Ramdas Shenoyy speaks to Mr. Roy, Founding Member & Head – Analytics, AI, Machine Learning & Emerging Tech Practice at Thoucentric.
How do you see the world of Analytics and its importance in business and life?
As AI and machine learning continue to develop, the way we use analytics also continues to grow and change. While in the past, businesses focused on harvesting descriptive data about their customers and products, now they are into pulling both predictive and prescriptive learnings from the historical data that keeps on growing.
Customer expectations of brands are increasing — they want access to what they need, when and where they need it, regardless of channel or touchpoint.1 Without robust digital data and analytics, organizations can only cater to a fuzzy picture of buyers’ needs and behaviors.
We foresee a very bright future for predictive analytics. Our customers are challenging us in ways that we wouldn’t have expected even 5 years ago.
Our customers are at the helm of analytics evolution and we are always kept on our feet and build solutions that defy ‘reality’
AI and ML are being abusively used in most product marketing communications, how genuine are these communications?
Unfortunately AI ML have become buzzwords and I have seen even automation providers positioning their ware as AI ML driven, However our clients are also moving up the learning curve! Almost every client I work with has a resident team of data scientists or at least Citizen Data Scientists. A grasp of quants is a must for almost everyone today. No wonder we get challenged by our clients and get spurred to do even better.
Is decision-making a science, art, or a gut feeling in life and business?
Decision making is all encompassing in the sense that it’s a combination of science, math, arts and our innate common sense. It borrows heavily from not just math, stats and engineering but also from day to day observations and being able to infer from our surroundings!
What would be your advice to young and mid-level managers who want to venture into analytics, AI, and ML?
Just begin wherever you are at the moment! Look for opportunities to invoke analytics in your day to day decision making. by looking at historical patterns. See if you can spot micro trends. A simple time series plot reveals a lot and so does a XY scatter. Enroll in online courses offered by Coursera and Udacity. Engage your teams and challenge them on finding a nugget from numbers, which could alter the course of business by challenging your assumptions. You will see the magic unravel.
What are the emerging technologies that businesses should invest in to be really tech-ready?
Fortunately the best things in life come for free! We as data scientists, ML engineers and solution architects are suckers for Opensource . The world of Python & R, the world of Hadoop and MongoDB! Best of data scientists and ML engineers have spawned from Open Source. But the Openware while enabling data engineering and modeling, need broad basing in terms of deployment. Thats where the power of Cloud is unleashed! At the least, a company should have best of IT infrastructure, that can scale with business growth.
What is Thoucentric?
Thoucentric is a niche management consulting firm, solving complex business problems across industries and functions.We help our clients take better business decisions, optimize their operations and generate higher returns for their stakeholders. Our focus area has been around IT aspects of Supply Chain Management.
In 2017, Analytics and Emerging Technologies were inducted into Thoucentric. We began by addressing traditional Demand & Supply side problems using Machine Learning, for leading CPG companies with global footprint.
Over time the assets we built in Thoucentric, showed promises of being offered as platformized offerings, leveraging the power of Cloud and Big Data.
Today we have floated a subsidiary called Thoucentric Labs, which specifically works towards building assets focussed on Demand Sensing, Predictive Quality & Reliability Engineering as well as Commodity Price Forecasting.