Meet the winners of Women in AI Leadership Awards at The Rising 2022

Analytics India Magazine’s Women in AI Leadership Awards 2022 celebrates the leaders who have put a dent in the universe with their game-changing work in artificial intelligence and data science. The winners were selected by our jury panel comprising Swati Jain, VP Analytics at EXL Service, Sanjay Srivastava, VP – Analytics and Reporting at American Express, Gaurav Dhall, VP – APJ & Middle East, MD– India at SingleStore, Suresh Chintada, CTO at Subex and Mathangi Sri, CDO at CredAvenue. The panellists are also members of the AIM Leaders Council – an invitation-only forum of AI and data science leaders.

Watch all the recorded sessions of Rising 2022 here>>

Check out the winners below:

Aunkita Nandi, co-founder & managing director of Tier5 Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Aunkita co-founded Tier5 Technology Solutions — the first-ever community-owned and operated software development firm that specialises in making innovative and user-friendly products that enable business owners to attain more clients and grow their business. She also ideated and executed all the products.

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Hardika Shah, founder and CEO of Kinara Capital 

Hardika comes with over 20 years of experience  as a management consultant with Accenture, leading large teams and executing complex projects for global companies across the US, EU and Asia Pacific. She has also served as a pro-bono mentor for over a decade at top social entrepreneurship programs at various universities. 

Kinara Capital focuses on driving financial inclusion of small business entrepreneurs.  Kinara Capital disrupted small business lending in India by offering No Property Collateral loans to entrepreneurs. Recently, Kinara Capital was recognised as Bank of the Year-Asia by the IFC/World Bank for its pioneering work in SME financing.

Divya Mittal, director, data science at American Express

A seasoned risk professional, Divya Mittal comes with over 11 years of experience in the banking and financial services domain. She has managed credit risk across the customer lifecycle from credit underwriting of a new customer to predictive modeling of existing customers as well as high-value collections in the stressed industry sectors during the Indian banking crisis in 2019/2020. She has continuously strived to make data-driven credit decisions in the small business and mid-corporate space by strengthening decision science models and innovating in underwriting.

Ishu Jain, director at Swiggy

Ishu Jain comes with over 15 years of diverse work experience in delivering analytical insight and ML models in companies like Swiggy, Dell, Genpact, Fractal, and Target. She’s currently leading a team of 100 data scientists/ analysts for four key areas – delivery network optimisation, fleet assignment and efficiency, demand and supply and optimisation and customer segmentation. She has also been instrumental in leading and participating  in L&D & hiring across Dell, Fractal and Swiggy.

Kamiya Motwani, senior manager II, data science at Walmart Global Tech, India

Kamiya Motwani is currently leading a team of data scientists, and her work specialises in building optimised recommendation engines in the Grocery domain for providing personalised substitutes — starting from building a state-of-the-art neural network-based model to substituting out of stock items during order fulfilment. She has also worked extensively on click prediction for advertisements and has experience in building machines that learn from data. Before joining Walmart, she worked in organisations such as Oracle Corporation and Yahoo Inc. 

Lakshmi Vaideeswaran, Vice President, Analytics Consulting at Tiger Analytics

As a client partner, Lakshmi Vaideeswaran ensures all of Tiger’s clients achieve value from their engagement with Tiger Analytics. Her core strength is technology development and commercialisation with 30 years of work experience to boot. The Confederation of Indian Industry had named Lakshmi as one of the top 50 women STEM scientists in the country. She is also the industry advisor to Stella Maris.

Neharika Agarwal, Vice President & head of Analytics and Business Intelligence at Bharti Axa Life Insurance

Neharika Agarwal has 12 years of experience in connecting data, analytics and technology to drive decision making, strategy development and implementation. She specialises in solving customer problems across industries such as BFSI, FMCG and automobiles. She currently heads a 14-member data science, business intelligence and reporting team at Bharti Axa Life Insurance. Neharika has also created a centre of excellence for data-enabled decision making culture within the organisation.

Manisha Banthia, vice president, Data & Analytics at Fiserv Global Services

Manisha Banthia comes with over two decades of experience in the technology industry and currently, she is the vice president – Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence at Fiserv Global Services. She enables the 250 members- strong team to combine digital analytics with AI and visualisation to generate business insights for clients. Her job role involves understanding stakeholders’ pain points, translating problems into solutions, and interpreting the business impact while harnessing the power of emerging technologies. As a leader, Manisha is responsible for liaising and interacting with business heads and Fiserv client advisory councils to build analytics products and solutions.

Preet Saxena, group leader, Global Analytics Practice at Concentrix

Preet Saxena comes with a solid experience of over 14 years in research, analytics (solutioning and delivery), consulting and productization. Presently, she is leading the Centre of Excellence for social and brand analytics, content evaluation and moderation analytics and people analytics. Preet has also been named a leader in the 2019 Everest Group – Analytics Services PEAK Matrix™.

