It is exciting times in AI, so fasten your seatbelts — this was the reigning sentiment at Cypher 2019 that opened with a record number of 900+ delegates attending the premier analytics and AI summit. The flagship conference serves as an excellent platform to network and learn from leading AI thought leaders, fellow practitioners and researchers. We bring you highlights from Day 1 — quite an action-packed day with 29 sessions spanning an array of Keynotes, Tech Talks and Knowledge Talks held by 40+ speakers — all this just on Day 1.  

Cypher 2019 kicked off with a keynote by AI luminary and global business leader Vikram Mahidhar Senior Vice President – Artificial Intelligence Solutions at Genpact with a compelling narrative around the next wave of AI-augmented intelligence. The keynote touched upon some of the toughest challenges AI is solving in the real world and how Genpact is delivering real value to businesses around the globe.  This was followed by a talk by SAP’s VP & Chief Evangelist  APJ & GC Shailendra Kumar who shared insights on how AI creates value in the experience economy and allows businesses to gain a new level of visibility into data.

Also taking the keynote stage was enterprise leader Deep Thomas Group Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Aditya Birla Group who’s played a pivotal role in supercharging India’s multinationals. Thomas shared his vision around build a lean organisation and “making the move from organisations as machines to organisations as organisms”. In this journey, leaders play an important role in showing the right direction and enabling action. Thomas also added how ABG is one of the few multinationals that welcomes both industry giants — AWS & Google. 

Bridgei2i’s Venkat Subramaniam laid down the “Value Roadmap” for AI for businesses and how the enterprise AI ecosystem is set to boom in India. 

Up next, Bhavik Gandhi from Shaadi.com who held a talk on “Are marriages made in heaven or do algos decide who we love” made the participants question their dating website profiles and their preferences to swipe left or right and in addition to that, gave his insights how an algorithm perceives a profile to be fake or not. He quoted an example, “Usually most of the fraudsters claim on Shaadi.com profile that they don’t have any siblings while the other way round may not necessarily be true but our algorithms have found out that fraudsters and scammers ask for money on the basis that they have no immediate family to rely on,” he said.

We had a line up of tech talks by Jigsaw, Evalueserve, Ericsson, Aditya Birla Group, Praxis Business School and MiQ Digital that took attendees through some of the toughest challenges in getting machine learning projects off the ground, such as finding and labeling solid training data.  

The day closed with a very interesting debate between Chris Arnold of Wells Fargo and Anshu Sharma Raja of Standard Chartered Bank with Arnold dubbing AI as lumpy. Meanwhile, Raja believes AI has changed our lives significantly.