Manila, Philippines — The Philippine economy is heavily backed by Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), which has a significant role in improving employment, income and economic status and stability of the country.
Data from the Philippine Statistics Authority revealed that MSMEs comprised 99.6 % of total business establishments in the country as of 2023—with over 90% covering micro and small businesses.
While the Philippine economy is largely run by MSMEs, most of these enterprises continue to struggle in terms of stability, growth, and optimization—globally and digitally.
Aiming to address these issues and challenges within the business industry, BlueArc Technologies CEO Norris Jajjo seeks to promote and incorporate business automation via use of artificial intelligence.
“We saw a gap in the market in small to medium enterprise companies that really wanted to do AI, that wanted to do business automation, but there wasn’t a lot of focus on helping the smaller-sized companies and organizations. The goal is to bring the level of expertise that KPMG and PwC have, but to the smaller organizations and businesses on a global scale,” Jajjo explained.
“So every business we’ve spoken to in the Philippines, they explained to us the reason for their stagnant growth, customer satisfaction is going down, operationally visibility of what happens in all the breakpoints is because they don’t have visibility of dashboards and integration technology that they can actually push their companies and businesses forward,” he added.
Jajjo pointed out that Filipino businesses tend to waste more resources trying to resolve an issue, rather than actually identifying the core of the problem.
In BlueArc technologies, the company aims to provide assistance in turning manual activities into AI automated processes that will allow employees to focus on higher-value work.
“How do we do automation? How do we move forward? What we want to do is upskill the skill sets that already exist, and rather than doing administrative tasks or marketing tasks, we bring in AI and business processes that allow those forms and admin to be mitigated,” Jajjo emphasized.
He further said “We want to take away the boredom and make those roles a lot more interesting, develop a lot more high-value skill sets, because on a global scale, resources are not going to drive the country forward. It’s going to be automation, it’s going to be business visibility, so understanding every process of a business, and it’s going to be customer satisfaction.”
With this, BlueArc Technologies is opening its first business conference in the Philippines which will cover business transformation through AI Automation, cybersecurity and salesforce innovation.
This event will bring together Filipino entrepreneurs from various business industries to tackle how AI automation processes can help in growing and developing their businesses to gain relevance and competitiveness in the global scale.
Among the guest speakers to the upcoming event is Stephen Fox, salesforce solutions secure cloud, compliance and hybrid infrastructure architect, who is looking forward to encouraging more business people to incorporate use of AI in their business processes.
While Fox understands that there may be business people who may still be hesitant and finds use of AI risky, he noted that it is significant to find the most appropriate AI platform to help your business grow.
“You need to understand your data, understand your models, understand the way that data is used. They talk about data science, but it isn’t a way, but it’s also just making sure that you have enough and the right structure of your data to actually make automation and AI work,” Fox noted.
“If you’re a small business and you are happy with what you’re doing, if you don’t have any problems and no issues, it’s there, but your competitors, when they use it, will have an advantage. AI is rapidly moving. What AI was a few years back is quite different today and will be different tomorrow,” Fox added.
BlueArc technologies is inviting and encouraging individuals from the business sector to join the business conference set on January 24 to be held at Miramar Hotel.
The three hour conference will discuss and uncover strategies to a smarter and safer digital evolution in the business sector.
“If you want to know something about it, if you want to understand what is possible or what’s not possible, then hopefully that will come in there. A lot of these people won’t really want to know about some of the underlying technologies. What they want to know is, how is my business affected? I’m that front end that can translate between business and technology,” Fox said.
“Everything’s ready. I think we’ve got a good amount of people coming from different industries. We’re already done. Everything’s ready to go. I’m really excited about this conference,” Jajjo concluded.
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