The seventh International Conference on Business Analytics and Intelligence, hosted from December 5 to 8, by the Data Centre and Analytics Lab (DCAL), at IIM Bangalore, drew analytics and big data professionals who addressed critical questions around the role of analytics in solving business problems.
The speakers were from Cisco, LinkedIn, VMware, Bain & Company, IBM, TCS, Aditya Birla Group, and TVS Motors.
Housed within the IIM-B campus, DCAL is a dedicated research and training lab that supports interdisciplinary empirical research using data on Indian and other emerging markets. DCAL is one of the pioneers to focus research on advanced data Science, business analytics and intelligence, the institute said.
Analytics and big data technologies have become a competitive strategy for many companies. Through this conference, DCAL at IIM Bangalore provided a platform for analytics and big data professionals to create and disseminate knowledge in the field of analytics.
Changing businesses
Venkatesan Sukumaran, head of business analytics, TCS, said: “Businesses are changing and redefining themselves in terms of having more hyper-connected customers, leveraging larger ecosystems for data and connections, driving higher productivity, and taking controlled risks.”
Aman Goswami, senior specialist of data science, Bain & Company, shared his thoughts on whether ‘The price is right?’ at the conference. He pointed out: “Today, B2C is having a major influence on B2B and vice versa. It’s creating democratisation of the marketplace. Analytical algorithms can optimise the pricing process enabling the right prices for the right products at the right time in both spaces.”
Prof U Dinesh Kumar, Chair, DCAL at IIM-B, moderated a panel discussion on the the AI-First approach and the range of opportunities and challenges it brings in in order to understand whether AI-First is hype or reality, enlighten the audience about what the AI-First approach means and how the technology is being used far and wide to solve business challenges.
Prof Dinesh Kumar said: “Creating intelligence around technology systems is the way into an AI-First world.”
Upskill with AI
Payeli Ghosh, founder and partner at Jiffy, remarked that the existing workforce need to reskill, and the upcoming generation must upskill themselves with the AI trends.
Answering a question from the audience on how AI will transform the future of learning, Vikas Gupta, Managing Director, Wiley India, said: “Whatever you learn today should give you royalty for life. We need to find patterns that we call algorithms in AI. If you find patterns in learning which allow you to attain a set of skills, you can become relevant in the coming era, and that is what learning is.”