Fireflies to launch new products, plans India-specific pricing: CEO

Fireflies.ai plans a broader AI product suite, India-specific pricing and local-language support as it expands from meeting notes to automating routine work

Fireflies.ai, known for its AI-enabled meeting notetaker, is launching over a dozen new products within the next year to reduce clerical busywork and enhance human productivity. The company aims to transition from a single-tool solution into a comprehensive productivity platform, which will be supported by an India-specific pricing strategy to expand its reach, Krish Ramineni, cofounder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Fireflies, tells Business Standard’s Aashish Aryan in an interview. 

Edited excerpts: 

What are the newer areas of innovation that users can expect from Fireflies? 

We are expanding Fireflies beyond notetaking into a broader product suite. There is always this vision of building an AI teammate, a sort of work assistant that follows you around and helps you with all the busywork and the data entry. We are trying to take Fireflies from being a notetaker to an action figure. 

We are continuing to build and launch several new products over the next few months. One of the products we are working on actively is having Fireflies go and take meetings on your behalf. So, let’s say it’s a customer survey or a question-and-answer meeting. A Fireflies voice agent will then collect all that information and bring it back to you. 

Will AI agents follow the same path as AI tokens? Are most companies deploying AI agents right now for the sake of it? 

We are still in the early stages of AI adoption. There is a bias towards looking at Silicon Valley and all the magic they are promoting. Everyone is chasing what the next most important model is, but I think what’s more important is good models that are cheap and can run 24x7. There is so much mundane, busywork, and that is what we want to go after. 

One of the things that I think was very wrong was how companies and CIOs (chief information officers) pushed token maxing and tried to create leaderboards around which the engineer uses the most tokens. And now they are all cutting back. I think that was a really big mistake. 

We tend to have this issue in the industry where we try to overcompensate for the fear of missing out. And then we have to course-correct. So, when you give people that incentive, they will gamify it, whatever it may be. 

What are your plans for India, where there is no dearth of human resource supply, especially for mundane busywork? 

We need to be in the business of selling results, and focus more on the amount of work done than on headcount. There is incredible talent across India, and not just in metro cities. We will continue to hire a lot more, especially as we try to build out a new product. The team will have to continue growing. 

From a product perspective, we always think about how we can make Fireflies more affordable for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and even the mid-market businesses in India. We are actually coming up with a new pricing plan specifically for India. We are also looking at languages and thinking about how we can incorporate most of them. 

From a talent perspective, I am also looking at how we can set up opportunities like AI training institutes, so we can build more AI-ready talent, train them, and hire from that pool if needed.