Mukund Raghunath, Founder and CEO of Acies Global, speaks with Della Shea, Head of Operational Risk, Data, and AI at CIBC, in a video interview about the importance of accountability, constant learning, and organizational focus on leveraging generative AI (GenAI).

Acies Global is a data science and analytics consulting firm that helps companies navigate the digital continuum iteratively.

At the outset, Raghunath mentions that it is a constant endeavor to ensure that the principles of accountability and ownership are celebrated regularly. He adds that when somebody takes ownership of not knowing something and is willing to learn, that is a positive sign because it conveys that for them, the outcome is important.

In terms of broadening the scope, Raghunath states that the organization encourages constant learning. Stressing the three buckets of creation, scaling, and consumption, he affirms encouraging people to surpass those.

For instance, Raghunath mentions having people who have worked as data scientists for a particular engagement now play the role of data engineers for another engagement. Similarly, Acies has software developers who have built products internally and have now transitioned to become data scientists.

Speaking of interesting organizational developments down the line, Raghunath shares about the focus on GenAI. Elaborating further, he states that the company wants to build numerous GenAI-driven accelerators that could reduce the time to market and time to value.

Therefore, Acies is strategically investing in building accelerators that can resolve common components of problems for different use cases faster. To accelerate the approach, he mentions having a hackathon, where multiple people took part to build these accelerators.

Another area of investment for Acies Global is sustainability and climate change, says Raghunath. He believes it to be an area where data and technology can play a vital role.

While many companies are investing heavily in creating more sustainable products, services, and operations, effectively communicating the value of the efforts with downstream partners or customers remains unclear. This, he emphasizes, is the biggest challenge in sustainability, and Acies Global is building a solution to help with that.

One impactful piece of advice Raghunath shares is to never stop learning. Especially in this rapidly evolving field, technologies are getting obsolete faster than ever. This reinstates that one has to have a deep generalist mindset and learn the fundamental concepts of data science, data engineering, and software engineering.

When asked to share about his favorite book, Raghunath mentions Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Data science is all about decision-making, he maintains, and that comes with the human aspects of irrationality.

According to Raghunath, understanding cognitive biases helps in crafting better hypotheses and having a pragmatic approach to decision-making. He also mentions reading a lot of articles on Medium to stay abreast of the latest happenings in the digital and technology space.

Concluding, Raghunath notes that the two books that opened up a world of imagination for him were the Harry Potter series and “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini.

CDO Magazine appreciates Mukund Raghunath for sharing his insights with our global community.