Latest news with #Jigar
Forbes
19 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
Rethinking ROI: The New Metrics Defining AI Agent Success
Sr. Director of Product at Aisera, Jigar brings 15+ years in enterprise AI, GenAI innovation, agentic automation and product-led growth. As AI agents evolve from basic chatbots to enterprise-grade assistants capable of autonomous decision making, a pressing question arises: How should their success be measured? Traditional metrics like task completion rates or average time to resolution fall short in capturing the depth and complexity of these intelligent systems. In this new era of enterprise AI, organizations must adopt metrics that evaluate how agents operate, how independently they perform and how well they align with business objectives. The Limits Of Traditional Automation Metrics Historically, early AI implementations, primarily rule-based bots, were assessed using narrow KPIs: Did the bot complete the task? How quickly? Was the user satisfied? While helpful at a high level, these metrics are inadequate for today's AI agents that perform multi-step reasoning and dynamic decision-making and operate in unstructured environments. Consider task completion rate. An agent might achieve a 95% success rate, but if it takes 20 redundant steps or bypasses critical processes, the number is misleading. Similarly, a quick resolution time may signal speed, but could also indicate the agent skipped necessary context or validation steps. Simply put, the path to the result matters. Measuring AI agents requires more than tracking outputs—it demands evaluation of the logic, decisions and efficiency that drive those outputs. Enterprises need metrics that assess autonomy, contextual understanding and goal alignment. New Metrics For AI Agent Success To address these gaps, organizations must adopt four key metrics designed specifically for AI agents in enterprise environments: What it measures: How efficiently an agent completes tasks relative to an ideal workflow. AEI compares the actual number of steps an agent takes to a benchmarked optimal path. For example, if a process ideally takes 10 steps but the agent takes 15, its AEI is 0.67. A higher AEI signals clear reasoning, minimal redundancy and smart use of tools. Beyond speed, this metric captures how resourceful and intelligent the agent is in execution. For businesses focused on scalability, AEI helps track efficiency without inflating operational costs. What it measures: The percentage of tasks completed without human intervention. This metric reflects how independently an agent functions. If 80 out of 100 tasks are completed without assistance, the autonomy ratio is 80%. A rising score indicates that the agent is trusted to handle more complex workflows and reduce human workload. Monitoring autonomy over time allows organizations to measure progress and maturity in automation, while identifying tasks that still require manual oversight. What it measures: The agent's ability to incorporate relevant contextual information into its behavior. Enterprise environments are rich in variables—user roles, historical data and real-time updates. Agents need to understand this context to deliver personalized and accurate responses. The Context Awareness Score evaluates how effectively the agent applies this information. Key indicators include whether the agent remembers prior interactions, adjusts responses based on the user's department or adapts to updated instructions. As memory architectures and retrieval models improve, this score becomes a marker of intelligent responsiveness. What it measures: How often the agent strays from its intended purpose or policy. Even capable agents can misinterpret goals or pursue unintended actions. The deviation rate tracks these missteps. For instance, if five of 100 agent decisions are misaligned, the deviation rate is 5%. This metric is especially vital for regulated industries or sensitive functions. It ensures agents don't just perform tasks, but do so responsibly and within defined boundaries. Managing Alignment: Why Deviation Rate Is Critical Among all metrics, deviation rate stands out as the most crucial for governance. Even agents that achieve their goals can cause harm if they violate policy, introduce risk or act unpredictably. To manage deviation, organizations can use several strategies: • Goal Constraints And Guardrails: Define what the agent can and cannot do. Some platforms enforce these rules programmatically to prevent unsafe actions. • Live Monitoring And Alerts: Track agent behavior in real time to flag anomalies early. • Human-In-The-Loop Oversight: Embed human approval for high-stakes tasks or audits to catch alignment issues. • Continuous Tuning: Use observed deviations to improve training data, adjust rules or refine prompts. This layered approach ensures AI agents remain aligned and safe, even as they take on more responsibility. Defining Success In The Age Of AI Agents As AI agents grow more capable, traditional success metrics fall short. Enterprises must assess more than just whether the task was completed; they must understand how intelligently and responsibly the agent operated. The metrics above offer a new framework for evaluating AI in complex business environments and empower organizations to continuously refine agent behavior, identify performance gaps and ensure systems stay aligned with strategic goals. With the right measurements in place, enterprises can scale AI agents with confidence, knowing they are not only automating work, but doing so efficiently, autonomously and with precision. Forbes Business Development Council is an invitation-only community for sales and biz dev executives. Do I qualify?
