The 10 Most Influential AI Leaders to Watch in 2021

ISSN 2582-127X

November 2021

10

THE

MOST

INFLUENTIAL

LEADERS TO WATCH IN 2021

Leadership Slogans in the Era of AI How is Artificial Intelligence Going to Redefine Leadership in 2021?

Avi Bhagtani CMO, Digitate

EDITORIAL A

I forms the basis of computer systems handling tasks such as voice recognition and translation on smartphones, piloting driverless cars, and controlling robots that automate chores in homes and factories. In research, AI is being used in a growing number of applications, such as processing the enormous amounts of data that underpin fields including astronomy and genomics, producing climate models and weather forecasts, and identifying signs of disease in medical imaging.

The 2019 AI Index Report, published by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence in California, estimates that global private investment in AI in 2019 was more than US$70 billion. The US, China and Europe took the largest share; Israel, Singapore and Iceland were found to invest heavily in per capita terms. Start-ups founded on AI technologies are a major part of the ecosystem, garnering more than $37 billion globally in investments in 2019, up from $1.3 billion raised in 2010, according to the report.

Revenues have also skyrocketed. The International Data Corporation (IDC), a market research company based in Framingham, Massachusetts, predicts that worldwide revenues for the AI market will total $156.5 billion in 2020, an increase of 12.3% over 2019. Although growth in 2020 is slower than in previous years due to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the IDC expects that global revenues will surpass $300 billion in 2024.

AI-enhanced technologies and solutions are now more widely available than before across industries, though they are not necessarily cheap to implement. Voice-based assistants are at the forefront of the AI adoption process in industries as diverse as IT, automotive, aaand retail. Smaller-scale AI as seen in chatbots enables smaller brands to save resources and improve customer satisfaction. An increasing number of AI-enhanced tools are available as software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Mobile devices and apps have become one of the easiest ways to deploy AI technologies across industries, whether it's in the form of voice assistants, smart monitoring and control, personalized shopping experiences, or warehouse management apps. AI is present in intelligent applications, neuronal networks, AI platforms as a service, and AI cloud services.

Emerging AI technologies include augmented intelligence, which seeks to enhance human intelligence and edge AI, where AI algorithms are processed locally without the need for an internet connection (such as some forms of face recognition).

According to the Artificial Intelligence Index Report, AI computing power keeps doubling every 3.4 months.

Active use of AI has been instrumental in expediting diagnostics, development of vaccines and treatment protocol for the Covid-19 pandemic. The need of the hour is, therefore, to enhance the capabilities of human beings with the support of these intelligent machines while attempting to keep the apprehensions at bay. A leader in any organization will, therefore, need to develop skills to seamlessly fuse this 'mechanical' workforce with 'human'.

At the same time, however, AI has also raised ethical questions that brands that adopt it on a large scale now have to consider more carefully than before. AI governance, or the process of creating policies that address the negative implications of AI, will likely continue to attract attention until the capabilities of AI and their impact on human lives are fully defined.

Satavisa Pati Content Analyst

November

2021 1357, Ridder Park, Dr. San Jose, CA 95131, USA Tel : +1-408-380-2566 540/6, 3rd Floor, Geetanjali Towers, KPHB, Phase-6, Hyderabad 500072, Telangana, India Tel: +91 40 23055215 Copyright @2021 Analytics Insight. All Rights Reserved.

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CONTENTS

COVER STORY

AVI BHAGTANI

08

16

24

Andrew Demchenko

Ajay Vohora

34

38

Joshua Geist

Tony Scott

28

Surend Dayal

44

Harris Sun

Articles 48

Stefanos Karagos

20

52

Leadership Slogans in the Era of AI

How is Artificial Intelligence Going to Redefine Leadership in 2021?

COVER STORY

Avi Bhagtani CMO, Digitate

The 10 Most Influential AI Leaders to Watch in 2021

AVI BHAGTANI: Leading AI-powered Digital Transformation at Digitate

E

nterprise technology has transformed the way we work, giving rise to innovative hardware and software solutions that automate every aspect of business and IT operations. The challenge remains that those solutions need to be managed – which can eat up much of the productivity gains they offered in the first place.

Digitate has a solution: applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to digital transformation success.

The company is known for providing autonomous enterprise solutions that help IT teams rapidly identify and remediate outages within minutes, shrinking downtime by up to 80 percent and cutting administrative effort and cost in half. These solutions leverage the power of AI to connect business applications, processes, and other tech infrastructures to enable smart decision making. www.analyticsinsight.net

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www.digitate.com

“

AI leaders should be passionate about explaining, educating, and encouraging its benefits. Business leaders in the field of AI should transform themselves into global thought leaders and storytellers of AI successes, explaining them in simple, tangible, and meaningful ways.

Avi Bhagtani CMO, Digitate

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Enabling 360-Degree Automation Digitate's flagship product, ignio™, is an awardwinning AIOps solution that reimagines enterprise IT and business landscape with its one-of-a-kind closed-loop approach that combines context, insights, and intelligent automation to autonomously predict and prevent issues. Digitate is helping Fortune 500 companies harness the power of AI and automation as they scale to meet the demands

of their own customers and ease the everincreasing workload of their businesses.

Digitate's mission to support enterprise operations with AI has brought a new level of adaptability and resilience to organizations, particularly through the turbulent and unpredictable times of the last two years.

Leading Transformation Over the last decade, Digitate's Chief Marketing Officer, Avi Bhagtani, has focused on the application of AI and intelligent automation to real-world problems, thereby helping enterprises through digital transformation. He leads a fastgrowing marketing organization across four continents. His experience includes managing global product portfolios across enterprise

solutions, automation, AI, and cloud organizations.

Avi is very passionate about the democratization of AI beyond data scientists and power users.

He believes it's important to create solutions that are easy to use and deploy, making AI available to everyone.

Converting Experience into Successful Strategies Prior to Digitate, Avi was at Automation Anywhere, a market leader in robotic process automation (RPA). There he led the go-to-market efforts for intelligent automation solutions combining RPA with AI technology to automate business processes for some of the world's leading enterprises. He created and executed strategies that drove adoption of the company's cutting-edge AI products across finance, healthcare, insurance, and other industries. This role gave Avi the opportunity to become an AI thought leader, industry spokesperson, and an author of many RPA and AI-related articles.

The onset of the COVID pandemic propelled organizations to respond to new business demands and use cases at an accelerated rate.

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Airline cancellations, patient registrations, loan applications – everything had to be fast-tracked, while the human workforce couldn't keep up. Avi led the product teams at Automation Anywhere to come up with progressive solutions – which required new ways of marketing, deploying, and leveraging AI. At Digitate, Avi saw the opportunity to continue this journey. “As enterprises move into the postCovid world, they have to evolve new business practices and technologies that can drive the roadmap of the future,” he explains. “That means vendors need to be able to show them how we solve those real-world problems.”

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Finding Practical Solutions for Critical Challenges Avi recalls several challenges he faced during the beginning of his journey with AI. First, AI is so often misunderstood and misrepresented. AI encompasses many different technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, and computer vision, so explaining these differences and teaching how to navigate them to guarantee success is quite nuanced. Avi believes that every business aiming to win in AI must nurture and coach its prospective customers about the value of its solutions.

Avi led cross-functional teams hosting internal and external training on intelligent automation, such as webinars, podcasts, and ROI

calculators, as well as organize hands-on labs for customers and prospects to become familiar with AI bots in action. These workshops not only helped to speed up buying decisions but also improved the understanding of the technology in general.

Another challenge that Avi faced was the perception that AI deployments will require complex engineering resources and become cumbersome and cost-prohibitive. To overcome these misconceptions, Avi created a focused effort to demonstrate “business-friendly” AI to customers and showcase its long-term benefits.

Vital Attributes of a Leader, as Told by a Leader AI leaders should be passionate about explaining, educating, and encouraging its benefits. Business leaders in the field of AI should transform themselves into global thought leaders and storytellers of AI successes, explaining them in simple, tangible, and meaningful ways.

It's also important to be practical about the limits of AI and the ethical implications of the technology. While AI can do so much, its power is truly materialized when applied to the right use cases. As leaders, we need to communicate that there is no “one-size-fits-all” AI solution and avoid allowing any bias in the way we apply it.

