IIM Bangalore Professor Pulak Ghosh delivers the first lecture of the VYAKHYAN-IndianOil LEAD Talks on ‘Big Data and Emerging Technologies’

New Delhi: Professor Pulak Ghosh, faculty in the Decision Sciences area of IIM Bangalore and IIMB Chair of Excellence, delivered the first talk at the ‘IndianOil LEAD Talks’, held on April 01 in New Delhi. Prof. Ghosh spoke on ‘Big Data and Emerging Technologies’.
‘IndianOil LEAD Talks’ lecture series is a future-oriented Corporate HR initiative that aims to mainstream a learning ecosystem in the corporation.
The lecture took place in the presence of a large gathering of officials of IOC, including Sanjiv Singh, Chairman, A.K. Sharma, Director (Finance), Ranjan Kumar Mohapatra, Director (HR), etc. The event was also webcast live across IndianOil.

In his hour-long comprehensive, insightful and engaging lecture, Prof. Ghosh took the audience into the amazing world of AI-aided Business Analytics that has a huge potential to make business decisions efficient and profitable. He said that AI, Big Data and Analytics have become the game changers in businesses across the globe in the context of large scale computing, the internet boom and the revolution in mobile telephony. It has given a tremendous power to decision makers to take advantage of their customer data bases, slice and dice them and create analytic and predictive algorithms, he added.

He further said that AI is evolving exponentially and that though we are still in the era of weak AI , the era of strong AI where machine learning will be more advanced is just a couple of years away. “The most important aspect of Data Analytics is the right match between business domain expertise and analysts, so it is of paramount importance to understand our businesses and our customers. AI and BA will of course give a deeper pattern and throw up algorithms that can help us serve our customers better. The key is to tap and woo our potential customers more vigorously”, he pointed out.

Stating that Big Data is a proven methodology, Prof. Ghosh mentioned a survey which reveals that every dollar spent brings back eight dollars in revenue. “Analytics is a multi-disciplinary science which explains why many leading organizations are hiring employees from unorthodox disciplines”.

Prof. Ghosh’s talk has received encouraging feedback from employees and IOC seeks a longer presentation from him on the subject in the future.
Prof. Pulak Ghosh serves at NITI Ayog and advises the Government of India on various issues relating to economics, agriculture, data-driven policy, AI, etc. He was also on the Advisory group of Big Data at the United Nations Global Pulse, an initiative of the United Nations.