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A US$ 48.3 billion-corporation, the Aditya Birla Group is in the league of Fortune 500. Anchored by an extraordinary force of over 120,000 employees belonging to 42 nationalities, the Group is built on a strong foundation of stakeholder value creation. With over 7 decades of responsible business practices, Aditya Birla Group's businesses have grown into global powerhouses in a wide range of sectors – metals, chemicals, pulp & fibre, textiles, carbon black, cement and telecom. Today, over 50% of its revenues flow from overseas operations that span 36 countries in North and South America, Africa and Asia.
The Group Data 'n' Analytics Cell (GDNA) is the Big Data and Analytics arm of the Aditya Birla Group created at its centre to strategize and partner with 18+ Group businesses across B2B and B2C domains to deliver on its strategic priorities through the power of AI. The company represents strong analytics and domain expertise drawn from the best-in-class talent from leading global and Indian businesses that leverage cutting edge tools and advanced AI algorithms built on a highly scalable and robust big data infrastructure to mine and act upon petabytes of structured and unstructured data.
Deep Thomas, the Group Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Aditya Birla Group, is at the helm of steering organization-wide initiatives and transformation programs that leverage data and cutting edge analytics solutions enabling business opportunities, growth and operational efficiencies across its multi-sector businesses. As a reputed analytics expert and thought leader, Deep's career spans over 2 decades in steering business transformation across global and India blue-chip organizations through Digital and AI. Prior to Aditya Birla Group, Deep was the Founder-CEO of Tata Insights & Quants, Tata Group's Big Data and Decision Science company and has also held various key positions in US and India with multinationals like Citigroup, HSBC, and American Express to steer their Global Digital and Analytics agenda.
The charter of the team entails delivering business value by (i) making ABG's businesses more data-focused through analytics solutions and AI/ML products that can affect both top and bottom line; (ii) creating a sustainable next-gen digital talent across the Group for embedding a data-driven culture; and (iii) developing digital and algorithmic assets for scale and accelerated value-addition.
ABG's focus is on understanding the challenges and business priorities across front-end and back-end business processes, implementing AI solutions, mapping their business value and scaling these solutions across domains. Some areas for AI-driven initiatives that are benefitting the company's businesses include Energy, Logistics, and Network Optimization for Operational Efficiency, Pricing Intelligence for Procurement, Demand Forecasting for better Sales & Operations Planning, Churn Prediction for Customer Retention, Feedback Analytics for Customer Relationship, and Sales and Marketing Analytics for serving its customers better. Each of these solutions impacts ABG's supply value chain and customer value chain thereby improving operational efficiency, quality, productivity, time-to-market, customer-centricity, etc.
Deep's tryst with data started nearly 25 years ago with American Express where his role was to apply a data-driven approach to improve the marketing effectiveness in the Asia-Pacific region through cost-revenue trade-offs leveraging statistical and financial models. A few years later, he moved from AmEx International to its US business where he got an opportunity to work across some cutting-edge areas in applications of 'Decisions Science'.
Post that, Deep moved to India to help scale up global analytics centre for HSBC and later with Citigroup, where-in both the roles presented an opportunity to strengthen his understanding of the Global Retail and Commercial Banking business on a global scale whilst also understanding, building, and nurturing the growing data science talent in India and China.
Post Citi, he got an opportunity with the Tata Group to set up its big data company as Founder-CEO and recently with Aditya Birla Group to set-up its Data Analytics Corporate function; both giving him an opportunity to deliver value through analytics across many sectors such as Cement, Auto, Steel, Retail, E-commerce, Power and many more, and proudly build AI capability that is "made in India" and "made for India" while learning from some of the brightest minds in the country.
Each of these experiences has instilled Deep with the belief and courage to take upon new challenges, industries, and nations that have erstwhile been slower in the digital adoption through the power of collaboration, novel processes, change management, and above all; a passionate group of high-calibre talent.
The challenges can vary from one organization to another such as data and infrastructure maturity, be it data quality, data governance, data synchronization, or infrastructure readiness. To circumvent this issue, it is important that one understands his organization's data landscape really well and takes the necessary interventions before investing in technology. Similarly, the other concerning factor can be around infrastructure maturity. The right platform and technology stack that is scalable and flexible is needed to address the current and future business requirements. Other challenges include a lack of awareness of the potential from AI and/or business sponsorship. Lastly, it is the culture – culture of experimentation, curiosity, and challenging the status quo.
Every innovative leader should strive to instil a culture of innovation through 'Outside-In' view, influencing skills and a beehive mentality. Innovation cannot be created through appeals to authority. Strong collaborative leaders focus on the collective good to steer winning teams coupled with a boundary-less behavior where ideas are accepted and nurtured regardless of where it comes from. Lastly, transparency and communication of what the company is building and what's the big picture are important to have, while anchoring everyone towards the big goal of driving innovation.
According to Deep, "While innovating our products/solutions for our target audience, we leverage a 2X2 matrix of the "Value vs. Differentiation" framework where 'Value' is the impact created for the business and 'Differentiation' is the level of differentiation vis-à-vis our competitors." This framework is applied in conjunction with an agile approach and outside-in focus to rapidly build and test solutions in partnership with academia, start-ups, and platform/product solution providers.
As more and more data is made available through connected machines and humans, coupled with ever-increasing consumer expectations and rising global standards, Deep believes that there is a need to make superior business decisions with speed, scale, and accuracy that will propel analytics to become more critical and core to each business and its function. He quotes, "It will be imperative for every business to have analytics at its core to succeed!"
Deep considers, 'Yearning for Learning' is more important than 'Yearning for Earning'. Things are changing so rapidly in the industry that one needs to keep learning so as to stay relevant. Outside-in focus i.e. keep a constant eye on what's happening around him; be it in his own industry or in other industries that could soon become the new bench-mark, is necessary. While sharing his wisdom to budding leaders, he notes that passion and attitude also hold equal importance as these are what drives one to do more than just an 8-hour job. Unarguably, hard work, focus, humility, and commitment are indispensable qualities for all with other essential traits including one's sense of integrity and value system.
