Greenlight Consulting has built its reputation by spotting opportunity early and adapting fast. The company, which has evolved from its roots in quality assurance to delivering enterprise grade automation and AI solutions, has shown that willingness throughout its existence—and even before. Co-founder and CEO Shameiz Hemani recognized while completing a degree in electrical engineering that his future lay elsewhere: helping organizations as they solve complex challenges through technology. That early pivot foreshadowed a vision that continues to guide Greenlight’s growth today.
While his personal journey eschewed engineering for consulting, Greenlight’s direction took a similar turn when it was young. It grew out of Hemani’s first independent venture—a quality assurance provider for business intelligence technology founded in 2005. Three years later, that entrepreneurial gamble turned into Greenlight Consulting, when he partnered with several other friends and colleagues.
Their initial focus remained on QA, but it expanded beyond BI to include testing automation software, which sparked the imagination of Greenlight’s founders. By the early 2010s, it was apparent that change, again, was necessary.
“We learned quickly that testing was becoming commoditized,” Hemani remembers. “But we loved the automation side of it, and we were trying to figure out what we wanted to be when we grew up.”
A chance encounter with one of Blue Prism’s founders in 2013 alerted Hemani to the potential RPA was demonstrating as an automation technology. The rest of Greenlight’s founders agreed and its future as an automation services provider was solidified. The company started as a Blue Prism partner but added UiPath in 2018. Hemani says the company serves clients in a range of industries including food & beverage, retail and electronics, but predominantly financial services.
Agents in Charge?
As a UiPath partner, agentic automation has become more emphasized in the services and technology Greenlight is providing to its clients. But Hemani is quick to acknowledge that existing intelligent automation technologies like RPA and IDP are still central to its offering.
“I think there is concern from many of our clients that agentic AI lacks practicality at this point in its development,” he says.
In many ways, Hemani notes, startups are in a better position to take advantage of agentic AI. Digital first organizations have all their technology in the cloud, and they run everything through APIs.
“They don’t need RPA,” he says.
Most companies Greenlight deals with, however, have a more complicated playing field that requires traditional automation technologies.
“They have a lot of old technology, they have a variety of systems in place, some might be on premises, others might be cloud integrated, and they probably have some APIs” he explains. “So, depending on the kind of organization they are, without RPA, they probably couldn’t get to half the data they would need to effectively automate their processes. My smarter customers know RPA works in this kind of environment and they cannot lose focus chasing after the shiny new thing.”
He characterizes the problems agentic automation is experiencing right now as a “last mile” issue.
“I can use a Microsoft agent, a UiPath agent, an Automation Anywhere agent. They’re all capable of a lot of things,” he says. “But if I have to go to your CRM and get an answer and I can’t get that data, then the agent is useless. RPA is foundational. It’s important.”
On the other hand, Hemani points out, the addition of agentic AI to the automation toolkit will be crucial to realizing the truly significant impacts that intelligent automation will have.
And, as organizations are being forced to run leaner, managers are more open than ever to automation solutions and more interested than ever in talking to consultants that can deliver the expertise they need.
“I do see a lot of that movement,” he agrees. “The layer I would add in that we provide is speed and enablement. I think customers still want to have some control, but they know they want augmented help.”
For a process like invoice automation, clients benefit from the many times Greenlight has built similar automations for other clients. A project that took 18 months in 2016 and five months in 2022 now takes eight weeks.
“As a company, it’s been incumbent on us to stay ahead of the technology that’s advancing the industry,” he says. “I know how much effort, time, money, sweat and tears I have to put in to make sure my team is ahead of the curve. Every time we do that, we know we’re reducing our revenues because we can do things faster. But we have to do it that way because I want to deliver value faster. Customers can’t do that. And I think that’s the real win for everyone. Let’s do the newest things that are ready to go, scalable, enterprise grade and bulletproof. Then we’ll teach you along the way so that you can have oversight and understand the system. That’s enablement, and it just creates better relationships.”
The New Path
As Greenlight evolved from a QA and testing consultancy to an automation services provider, Hemani says the firm also has moved away from the traditional consulting model—a few partners with institutional knowledge hire an army of smart young people who they teach that institutional knowledge, which they apply across a wide range of industries and customers.
“That had a ton of value and clients would pay a premium for that expertise,” he notes. “Today, every single human being can have instant access to that institutional knowledge for $30 a month. As consultants today, our value is we have to show clients we can apply that knowledge a lot faster than they could on their own. We can filter the signal from the noise. We’ve already tried three or four different paths to solve a problem, so we can point to the successful one and say, ‘here’s the right way to deliver this thing.’
Hemani says automation has always been an imperative for organizations, whether a company was building it decades ago at a database level or is investing in the most advanced agentic AI-based platform. The trick, he explains, is figuring out which technologies are going to be around long enough to get to a return, and to get that ROI quicker than ever.
“Eventually, you’ll have to refresh every technology. So, if you’re not in a four- or five-year reevaluation cycle, you’re probably doing it wrong. But that means my job is to show clients how to get to value very quickly with whatever automation technology makes the most sense right now. It needs to be better within the first year, so that in five years, when the customer has to adjust to a fully agentic world, it doesn’t feel like they wasted that time. You got your value out of it and now you have to go get it somewhere else.”
