Breakfast forum on driving business impact with machine learning and A.I.

A recently concluded forum held at Cinnamon Grand, Colombo, organised by Linear Squared (Pvt.) Ltd, Sri Lanka’s pioneers in machine learning and advanced analytics solutions, showcased the potential of machine learning and artificial intelligence (A.I.) in driving business impact.

The event was organised to create awareness amongst the Sri Lankan business leaders about the current trends and developments in the use of ML and AI technology around the world and the opportunities to apply them in the local context.

Event participation was by invitation only and included heads of several top local corporates as well as multinational companies from a variety of sectors including FMCG, telco, banking and manufacturing.

Welcoming the participants, Linear Squared CEO and Co-founder Sankha Muthu Poruthotage spoke about the importance of data platforms, and that prescriptive analytics are proving to the be the competitive advantage of Enterprises. He also spoke about companies in Sri Lanka who have started using these cutting edge technologies, and are seeing huge business benefits.

The event featured a keynote address by Linear Squared Chairman and Google India and South East Asia VP and MD Rajan Anandan. Rajan highlighted the impact of artificial intelligence, and how technologies companies like Google are taking an Ai-first approach in products to make lives better for consumers globally.

Dialog Axiata PLC COO Dr. Rainer Deutschmann represented the business community and illustrated the power of analytics across all business domains. He gave examples along the customer journey, such as for lead qualification, targeted cross-and up-selling, churn prevention, and customer care - all to improve the customer experience. Also, analytics significantly improves technical operations, for network planning, continuous network improvement, and for fault prevention.

Dialog has transformed to an analytics driven company, based on a best in class real-time analytics infrastructure which connects data sources through a 360 degree data lake to real-time dashboards and machine learning models. Dialog has attracted a team of leading analytics experts which is continuously being built out, and further strengthens its capabilities being part of the international Axiata analytics center of excellence.

Also presenting at the event was Mohit Pande, who has just joined Linear Squared as Senior Vice President. Mohit is the former Country Manager - India, Google Cloud. Prior to Google, Mohit held senior leadership roles with Microsoft in India and South East Asia. In his previous role, Mohit founded and led the cloud business for Google in India. Speaking in the event, Mohit commented on how cloud is giving access to unprecedented and economical access to computing power - enabling massive data processing. This, combined with sophisticated mathematical and statistical frameworks which are available today, allows Machine Learning models to be developed to address business problems which we thought were unsolvable till now. He illustrated how Linear Squared has democratised these machine learning models, and hence addressing some core business issues for enterprises.

Linear Squared (Pvt.) Ltd is one of the pioneering companies based out of Sri Lanka, providing machine learning and advanced data analytics solutions, and home to the largest pool of data scientists in the country. The company specialises in developing end-to-end solutions leveraging on a combination of cutting-edge technology (Machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud platform) and statistical models to deliver solutions to business problems across multiple domains including apparel, FMCG, financial services and telecom.

Printed and published by Wijeya Newspapers Ltd. on Friday July 16, 2018 at No. 8, Hunupitiya Cross Road, Colombo 02