Prithvijit Roy: Making AI Real for Enterprises and Pushing Boundaries on Digital

BRIDGEi2i is a trusted partner for enabling AI for Digital Enterprises by leveraging data engineering, advanced analytics, proprietary AI accelerators, and consulting expertise. The company enables businesses to contextualize data, generate actionable insights from complex business problems, and make data-driven decisions across pan-enterprise processes to create sustainable business impact.

BRIDGEi2i partners with enterprises to help them drive pan-enterprise "Digital" initiatives; it specializes in asset-based consulting to solve complex business problems that deploy contextual solutions powered by its proprietary AI accelerators (Watchtower^TM, Recommender^TM, Optimizer^TM, and Converser^TM) to enable wider consumption of insights and ensure faster and more accurate decision-making up to the last mile.

A Leadership with Global Perspective

Prithvijit Roy, CEO, and Co-founder of BRIDGEi2i is an alumnus of the Indian Statistical Institute with a Master's in Quantitative Economics. After graduation, he spent a significant part of his early years with GE and HP, where he helped in setting up the analytics centers of expertise. The global perspective, experience and growing demand for insight services gave Prithvijit the impetus to set up BRIDGEi2i nine years ago. Prithvijit setup BRIDGEi2i with Ashish Sharma and Pritam Kanti Paul in a small garage office. BRIDGEi2i has scaled from pure-play analytics services startup to a leading global AI consultancy and a transformation partner to Fortune 500 enterprises across industries like enterprise tech, banking, insurance, consumer goods, manufacturing across functions ranging from marketing, sales, customer experience, supply chain and risk.

Thriving on the "Value" Obsession

The obsession with "Value to client" has been at the core of the BRIDGEi2i culture from day one. As an AI consultancy, BRIDGEi2i focuses on delivering digital transformation outcomes for enterprises – improving operational effectiveness, enhancing customer experience, and enabling new digital business models. Teams across the board, be it delivery, smartapps, AI labs or consulting, are aligned to value creation frameworks developed for their specific function. With the ability to extract the potential that AI holds, BRIDGEi2i is also investing in "AI for Better Lives" to leverage AI for use cases that society can benefit from. As the team keeps growing year on year, the "value obsession" keeps getting sharper and stronger.

Keep at it; the world will do the talking

One of the prominent facets of the BRIDGEi2i culture is the consistent focus on contribution. Achievements are enjoyed and celebrated, and it's back to the next big thing! Collaboration, a self-motivated workforce and a strong growth mindset are the hallmarks of the BRIDGEi2i DNA. "Today, it's about the effort of my team as a whole that motivates me and inspires me to be better. I'm gratified when our clients acknowledge the impact we delivered or when I see employees progress in their careers and achieve more significant milestones. Seeing the BRIDGEi2i brand grow year-on-year is a proud achievement in my mind," says Prithvijit.

Optimizing Transformation Journey with AI

Today, the enterprise landscape is changing rapidly. The evolving customer expectations are pushing enterprises to rethink the way they run their business and engage with customers. Transformation is not a choice anymore; it is a must to stay relevant and competitive. Today, BRIDGEi2i is uniquely positioned among its peers owing to its asset based consulting approach to Digital Transformation and its on a mission to make AI real for enterprises.

Relevance of People-Skills for Business Growth

As observed by Prithvijit, even experts with extensive individual competencies and technical knowledge may sometimes find it challenging to work with a large group of people. So, people-skills are extremely important in the workplace, whether you are an individual contributor or leader. In general, readiness to dive deep into the data and get one's hands dirty can set people apart from the rest. People should also be able to work in unconventional settings across teams to bring everyone together on a challenge.

Coming Ahead of Inceptive Challenges

While setting up BRIDGEi2i back in the days, Prithvijit recalls, there were not many pure-play analytics organizations, and the company's competition came from consulting, IT, and BPOs. Scaling the startup, ensuring structured thinking on many levels, and differentiation were the primary factors that mattered to BRIDGEi2i then. Today, the landscape for analytics and AI is widespread, so it's more about driving innovation and adapting AI for contextual solutions.

Innovative Attributes of New-Age Leaders

Disruptive technologies are the norm of the day, and with AI becoming mainstream, enterprises are attempting to gain the first-mover advantage in innovation. For leaders, it's not just about delivering the perfect solution by bringing technology and data science together. New-age leaders need to be adept at working with executives to help them build a robust roadmap for delivering sustainable impact through AI.

Reverence for Technology Empowering Industry-Future

Prithvijit believes that AI is the future of analytics, but a lot of people fear losing jobs to AI and automation. In reality, the services industry has evolved tremendously in the last two decades. It is responsible for the creation of countless job opportunities for people to leverage data science and AI. Fifteen years ago, it was challenging to explain analytics to people, but today, people are keen to explore and experiment in this field. The allure attached to gold mining or oil mining is as good as the reverence for data mining today.

On the talent front, India has a lot of people in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), but there's a bridge between academic learning and industry readiness, which needs to be tackled.

Having said that, Prithvijit further notes that BRIDGEi2i has evolved immensely to become suppliers of analytics solutions to companies across the globe, giving it the first-mover advantage over other nations. India has to now work on maintaining this momentous advantage.

From a company point of view, BRIDGEi2i's clients would remain at the heart of its business with the team, continuously aiming to bring the best in class capabilities and bringing more value to clients.

Agility and Upskilling Defines Vibrant Leaders

Given the abundance of startups today, it's clear that it's easy for entrepreneurs in India to set up their own ventures. Every Fortune 500 company has invested here, and India as a market and talent pool has extensively evolved. Besides, there's a boom in co-working spaces, global enterprise companies, and investments. Prithvijit believes that because of technological innovations and disruptions, the business scenario changes rapidly. Thus, business leaders need to upgrade and upskill themselves with changing scenarios constantly and should be flexible in experimenting with new things.