Innovation in the Service of Business Value So much attention to the practical uses of AI doesn't mean Digitate is overlooking technical advancements. “Innovation is at the heart of our product and market strategy. We have hundreds of data scientists constantly seeking out improvements in AI, machine learning, and cloud,” Avi says. “We believe that by leveraging the latest AI technologies and applying them

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towards business practicality, we can deliver greater value to our customers.”

Because Digitate's customers include some of the largest enterprises in the world, the goal is to help them maximize the ROI of their investments in the shortest time possible and future-proof their investments.

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Keeping Technology in the Forefront “AI, Big Data, and cloud are no longer merely investments to be considered 'down the road'; they are here today,” states Avi. As the business landscape shifts at a rapid pace, today's leaders

are expected to stay ahead of their competitors at every step. This means they need to keep an ear to the ground, learn, adapt, implement, and be proactive in their strategies.

The Road Ahead “In the last six years, Digitate grew at a record pace. We expect this growth to continue, fueled by the frenzied investments in the digital transformation initiatives,” he added.

The AIOps industry is expected to grow by more than 25% in the next four years. Though multiple AIOps solutions are emerging, Avi firmly

believes that Digitate's closed-loop AI-driven technology will lead the market in creating autonomous IT and business solutions. The company has already been named a market leader in AIOps and has been recognized via multiple technology and industry awards.

Advice to Grow in the Industry AI, with its wide-ranging tools and technology, is transforming every walk of life. Avi explains that as an AI leader, you are driven to influence change and make an impact in whichever way you choose. That said, he hopes that any emerging leader will realize that responsibility

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and nurture AI's power for positive impact. “In AI, patience is key. So, invest your time and resources, learn to navigate the successes and failures (hopefully few!) and enjoy the ride!” Avi concludes.

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Digitate

10

Io-Tahoe

Avi Bhagtani

Ajay Vohora

Chief Marketing Officer

CEO

Avi Bhagtani is the Chief Marketing Officer of Digitate.

Over the last decade, he has focused on the application of Artificial Intelligence and intelligent automation to address real-world problems, thereby helping enterprises through digital transformation. Avi leads a fast-growing marketing organization across four continents. His experience includes managing global product portfolios across enterprise solutions,

Ajay Vohora is the CEO of IoTahoe. He is an experienced entrepreneur, investor, executive and leader, specializing in scaling highgrowth software companies.

With over two decades of experience, Ajay is one of the foremost proponents in leveraging automation, AI, and machine learning in the field of quantitative finance where these technologies are more widely applied to help organizations leverage data assets.

www.digitate.com

www.aiotahoe.com

THE

MOST

INFLUENTIAL

LEADERS TO WATCH IN 2021

XPLAIN

NeuralRays AI

Joshua Geist

Stefanos Karagos

Tony Sco

Geminare

Harris Sun

Founder

Founder & CEO

CEO

CEO & Founder

Stefanos Karagos is the

Tony Sco is the Founder and CEO of NeuralRays AI. Prior to this, he has worked in clientfacing technology roles for over thirty years, including being co-founder and CTO. Tony’s passion has always been to use technology to deliver positive human and business outcomes. This remains at the heart of his new role as founding CEO of NeuralRays AI.

Besides being the CEO of Geminare, Joshua Geist is also a career entrepreneur, presenter, multi-patent holder, technology industry commentator and expert, and a recognized innovator within the IT Orchestration Market.

Leveraging the core technology strength of the Geminare, Joshua has been pivotal in launching mezzanine.ai, another industry’s first SaaS platform.

As the CEO and Founder of RaSpect Intelligence Inspection Limited, Harris Sun believes in meeting challenges head-on and learning from them. He is a serial entrepreneur and insightful leader in innovation who is highly commi ed to ge ing things done and creatively solving problems. His passion and zeal for innovation, exploration, and entrepreneurship has brought UN-based World Summit Awards.

www.xplain.co

www.magia-solutions.com

www.geminare.com

www.raspect.ai

Gargoyle

Google DeepMind

Magia Solutions

Landing AI

Founder of XPLAIN. He is an Information Scientist who loves disruptive strategic thinking. Stefanos has been a pioneer and a thought leader in the technology and marketing sectors for over 27 years. As the base member of XPLAIN, he has elevated the company’s current position of offering Digital Innovation Services to brands active in 71

RaSpect

countries.

Andrew Demchenko

Demis Hassabis

Surend Dayal

Andrew Ng

Founder & CEO

Vice President of Engineering

CEO

Founder & CEO

As the Founder and CEO of Gargoyle, Andrew Demchenko focuses on developing and implementing the company’s strategy at the global level. He finds it imperative to foster a culture of high–level innovation as Gargoyle aims to advance in terms of industrial growth. To achieve this, Andrew has developed and tested various approaches and created a unique level of service delivery.

Demis Hassabis is the Vice President of Engineering at Google DeepMind and leads Google’s general AI efforts, including the development of AlphaGo, the first program to ever beat a professional player at the game of Go. He cofounded DeepMind, a neuroscience-inspired AI company, bought by Google in 2014. Demis finished his Alevels two years early before coding Theme Park.

Surend Dayal is the CEO of Magia Solutions. Prior to his current role, he has an excellent track record of growing Australian businesses globally. Surend finds himself passionate about Australian innovation and has heavily invested his time in the local startup community, including AI-related startups. He is also a qualified barrister admi ed to the Supreme Court of NSW.

Andrew Ng is Founder and CEO of Landing AI, Founder of deeplearning.ai, Co-Chairman and Co-Founder of Coursera, and is currently an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. He also worked as a Chief Scientist at Baidu Inc. Andrew's interest in machine learning with an emphasis on deep learning has made him find and lead Google Brain Project, which developed massive-scale deep learning algorithms.

www.gargoyle.ltd

www.deepmind.com

www.magia-solutions.com

www.landing.ai

ANDREW DEMCHENKO Founder and CEO of Gargoyle 16

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GARGOYLE Transforming Ideas into Innovation through Artificial Intelligence

G

argoyle is an artificial intelligence development company that helps businesses around the globe to stay ahead of the innovation revolution and appear at the top positions near the industry leaders.

It achieves this by implementing technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, neural networks, natural language processing, and data science best practices. Over the years, the company has positioned itself as trusted experts in business analysis, product improvement, and workflow automation by participating in various projects, programs, and initiatives, aimed at the development of agriculture, finance, healthcare, marketing, retail, security, and other industries.

A Dynamic Leader Balancing Business and Innovation As the company Founder and CEO, Andrew Demchenko's main emphasis is on developing and implementing the company's strategy at the global level. Andrew finds it imperative to foster a culture of high-level innovation as Gargoyle aims to advance in terms of industrial growth. To achieve this, he has developed and tested various approaches while working with clients and partners of the company to create a unique level of service delivery. Over the span of past years, he and his team have implemented about 19 different features that have significantly simplified the work of each employee. This ranges from the sales and development department to financial and legal functions. Thus, resulting in growth by 6 times in terms of annual revenue and doubling the workforce.

Converging AI Solutions to Meet Challenges Andrew asserts that Gargoyle is actively involved in the www.analyticsinsight.net

development of commercial and non-commercial systems based on artificial intelligence in several countries. One of the recent projects undertaken by the company involved fighting against the coronavirus pandemic, where it developed computer vision algorithms in combination with neural networks to determine coronavirus infections from computed tomography images with an accuracy of 97%. This significantly accelerated the receipt of test results by patients. Prior to this project, Gargoyle also took part in the development of natural language processing and artificial intelligence algorithms to find new ways to combat diabetes and obesity for the Ministry of Health.

Besides, the company is currently engaged in several critical commercial business projects from various industries. According to Andrew, all projects from this category are related to the automation of work in different departments. At present, work is in progress to create an integrated system for automating contextual advertising campaigns. Further, a neural network was implemented within the framework of this initiative. Andrew claims the neural network is capable of generating advertising titles and descriptions, as well as optimizing advertising in accordance with the set goals.

"Generally speaking, the artificial intelligence systems we create can improve various KPIs, namely: increase monthly profit by 41%, reduce operating expenses by 63%, and also reduce task completion time by 94%.

