Rebhav Bharadwaj

Rebhav Bharadwaj is co-founder and chief executive of Dodge AI, a San Francisco, California, company whose agents maintain enterprise software such as SAP, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics. He runs it with Aditya Thakur, the chief technology officer, whom he met at BITS Pilani, an engineering university in India. Dodge works from San Francisco and Bengaluru, India.

Born into systems integration

Bharadwaj learned the problem in his mother’s business. “My mom had a consultancy business helping large enterprises with systems integration and when I left university, she persuaded me to help her out,” he told Forbes. He found the work frustrating because at the companies they served, “making the simplest of changes would often take days or weeks.” On The Offline Network podcast he put it this way: “I think I was slightly tricked into it and slightly born into it as well.”

Before Dodge, he and Thakur sold AI agents for accounts payable work around 2022 and 2023, with L’Oréal among their customers. They found that the systems underneath, such as SAP and Oracle Fusion Cloud, were often still running on companies’ own servers. Dodge set out to bring those systems up to date.

Agents as the maintenance crew

“For a long time, the only way to maintain enterprise systems was to add more people,” Bharadwaj told Forbes. He estimates that for every $1 a company spends on SAP licenses, about $6 goes to implementation and upkeep. Dodge connects to ticketing systems such as ServiceNow and Jira, talks with the employee who filed a ticket, reads the custom code and configuration built up over years, and fixes the issue, with Dodge’s consultants checking the work. He describes the goal as a setup where “agents do 90% of the work and humans are just verifiers of the upkeep of the system.”