Actify Data Labs: Helping drive value from data

The Eureka Moment!

The ideation of Actify Data Labs is said to have started off as a set of brainstorming sessions between Anand Narayan – the chief digital officer at True North) and Hindol Basu. Eventually, Pramod Kabra who heads business management at True North came forward to help them with his business perspectives. This was the time when both Anand and Hindol identified that the use of Voice, Image and Text data could have a revolutionary impact. “We could create solutions in areas like voice analytics, image analytics and use of alternate data for credit underwriting that could help us build a solid machine learning and AI company,” mentions Hindol. This marked the beginning of Actify Data Labs in 2018.

Team Actify leaves no stone unturned to carve a niche in the ML space by bridging the gap between black box machine learning and traditional glass box analytics by leveraging the power of voice, image and text data. The benefits to companies range from save in operations costs, credit loss, insurance loss and enhancement of revenue. “There is a huge potential in the market because of likely adoption of ML and AI in most business across industries. Noticeably, Chinese companies are making huge strides in this area. In

case of India, data availability remains a challenge and availability of talent with multi-disciplinary skills is also a big gap, mentions Hindol.

Working towards the goal, the company involves a combination of exploration and implementation where the team devotes significant amount of time in understanding and analysing research papers from academic journals. This involves spending time with clients in understanding the business problems and finding out how ML can help deliver incremental dollars. Hindol adds, “We spend a lot of time in understanding how the client stores and processes data. We frequently encounter cases where the client’s data and technology environment fail to support the processing needs that ML and AI demands, in those cases we work closely with technology teams to iron out the glitches.”

The Journey from Good to Great!

Actify’s association with True North has been the silver lining. With constant support from them, team Actify now wishes to democratise the application of ML and AI and make ML an integral part of every business process. “As we build ML and AI solutions for our clients, we are also creating product like frameworks which will get refined as we take up newer areas of problem solving,” says Hindol. The company expects to grow their business across Asia Pacific and Americas with a focus on few select verticals.