Naturally, all of the above indicators reflect the arithmetic average for all clients of the company," says Andrew. This empowered the client to receive a lot of appraisal and awards owing to the innovative approaches the Gargoyle team built for them.

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www.gargoyle.ltd

“

Today, the only thing you need to benefit from artificial intelligence is great idea.

Other else we will do for you.

Andrew Demchenko Founder and CEO, Gargoyle

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Factors Shaping the Leader of Tomorrow Speaking about his journey so far, Andrew finds it difficult to pick his favorite experience. He continues, "It's actually very difficult to answer this question. I am young enough that there was some event that divided my life into before and after." He believes that working in other companies created a huge impact on his life and him. Before starting Gargoyle, he worked for a long time in the field of artificial intelligence as a developer, which broaden his understanding of how everything works under the hood.

After that, Andrew capped many management roles, which gave him insider insights into business processes in various companies. He thinks that this combination of skills and knowledge presented a great opportunity to be an innovative partner for his clients. He finds it immensely helpful when he lends his ears to understand bottlenecks in a business and how artificial intelligence can help solve them.

Overcoming Challenges Looking back, Andrew finds sales management as the main hurdle at the beginning of his journey. He says, "Artificial intelligence is a new technology in business that has been heard about a lot, but few have used it. Most of the Founders and CEOs simply did not understand how artificial intelligence could help their company reach the next level and become an order of magnitude better than its competitors."

This is why he spent all the time negotiating and explaining the benefits of artificial intelligence solutions.

Thanks to his determination and hard work, Gargoyle gained immense expertise that it can show a real use case and request a reference from clients, to the extent that all their queries are resolved.

Hallmarks of an Innovative Leader A company's innovation potential is the Founder and CEO's ability to be open-minded. Andrew strongly supports this notion. He cites that while people are young, they always experiment in everything and often invent new approaches to solve new problems. They are open to everything new and are not afraid to try to do something in their way. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm fades away over the years. This is because people are locked into the experience they acquired earlier and did not accept anything that does not fit into their business vision. This shift in thinking inspired Andrew to sport an open-minded mentality. He says that it is one of the most important features of an innovative leader.

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Striving for Client Satisfactory Solutions Gargoyle generally concentrates on creating unique valuebased solutions. Its team conducts a series of strategic consultations, during which experts examine the client's business completely and identify areas that can be optimized. Once this is done, the team starts brainstorming to generate potentially viable ideas with the ability to solve a specific problem. Among all the proposed options, a string of most optimal solutions is selected and presented to the client. After discovering the idea that shall yield maximum value to the client's business, the team starts working on it. Usually, the idea is finalized on the grounds of how quickly it shall be ready and bring value to the client. And when the client observes the result, the team starts devising an innovative and proactive strategy for the client's company, which the company considers as an innovative partnership.

Augmenting Technical Footprint Andrew stresses the fact that technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, automation, cloud computing, and big data hold enormous potential to accelerate the development of innovations in the world.

He points out that today we are capable of bringing ideas to life that seemed impossible a couple of years ago. He finds the development of technology to be proceeding at an incredible pace with artificial intelligence being applied in completely unexpected areas. "It would seem that such super complicated and incomprehensible technologies should attract only scientists, but no," he adds. According to him, today's entrepreneurs are focused on how to simplify their business, and artificial intelligence is the right answer for many of them.

A Roadmap to Future Andrew is confident that artificial intelligence will only gain popularity every year and will eventually become more than just a technology for giant companies. He envisions that this growth in popularity will lead to a number of studies aimed at developing new models and architectures of neural networks. Thus, consequently increasing the "intelligence" of algorithms and widening the scope of their applications.

Advice to Next Leaders: To tap the most of the opportunities that may come knocking, his advice to the emerging business leaders and executives is to be openminded, maintain a sense of humor, learn to apply tough decisions, and never give up.

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Leadership Slogans in the Era of

AI

T

he advent of the steam engine in the 17th century ushered in an era when machines replaced human muscular power. The second machine age, driven by artificial intelligence (AI), has the potential to replace humans in areas where they are superior to all others, such as intellectual capacity. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has identified artificial intelligence as humanity's greatest existential danger. In addition, the late Stephen Hawking raised concerns that future advances in AI “could mean the end of the human race.” Or, as Yuval Noah Harari, a well-known author, puts it, “AI will create a worthless class” of humans. These concerns stem from groundbreaking discoveries in the field of machine learning, in which technology is augmenting (and even replacing) human intelligence.

Despite these reservations, AI is already used in nearly every sector, business, and even everyday activity. It is already assisting company leaders in automating

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business operations, obtaining insights through advanced data analytics, and interacting with consumers and workers using natural language processing chatbots. The application of artificial intelligence (AI) has aided in the diagnosis, creation of vaccinations, and treatment of the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, the need of the hour is to improve human skills with the help of these intelligent robots while striving to keep apprehensions at bay. As a result, every organization's CEO will need to learn how to smoothly integrate this “machine” workforce with "human" workers. The following abilities may be useful: Adaptability: In the virtual world of data, the rate of technological innovation is matching the speed of light, and product life is growing shorter by the day.

Smartphones have a relatively short product life cycle of 12 to 24 months. To keep his organization ahead of the curve, a leader must adapt to the rapid speed of change and employ technology.

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service delivery, and optimize business processes, innovation must be 'innovated' in this era.

Emotional Intelligence: We now outperform robots in terms of emotions and empathy, even though AI-enabled machines are rapidly catching up. The capacity to control one's emotions and connect with other individuals gives a leader a distinct edge in situations where success relies on influencing others.

Data Vision: Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced, and this number is increasing as the Internet of Things expands (IoT). Machines outperform humans at identifying patterns in data and presenting them in interactive dashboards. To carve out an effective business strategy, vision, and purpose for the organization, leaders must establish a data vision to detect signals from noise in data utilizing dashboards. Mapping, mining, preparation, modeling, analysis, assessment, and implementation of data solutions are all common steps in the process. Given AI's capacity to analyze and calculate far more data than humans, Deep Knowledge Ventures (DKV), a Hong Kong-based venture capital firm, made history in 2017 by appointing the world's first AI robot to its board of directors. DKV has opted to wait for Vital's permission before making any positive investment choices.

Judgment: The significance of anticipating the next market change or creating a fantastic product, as well as making sense of many elements, cannot be overstated for any company leader. Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used to capture market patterns and forecast upcoming trends. In machine-assisted decisionmaking, however, a leader's judgment becomes even more critical. The AI system beauty. AI, which was employed to judge an international beauty contest, became an embarrassment when it chose the winners exclusively based on skin color. Before deploying the model, a leader must verify that bias-free data is utilized for machine learning and that the findings are fully evaluated.

Keeping an Eye Out for 'Fake' Data: Deep-fake, a subfield of machine learning, uses neural net simulation to produce a 'fake' by applying it to huge data sets. Jordan Peel, an American comedian, utilized cutting-edge AI techniques to produce a false film of Barack Obama criticizing President Donald Trump to illustrate the dangers of AI misuse. One might envision the ramifications of such deception in a culturally varied nation like India, where deep fakes can be exploited to sow discord among religious groups. To avoid any negative consequences, a leader must be aware of such false information.

Innovation: Long-term success of a company has always depended on its ability to innovate. To enhance productivity, engage consumers and workers, improve www.analyticsinsight.net

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AJAY VOHORA CEO, Io-Tahoe

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Enabling Industries to Transform Their Data Pools into Enterprise Knowledge

I

o-Tahoe is a leading Intelligent Automation (IA) software provider designed to accelerate valuable knowledge from across fragmented enterprise data.

The proven Io-Tahoe IA Suite provides comprehensive services to build enterprise-scale automation to manage and govern the entire data value chain more efficiently and cost-effectively than alternative approaches.

Since 2017, Io-Tahoe has built strong and long-lasting customer and partner relationships with industry leaders including Oracle, Red Hat, AWS, Google, Snowflake, and MongoDB. Io-Tahoe serves customers and developers across industries to deploy IA Workers in Banking, Insurance, Media & Telecoms, Healthcare, Government, Utilities, Retail and Energy. By providing immersive 360 view of data that needs to be applied to regulatory compliance (GHG, ESG, CSR reporting), Io-Tahoe excels in the field of data analytics.