India.com
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- India.com
Meet actor who is Karisma Kapoor's brother, both share same birthday, his debut film was superhit, then gave 40 flop films; his name is...
Relationships in the film industry are often as colourful as they are intriguing. The bond between Karisma Kapoor and Aftab Shivdasani is one such example. Karisma entered the Hindi film industry as a leading actress in the 1990s, while Aftab began his career as a child artist. What many people don't know is that their connection goes beyond the film world; they are also related by blood. Yes, you read it right! How are Karisma Kapoor and Aftab Shivdasani related? Interestingly, both of them share the same birthday: June 25. Karisma was born on June 25, 1974, in Mumbai. She is the daughter of actors Randhir Kapoor and Babita. Aftab was born on June 25, 1978, also in Mumbai. His father is Prem Shivdasani and his mother is Putli Shivdasani Irani. Karisma's mother, Babita, was Babita Shivdasani before her marriage. Aftab's father, Prem Shivdasani, was the nephew of Babita's father, Hari Shivdasani. By this relation, Babita is Aftab's aunt, making Aftab Karisma's maternal cousin. Karisma Kapoor's career growth Looking at their careers, Karisma Kapoor left her studies midway to pursue a career in Bollywood. She began her film journey at 16 with Prem Qaidi , which was released in 1991. In 1992, she starred alongside veteran actor Jackie Shroff in the film Police Officer . Films like Jigar and Anari helped her gain recognition as an actress. By 1994, her career began to gain momentum with hits such as Raja Babu, Khuddar, Andaz Apna Apna, and Suhaag. In the 1990s, Karisma Kapoor formed a successful on-screen pairing with Govinda in hit comedy films like Coolie No. 1, Saajan Chale Sasural , and Hero No. 1 . The 1996 film Raja Hindustani made her a superstar and earned her first Filmfare Award. She went on to receive a National Award for her performance in 1997's Dil To Pagal Hai. She continued to win acclaim with films like Biwi No. 1, Hum Saath-Saath Hain, Fiza, and Zubeidaa. After 2003, she took a step back from acting but made a comeback in 2012 with Dangerous Ishhq . She later entered the OTT space with the web series Mentalhood in 2020, followed by Murder Mubarak in 2024. Aftab Shivdasani's career growth Aftab Shivdasani began his career as a child artist. He appeared in a Farex Baby advertisement at just 14 months old and went on to feature in numerous TV commercials. He acted as a child artist in popular films like Mr. India, Shahenshah, and ChaalBaaz, all released in 1987. In 1999, Aftab made his debut as a lead actor in Ram Gopal Varma's film Mast, for which he received the Zee Cine Award for Best Debut Actor. In 2001, he won hearts with his negative role in Kasoor, earning a Filmfare nomination for Best Villain. He went on to showcase his acting skills in films like Love Ke Liye Kuch Bhi Karega, Pyaar Ishq Aur Mohabbat, and Kya Yehi Pyaar Hai . Hit films like Hungama (2003) and Masti (2004) made him a comedy star. Although some of his films flopped afterward, hits like the 2012 horror film 1920: The Evil Returns and the multi-starrer Grand Masti brought him back into the spotlight. In 2021, he appeared in the web series Special Ops 1.5 , where his performance was highly appreciated.
