Exclusive Interview with Amit Das, CEO and Co-Founder, Think360.ai

Think360.ai is focused on transforming other organizations with Algo360 and Kwik.ID

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are flourishing the global tech market across all kinds of industries in the present scenario. Organizations are transforming their products and services to enhance customer engagement with the implementation of AI and other disruptive technologies. Accelerating the revenue drive with AI helps to transform the market position in Industry 4.0 efficiently.

Here is an exclusive interview with Amit Das, CEO, and Co-Founder, Think360.ai, who elaborates how the implementation of artificial intelligence and other intelligent solutions of this company can help other organizations to transform their products and services efficiently and effectively in this highly competitive market.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Think360.ai is a full stack AI firm with market leading products, solutions, and advisory services. The vision of "Accelerating Intelligent Transformation" builds on the three pillars of core value proposition— accelerated time to market, intelligent solutions and frameworks, and transformative outcomes.

The team partners with clients at the intersection of data, algorithms, technology, and business to solve their most complex problems. Algo360, India's largest alternate credit score has already supported more than 60 million lending decisions, while Kwik.ID, the first fully compliant video-KYC solution, has an NPS of over 90 across more than 100K video KYC sessions. The advisory work has delivered a business impact of beyond US$1 billion in the last seven years, for clients across financial services, pharma, oil & gas, and more across US and India.

The company has been focused on picking high complexity-high value problems and exploring innovative solutions, and it forces to explore cutting-edge technologies, advanced analytics, and AI/ML capabilities to sync with evolving customer expectations. The work spans bringing newer and interesting data assets to clients, building sophisticated statistical and predictive models, and helping clients extract the value out of these models and data through modern application development, APIs, and IaaS solutions— that's why Think360.ai is a full-stack AI firm.

2. Brief us about the proactive Founder/CEO of the company and his contributions towards the company and the industry.

Think360.ai started its operations in July 2014. It was founded by Amit Das, Suryadip Ghoshal, and Monish Salot. Amit is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore (2003) and has set up and scaled analytics capabilities for TCS, Inductis (acquired by EXL Services), Diamond Consultants (acquired by PwC USA), and 3i Infotech, before starting Think360.ai. Over his more than18 year career, he has mentored over 500 data scientists, many of them recognized as analytics industry leaders today. At Think360.ai, Amit is the CEO and has been actively involved in market development and organizational development roles.

Suryadip Ghoshal, alumnus of IGIDR (2005), is a classical econometrician by education and problem solver by interest. He worked on credit risk problems across India, APAC, EU/UK at FICO before joining Diamond Consultant/ PwC where he and Amit met. Surya is the algorithm designer and architect of Algo360, the alternate credit score, and the Chief Analytics Officer of Think360.ai. He continues to be the trusted analytics and AI advisor for over 100 clients.

In 2015, Monish Salot, alumnus of Hofstra University, joined the team as the third Co-Founder, to sharpen the technology focus. Monish, a computer science graduate from KJ Somaiya and MBA from Hofstra University, is a solution architect at heart. Starting his career as a rapid prototyping and new technology evangelist at L&T Infotech, he and Amit crossed roads at 3i Infotech whereas a part of the CEO's think tank, they had the opportunity to brainstorm on several industry-leading ideas. Monish is the Chief Product Officer of the company and is also the business head for SaaS products.

Together, they act as the three vertices of a triangle— Monish as the technologist, Surya as the data scientist, and Amit as the strategist— building an organization as a first-principles organization.

3. Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how do they get value out of it.

Think360.ai offers two flagship products, Algo360 and Kwik.ID, along with analytics and data science consulting services and over 20 accelerators and enablers.

Algo360 is India's largest AI-driven alternate credit score solution that provides lenders with more than 1000 alternate data points to gauge the creditworthiness of individuals. Algo360 is a big data analytics solution in its truest form with 25 billion strings of unstructured information, more than 60 million customers, a model that continually retrains itself on a base of 25 million data points, and more. It is revolutionizing credit risk and underwriting in modern digital lending and furthers the cause of financial inclusion by enabling financial institutions to extend credit offerings to the underserved population. Clients use Algo360 to power their instant underwriting and decisioning processes— whenever one sees an instant loan proposition— one can be sure that an Algo360 proposition is powering it.

