Continuing to bring forward AI leaders’ work and inspiring stories, Jibu Elias, Content Head, IndiaAI, had an insightful conversation with Radha Basu, Chief Executive Officer – iMerit Technology Services. Radha Basu is the Founder and CEO of iMerit and the co-founder of Anudip Foundation – iMerit’s sister foundation – a leading tech entrepreneur and a pioneer in the Indian software business.
Through iMerit and Anudip, Radha is committed to using her wealth of experience in technology management to holistically address one of the world’s most pressing challenges: youth unemployment. iMerit has employed and skilled hundreds of marginalized women and youth in digital and data services. iMerit employees contribute to growing industries ranging from virtual/augmented reality to the sharing economy to e-commerce and financial services. Before founding iMerit and Anudip, Radha served as the Chairman & CEO of SupportSoft. She led the company through initial and secondary public offerings in 2000 and 2003 and built it into a worldwide market leader in support automation software.
Before SupportSoft, Basu spent 20 years at Hewlett Packard. Her most recent position at HP was Senior General Manager of the Electronic Business Software Organization, which she grew to a global $1.2 billion business. Radha’s career at HP had begun as she founded the company’s operations in India and set up the first software centre of any multinational in Bangalore.
iMerit is a leading AI data solutions company providing high-quality data across computer vision, natural language processing, and content services that power machine learning and artificial intelligence applications for large enterprises. iMerit provides end-to-end data labelling services to Fortune 500 companies in a wide array of industries, including agricultural AI, autonomous vehicles, commerce, geospatial, government, financial services, medical AI, and technology.
Talking about IndiaAI’s journey, Ms Basu said, “it really is a unique way of bringing different players together whether they are startups, academicians or the actual users. Bringing it all together, get information, how do you create a unified AI digital ecosystem is the need of the hour.”
Radha Basu: AI technologies are quite transformative because they allow us to bring computing intelligence and human intelligence together. It is the nexus of both every step of the way. The two need to advance together; that’s one thing, and the second thing is that AI, right from the beginning, has broader societal applications than any other technology.
In a way, most technologies that we have started with have become so ubiquitous they are a part of our existence now, such as cell phones and stuff. It is no longer for an elite few; it is really societal. AI has the ability and the potential to do that.
The third point is that AI needs to be made inclusive now, and we need to bridge the AI divide now. We need to work with people hand in hand and with the right guiding principles.
Technology is something that touches each one of these components. We are at the forefront of the technologies working on images, autonomous vehicles, autonomous mobility, medical AI, AI in precision agriculture, geospatial applications, and natural language processing that can be applied to detect financial fraud and it is really at the forefront of taking AI technologies in computer vision and speech and text.
We at iMerit are bringing them together to how they can be applied in societal applications. We have rich culture at iMerit with 54% women employees who are so right-spirited. The average age for employees is just about 24. These are very young people who think AI is part of everything in the world; they are very eager and curious to learn. The right can-do attitude drives these sassy young people who are open to taking risks.
If one goes to one of our centers, he will notice the complexity of the images that we work on or the complexity of the content of natural language processing. We actually have a project with one of our clients where they have a robot. As the robots are working, our human intelligence is looking at the interaction between the client and the robot. We are in the middle of training the robot in the way it can respond to medical customer service.
This is really interesting in terms of speech AI and conversational AI technologies because we’re not just training the robot now; we’re actually thinking about humans in the loop of a robot and human conversation.
In the last year, we grew 80% of our business in medical AI, applications in speech conversation, computer vision, object tracking, drone deliveries, geospatial as it applies to weather tracking for floods, and more.
I can see the societal applications of AI in medicine, precision agriculture, sensors looking at crops, and determining how much water is needed. This even worked great for a client involved in some anti-poaching projects with wildlife.
We created about 1300 jobs in the last year. Now you have to put a lot into technology for skilling. iMerit’s data solution brings together technology, talent, and techniques to provide high-quality data and precision at the scale of production required. We meet the need for a consistent supply of data in the process of AI development, from the training data all the way to the validation and deployment.
Jibu Elias: One thing I want to know is how did you take this leap of faith in this particular space? You had a very remarkable career; then what motivated you to start iMerit. What do you think distinguishes you from other AI startups?
Radha Basu: I think two things. One is that very early on in the late 1980s when people didn’t believe you could do IT in India. I had an absolutely fantastic opportunity of starting the first software center of any multinational, along with Texas Instruments. It was very hard at that time to think about doing Unix work in India or operating system work. I remember celebrating the first $1,000,000 of software export from India with people from some of the most wonderful companies today that lead the world TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and Mindtree. There was a key learning for us that there is so much potential in young people, and you learn that you could take a risk and go into things like this.
With the mobile revolution, we felt this could be the second wave, meaning we could take a step forward, and out of that came the HP 1.2 billion dollar enterprise solutions organization where India and eight other centers. I believe that we could do it, had missteps, and like we were doing everything and then found the formula, it became really a mission.
Then we used the same AI technologies for skilling and became a technology powerhouse.
Jibu: What is your advice, or what are your thoughts to people who ask, “what should I study in the next few years or what should I do so that I am relevant in the job market?
Radha Basu: If you look at how AI has advanced, the first AI products are going into production. There is a switch happening; data and high-quality data are at the core. As Andrew NG says, it’s the food of AI. High-quality data and intelligence become what propels AI forward. This intelligence is a fusion of computing intelligence and human intelligence. So human intelligence, knowledge, and judgment become an integral part of high-quality data, which becomes an integral part of taking AI into production. That is the kind of job you want to train yourself for.
Jibu: How do we ensure that more women enter the AI space? How can we improve this number? Your thoughts, please.
Radha Basu: I think a lot of that will come from awareness and making proactive efforts to talk to young people. I believe it is essential to talk about the AI careers and growth in AI careers at the school level and definitely as people get into colleges. We shouldn’t write about AI being unique or that it is one of a kind. It has to become ubiquitous.
When I walk into engineering colleges today, there is 50:50 girls to boys ratio. The world, too, is 50:50. If the world is 50:50, why shouldn’t it be the same in AI?
In computer vision, the ability to do pixel-level work, we need great accuracy. Women are brilliant at it, and they have the ability to juggle different things.
There are some truly fantastic skills that women bring in, so my view is you wanna be competitive, and you want to be a real player in this space, then you better get the right talent into it and the people with the right potential.
If you want to really be at the top of your field, then get the best talent in. Don’t look at gender, where did they come from, which place or background.
Jibu: My final question will be, what are your future plans with iMerit? What is the direction it is going to take?
Radha Basu: We are definitely a competitive organization. For me, the idea is to really grow the company to be at the forefront in bringing this data intelligence and AI technology solutions to the top clients. Right now, we are primarily in 3 types of clients autonomous mobility vehicles, medical AI, and technology high tech clients you know across the spectrum for in different types of AI technologies. We want to get AI into production, which is called ML Ops; we want to be the leader in ML Ops. We wish to be a data operation Center for all the data coming in and the the analytics and insight from that.
What makes AI really difficult to go into production is the fact that after you have the models, you have a large number of edge cases; that is where human intelligence becomes so critical.
Source: indiaai.gov.in
