I had the privilege of speaking with Srikrishna Varadharajan, Founder and Director of KritiLabs Technologies, on my podcast last week.
Shri has been in tech-commercial roles for nearly 2 decades. And KritiLabs are into IoT services with biggest portfolio in providing technology for logistics function in the oil & gas industry.
→ 30,000 trips managed daily. → Present across 220 towns.
I asked what made companies actually move to them, and his answer was crystal clear. He mentioned that many of the companies, before they were introduced, were trying to use their vehicle tracking systems as a control system.
He also mentioned that a vehicle tracking system is a monitoring system. It can provide insights, but to act on them, you will need a control system.
Here's what that means in practice:
📍 Monitoring tells you a truck is at location X at 3 PM. 📍 Control lets you lock that truck remotely when something goes wrong.
The business result? Pilferage dropped from 2% to 1.5% for clients. In large oil companies, that 0.5% difference is worth crores on the balance sheet every year.
Here's what I keep seeing with mid-market companies.
They buy the software, get the dashboards, and start calling it digital transformation. Then they wonder why ROI never shows up. The ROI is not in the data you see. It's in the decision you make because of that data.
Shri made one thing very clear. You cannot build on AI before your systems are actually capturing the right data. Most companies skip this step entirely.
Most companies want AI before they have clean, structured, real-time data. But that is the wrong order. Winning at tech adoption has nothing to do with how many tools you have. It comes down to whether your systems help you act or just watch.
Is your current tech setup built for monitoring or for control? What's the gap? Watch the full podcast from the links in the comments.