Time of India
13-06-2025
- Time of India
Lender killed by kin for asking them to repay Rs 25,000 loan
Rajkot: A dispute over Rs 25,000 loan turned fatal for the lender who was allegedly murdered his two relative in Jakhaniya village of Kutch's Mandvi taluka on Thursday. Chintan Gor, the victim, was stabbed to death by Jigar Gor (31) and Jay Gor (20). Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Jigar was enraged as Chintan kept reminding him to repay Rs 25,000 he had lent him a few months ago. The Local Crime Branch (LCB) arrested both assailants from Madhapar village later in the day. On Thursday, Chintan again called Jigar requesting repayment as he needed the money for a family function. Jigar asked Chintan to come to Jakhaniya village to collect the money. When Chintan and Priyen reached there, Jigar told him to come at a nearby temple. As soon as they reached there, Jigar assaulted him while Jay stabbed him with a knife. Priyen rushed Chintan to a hospital where he succumbed. Investigation officer H M Vaghela of Kodai police station said Chintan was involved in agricultural work. Jigar is also a farmer, while Jay works at a roadside food stall.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
U.S. electricity rates are rising, and utilities are making more money than ever
U.S. electricity costs are soaring. The average price of electricity hit 18 cents per kilowatt-hour in April 2025, up 35% from five years ago. It's significantly outpacing inflation. According to a recent PowerLines report, nearly 80 million Americans struggle to pay their utility bills, yet prices are expected to increase. In early 2025, U.S. gas and electric utilities either requested or were approved for rate hikes totaling roughly $20 billion. Utility companies say the price increases are necessary to upgrade our aging grid. Some also point to clean energy, specifically solar homeowners, as the reason electric bills are rising. But researchers have looked into the numbers and say they don't add up. 'Utility spending has been out of control for years and years and years,' said Brad Heavner, Executive Director of the California Solar and Storage Association (CALSSA). Stay informed on the latest industry news—delivered to your inbox each month. Sign up for EnergySage's newsletter. Your electric bill is divided into two sections: Supply and delivery. The supply part covers the cost of generating the electricity you use, while delivery is the cost of delivering the electricity to your home. Price fluctuations will always surround energy generation, whether it's coal, gas, or renewables. But when we asked Jigar Shah—an entrepreneur and podcaster who was formerly the Director of the Loans Program at the Department of Energy—he said it's not generation but the distribution part of our electric bills that has 'been going haywire.' 'Distribution used to be 20%, today, it's 50% of your bill,' said Jigar. Below is an example of an electric bill from a Massachusetts home. The electricity supply is about $220, which is still high, but the delivery charges are nearly $315, or 60% of the bill. So the question becomes, why are energy delivery costs rising? Jigar says our electricity demands are too great for the current grid infrastructure. 'People are buying all sorts of things that use electricity, whether hair dryers, electric vehicles, heat pumps, electric water heaters, or whatever it is. And every time you do that, the utility says, 'We need to be able to upgrade the distribution grid so that you can do whatever you want. You can turn everything on in your house simultaneously, and we have to be able to serve you.' That bargain is getting way too expensive,' said Jigar. He's right—Americans are using electricity like never before. This isn't necessarily bad because home electrification is excellent for our planet and health. The problem is that much of our power grid was built in the 1960s and 1970s, when people had one TV, no computers or internet, and only 12% of homes had air conditioning. Jesse Buchsbaum, energy economist and fellow at Resources of the Future (REF), said our electric bills are directly tied to utilities' investments to upgrade transmission and distribution infrastructure. (FYI—transmission lines are the high voltage wires that carry electricity from a power plant to your city or town.) 'In many places, the grid is aging, and so there are necessary upgrades that are needed, especially as climate risk and natural disaster risk are rising,' Jesse said. He also raises the valid argument of a changing climate. Over the last decade, we've seen record-hot summers and historic freezes, which only put a bigger strain on the grid. For example, in 2024, Hurricane Helene shut off power to more than two million North Carolinians. In 2021, the ice storm in Texas left millions of people powerless in freezing temperatures for days. To prevent these events from happening, utilities need to strengthen and expand our current power grid—and we're the ones paying for it. '[Rate increases] are needed to expand the grid, both in the generation sense, but also to build the poles and wires that will transport the power to those new sources of demand, " Jesse said. 