Arnab Chakraborty: Driving Large Scale Analytics-led Transformations Across Businesses and Communities for Greater Impact

Accenture is a leading global professional services company, working at the intersection of business and technology to improve the way the world works and lives. Within the Applied Intelligence group, the team provides strategy and technical services to help smooth clients' path to AI adoption, extending human capabilities and supporting clients in scaling AI responsibly.

As managing director at Accenture Applied Intelligence, Arnab Chakraborty "speaks" Analytics and Artificial Intelligence fluently. He is based out of San Francisco and a key member of Accenture's Applied Intelligence global leadership team, responsible for driving Accenture's AI business on the U.S. West Coast, and also globally responsible for building the AI business with key cloud ecosystem partners. Prior to his current role, Arnab built Accenture's AI business in Central Europe and served as the Applied Intelligence lead across all industry groups in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Arnab has been instrumental in rapidly scaling the Analytics business with clients in Europe and North America, and has been awarded several patents for his work in machine learning.

Meeting Industry Demands with Disruptive Technologies

Accenture is focused on helping clients drive business transformation by applying intelligent technologies, in particular, data-powered automation, analytics, and AI. The company calls these the "3As," and it is their combined effect, along with a deep understanding of industries and functions that delivers true business impact. Accenture has brought together these capabilities to form a global business, called Applied Intelligence, to help its clients realize their end-to-end vision to gain better, more actionable insights from their data by embedding the 3As enterprise-wide.

Arnab believes that outcomes vary by industry and function but, at the core, they include: new efficiencies and revenue streams; lower costs; speed to market; greater profitability; reimagined customer experiences; new products and services; and unlocking new markets. For example, by incorporating AI, smart blood pressure sensors can help physicians respond to changes in the patient in real-time, or combining IoT and machine learning can reduce equipment failure through predictive analytics.

A Dynamic, Human-centric Leader at the Cross section of Business and Technology

Starting his career as an engineer, Arnab always found problem-solving an exciting challenge. Working for GE, he was first introduced to the impact that data and analytics could have on both the top and bottom line of the business, as well as more generally in the culture of the organization.

Moving to HP, he saw the impact that analytics could have across multiple functions – from marketing, to sales, to supply chain. Arnab realized partnership and collaboration between technology and business was essential to co-create solutions and generate multiplier effects.

One constant throughout his career has been the conviction that a real competitive edge comes from talent. Arnab believes that leaders must always hire people who are smarter than themselves. Every business he has built has always had the right team and talent at its heart, with diversity bringing energy, fresh insight, and new skills.

Exposure to other cultures and ways of working is another critical success factor for Arnab. He believes that learning from the friends you make, appreciating the differences, and having new experiences are all tremendous learning opportunities. According to Arnab, such opportunities inform how people operate as business leaders and the degree of empathy they have.

Gaining Expertise to Solve Industry Challenges

Very early in his career as an engineer designing power plants, Arnab realized that he needed to marry business expertise with technical know-how in order to truly demonstrate an understanding of different business scenarios. After completing his MBA he eventually moved into consulting at GE, focusing on gaining expertise in a key capability area – analytics. In addition to realizing that he needed to be able to speak the same language as the data scientists and specialists, he developed a broad range of business skills that enabled him to translate technical content into actionable insights. Seeing the bigger picture enabled him to build credibility with clients by showing that he understood the challenges they were facing, and how technology could help address them.

Essential Leadership Attributes

Arnab cites the ability to spot a trend or market opportunity, and build an innovative solution to capitalize on it, as an essential leadership attribute, as is the ability to assemble the right team. Innovative leaders do all of this rapidly, and with conviction that inspires others. Leaders also demonstrate sustained innovation – they follow through and set up the right organization to develop and deliver a new solution before they move on to the next challenge or opportunity. The culture they create enables their teams to take risks without fear of failure, and gives them the freedom to fulfill their ideas. Crucially, leaders recognize today that innovation can come from anywhere, not just from the top of their organization, which means tapping into a diverse talent base for ideas, as well as learning what's happening outside in the wider ecosystem and collaborating with these players.

Proving The Value of Innovation for Business

The future of Applied Intelligence is upon the team, and the epicenter for what's next in AI is the just-opened Accenture Applied Intelligence Studio in San Francisco. This is where new ideas and concepts become real AI innovations that solve real client problems. Accenture, the company's ecosystem partners, and the startups it works with through its Accenture Ventures program, are at the heart of this exciting venture.

At the Accenture Applied Intelligence Studio, the team helps its clients realize the power of AI and how their organizations can take advantage of the innovations the company is building. From conceptualizing on how to apply AI to specific operations within client's enterprise, to rapidly launching prototypes and real-world pilots, the company will help them explore opportunities and outcomes that demonstrate the value of AI for their business.

At the Studio, Applied Intelligence brings together the right mix of data scientists, ML engineers, artists, technologists, and start-ups (through Accenture Ventures), empowered by the latest tools, data sets, and AI platforms under one roof.

AI-Powered and Automated Future of Analytics

Arnab feels the industry trends are moving fast, with new technologies constantly evolving, along with new ways to combine and apply them. In analytics, the future will be powered by the automation of AI. Integrating new capabilities around deep learning, machine vision, natural language processing – all powered by cloud computing platforms – will lead to intelligent solutions embedded into industries and workflows so pervasively that they will become omnipresent, transforming how people live and work.

Words of Wisdom

Arnab advises budding leaders to, first and foremost, think about the wider impact they want to create in their community – business, people and society more broadly. He further suggests that they should always think through the legacy they want to leave – their bigger sense of purpose – and share that vision. Also, they should create an open, flat organizational culture with free-flowing communication to inspire their people. According to Arnab, it is necessary for them to see bottlenecks or hurdles as learning opportunities and emphasize teamwork and collaboration, as leaders should be able to touch and work across all the different parts of the enterprise.

"This is an amazing time. The availability of technology, talent and ambition, along with the ecosystem maturity and speed of innovation has never been greater. Nor has the demand for new solutions. Leaders need to boldly take advantage of this opportunity," Arnab asserts.