In our next series of interaction, Anand Ganesh of BRIDGEi2i shares his views on how AI is affecting human lives. With years of experience of across sales, marketing, product management, product marketing consulting, he currently holds the post of the VP of strategy and products at BRIDGEi2i. He specialises in analytics, data-driven marketing, technology markets. Consumer goods and retail, business-to-business marketing and others.
Analytics India Magazine: How is AI affecting your life and work? What are some of the ways that you are personally using AI? Please elaborate on the use cases.
Anand Ganesh: I would probably look at that a little differently. I think we are blessed to be living in this age. We have evolved from the industrial age to the digital age, where technological investments have brought changes in the fundamental ways that we function. Though there is a certain degree of uncertainty as none of us have seen the model, but being a part of the transformational journey, I am sure the journey will be beautiful. It’s an opportunity to harness some of these capabilities and technologies in the best way we can. I’m really excited to be part of the journey.
AIM: What are some of the practical implementations of AI that have revolutionised the way we as humans function?
AG: AI is in an early stage and there is still a lot that needs to be discovered and invented. Having said that I see the impact that AI is helping us improve the quality of life in three important buckets.
- Improving and managing productivity — from personal finances to education
- Resource deployments in sectors such as agriculture, production, transportation
- Unique unsolved problems such as medical drug discovery, disease and prediction
In these cases, AI technologies can help us significantly improve in these areas and find answers to some of the questions in these three buckets.
AIM: What are some of the ways that BRIDGEi2i is adopting AI? Please highlight some use cases with your success stories?
AG: Today AI is embedded within the DNA of an organisation where all our solutions and products embed a significant component of AI within what we deliver to our clients. For us, as we provide business solutions, we look at some of these paradigms.
- Enhancing customer experience
- Optimising operational effectiveness
- Helping appliance and stakeholders evaluate and take advantage of completely new business models with which they can serve their customers effectively
We embed AI frameworks that help us understand the streams of patterns high velocity, high volume patterns and be able to detect these anomalies. So areas of customer personalisation, customer experience enhancement, anomaly detection, fraud detection are some areas where we use AI. Recommendation is another area where we use AI. The other areas are optimisation and providing an immersive experience through voice and interactive conversations.
AIM: What are some of the AI products offered by BRIDGEi2i?
AG: There are two product investments from BRIDGEi2i where AI is creating a significant impact. One is in the area of Salesforce effectiveness where we are looking at large enterprise complex sales organisations, multi-tiered, multi-country product and business lines. The second is how can one optimise the resources available to the sales organisation which could be men, machine, money, and material to accelerate customer adoption and customer conversion. Third is to just look at the overall funnel and how can we drive faster conversion in what is otherwise a highly competitive environment that most of my clients operate within.
AIM: With voice-based assistants, facial recognition and other AI-based tech getting more and more popular, can the user privacy be jeopardised?
AG: Without trying to paint a doom and gloom picture, I don’t think the concept of data privacy is valid anymore. We are in an era where data maturity has a greater purpose to be thought about. As a consumer, the only way I can extract greater value from all of the brand services and corporates that I engage with, is to collect the data and use it. I believe that its a function of greater maturity. It’s not a function of the number of rules, governance, layers that we place on data privacy. More laws do not necessarily mean better governance. Generally speaking, we have gained a maturity to be able to manage the sheer volume and value and wealth of data that is available to us as businesses, as consumers, and as the government and we will find a way in which we can engage with mutually.
AIM: What are some of the other challenges that you have faced while adopting AI?
AG: There are some interesting challenges we face while dealing with our clients. One is the adoption itself and the second is the domain of usage. Since it’s a new emerging technology, clients are still exploring the best ways and capabilities that it could be used to meet their end goals and objectives. Second is in usage. AI paradigms are fundamentally changing the way in which analytics is consumed by a manager or by another machine or a system. For instance, now we can inject pricing recommendations in real time into the transaction system to automate a process. These are certain changes that professionals are witnessing and slowly getting used to it.
AIM: How has been the adoption of AI in Indian scenario?
AG: In our experience, we’ve not seen that dichotomy between an Indian client and a global client. I want to see those with a good degree of humility. Our customers in India that we engage with are as mature and forward-thinking, if not more visionary, than some of our clients and customers in other regions and geographies. They are very excited to be a part AI wave. Having said that, it’s not fair to have that comparison at all. But I don’t see a difference in any form.
AIM: Will AI take away the creative thinking and downgrade the humans intellect?
AG: Every infusion of technology, especially of the nature of AI, creates a shift in the evolution of us as human beings and as human societies. We are at that stage today, and this injection of AI and digital technologies is significantly transforming humans, and corporates like BRIDGEi2i are a part of this transition. I don’t believe it is going to make us less creative and in fact believe that it would make us more evolved as humans.