'A lot of those costs end up being borne by both residential and commercial industrial rate payers.' While our electricity needs have increased and our grid needs upgrades, some experts argue that utilities are hiking our rates more than they need to. In a report published earlier this year, Brad and his team at CALSSA said the real reason rates are rising in California is 'out of control utility spending.' CALSSA hired an independent economist to investigate 20 years of utility rate case filings in the state. Brad said that when utilities claim they need more money to fix and expand the distribution grid, regulators are 'unable to say no' and approve rate hikes that may not be necessary. 'And the utilities get away with it—they're laughing year after year,' Brad said. 'Now, after two decades of effectively playing this game, their profits have soared and so have electric rates.' While the CALSSA report is specific to California, utility mismanagement of funds is a nationwide issue. RMI released a report in November 2024 highlighting how utilities have invested money into small transmission projects within their territories. The report says these small, local projects have very little oversight from state and federal regulators, earn the utilities guaranteed profits, and cost us ratepayers way more than if they were to invest in bigger, regional projects—ones that would require more overhead and planning. Report co-author Claire Wayner told Canary Media that transmission planning is like 'two cars being driven on two different roads in parallel. The regional road is like a toll road with all these checkpoints: identify regional needs, open competitive bidding windows, identify the costs and benefits…The local road has no speed limits. [Utilities] can build as much as they want.' Here's some proof in the pudding: A 2024 analysis by Grid Strategies found that transmission project spending hit an all-time high in 2023, but only 55 miles of new transmission lines were added that year, compared to a record 4,000 miles added in 2013. Yet, our electricity rates were about 20% less in 2013. 'We've authorized the utilities to spend a lot of money, and they haven't spent most of that money yet,' Brad said. 'It's really criminal—in some cases, we've paid them to make upgrades and fix transmission towers, and they haven't done it.' While millions of Americans are unable to pay their monthly bills, an analysis by the Energy and Policy Institute shows the country's largest publicly owned utilities pay their CEOs between $17 and $33 million a year. The CEOs earned a collective $647 million in 2023, a 9% increase from 2022. The 2025 analysis shows that the collective payout dropped to $530 million in 2024. However, it states that most of the 54 utilities examined increased their executive payouts year over year. Some utilities also claim that homes with solar panels are increasing your bills—a theory called 'the solar cost shift.' The idea is that if solar homeowners generate their own power, utilities make less money. But because solar homeowners still have to use the grid sometimes, the utility raises everyone else's rates to compensate. It sort of paints solar panel owners as freeloaders. Jigar says there is some cost shift involved when people go solar, but it's 'far smaller than what people are suggesting.' 'I think the bigger problem is that it feels bad when your bills are going up. And a bunch of people that have the means to put solar on their roof are getting a good deal, and all of your neighbors are not getting a good deal,' Jigar said. Most of us—whether we have solar panels or not—can look at our utility bill and clearly see charges related to solar panels. So, utilities are making us all pay extra while our neighbors with solar enjoy lower electric bills? It doesn't sound fair, but Brad and the CALLSSA team crunched the numbers and said the solar cost shift is extremely inflated and created with 'faulty math.' 'It's really very creative how [utilities] have built this methodology and storyline that has sunk in with a lot of policymakers. And they push it so hard and in such a widespread fashion that it's difficult to counter,' Brad said. It's not just California; the nonprofit Solar United Neighbors compiled numerous studies from Mississippi to Maine to Nevada and 'found little or no evidence for a 'cost shift' from rooftop solar customers.' Similarly, a report from Brookings found that the economic benefits of solar homeowners not only outweigh the costs but, in most cases, provide a 'net benefit' for the utility and non-solar ratepayers. 