Renuka Sindhgatta, research manager and senior technical staff member at IBM Research India

Renuka Sindhgatta leads a team of researchers in envisioning and building AI-based solutions at IBM Research. She works across IBM’s Research and product teams to develop and drive ground-breaking data science and ML innovations for optimising IT operation. The solutions developed by the team have contributed to various IBM offerings and engagements.

Sandhya Gopalan, AI & MLOps practice leader in EY Global Delivery Services, Data and Analytics Practice

Sandhya Gopalan comes with over 16 years of experience in the field of AI and  ML. At EY, her role is to conceptualise, build and deploy AI, and ML at scale for global clients across sectors. She has also scaled MLOps solutions and built target architecture working with client enterprise and data architects, CDOs and businesses, which have enabled data-driven transformation for large financial services clients.

Shaveta Kapoor, media director (Global Applied Data Science Head of Media Products), dunnhumby

Shaveta Kapoor is a seasoned data science professional with rich experience in leveraging data-driven insights, data science and AI at scale to drive transformation and deliver business impact across multiple clients globally over the years. She has a proven track record in setting up and scaling data science solutions and teams across developed and emerging markets. Currently, she leads the Media Analytics hub of over 130 data scientists within dunnhumby.

Shikha Shandilya, founder, CEO at Networth Corp

Shikha Shandilya has built Networth Corp from the ground up. Her solutions have helped improve the bottomline of many organisations. Shikha is also a recipient of multiple tech entrepreneurship awards. She aims to make Networth Corp a force to reckon with by solving complex, large scale business problems.

Shirsha Ray Chaudhuri, Director of Engineering at Thomson Reuters Labs

Shirsha Ray Chaudhuri has been a crucial contributor in setting up a new team for Thomson Reuters Labs (TR Labs) in Bangalore. TR Labs is Thomson Reuters applied research division, focused on delivering solutions with AI and emerging tech to TR’s platforms, products and customer PoCs. 

Shirsha has built a team of engineers and data scientists in four months. Along with providing point in time solutions for a single-use case, she implemented generic modifications of AI services, which could be replicated across geographies and operators.

Silky Rout, VP, Course5 Intelligence

Silky Rout comes with a proven record of handling large teams and delivering the highest level of customer satisfaction. At Course5, she is responsible for managing global delivery models and teams to help the Market Insights divisions of the clients. She leads a team of over 90 analysts looking at traditional and agile surveys, syndicated research, transactional, digital and social data. Her key focus is to provide integrated and actionable insights to the clients and create efficiencies using AI, analytics and automation.

Sindhu Ramachandran S, director of technology (Leader of Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence), QuEST Global Engineering Services

As a director of technology at QuEST Global, she leads the Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence (CoE) in Software and Digital Practice at QuEST. Earlier, she has also led the Deep Learning and Image Analytics Practices and Artificial Intelligence (AI) CoE in the Electronics & Embedded Systems services lines. She has been instrumental in driving partnerships with NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon, and Renesas.

Sonia Thakurani, vice president at Ugam, A Merkle Company

Sonia Thakurani comes with over 19 years of experience and is currently responsible for leading a talented team of 300 analytics professionals who support Merkle’s ‘Connected Recognition’. As a part of senior leadership at Ugam, Sonia has been credited with significant contributions such as scaling competency with a 250+ member team to manage data integration and pipelines for customer experience management and building a 35+ member team to support visualisation of Rapid Analytics Insights outcomes on advanced measurement like customer journey analytics.

Sripriya Venkatesan, chief architect/ program manager at Capgemini

Sripriya Venkatesan is an experienced chief architect working for Capgemini, with two decades of expertise in core architecture, solutioning large deals, delivery architecture of mission-critical systems and innovation. She was responsible for the creation of over 20 new go-to-market assets and reference architecture in this space. She focuses on Cloud, Cloud AI, AI, Java, and related technologies, solutioning and innovation for new-age digital enterprises, and end to end architecture for complex application landscapes. 

Vaishali Rana, Deputy Chief (MIS) at Central Electricity Regulatory Commission

Vaishali Rana comes with 21 years of experience in the Government IT sector, project management, infrastructure planning and execution, IT business analysis, implementation and development of the latest technology applications/ softwares. She has initiated and is the technical head for the implementation and development of an AI-based project, “Regulatory Expert System Tool (REST), for the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC).    

Vidhya TV, managing director and VP of Engineering at Streamingo Solutions

Vidhya TV is a seasoned deep learning and systems software professional with 26 years of industry experience. She has led teams of engineers for product development at leading MNCs like Cisco and Informix. She has developed hybrid activity recognition algorithms for a Fortune-50 company and productised the same, alongside filing four patents in the USPTO along with her team. Her area of interest includes artificial intelligence, data analytics, cloud computing, and e-governance.