation. We think India is a place where you can just find tremendous amounts of talent, lots of energy, and it's a very exciting place to be. We had kept things at a common level of 2,000 employees in India. As we go forward, I expect we are going to continue increasing this.

 

How is Pega leveraging AI and automation to better serve clients?

 

In the last two years, Pega has used AI to completely change the way we engage with customers. We have built a new GenAI capability called Blueprint, which is the most powerful application of GenAI that I have ever seen. It allows an organisation to define how they would like to automate a part of their business. It even allows them to upload or include information about existing systems that they would like to replace with something smarter, better and more powerful. This is so easy to use that we now have our salespeople demonstrate this to our customers in their first meeting.

 

What impact do you see AI and automation having on jobs, both in India and globally?

 

AI is going to have a very pragmatic impact on how jobs are done and for some people their jobs may have to change for them to remain employed. The reality is that this is a disruptive technology, and the nature of disruptive technologies is that they can create levels of discomfort, but they can also create new levels of service and opportunities. We need to be creative in thinking about how AI opens the avenues that it will open because I believe it will. At the same time, we do need to acknowledge that a lot of jobs are tangibly going to end up going away or are going to end up changing material wise. I think India, and engineers in general, need to embrace it and find out how to apply it in ways that will enable new things to be done. People who only do things in a traditional way, like programming, are going to find that those jobs will be threatened. 

 

What is your biggest hope and biggest fear regarding the future of AI?

 

My biggest hope is that it continues to become more accurate and that concepts like hallucinations, which do exist, can be managed to become so controlled, that you don't have to manage them. So, AI can apply its own quality control to what it does. My anxiety about it is that these powerful AI tools, in the hands of bad actors, make it possible for those bad actors to create more personal attacks and materials that could be very territorial. These tools can almost act as a force multiplier in ways that are very troubling when you look at concepts like Deepfakes and other issues like that. Sadly, it's going to be extremely hard, if not impossible, to regulate in a credible way. So, I feel instead that people are going to have to become way more attuned to recognising and not reacting to AI-generated things like stories and voices. I believe it's possible to use AI in ways that really address core ethical concerns. The downside is that if you have people who are not bound by ethical standards, or people who operate in countries where the governments actually support attacks, they will be able to apply this technology as a force multiplier. 

 

Under the Trump administration, what impact will the technology sector have, particularly in terms of tech collaboration and trade with India?

 

In my opinion, it is a very vulnerable environment, and we have to see what happens, because there are so many things going on. It is reality that will sink in. There are a couple of things, though, that we think could be positive for us, which includes the desire for greater efficiency. That is central to the Elon Musk agenda, which is to make things operate with more automation and with fewer human hands working on them. That works quite well with our vision of agentic and automation workflows. I believe that the types of things they are doing turn out to fit pretty well with our agenda. On how it's being done, it is hard to predict how this disruption is going to either confuse or slow things down. But in the long run, I believe there should be more opportunities for companies like us. The greater concern, as it relates to trade, is whether it creates recessionary pressure on countries around the world. We have offices in 31 countries. We operate globally, and if some parts of the world go into recession because of trade issues, it would obviously have a negative effect on us. Historically, tariffs have not applied to software, and we have not heard anyone discussing that. The concern is more about an indirect economic market effect, which is potentially more concerning than a direct impact on one of our products.