'People are catching on to that fact, and the data is pretty clear how much they've increased their spending,' said Brad. 'To deflect attention away from them, they've come up with this elaborate 'cost shift' story saying solar customers are to blame.' Utilities say they have to increase our rates to bring more electricity onto the grid during moments of high demand, like on a hot summer day when everyone is cranking their AC. But Brad explained that one of the biggest holes in the cost shift theory is that when homes generate their own electricity, they actually help offset this peak power demand. 'Normally, you expand the grid in order to serve a higher peak load. We've kept peak load constant, yet they're spending three times as much money as they did 15 years ago,' Brad said. Utilities are painting solar owners as the scapegoat for high rates, but really, it's the opposite. Research shows rooftop solar saved California ratepayers $1.5 billion in 2024 alone. Home solar supplies much-needed electricity to the grid, but Brad claims that throws a wrench in the utility's profits. 'Utilities feel threatened by customer solar and storage because it reduces their profit motive, their ability to rate base grid expansion, which is what drives their profits,' Brad explains. 'In California, there's enough solar that they feel like we're really taking weight off the grid and causing them to build less infrastructure, hurting their profits. So they've gone after us in a very strong way here, and that is spilling over into other states, sadly, where you don't have nearly as much solar. And yet this utility playbook is playing out across the country.' It comes down to simple supply and demand: Utilities are in the business of generating electricity and selling it to us. When you produce your own electricity with solar, that threatens their business model and their large paychecks. To try and simply answer the question of why your electric bill is so high, it's because our power grid is old and overloaded. And the way most utilities are fixing it is akin to slapping a very expensive band-aid on a gaping wound. Oh, and we're paying for that band-aid.
New Indian Express
20-05-2025
- Politics
- New Indian Express
Jigar Nagda Interview: Ignorance is what ails the oppressed communities
Batti, especially when Bheru gets turned down every time he approaches the officials, might remind audiences of Nawazuddin Siddique's Manjhi – The Mountain Man, where the lead knocks on every door to make a road for his village. Not all government schemes reach the last person in the social ladder, and in most cases, this last person will either be a Dalit or an Adivasi. Jigar affirms, "In both the cases (Batti and Manjhi), the grieving party belongs to the downtrodden community. The reason is the last mile connectivity of schemes is the responsibility of a Sarpanch and the Panchayat authorities. Belonging to a dominant caste enables a person to wield power and it is that power that makes someone a village head. Their inherent caste bias gets them worked up with the prospect of treating the Dalit/tribal people on par with those in their community. Also, corruption plays a huge role. Sarpanchs like the one I show in Batti will put up a facade of being do-gooders and lend money to the tribal people only to get the lion's share of their crops as interest, but will shut the door if approached for amenities. This way, even the land-owning tribal person will be at a disadvantaged position. When people can discriminate against people based on their caste just for the sake of 'superiority,' will they not do it if they can make themselves richer? The oppressed are falling prey to exploitation or accepting their status quo as 'normal' due to their ignorance." Bheru is the 'black sheep' who wants to break free of this inhumane system, coupled with the generational trauma, and as a result, faces stiff resistance from several corners. Incidentally, his father Nathu (Mahendra Shrivas) is the first hurdle. "Being denied basic rights is Hobson's choice for Nathu, but he chides his son, asking, 'Haven't our women lived in houses without power?' This is, of course, to dodge the guilt of his inability to obtain electricity, resulting in a close one's death. Beneath his rude opposition to his son's 'rebelliousness,' he feels helpless, and even tells Bheru that if he was as active as his son, he might have done a lot more in his youth," says Jigar, who points out the differences in the father figures in the film, including the Sarpanch.
