Carsome, CDO: Data is About More Than Just Reporting Numbers; It Drives Innovation Toward Specific Industry Pain Points

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(Asia) In this interview, Piyush Palkar, Chief Data Officer, Carsome, and Ambassador of CDO Magazine for Malaysia, talks to Chris Knerr, Chief Digital Officer, Syniti, about Carsome and its innovative journey so far.

Carsome has been in the industry for close to six years. It has collected a wealth of data by being in this industry as they are into the business of buying and selling used cars. So basically anyone who wants to sell their car, go to Carsome. They inspect the car by basically going into 175 inspection points. Carsome understands what that car is all about and then moves towards quoting a price or using their own auction house. It has a network of around 5,000 dealers in the market. They are in Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia.

So all this as a total package allows the seller to basically put the car on auction or even we buy it. So Carsome collected the initial massive amount of data in the whole process. He shares that as a CDO to digitalize the entire process, there are so many use cases that need to be put into practice.

He shares further that, just like when we talk about engine pricing car scoring engine and personalizing the customer user journey. So with all these data points coming in, it becomes crucial that Carsome solves the customer's problem. So we make the pricing more transparent and help meet this industry by making the entire process transparent, digitalizing everything. So with the power of data, he thinks it gets crucial.

As a CDO of Carsome, he shares that he looks after four verticals- business intelligence, data engineering, data management and then insights, data science, and advanced analytics. These four functions are essentially established at the center of excellence for Carsome to help increase business operational efficiency and understand how Carsome can solve different departments' problems with the power of data.

He shares when data is collected; it is democratized data. At Carsome, they make sure even the retail inspectors and managers have access to these data points to make informed decisions. They can get into giving them reasonable prices, predictive models, cars supporting engines, or even automating some tasks, which increase their efficiency.

So they don't need to go and click the car plate images and then mask it by themselves. They can use AI solutions such as automatic masking. It helps as data essentially is not only giving reporting numbers. But it is all about how you can drive innovation towards these specific industry pain points.

He stresses that data protection privacy is paramount as they don't want their inspection process to get longer, so people think they are wasting time masking those. But, instead, it increases operational efficiency and privacy.