Pankaj Kumar’s Three-Day Test

Every month, the numbers had to agree. Bank statements, credit-card records and the books kept for American cities all needed to reconcile. Pankaj Kumar’s company, PM AM, had five business days to deliver the finished accounts. In December 2022, he described getting the work done in three. For a technology founder, it was an unusually concrete way to explain progress: the calendar had two days left over.

The job involved alarm administration, a business in which a city’s ordinance becomes a succession of registrations, notices, payments and records. Kumar said PM AM was serving more than 125 cities in that operation at the time. A missed deadline would have a municipal audience. An elegant presentation would be unlikely to improve its mood.

His team used UiPath automation to handle the recurring work. Kumar reported annual savings of just under $1 million and said the system could accommodate substantial growth without a corresponding increase in staffing. These were his figures for that project, at that moment. They also offer a useful introduction to the founder: he explained the technology through the obligation it helped him keep.

A sales method looking for a keyboard

Long before that accounting exercise, Kumar had made a smaller conversion. His sales team had a formal way of approaching potential customers. By 2003, that method had become a software tool. A routine had acquired a keyboard, and the founder had found something he could sell.

He had arrived in the United States from India in 1996 as a technology executive. After leaving that role in 2000, he began building his own business from a Los Colinas office. The early operation was small; the ambition already crossed borders. There was a team in India as well as a presence in Texas.

Kumar described his approach to the marketplace as “professional, scientific and disciplined.” That choice of words is revealing. Sales can be presented as personal magic, an activity performed by people with mysterious gifts and very good shoes. Kumar was discussing a method that could be made explicit. Once a method can be described, software has something to work with.

PM AM dates its founding team to 2001, with six software professionals and a Dallas headquarters. The company’s name now appears on products for municipal administration, employee training and artificial intelligence. The sales tool belongs near the beginning of that story because it shows the same practical move: start with work people already do, then give it a repeatable structure.

“professional, scientific and disciplined”

Kumar on his approach to the marketplace, 2003

The city is a demanding customer

Kumar brought experience from larger organizations. Before PM AM, he led Birla Consultancy and Software Services and worked on information technology for Aditya Birla Group businesses in India and Thailand. He also held an honorary role advising an Indian state’s chief minister on technology strategy. His work included planning how a government would organize and oversee its technology initiatives.

With PM AM, government became a customer in a particularly specific form. The company began working with American law-enforcement agencies in 2003. In Richardson, Texas, its work on alarm permits connected the city, alarm businesses and residents. Each group needed the records to make sense, even though each arrived with a different reason for caring.

Richardson police chief Jim Spivey described three ingredients in the program: customer service, relationships and data management. The details were ordinary and consequential. Residents needed a dependable place to register and pay. The department needed useful reports. Alarm operators needed their information kept current. A permit system has many opportunities to become somebody else’s problem.

The municipal record supplies its own test of usefulness. Oakland’s 2016 review of its false-alarm program recorded 9,077 false alarms in 2010 and 6,927 in 2015, a decline of about 24 percent. PM AM administered the program during part of that period. The figures describe the broader city program, including its ordinance and enforcement, rather than an effect attributable to software alone.

That distinction matters to understanding Kumar’s business. The software operates inside a civic arrangement: rules, people, notices, payments and decisions. Its value depends on how those pieces work together. A declining count of avoidable calls is meaningful because officers have other work waiting. The administrative layer earns attention by helping the rest of the system function.

Three days, and room to grow

In Kumar’s 2022 account, the accounting problem had grown out of this service business. PM AM needed to collect financial records from different institutions and match them against its own books. The work recurred every month. Automation gave the company a way to make that cycle less dependent on adding people as the client list grew.

There is an interesting consequence for a founder who also sells software development services. His own operation becomes a place to test the argument he makes to customers. The question becomes practical: can the system handle the necessary records, produce the required output and meet the date promised? A city finance team can inspect the answer without becoming interested in the machinery.

PM AM received finance and accounting recognition at the UiPath Automation Excellence Awards in 2022. Kumar’s accompanying explanation lingered on the mechanics and the capacity to expand. The award was a useful occasion to speak; the recurring deadline supplied the substance. Next month’s bank statements would arrive with the same stubborn indifference to ceremony.

What the grocery aisle knew

Another application took Kumar into the grocery store. Town Talk Foods, a Texas retailer, used PM AM’s i3Di video analytics to understand how customers moved and shopped. The store had transactions. It wanted a clearer account of the activity around them: visits, empty shelves and the hours when people actually appeared.

At the Arlington location, the analysis challenged assumptions about the audience. Marketing had concentrated on women and baby boomers; the observed customer mix pointed toward men and millennials. Keeping the store open late also deserved another look: shopping after 7 p.m. contributed less than 2 percent of revenue in the case study. Customer requests and customer behavior had supplied different advice.

The system combined cameras, processing in the store and a dashboard. It also identified shelf outages so staff could respond. Kumar’s stated principle was that “in order to manage, one needs to measure.” The example gives those words something tangible to describe. An empty shelf is an awkwardly persuasive management report.

Town Talk reached its 2021 sales target two months early after using the insights to adjust its operations. That is a result from one retailer, under its own conditions. Its interest lies in the decisions behind it: whom to advertise to, when to staff the store and where merchandise needed attention. Kumar’s technology entered through familiar questions a shopkeeper already had reasons to ask.

The colleague beyond the dashboard

The public record also places Kumar alongside employees doing work that had no software release attached. In March 2015, he joined a twenty-person PM AM team distributing clothes in Mumbai. Oniel Gracious, who leads the company’s India operation, participated as well. The activity took the colleagues to the Vakola Bridge area and Bisleri Junction.

Earlier that year, employees had raised more than 40,000 rupees for the Umang Foundation’s Kids Education Kit initiative. Kumar welcomed their contribution and described the company’s responsibilities to the surrounding community. These were modest, specified activities: a collection inside the organization, a distribution outside it, employees taking part together.

They add another scale to a career often described through departments, clients and platforms. A corporate timeline measures expansion in products and locations. A clothing distribution records who turned up. Both belong in an account of an executive whose company operates across the United States and India. The people doing the work are part of the story, even when there is no graph for their afternoon.

Kumar has also appeared in the company’s Pankaj Talks videos, with episodes devoted to innovation and mergers and acquisitions. The subjects fit the working life around him: building new offerings and considering how businesses combine. They let a reader encounter his presentation directly, beyond a job title and a list of company milestones.

The next deadline

PM AM’s newer products extend into voice analytics and software testing. VAi analyzes customer conversations; EverQA supports quality assurance. The company announced EverQA in November 2025. A founder who once turned a sales approach into software now leads a business offering tools for other repeatable activities: reviewing a call, checking a release, understanding what happened in a store.

The government work continues alongside those offerings. Bellaire, Texas, introduced a PM AM false-alarm tracking system with annual permit fees beginning in October 2025. In February 2026, PM AM announced completion of a SOC 2 audit. For customers handing over operational records, the controls around a service form part of the purchase, as surely as its features do.

These developments give Kumar’s ambitions a defined shape. His company is selling technology that helps organizations examine and carry out everyday work. Each new setting brings different requirements. A retail manager looking at a shelf and a city employee checking a permit will judge usefulness in their own terms. The founder’s task is to build a business capable of satisfying both.

There is a pleasing lack of glamour in the three-day test. It gives the grand language of technology a desk, a stack of statements and a due date. Kumar’s career has included international operations, public-sector advice and artificial intelligence. The accounting close provides a smaller picture, and an unusually legible one: the books agree, the customer has the report, and the month can move on.