Headline Partner

Vivek Gupta, Founder and CEO, Softsensor.ai

Describe your career to date

I have been an entrepreneur, thought leader, and teacher in data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). I have co-founded and scaled multiple startups such as Softsensor.ai, LMDmax Corp, PRr.ai, Essex Lake Group, and Map My Learning. I also mentor Ridge Robotics, a high school STEM initiative, and co-founded a research-focused 501c3 for coronavirus.

My early career includes roles at Decision Craft Analytics and Inductis, and later founding the analytics practice for Opera Solutions in India. I have worked across multiple sectors and built expertise, built and led high-performance teams, spearheaded analytics-driven transformations, and delivered innovative solutions.

I have been a trusted partner in driving significant top-line and bottom-line improvements and have worked with prominent clients such as JPMC, American Express, TD, Wachovia, FHN, MetLife, Tata Sons, JSW Steel, and numerous private equity firms.

I am also working on areas in Enterprise AI applications and medical AI where we are using large language models, computer vision, and deep learning to rebuild organizations with an AI backbone.

What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your clients and on the industry as a whole?

Today, the generative AI (genAI) and large language models have opened the board’s attention to previously unseen possibilities. While most of these out-of-the-box models give an impressive answer to generic questions, the industry has yet to employ these agents for specialized industry and function-level jobs. Training and deploying intelligence on corporate functions and making them work reliably is the greatest challenge for this year. Also, ensuring these are driven by responsible AI guardrails will be an important mandate.

How are you developing the data literacy of a) your own organization and b) your clients?

We continuously train our people in thinking how to use data, training them how to learn to continuously learn, and deeper questioning of outcomes. They use innovative ways to build proxy ideas to estimate the unknown or non-measured variables and bring data and business understanding to the discussion.

For our customers, we believe in leading by example. Most customers like to focus on what can be valuable to them be it in profits, cost reduction, or any other KPIs. We are deploying genAI-based assistants and tools that are helping CXOs to directly question the data using the natural language interface in business language. This is massively transforming the consumption and use of data and KPIs.

How are you preparing your organization and your clients for AI adoption and change management?

We are working with leading hyperscalers in building and deploying applications in AI ranging from medical underwriting to customer assistants. There is a strong interest and curiosity in exploring the use cases of AI models for client organizations. The customers also want to make sure that the deployed solutions meet the standards of responsible AI. We are taking an AI-first approach within our teams and building talent.

For customers, we conduct thought leadership sessions, workshops, demos, and POCs to help them understand and appreciate the use cases. We are providing significant observability and testing of AI for building trust and taking the use cases to production. Our solutions also make sure that we are keeping the human-in-the-loop window so that customers have significant control and understanding of the deployed AI. This way, the model continues to train on the variety of corner cases, while building a record of accomplishment of performance and feedback. This approach also gives the human to become familiar with the AI model and a chance to upgrade and upskill themselves to work on a higher order problem-solving.

Vivek Gupta
has been included in:

100 Enablers 2023 (USA)
100 Enablers 2024 (USA)

Enabling data and AI leaders to drive impact

Enabling the success of Data and AI leaders and their teams.

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