Uniqueness in Every Step Enterprises currently are dealing with data abundance and often struggle to treat them with efficiency. The Io-Tahoe platform uses a unique metadata architecture to accelerate delivery and reduce the complexities of managing enterprise data.

With prebuilt, configurable, high-value IA Workers for data discovery, data unification, data quality, adaptive data governance, data enrichment, data security and data analytics, the company's IA Suite provides data value chain in all the industries.

The proven Io-Tahoe IA Workers delivers comprehensive services to automate all aspects of data management for all kinds of business. It enables to receive governed self-service access to data, streamline data dependent business operations, provide immersive customer experiences, and achieve regulatory compliance across supply chains. IoTahoe says that developers can quickly build, deploy, and operate IA Workers at enterprise scale by using a no-code application, EKC. This AI powered Enterprise Knowledge

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Catalog (EKC) consists of all business critical data elements automatically discovered, classified, and curated from across fragmented systems, applications and data siloes.

Under the Guidance of a Passionate Leader Ajay Vohora, CEO of IoTahoe, is an experienced entrepreneur, investor, executive and leader specializing in scaling high-growth software companies. With over two decades of experience, Ajay is one of the foremost proponents in leveraging automation, AI, and machine learning in the field of quantitative finance where these technologies are more widely applied to help many organizations leverage their data assets to drive down costs, accelerate time to value, and achieve customer excellence.

After receiving degrees in computer science and finance, Ajay was granted a full PhD scholarship by University of Cambridge Department of Engineering. Ajay worked there on machine learning research in collaboration with several industry data laboratories. Ajay has successfully combined his background in engineering and finance while managing technology focused venture capital and private equity investment funds with portfolio responsibilities as Investment Director and Operating Partner. Ajay is a board advisor to several private equity backed fintech and technology companies.

Data Automation: The Enterprise Heartbeat Organizations around the globe are dependent on reliable and accurate data-driven insights to carry out business processes, decision-making and strategic planning.

Everything from serving customer needs, supporting employees and collaborating across supply chains to timely completion of simple tasks revolve around data.

The company believes that this data and its potential is often locked in undocumented IT systems and fragmented across many siloes across different departments and locations. Io-Tahoe utilizes Intelligent Automation to help enterprises and customers to automatically discover,

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www.iotahoe.com

“

Being technical is one thing, but never lose your humanity.

Have a business sense and business acumen. It's not just good enough to be just a great technical visionary, bringing those things to market – make the ethereal real is where the magic really happens.

Ajay Vohora CEO, Io-Tahoe

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classify, catalog, unify, organize, secure and manage data to drive business value in a faster pace. The Enterprise Knowledge Catalog (EKC) provided by Io-Tahoe is an ideal example of such data curation platforms.

adoption. Ajay reveals that making disruptive technologies like AI, machine learning, and intelligent automation accessible to all the employees and gaining trust on these techs posed a great challenge.

The company's clients consider the automation strategy beneficial since they no longer have to manually perform repetitive tasks to transform data into a usable, shareable and trusted asset. Instead, their energy and creativity can be directed towards running their businesses more successfully.

Techs Shaping Leaders Disruptive technologies have changed the outlook of many businesses over these years. According to Ajay, the speed in which these disruptive technologies are emerging and how quickly and widely they are adopted have changed extensively. He says that the company is fortunate to build AI technologies on the contribution and achievements made from multiple disciplines beyond computer science including psychology, economics, medicine, engineering, natural sciences, and mathematics. Building AI solutions that can learn, adapt and improve in their environment is surprisingly creative With the IoTahoe IA Suite, the company can focus on the AI and machine learning capabilities to create new algorithms and models every day of the week. Every new customer brings the opportunity to work on a new problem to solve with the company's IA Workers that range from automating governance, compliance reporting, training machine learning to perform predictive maintenance or refreshing a single customer view within hours to drive real-time insights to personalize customer experience.

Fundamentally, in the context of growing a software business, Ajay believes that the role of a leader has not changed at all. It always was and always will be about empowering teams of talented individuals to take more good decisions and to think critically about the options available to them in any situation to create a new option. Ajay mentions that this will instill responsibility by holding them accountable to the consequences of those decisions whether the outcome of their decisions plays out as expected or not, and finally, to reward behavior that proactively contributes to taking more good decisions bad, more often than not.

Climbing Up the Ladder Built on Life Lessons After successfully scaling the first data SaaS business, Ajay worked in the venture capital sector. As an operating executive working across five investment funds, Ajay says that he enjoyed the advantage of working alongside exceptional technology entrepreneurs leading talented software product teams to build companies from the scratch.

When asked about the lessons that shaped his journey, Ajay says, “The most important thing I learned was teamwork and the right culture will build resilience when business circumstances change and when they do, it's about speed to adapting successfully that distinguishes leading companies.

And adapting successfully means knowing your customer's business like it was your own.” Although it sounds simple, according to Ajay it shows the employees that you are committed to their success and growing talent and that talent wins when you can bring focus and capital. Secondly, Ajay states that this shows our clients that the company genuinely cares about their own customers and shareholders by designing AI enabled software that allows them to achieve a positive and sustainable impact.

Growing talent that is capable of incorporating knowledge of consumer preferences into software products takes deliberate and sustained focus. Ajay believes that over time, this effort creates the 'competitive edge', which makes the difference in business. Further, he reiterates that this mindset is earned and learned by handling customers and by solving problems to achieve more 'wins' than 'loses'.

Challenges? Meet Them and Beat Them Being able to transform data into knowledge was a primary challenge in the journey, says Ajay. Removing the complexity from this data management process and making it convenient for the customers was considered an opportunity

by Ajay and his team. While the company decided to make sense of the abundant data generated every day, incorporating humans into this system became another challenge. As Ajay calls it, bringing 'Human into the Loop' was difficult since it demanded harnessing knowledge in the employees and skilling them to leverage these technologies so that they can operate more efficiently in their daily work.

Holding the tail of this problem was another barrier of AI

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Future Seems Predictable Sometimes Ajay is sure that automation is here to stay and will become diffused by inserting intelligence into 'micro' steps across products, services, devices and processes. Io-Tahoe has developed these Intelligent Automation Workers because they perform the complex and repetitive work at scale and speed that is humanly impossible to achieve in order to serve knowledge workers like analysts and healthcare workers with insights to perform their work with confidence.

Ajay confidently says that the world ahead will witness sustainable industries that leverages all these disruptive technologies. Immersive customer experience will also have a great role to play in the growth of industries in future. Ajay concludes by saying that the ability to assess all the different options beyond just revenue and profit and considering human wellbeing, sustainability, and immersive experience that people enjoy, AI and Io-Tahoe will play a pivotal role in the coming years by imparting knowledgebased business decisions from raw data.

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SUREND DAYAL CEO, Magia Solutions 28

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Changing Australian AI landscape with Influential Leadership and Customer Integrated Solutions

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agia Solutions is a prominent advanced enterprise cloud technology company that aims to help enterprises, government, and higher education deliver a seamless business experience. The company implements and resells Oracle products, primarily Oracle Software as a Service. Magia Solutions also offers services across project delivery, training, and managed services. Further, the company has received a Certified Excellence Implementer status in several fields, indicating a consistent year-on-year rating of its implementation and support services by its customers. Magia Solutions' goal is to gain global recognition as the premier Oracle Cloud Business Solution Provider, starting with Australia & New Zealand, where the company is currently viewed as the most qualified CX partner for Oracle.

Magia Solutions was founded as SDS Group in 1998. The company initially focused on Oracle BI solutions and then expanded into Oracle ERP solutions from 2004 until 2013 when the focus shifted to Oracle Cloud technologies.

