People still trust people. While for simpler processes, we may trust machines because of their consistency & speed, when it comes to complex decisions or where the stakes are higher, we will continue to depend on people. So for the foreseeable future soft skills will continue to be important in terms of human interaction, to get businesses to invest in areas that lead to higher customer experience & satisfaction. - Excerpt from the interview with Shailesh Jain Today is Episode 14 of the Interview series on Expert-Talks, with Leaders in the Analytics, AI and Transformation space. For this episode, our CEO Mahadevann Iyerr (Mahaa) is in conversation with Shailesh Jain, Group Head – Analytics & Insights, Landmark Group, Dubai. Prior to Landmark Group, Shailesh was Senior Vice President & Head of Analytics ( Decision Management ) at Citibank India. He has also held Analytics leadership roles at KPMG Advisory and DunnHumby. Shailesh frequently shares his thoughts at Industry forums. We are sure you will benefit greatly from listening to his perspectives. A few key points from the interview : Shailesh spoke about the top 3 building blocks he focuses on, to build great analytics capability & business impact. First, deep business partnering with the business & functional leaders to understand their needs & vision better; Second, his analytics team spends quality learning time in the process be it the retail stores/distribution centres/merchandising process etc; and third role-rotation across various functions for each person to understand the interlinkages and the big picture better. Projects are ideally planned with short-term objectives to create near-term business impact & credibility, and with long-term objectives which align with the strategic transformational vision for that business. Getting outside in perspective to complement internal performance has always been a key business expectation, and was mostly collected manually through surveys, research etc. This has now become easier thanks to customer’s digital footprint across social media, search, website journeys etc. In future, any processes where decisions are based on business rules or discriminative insights will see faster AI adoption, while complex decision making which requires a leap of faith / probabilistic calls, will still be taken by humans. When it comes to generative AI, organisations for now will use it for in-house processes within their private cloud. For any external & customer-facing use cases, it will continue to be with a human-in-the-loop A Stanford University research validates that Deep Learning models with Explainable AI outperformed other deep learning models. This is because, rarely does a model work in isolation – typically the output of one model is fed into another model, and so understanding the variables & weights of each model is important. You can watch/listen to the interview on our website, youtube, apple, amazon music and Spotify podcasts on the links below. Please do share your comments and subscribe/follow us on @maavrus on LinkedIn, facebook and Twitter. Youtube Video link. https://youtu.be/zOfYCdGNYOc
