What we talked about
Philip Samuelraj is the Founder and CEO of Techjays. He argues that the real opportunity is workflow reimagination, not simple automation: agentic AI can handle repetitive work while humans move upstream into review, approval, audit, and higher level problem solving.
Philip and Federico compare this shift to past disruptions like Excel replacing manual ledgers and ATMs changing banking roles. Philip says the biggest risk is people tying identity to old jobs, while the upside is redirecting human effort toward problems that were previously too expensive to solve.
Show notes
Philip Samuelraj’s father was a banker in India when bank unions were actively fighting against computers and ATMs in the 1980s, convinced the machines would destroy their livelihoods. That family history gives Philip a long lens on disruption, and he uses it to argue that every major technology wave redirects human potential rather than eliminating it. At Techjays he applies that conviction to agentic AI, signing contracts not on hours or headcount but on business outcomes, and only getting paid when they are delivered.
What we covered
- Philip draws a sharp distinction between “workflow automation” and “workflow reimagination.” All existing workflows were designed with a human in every step; enterprise software was built to visualize and report on what humans do. Reimagining a workflow with agentic AI means asking where humans actually need to be in the loop for review or audit, and then designing the system around that much smaller role, a fundamentally different exercise from adding AI to an existing process.
- The quality curve for agentic systems is exponential: getting from zero to 80 percent accuracy is relatively straightforward because foundation models are already capable. Getting from 80 to 90 percent requires serious engineering rigor and reinforcement learning infrastructure. From 90 to 95 is harder than the entire 0-to-90 journey. From 99 to 99.9 is harder still, which is why deploying a proof-of-concept that works four out of five times into production is a mistake most vendors make.
- Techjays structures its work as AI builders paired with AI validators. The validators are obsessively focused on data and outcomes, cataloging all possible inputs, defining what the correct output looks like for each, and running the reinforcement learning loop when the system fails. A human in the loop reviews those failures and feeds the learning cycle; without that loop, the system plateaus.
- The most common mistake Philip sees is companies slapping AI on top of existing inefficient workflows and then calling a 10-to-30 percent improvement a success. The second-most-common mistake is treating a proof of concept, where the model delivers something impressive in a single-shot demo, as equivalent to a production-grade system.
- On the “gold rush” of AI vendors: Philip is direct that Techjays is in what he estimates is the 0.1 percent of companies that claim to build AI and can actually do it. He has had to take over projects from other vendors where none of the prior work could be salvaged. His response to hype is to point to whether a vendor signs on outcomes, if they don’t, the incentive to deliver is not there.
- On AGI: Philip says he had a moment 11 months before the conversation when he tested a voice demo from sesame.com and realized within 90 seconds he had stopped treating it like a bot. He expects conversational agents to reach an inflection point, probably in a few years, where users prefer talking to them over a call center agent, and that moment will be the practical marker most people use for what “general” AI feels like, regardless of how academics define it.
About Philip
Philip Samuelraj is the Founder and CEO of Techjays, an AI engineering firm whose mission is to help organizations reimagine their operations with AI. He previously served as a program manager at Google focused on Gen AI for support intelligence, and earlier built his career in QA, testing, and delivery leadership at Cognizant, Bosch, NetApp, and Infosys.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipclementssamuelraj
- Website: https://techjays.com
Episode 127 of the PreVetted Podcast.