Magia Solutions' Australian offices are located in Perth, Canberra, Sydney, and Melbourne. The company has an operation in the United States and a partnership in the United Kingdom.

pioneering AI company, in Australia, Europe, and the US before selling it to Oracle Corporation in 2009. After that, he worked in Oracle for ten years under several designations in the US, APAC, and Australia; most recently as the Vice President for Public Sector in ANZ. Surend finds himself passionate about Australian innovation and has heavily invested his time in the local startup community, including AI-related startups. Apart from this tutelage as a businessman, he is also a qualified barrister admitted to the Supreme Court of NSW holding degrees in computer science and law. At present, Surend's primary focus is on building the Magia business locally and globally through the delivery of successful outcomes for customers.

Transforming Industry Demands into Opportunities Magia Solutions leverages AI to build effective solutions across a number of Oracle product lines, including: Oracle Intelligent Advisor: This is a natural language rules engine (expert system) where the non-technical staff can enter complex rules in any language and deploy them as simple interactive questionnaires, web services, or embedded in other applications.

A Passionate and Far-Sighted Leader

Oracle Digital Assistants: These are online interactive tools that learn through continued interaction to provide answers to questions through any Chat interface (e.g., SMS, messenger, slack, etc.).

Surend Dayal is the CEO of Magia Solutions. Prior to his current stance at the company, he has an excellent track record of growing Australian businesses globally. Surend was one of the original founders of RuleBurst, a

Deep learning models are also embedded in Oracle SaaS and PaaS product lines implemented by Magia.

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I've already identified Magia as having a solid foundation with a reputation for innovation, rigor, and producing quality results for clients. That potential can be expanded globally by empowering our staff and capturing the clear benefits that AI offers if applied ethically.

Surend Dayal CEO, Magia Solutions

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Other arrays of Oracle solutions from Magia include Oracle Service Cloud, Oracle Commerce Cloud, Oracle Engagement Cloud, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Oracle Field Service Cloud, Oracle HCM, Oracle ERP, Oracle Application Express, and the Oracle Autonomous Database.

Meeting Business Requirements with Innovation At Magia Solutions, Surend makes sure the team is constantly experimenting with new technologies to see how they can benefit Magia customers. The company innovates around the application of advanced technology, taking advantage of the US$6 billion that Oracle invests annually in its product stack and making it easier for end customers to consume that innovation.

Influential Leadership to Encourage AI Adoption Surend feels that artificial intelligence is disrupting industries that were previously thought to be dominated only by humans. This raises a lot of ethical questions about the best way to adopt such technology. However, proper management can help alleviate this conundrum.

He further mentions that there is a lot more evidencebased management theory available now than in the past.

Modern leaders should apply modern approaches to employee engagement such as Intent-Based Leadership and Authentic Leadership to empower their people and explain to them the potential and promise AI holds. Used well, Artificial Intelligence can be moulded into a key asset for any organisation.

explaining why Magia Solutions' products offer a unique approach for its clients.

Words of Wisdom Surend cites the ability to look at problems and challenges from a creative angle is an essential attribute of an innovative leader, as it is the ability to make products and solutions customer-centric. Leaders should also demonstrate compassion and empathy for people if they want to improve employee engagement and satisfaction in their company premises and beyond into their customer base.

Envisioning a Progressive Future Speaking about the future, Surend says that Magia Solutions has a very encouraging journey ahead.

Observing a 60 percent year-on-year growth in the financial year ended 30 June 2020, in the middle of Covid-19, has reinforced his belief in the company and its potential to help other organisations.

Surend is confident that in terms of the AI industry, Magia Solutions is only going to grow as AI becomes increasingly mainstream. This will be somewhat different from the timestamp, 25 years ago, when he was developing AI and taking it to the world.

Gaining Expertise to Solve Industry Challenges Surend believes that building up a small Australian business globally to be the best in class for Gartner's MQ and Forrester's Waves on Rules Engines, ultimately selling it to a Silicon Valley giant in Oracle, was a formative experience for him. His journey in building a business globally taught Surend how to operate across multiple cultures, and this was during the early days of AI. Now, the knowledge and expertise he acquired during the initial days of his career are helping him to guide Magia Solutions to be way ahead of the curve. Surend has devoted a lot of his time explaining the role of AI as a path to the future, both in business and at the Australian National University where he teaches amongs other things a unit in AI and Law. Educating people was crucial in the early days, as he discovered a lot of skepticism amongst the public about whether AI could actually work or not. Surend strives to overcome this bottleneck by www.analyticsinsight.net

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JOSHUA GEIST CEO of Mezzanine.ai 34

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Delivering Orchestrated ML and Automation Capabilities to Enterprises rtificial intelligence and machine learning stand out as the most transformational technology in this data-driven age. The rate of development and innovation in machine learning is relentless and what seemed impossible a few years ago is commonplace today.

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Joshua Geist, CEO of Geminare, a career entrepreneur, presenter, multi-patent holder, technology industry commentator and expert is a recognized innovator within the IT Orchestration Market.

Machine learning's practical application throughout the economy is growing apace, resulting from the accelerated development of the technology. However, designing and deploying machine learning at scale is a major challenge, no matter the size of the organization. Mezzanine.ai is democratizing machine learning across all industries and businesses by providing single point integration of readily available pre-trained machine learning models from AI industry leaders including Google Cloud, IBM Watson, AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Geist is a recipient of numerous industry accolades including multiple CRN Channel Chief awards, Gartner Cool Vendor designations, Most Innovative Solution winner from CIR international community, and lead contributor in the positioning of multiple Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders including global telco giants such as NTT Communications and Cable & Wireless. Geist has had direct responsibility for spearheading the launch of some of the largest and most successful Resiliency offerings in the market.

With a new approach for businesses looking to leverage machine learning, mezzanine.ai empowers enterprise data to be seamlessly and securely evaluated through multiple pre-trained machine learning models with a sophisticated, wizard driven, orchestration and automation platform.

Leveraging the core technology strength of the Geminare platform as well as the breadth of experience launching Cloud Solutions to the enterprise, Geist has been pivotal in launching mezzanine.ai, another industry's first SaaS platform which enables enterprise organizations to de-risk their AI initiatives by leveraging existing machine learning models in a simple, orchestrated and secure fashion.

Mezzanine.ai delivers on the promise of bringing AI and machine learning capabilities directly to businesses, with absolutely no need for in-house AI or machine learning knowledge, specialized technology or data scientists. By leveraging a multiplicity of machine learning models simultaneously, the detail and volume of data insights increases exponentially, and the value locked within the data becomes new revenue streams.

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An Industry Veteran and Innovative Leader

Distinct Offerings for the AI Industry Mezzanine.ai opens up the possibility of using machine learning for businesses by enabling them to access whatever models are best suited for their needs from whichever platform they chose to use, whether it's just a single pre-trained model or all of them at the same time.

With mezzanine.ai, businesses can test and evaluate the results of their data as they run through multiple pre-

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Data has become the lifeblood of every company in business today. Without the proper technologies, businesses are unable to monetize this lifeblood and risk critically jeopardizing existing revenue streams.

Mezzanine.ai empowers businesses to remove that risk and positions them for success.

Joshua Geist CEO, Mezzanine.ai

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trained ML models from a single interface, almost instantaneously. The wizard driven interfaces within mezzanine.ai accelerates access to readily available pretrained machine learning models from AI industry leaders including Google Cloud, IBM Watson, AWS and Microsoft Azure, enabling immediate insight into enterprise data and facilitating smarter, curated and more valuable business outcomes.

Customers across virtually all industries that leverage mezzanine.ai are empowered to evaluate their data for new insights, revenue streams and differentiation.

Customers like MovieComm in the Media & Entertainment industry, for example, leverage powerful video analysis machine learning models to reduce or eliminate manual cataloging processes.

With mezzanine.ai, MovieComm leverages multiple ML models in parallel, providing a broader and larger quantity of quality results. MovieComm is now able to deliver a vastly superior end-user experience, and fully leverage the value of their films' assets. Overnight, MovieComm went from a usable database of tens of thousands of searchable items to millions, and from a cataloging time of weeks to just minutes.

Innovation That Provides Customized Insights Recognizing that businesses would rather focus on their core competencies than on understanding how to leverage the latest industry innovation in artificial intelligence, mezzanine.ai focuses on delivering Orchestrated Outcomes.