Kwik.ID is an AI-enabled customer onboarding and video-KYC product. It is the first-ever fully compliant video-KYC solution for banks, NBFCs, fintech, e-Wallets, and more, and includes features like low-bandwidth video conversations, face match, liveness detection, intelligent and dynamic content masking, fraud checks, standard and non-standard OCR, low-code journey design, multiple API integrations, database verification, and a full audit and review layer, in addition to performance dashboards.

It provides bespoke analytics and technology consulting services for the BFSI, pharma, logistics, oil and gas, and retail industries, ranging from customized analytics solutions, credit policy development, data warehousing, executive dashboard creation, anomaly detection models, demand forecasting, market prioritization, and many more.

4. What are your growth plans for the next 12 months?

The team has had a historical CAGR of 55%+, and as a proudly bootstrapped organization, it plans on continuing and bettering the growth trajectory.

To drive this growth, the team will be continuing to make significant investments in driving product roadmap while working closely with clients on their priorities. For instance, with AA, OCEN, open banking, the PDP bill and its implications, RBI's recent notes on fintech and digital lending industry, the company believes the product roadmap will get accelerated and is quite enthused about the financial inclusion opportunities that will come with it. In a way, the recent surge in BNPL fintechs will further the cause of financial inclusion and the team wants to ensure that it continues to build the most intelligent rails for such innovation and growth.
Additionally, it believes that the amount of data that organizations have access to is growing at a tremendous rate, and they will be needing a lot of support from companies like Think360.ai to derive value out of these data investments. The company hopes to increase its footprint to 200+ clients in the next 18 months, and the eventual goal is to power a billion business outcomes!

5. How are disruptive technologies like IoT/big data analytics/AI/machine learning/cloud computing impacting today's innovation?

What these disruptive technologies are really changing are four key levers –

• The amount and quality of data available for businesses to work with
• Democratization of technology and AI for wider development and consumption
• Innovation in the available algorithmic options
• Lastly, the ease of deployment of solutions is built by combining these levers.

For instance, credit scores were earlier built on somewhat dated information that banks would share with credit bureaus through a batch upload process. In the current day and time, ML-backed alternate-data products like Algo360 are able to harness huge volumes of unstructured information available through user-consented APIs and create real-time credit scores.

Similarly, in smart grid management, predictive anomaly detection, health-care interventions, early warning signals, and all the way to driverless cars – AI is leading to disruptive business outcomes. The team believes the current use-cases are the tip of the iceberg.

There will be truly disruptive innovations in personal care, health, and wellness, public policy design and execution, urban transport, energy, and many industries— all powered by the innovation levers present today.  It can harness as much data as is available, in near-real-time, aided by infinitely scalable cloud computing infrastructure and highly efficient ML/ DL innovations.

6. What is your Leadership Mantra?

The company believes in hiring SWANs—Smart people who can Work hard (and not take their smartness for granted), are deeply Analytical (strong beliefs held lightly – empowered by data), and, most importantly, are Nice (team players, collaborative, inclusive). The four core values of Thinkers – Client Centricity (and not just external clients), Intellectual Curiosity (Jon Snow – you know nothing!), Smart Work (If it can be automated, automate it), and Collaboration (finding your success in your team-mates' success).

These are key to the leadership mantra— Grow together. Grow smartly. Be better than what you were a moment before. As long as one all does that, one will see progress— personal and organizational.

7. How can C-suite executives leverage data to deliver business value to their organizations?

In past experience, the best sponsorships for becoming a data-driven organization come from the C-suite. When I started my career, there was a joke about this not-so-data-savvy CMO that the team worked with— his cabin is where insights die a brutal death. Over the last decade, it has seen organizations increase their data and insight investments. C-suite's primary challenge is the balance between their experience/ intuition v/s the insights from data. These can often be at loggerheads. I would recommend a five-step approach

• Sponsor the core data and insight initiatives from the CEO's office. When that's not the case, organizations commission too many reports and dashboards and do not have sufficient action orientation around the data.
• For what it's worth, most client organizations struggle to build a good data science team because they can't articulate an aspirational career path, provide the requisite support structures, reward them for outcomes (compared to how sales organizations are rewarded), and manage their intellectual needs.
• Make the data office an integral component of all business reviews. In fact, data and the CEO's office should jointly run the PMO when an organization is going through this transition. The only counter-balance to the power data has is the CEO's office and vice versa.
• I've heard too many CEOs say this by now. Data and BI are subservient to the business. In that one moment, I've seen the entire data science organization feel powerless and deflated. Organizations need to empower their insight teams for success.
• Hold accountable. Force the so-what! Unless data and insight conversations focus on the outcome, they soon lose their way.