(US and Canada) Ashwini Asokan, Founder and CEO of computer vision and AI company Mad Street Den, speaks with Kirk Ball, EVP and CIO at Giant Eagle and CDO Magazine Editorial Board Member, about her journey, how her team is helping organizations become native in AI, how the platform assists in automating processes, and its potential to bring about meaningful growth and scale.

At the onset, Asokan speaks about her extensive experience in the product world at Intel, assisting multiple business units in the transition to a platform company. She recounts utilizing her business acumen to accumulate software, hardware, and business strategies, gathering knowledge through the development of various platform teams and businesses.

The two co-founders at Mad Street Den have backgrounds in neuroscience and neuromorphic engineering. This encouraged the creation of a platform that behaves and learns in a manner inspired by how humans understand the contextual world. This then led to the formation of their company.

While the founders thought deeply before deciding on a particular market path, Asokan mentions that the market has changed drastically since it first began. In addition, she notes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has not been as successful as promised or expected in recent years. She explains that for organizations to truly become AI native, owning the technology is not enough. Processes, systems, and approaches must be developed that organize and meaningfully connect data to fully understand the potential of AI.

She emphasizes that it is imperative to have AI in organizational DNA to move forward. To achieve that, enterprises must integrate AI into their culture, conversations, and processes as a means of making them AI-native.

Moving forward, Asokan observes three massive issues concerning Artificial Intelligence (AI):

1. Enterprises deploy too many single-purpose applications that cannot easily communicate with each other in their workflow, creating a disjointed system.
2. An overabundance of data science and machine learning tools makes it challenging to maintain models efficiently, leading to high operating costs. This also creates tension between data-centric and model-centric approaches.
3. The massive economic costs associated with broken data costing organizations trillions in unneeded losses and making it unappealing to be a “data janitor.”

Furthermore, she explains the value of applying AI across connected workflows. For instance, in the finance field, AI can automate the processing of documents, extract data, and enrich it to personalize the customer experience. AI can organize, extract, and recommend the right jobs In the staffing industry. Accordingly, without AI, it would take organizations three to five years to build these applications.

Emphasizing growth, Asokan believes that growth arises from working with customers to bring about the change they envision and that AI is only the last piece of the puzzle. She maintains that initially, clients may have doubts, but the leaders and the team act as determined change agents introducing organizations to the platform’s possibilities. She conveys that data, AI, and change management drive the transformation, allowing demonstration of the value and bringing meaningful scale and growth.

Thereafter, Asokan explains how organizational AI processes user information to keep it secure, extract crucial data, and create profiles to better understand client needs. This helps automate and digitize the process for millions of users monthly.

Similarly, the recommendation engine assists recruiters by allowing them to bid on jobs and discover the right job opportunity for a person at the right time. In conclusion, Asokan states that AI has many other use cases in finance, insurance, and retail and can be used in many spheres to make processes more efficient.

CDO Magazine appreciates Ashwini Asokan for sharing insights and data success stories with our global community.