Through sophisticated orchestration and automation capabilities, mezzanine.ai directly facilitates the transmission of data between multiple ML models, and offers follow-up orchestrated actions such as redactions, archiving, or further analysis.

tens of thousands of searchable items to millions, and from a cataloging time of weeks to just minutes. Our experience with mezzanine.ai capabilities has been invaluable.”

Scott DiGiammarino, CEO MovieComm AI Brings Intelligent and Smart Future Geist believes the astounding pace at which technology is evolving has caught even the most optimistic futurists by surprise. AI developments, use cases and capabilities are at the forefront of this crest and the industry is still in its infancy. “We don't have to look any further than making a reservation at our local restaurant to see the impact that AI has and will have, when at a recent Google I/O conference, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, demonstrated an AI agent (AI-based interactive service) making a reservation over the phone in real-time and with perfect pauses in speech and sentiment. It was so realistic that the receiver on the other side of the call was completely unaware that it was not an actual human they were engaged with. Most surprised was the audience, media and communities' reaction to this, which was 'shocked' to say the least,” he mentioned.

He further added that this is just a single point example of how AI will dramatically impact the world around, and again, it is just in its infancy. As deployment capabilities become more sophisticated, easier and cheaper, AI technologies will be embedded into virtually every piece of silicon that carries a current. Routine and mundane decisions will be handled through machine learning and its powerful prediction capabilities, while activities that were once “weekend tasks” such as dropping off the dry cleaning will be managed through AI self-driving cars and taxis.

“The industry will not question whether to embed AI capabilities into its technologies, it will question “which” AI to embed”, he said.

Testimonials by Clients Mezzanine.ai helps companies leverage multiple ML models in parallel, providing vastly superior and a larger quantity of results. Here are some motivative words from the clients on driving exceptional business results: “All machine learning models are not created equal.

MovieComm is now able to deliver a vastly superior enduser experience, and fully leverage the value of our films' assets. Overnight, we've gone from a usable database of www.analyticsinsight.net

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TONY SCOTT Founder & CEO of NeuralRays AI 38

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Aiming to Make a Safer and Smarter World with Ethical AI

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euralRays AI was founded in late 2018 with the vision of using ethical AI to create solutions for a better world. Founder and CEO Tony Scott, along with his two other cofounders, formed NeuralRays AI to help clients use emerging technologies to create innovative solutions that deliver positive human and business outcomes. They all had come from senior technology roles in large corporates and felt they could create something better. Their inspiration came from the principles of ethical AI – trustworthiness, predictability, fairness and transparency. Their motivation was, and still is, to build not just a company, but a community of passionate technologists who share the company's vision of creating solutions for a better world.

According to Tony, AI was increasingly being spoken of in negative terms back then. Stories focused on automation and robotics replacing jobs, instead of celebrating people being freed from mundane and repetitive tasks to excel in new roles using human traits such as empathy, creativity and leadership. His aim in creating NeuralRays AI was to shine a light on this world. Tony believes that when properly applied, AI and other digital technologies such as the Internet of things, virtual reality and blockchain can provide a force for good that accelerates the digital economy and positively transforms life at large.

NeuralRays AI has grown to 70 people in its first 18 months. Headquartered in London, UK, the company has its technology centre of excellence in Chennai, India, and commercial offices in Munich and Dubai. NeuralRays AI provides data science, AI and software development consulting and advisory services to clients globally and is www.analyticsinsight.net

developing product and platform-based solutions of its own.

A Resilient Technology Leader Tony has worked in client-facing technology roles for over thirty years, including being co-founder and CTO of a 120person software development consultancy in the City of London. Most of the last decade, he spent in digital transformation and CIO roles in leading multinational engineering companies such as Arup, Atkins and WSP. Tony's passion has always been to use technology to deliver positive human and business outcomes. This remains at the heart of his new role as founding CEO of NeuralRays AI. Serving Businesses by Integrating Ethical AI The philosophy of NeuralRays AI is to apply ethical AI and machine learning to solve real-world problems for its clients and their clients. This covers everything from advanced data science consultancy to building new AIdriven platforms and products.

In its short history, the company has delivered positive outcomes for customers seeking to improve safety in the workplace, automatically detect defects on a vehicle production line, become more efficient through the application of natural language processing to vast document repositories a half-century old, and more. As NeuralRays AI is looking hopefully towards a post-COVID19 world, the company is increasingly becoming involved in developing healthcare solutions, something that is close both to the founders' hearts and the company's founding principles.

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We aim to be masters of technology privately, but externally to focus almost exclusively on our clients' outcomes. We create personas and map out user journeys.

Knowing who will benefit from our solutions, and how, comes before deciding on the technologies and architectures to use.

Tony Scott Founder & CEO, NeuralRays AI

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Achieving Innovation by Understanding Customers Tony says: “We aim to be the masters of technology privately, but externally to focus almost exclusively on our clients' outcomes. How we achieve these outcomes should not matter. Hence, for example, the difference between machine learning and full AI is immaterial to us, especially if in some cases a traditional approach might be more appropriate.”

NeuralRays AI creates personas and maps out user journeys. Knowing who will benefit from its solutions, and how, should always come before deciding on the technologies and architectures to use.

Where technology must be surfaced, NeuralRays AI aims to demystify it into simpler and more understandable language. The company might use traditional teaching techniques, for example, to explain the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning when a client needs to understand this.

New Technologies to Drive Digital Transformation Today, innovation is happening at a much more accelerated pace than ever before. This is largely because the barriers to entry for startups are no longer there.

“With cloud services you do not have to buy any kit. When you add to this the availability of free open source libraries, bright and creative people with the best ideas are finding it far easier to shape, test and launch new products. It is an amazingly exciting time to be involved in digital transformation. It is even more exciting solving problems that had been considered impossible previously or creating solutions that had never been dreamt of before,” Tony says.

Imparting Unmatched Leadership Attributes According to Tony, where you really stand out as a true innovator is in what you do with technology. Being relentlessly outcome-driven is the most important attribute of an innovative leader. This means focusing on your clients to the extent you even strive to understand their clients better than they do. This requires both empathy and creativity.

Apart from this, leaders must consider a key lean and agile principle to treat failure as a learning exercise. This takes courage. Certainly, you should be succeeding more often than not. But, when things don't go as planned, leaders should try to fail quickly and cheaply, and by learning, ideally never the same way twice.

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Rising Above Challenges Tony spent much of his last ten years leading digital transformations in large corporates. He is passionate about using technology to achieve beneficial outcomes, but has long recognised that excelling at the technology itself is the relatively easy part. Much more challenging, he has found, is changing mindsets, behaviours and culture, which is essential if organisations are to transform digitally. The human challenge here is far harder than the technological one.

Hallmarks of Achievers According to Tony, leadership is not about making people do what you want but inspiring them with your vision, so they just do it anyway. This is also a far more scalable form of leadership, as it negates the need of micromanagement, which, having been on the receiving end more than a few times in Tony's career is his main bugbear of poor leadership. As a leader you should strive to be coach and mentor more than just a manager.

Looking back, some of Tony's most successful leadership roles have been when surrounded by keen and enthusiastic people who have bought into his shared vision and just got on with achieving it in their own unique ways. This principle is very much behind the team building in NeuralRays AI and the collaborative ways in which the company works with its clients.

The Future of Work AI is here to stay and will only be getting faster and more sophisticated. For companies to use AI and data science to their advantage, the key cornerstone in their strategies must be the combination of talent, skills and people with the right agile and creative mindsets. NeuralRays AI has already bet its future on this, and for Tony it is a safe bet.

He believes the company is well placed to succeed in this emerging data-driven digital world. If business leaders do not take this challenge seriously, their companies will undoubtedly be ripe for disruption.

Encouraging Young Minds To succeed in tomorrow's world, Tony advises that business leaders must think differently and more creatively than ever before. They must have the courage to disrupt themselves and their companies before someone beats them to it. He says, “We are all entrepreneurs now. We must seize the opportunity of AI and digital transformation not just to predict the future but to create it ourselves.”

