AI - A Partner in Creating Progress

Rajesh Kumar Rathinaswamy Karthigesan consistently bets on cutting-edge technologies, keeping the company ahead of the curve.

Apr 15, 2025 - 07:24

When Rajesh Kumar Rathinaswamy Karthigesan (widely called as RK within the industry) completed college in 2009, recession had sunk its teeth into the global economy and the job market. Undeterred, RK, a BTech in computer science from Jaya Engineering College, Anna University, took to freelancing. He started working on the side, while in his third year at college, an experience that proved to be handy during the recession.

As a freelancer, RK developed websites and web applications for clients in the US. He also worked as a trainer, teaching Perl programming language at institutes in Chennai, the city where he grew up.

Always curious and ready to learn, RK was looking beyond the limits of the courseware even when in college. He was adept at handling projects around open-source software and contributed to plugins for Linux environments.

He began working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) during college.“I was very keen on AI from early on. One of my final year projects was related to identifying screens to determine whether a particular employee is working, sharing the screen and so on. We also created AI tools to capture data, like formatting pin codes and phone numbers,” recalled RK, who is now Chief Solutions Architect at Stellar Innovations, a Bangalore-based IT company. Stellar Innovations focuses on developing solutions for the title and mortgage industries, mainly for the US market.

Responding to Market Needs

As a freelance web developer, and later in his stint with a banking software services provider based in Chennai, RK embraced cloud computing and serverless environments wholeheartedly. “Wherever I work, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been my preferred cloud provider. This is because of their support and the wide range of services they offer, compared to other cloud providers. AWS also gives us direct connections with a dedicated RM (Relationship Manager). So the support is end-to-end,” he says.

Among other attributes that make AWS attractive to RK is its culture of continuous innovation. “They responded to the changing market needs in AI with Bedrock. With other providers there was a steep learning curve for AI. Amazon Bedrock made it very simple to use,” he added. Amazon Bedrock offers a fully managed service that makes high-performing foundation models (FMs), both from inhouse as well as leading AI companies, accessible through a unified API. So, with Bedrock, companies can choose from a wide range of FMs, and get the model best suited for their use case.

Responding to market needs, much like AWS does, is essential in today’s environment as the pace of advancements in technology has changed dramatically. “There were always small changes happening frequently, but the big change came once every five years or 10 years. Now with LLMs (Large language Models) it’s a complete paradigm shift with rapid advancements in technology,” he says.

After several eventful years freelancing, working with a Chennai-based banking services provider, RK turned to entrepreneurship. He founded an internet of things (IoT) based venture to monitor the function of solar power plants. When unexpected floods in Chennai impacted the startup’s functioning, he chose to join

a business process outsourcing company, before joining Stellar Innovations in 2018.

The company provides a range of technology services including real estate taxation, property due diligence, mortgage solutions, title and settlement solutions, and more. It specializes in extracting data from scanned documents, analyzing them and providing actionable insights to its clients. “We created a framework, like a core banking framework, which can be used by title and mortgage investors,” RK explains.

Stellar Innovations handles the back-end processes, for example, handling the entire workflow - from loan applications to loan disposals, and even loan servicing. It has created specific products to deliver those solutions. All these functions rely on a robust technological backbone and scalable solutions to meet varying workloads. Stellar Innovations banks on AWS to provide that seamless, reliable, secure and scalable experience. “Our backend applications are primarily serverless microservices, which run on AWS Lambda. We connect with AWS Bedrock for our foundation models. We also use SageMaker to build, train and deploy machine learning (ML) models. With AWS, we don’t have to worry about scalability, and our running costs are also low,” says RK.

Stellar also uses other services like AWS gateway and EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) for deploying applications, load balancing and so on. “AWS services help us scale our applications as per customer needs. We pay only for what we use.”

This ease of use is ideal in today’s collaborative era, where AI has become a partner in progress. “AI increases our efficiency. It is not going to replace us,” says RK emphatically. For example, before AI, completing one mortgage cycle would take five days at the very least. Now, Stellar Innovations is able to close the entire cycle in a day and a half. AI assists by comprehending the data in different documents, understanding the problems and providing actionable insights. That in turn reduces the work of the underwriter and eventually saves time.

AI shifts: when science fiction meets reality!

RK observes that industries are ready to adopt AI that is both responsible and data sensitive. Additionally, he believes that technical knowhow is critical to the successful deployment of AI projects. Many companies that have attempted to leverage AI are eager to know more about how to run, scale AI capabilities beyond proof of concept.

Another concern in the industry is in regards to the cost benefit equation. RK is certain that the cost of AI will come down over the years. “In the future, say, another 2-3 years, smart device makers will embed a microprocessor which can handle AI tasks, for instance, on a smartphone, creating a small AI conversation agent that is built in your phone”, says RK.

This, he believes, will enhance user efficiency and increase the role of AI agents in our daily lives. “Robotics will advance, resembling what we've seen in movies like Iron Man and I, Robot,” added RK, who is based in Bangalore.

In his spare time, he loves spending time with his family and watching movies.

Aligning with the latest in AI

RK keeps up with industry trends by attending AWS conferences. As a matter of fact, Stellar Innovations was recently awarded the AWS AI/ML market disruptor of the year for SMBs.

Where does he see AI over the next five to 10 years? “AI will appear on phones. Companies are working on GPU processors for smartphones. So, people will get a lot of AI assistance, real time and on the move.” Generating videos and images will become a lot easier and lower cost. This will give a boost to jobs in areas like entertainment and marketing. Businesses will also reduce processing time for transactions. They will see productivity improvements among employees, even as human-machine interactions become more like routine conversations.

RK added, “Amazon Alexa introduced us to conversing with machines. And it has improved a lot since the early days, answering all kinds of queries and even assisting in several tasks. Likewise, our interactions with machines will also improve, becoming more conversational. Rather than replacing humans, machines will actually become better at assisting us in various tasks. So much so, that at some point, we will forget that a machine is answering. That’s how natural it will be”, he shared.