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HARRIS SUN Founder and CEO of RaSpect 44

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Mitigating Challenges of a Changing World of Architecture with AI

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aSpect is an AI-powered predictive inspection company for Architecture. By integrating IoT sensing technology and robotics system, the company aims to automate the process of data collection and standardize it to achieve remote detection and real-time monitoring. It further attempts to establish high-quality inspection of big data, cooperate with deep learning, image recognition, data model analysis, and other cuttingedge technologies to conduct early warning analysis for building safety. RaSpect can effectively assess the potential risks of architectural designs and calculate the degree of damage after a comprehensive analysis of the above data. The company promises that its solution not only provides more accurate detection and analysis than traditional methods but also saves more than 50% of time and cost. Its mission is to create a safer and smarter society through artificial intelligence detection technology.

Propelling towards AI-Powered Age RaSpect offers a fantastic smart city solution that significantly increases inspecting efficiency and accuracy while also reducing costs. Instead of Hong Kong's traditional inspection method of putting up expensive scaffolding to inspect a building's conditions, the company's core technology, employs autonomous robots and state-of-the-art sensing technology to optimize the data collection, which is then put through the dual procedures of processing and analysis using applied algorithms. This model has been proven effective as it has been replicated for various properties and has garnered satisfaction among clients for its low-cost, shorttimeframe, attention to workers' safety, and provision of a thorough inspection.

Instances of a Rewarding Career.

The time Harris spent working in various startup companies after graduation prepared him for a rewarding journey of leadership. The experience he gained there bolstered his vision and drive for innovation and was instrumental in inspiring him to become a founding member of the innovation center in Cathay Pacific Airways. Several awarding committees have recognized his passion, and as a result, he was bestowed with the World Summit Award and Red Herring Award in 2019, to name a few.

An Insightful Leader with Audacious Spirit “Be passionate and be embracing with the uncertainty". It is a strong belief of Harris during his entrepreneurial journey. Harris Sun, CEO and Founder of RaSpect Intelligence Inspection Limited, believes in meeting challenges head-on and learning from them. As a serial entrepreneur and insightful leader in innovation, Harris is highly committed to getting things done and creatively solving problems. His passion and zeal for innovation, exploration, and entrepreneurship were recognized both locally and internationally with awards including UN-based World Summit Awards.

Winning over Challenges

Harris graduated from the University of Hong Kong with a Bachelor's degree in computer science and holds a Master's degree in computer science from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His subordinates and colleagues speak highly of him and state that he never hesitates to help his team members whenever the need arises.

During the initial phase of this journey, Harris discovered that the public perception of building inspection was based on personal, visual, or manual experience. He found it challenging to open the reserved minds towards entrusting a machine for its accuracy and ability.

Therefore, the RaSpect team focused on educating and

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A great team needs great trust to build a great product. Do or do not; there is no try!

Harris Sun Founder and CEO, RaSpect

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showing the people how the company is capable of data capture and data analytics. After that, they enlightened the public mind by illustrating how RaSpect's techniques and services solved their problems and saved their money.

Attributes of an Exemplary Leader Harris believes that an innovative leader should possess five essential qualities, viz., being trustworthy, committed, persistent, passionate, and courageous.

He says, "A good leader should be able to trust his members, who in turn would return the trust to their leader, thus fostering a strong team spirit." According to him, a good leader ought to be committed to setting goals that are aligned with an innovative and well-explored approach for everyone's benefit. This commitment must be accompanied by persistence to challenge and help the market. Finally, a good leader should possess a passion for exploring newer and better options while being courageous to face failure with grace.

Instilling Technology to Address Customer Expectations RaSpect has developed its own patented AI-powered automated inspection solution, leveraging IoT, big data, AT, and computer vision technology. Harris informs that the company's solution is continuously being developed to achieve optimal results by its diverse team consisting of entrepreneurs, professors, PhDs in machine learning, computer vision, senior civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and a global R&D team.

Some of the company's outstanding list of solutions include, Automated Data collection: Here, live data of building performance is collected via robotics and IoT. And continuous inspections are performed autonomously with limited human intervention. This solution reduces human errors and saves the hazards associated with inspection operations. It uses a drone is installed with HD camera and different types of sensors for inspection, namely infrared, sonar, and LiDAR sensor. By leveraging on the infra-red sensor, clients can detect the thermal change of the surface, like water leakage, surface cracking. They further use the sonar sensor to inspect the inner structure. 24x7 IoT Inspection collects live stream data for structural assessment, data-driven inspection, improved awareness of safety state.

Data Post-processing Here, RaSpect makes use of managerial science for the automatic positioning of data. Inaccurate data is automatically cleaned from the raw data to increase data www.analyticsinsight.net

quality.

Data Analytics The company's data analytics system comprises up of defects recognitions, thermal analytics, vibration analytics, ultrasonic analytics, and structural analytics for structural integrity assessment covers from planned-tobuilt, indoor-to-outdoor.

Balancing Disruptive Technologies with Dynamic Leadership Harris acknowledges that the world is on the cusp of revolutionizing many sectors through artificial intelligence and data analytics. There already are significant deployments in finance, national security, health care, criminal justice, transportation, and smart cities that have altered decision making, business models, risk mitigation, and system performance. These developments are generating substantial economic and social benefits. Yet the manner in which AI systems unfold has major implications for society as a whole. It matters how policy issues are addressed, ethical conflicts are reconciled, legal realities are resolved, and how much transparency is required in AI and data analytic solutions.

"Human choices about software development affect how decisions are made and how they are integrated into organizational routines," expresses Harris. He asserts that it is crucial to understand how these processes are executed precisely, because they will have a substantial impact on the general public soon and for the foreseeable future. And it is also imperative since AI may revolutionary in human affairs and become the single most influential human innovation in history.

Envision Future Expansion Harris is confident that RaSpect will continue to educate the market and pave its way to be the leading AI-powered inspection company in the world. At present, the company is looking towards expanding its horizons to other global cities including Dubai and Tokyo in 2021, and Jakarta, Bangkok, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur in 2022. RaSpect aims to provide quality, cost-efficient, and sustainable service.

Advice for emerging business leaders.

Harris' advice for emerging leaders is not to be afraid to challenge the norms and traditions of an industry. Let your entrepreneurial spirit continue to fuel your passion and hunger for your idea in the same way that your idea gives life to your entrepreneurial spirit.

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STEFANOS KARAGOS Founder of XPLAIN

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Revolutionizing the Way Marketers Integrate Brands in People's Lives with the Help of Strategic AI

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PLAIN is fully committed to helping global brands thrive in the fast-changing world by providing Tailor-Made Strategic AI Solutions and Consumer & Industry Intelligence Consulting Services for a wide range of clients across the globe. Some of the company's customers include PepsiCo, Danone, AMEX, MetLife, Yum, and more.

For its extraordinary work, XPLAIN is acknowledged with the Gold Award for Global Innovative Digital Business.

XPLAIN was founded in 2008 as a digital marketing service provider. Like any other company that has innovation in its DNA, XPLAIN has grown by discerning the evolution of things and wanting to offer even more value to its customers along the way.

About seven years ago and after two years of continuous R&D in specialized XLabs laboratories, Artificial Intelligence (AI) in conjunction with Big Data was not just 'added' to what XPLAIN offers, but became the company's foundation.

XPLAIN integrated the solution in all its services, enabling the company to expand its customer base worldwide.

company's current position of offering Digital Innovation Services to brands active in 71 countries. Stefanos has significant experience in fields like FMCG, Retail, Technology, Finance/Insurance, Destinations/Tourism, and Automotive. He has been recognized by the industry and his colleagues on multiple occasions and was voted by his peers in the US as one of the Top Innovators in 2016.

Unraveling a Wide Array of Services Using AI Analytics & Big Data Having its own R&D capabilities, XPLAIN offers a wide spectrum of services to its clients with AI Analytics and Big Data at the core. Some of the company's services include, =

=

XPLAIN now provides AI services and tools to global brands, helping them not only to survive in an international environment but also to achieve important business results. = The Strong Founding Stone of XPLAIN Stefanos Karagos is the Founder of XPLAIN. He is an Information Scientist who loves disruptive strategic thinking. Stefanos has been a pioneer and a thought leader in the technology and marketing sectors for over 27 years. As the base member of XPLAIN, he has elevated the

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Creating a Behavioural and Business Insights (BBI) Platform specifically designed for SMEs, thus democratizing AI and big data insights for all. This is the result of XPLAIN's vision to offer tangible value for moving forward and evolving to be the 'Backbone' of most economies, which are affected by the Pandemic A Forecasting Platform to predict orders for over 780,000 stores is being leveraged by more than 1,100 SKUs on a day-to-day basis and for the next 10 days ahead, whilst also offering insights for further portfolio optimization to the company's clients, saving them millions in logistics and adding incremental sales in the process.

Tailor-Made Complicated War-Room Dashboard systems to connect all possible Data-Sources and to influence factors in XPLAIN's clients' business and markets. It is a need that has risen significantly during the pandemic in order to rectify the disruption in the business decision-making processes globally.

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XPLAIN has always and will always be in service of adding real value by focusing innovation towards a true understanding of people's needs and the behavior and choices they make. It is the only way to create, sustain and flourish meaningful relationships between brands and consumers in any category.

Stefanos Karagos Founder of XPLAIN

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In essence, XPLAIN is solving consumer and businessrelated challenges by building AI platforms and offering the consumer competitive intelligence and advisory services.

The company is also resolving its clients' challenges in modern strategic decision-making.

Integrating Technology to Enhance Decision-Making At XPLAIN, innovation is 'loaded' and potentially detrimental to results since it does not define an 'absolute' measure or benchmark. For the company's innovation, oversimplifying a bit is anything new in relation to a system that is being introduced and makes it better and more efficient. So, on the one hand, it is not technological progress in itself for its own sake, but rather understanding and giving insight in what is the most effective choice or choices one can make.

XPLAIN brings in the major categories of technology at such a stage that when used in the right manner and applied as it should, the company makes certain that its customers' decision-making process leads to a truly innovative choice, and is informed in the most relevant, unbiased, and insightful manner. The quintessence of how XPLAIN does it can be described by a few words: more connectivity, more data, faster and more intelligent analytics, and more insightful and actionable results.

Connecting all the Technological Dots to Fine-Tune Solutions The company is trying to always be one step ahead or further to enhance and fine-tune solutions that are true to the principles. This is why XPLAIN is working tirelessly on making certain that its output covers true needs that modern brands and marketers have, especially in such radically changing environments and contexts, like the one we're living through at the moment with a pandemic affecting behaviours and business models.

That is why XPLAIN invests heavily in cutting-edge fields such as Computer Vision, Unstructured/Agnostic Aspect Analytics, and Natural Language Processing and Analytics.

Indicatively, when it comes to NLP, the company is implementing proprietary top-of-class analyses that go beyond the usual sentiment, such as Contextual Narratives, Emotional Analyses, Motivational Segmentation, etc. The solutions have been developed in close collaboration with experts from around the world and top academic institutions in the field.

Envisaging the Challenge of Recruiting the Right Talent One of the primary challenges XPLAIN faced was that all innovation-focused and breakthrough technology companies it serves were hampered in finding and recruiting experts in the multi-disciplinary fields the company needs.

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For example, XPLAIN collectively combines three major fields of expertise such as AI, Consumer Behavior, and Business Strategy. Unfortunately, companies face the daily battle of finding excellent professionals like AI Scientists, Exploratory Data Analysts, Full-Stack Developers, Behaviorists, Business consultants, and Marcomms Advisers, and more.

On the other hand, XPLAIN also faced some setbacks with the effect of the pandemic. It was not on the operational continuity or efficiency, but mostly on making certain that the company keeps its people's morale and optimism levels as high as possible. The same goes for XPLAIN's clients. The company supported them equally in fighting in decisions with actionable insight.

Remarkable Awards and Recognition For many years in a row, XPLAIN was awarded Gold awards for Global Innovation Digital Solutions. Indicatively, for five consecutive years running, the company received the top accolade from the Internationalists (American National Advertisers) as the Most Innovative Marketing Solutions and Technology Firm.

XPLAIN has successfully leveraged Artificial Intelligence technology & proprietary algorithms to analyze millions of unbiased consumer conversations and reactions to the Content & Campaign initiatives of Brands. The company has delivered a fully tailored AI-Powered Marketing System to address each brand's needs that effectively support their content creation strategy. XPLAIN shows outstanding results by rendering enhanced targeting, augmented consumer understanding, and content optimization. The company also facilitates an extra layer of AI Pre–Testing across all content created to further maximize results in a digital, mobile-first world.

A Sneak-Peak into the Future of Humanizing Marketing Technology In the near future, XPLAIN is expecting to see great leaps in further humanizing marketing technology. This will come not only from making AI more intelligent through enhanced Neural Networks and their application but by a better understanding of what the true needs of the company's target audiences are.

It may seem a paradox, but the most valuable and humanlike capability that separates great brands from Loved Iconic Brands, which is empathy, will be further boosted and supported by the power of Artificial Intelligence (and not replaced).

XPLAIN promises to be at the forefront of the next great era in Marketing Technology.

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here must be a time when you have written a performance appraisal for someone's review and comments and waited for that person to return from a business trip or vacation to submit their performance review late. Does that feel like torture? If yes, then online performance appraisals are the solution to make your life hassle-free.

Discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) and occupations frequently rotate around the redistribution of assignments and abilities as society gets ready for the 58 million new jobs AI will make by 2022 (as per reports).

However, artificial intelligence effect rises above manual tasks. The essential, significant abilities of business leaders are all set for change.

How is

Artificial Intelligence Going to Redefine

Leadership in 2021?

In 2021, more creative leaders are getting ready to work alongside artificial intelligence to redefine leadership.

With the development of new jobs — some that are as yet getting characterized — pioneers are inclining toward artificial intelligence to pose queries that remained unanswered for years.

So how artificial intelligence is willing to redefine leadership? Here are two management practices in the path of artificial intelligence disruption: The Organizational Chart Small and big companies and enterprises depend on organizational charts to plan jobs and obligations, fully intent on characterizing jobs and advancing assignment across different lines of business. Assignments are then scattered to the appropriate department, with the graph filling in as the impetus to discover voids in existing jobs or map jobs successfully across divisions. Organizational charts have additionally been utilized as a tool to direct career advancement.

Digitalization is lessening the worth of organizational charts as devices for seeing how work gets done in an organization. Connections and jobs in current organizations are not as inflexible as the straight lines of an organizational chart would have you accept.

Individuals work cross-practically, with little idea to formal reporting connections. Just like utilizing organizational charts to direct career improvement no longer bodes well for most professionals.

With the ideal information, artificial intelligence can be used to acquire a superior comprehension of how work gets done in an organization where the organizational chart no longer means what it once did. Artificial

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intelligence can outline which workers have the best effect and where skill development is required. Artificial intelligence is likewise proving valuable in assisting workers with recognizing what occupation moves — horizontal, vertical, or something else — are probably going to have the best advantage for their drawn-out professional development.

Staffing Individuals will consistently be the core of any organization's prosperity, as there is no substitution for innovativeness and relational cooperation. But artificial intelligence can assist an organization's people to bring out the best on the tables. In particular, artificial intelligence will reclassify the staffing and recruiting measure by giving the responses to questions, for example, "What skills does this worker need to get to a higher level?" Artificial intelligence can likewise assist pioneers with recognizing when it's better to search for outer ability and when an advancement or inside candidate would be ideal.

Also, artificial intelligence can assist pioneers with entering into new business sectors, as it can illuminate pioneers whether a geographical region's ability and business conditions offer a feasible chance of growth and profit or not.

These equivalent information points assist pioneers to see the best way to staff an area and look at compensations by locale.

Pioneers need to trust artificial intelligence just like they trust their employees. And also understand that artificial intelligence is certainly not an enchantment mixture to fix all issues, and blind trust can make algorithmic inclination or lead to frameworks without the oversight important to guarantee the calculations perform ideally.

In any case, with trust and time, artificial intelligence will have a positive effect. Those pioneers who are available to explore innovations and ready to test new cycles will succeed. Today, the C-suite is transforming into the solution suite. Gone are the days when pioneers could exclusively depend on gut feelings to settle on business choices. From hiring and employee development to succession planning, every aspect of your workforce will be redesigned by artificial intelligence. Pioneers who figure out how to function close by artificial intelligence, utilizing it as a tool to help yet don't supplant conventional administration dynamic, will flourish.

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