The Pune Data Conference 2019 brought together 450+ experts including top business executives, distinguished speakers, solution architects and software engineers to discuss disruptive technologies that are shaping the future of banking and financial services, retail, insurance, healthcare and other industries. Most of these sessions and discussions revolved around emerging technology trends ranging from Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Hadoop Administration, Cloud, and many more.
The conference kicked off with a keynote speech by sales leader Vinod Ganesan, Country Manager — Cloudera. Vinod shared his views on the emergence of a modern data warehouse which allows us to integrate a wide array of data at an unprecedented scale — something traditional warehouses are not well suited for. An elite panel comprising of thought leaders from the banking industry — Kuldeep Deshpande (Ellicium), Gurang Arora (Amdocs), Pradeepta Mishra (Lymbyc), Sachin Janai (Saama) and Shantanu Mirajkar (Clairvoyant) — conversed on the growing role of AI and cloud in BFSI. The dialog revolved around how the industry adopted these innovative technologies and some interesting use cases to showcase how automation can help improve both operational efficiencies and customer experience.
The earlier versions of PDC focused more on the potential use cases related to AI, ML & analytics. By 2019, most of the industries have come a long way in implementing and executing these use cases. The focus shifted this year to how various industries adopted these disruptive technologies such as AI, ML, and blockchain.
Following are the highlights and key takeaways from the conference -
Translating technology trends into concrete business value
Companies want to understand how AI solves their problems and can increase the effectiveness of their operations by getting work completed more efficiently than ever before. More and more companies are claiming to use AI to improve their processes- but it can be difficult to assess the return on investment for AI-based solutions when not many case studies or benchmarks exist. Businesses should start gathering the components necessary for building AI products — a capable cloud platform, quality data, technological expertise to name a few.
Legacy Enterprises vs. Unicorns
Technology, especially cloud computing, has played a crucial role in small and medium businesses, and led to a rapid rise in the startup ecosystem. Entrepreneurs today realize that technologies like IoT, AI can level the playing field if they intend to dislodge industry giants. Keynote speaker Vinod Ganesan from Cloudera highlights how traditional IT companies need to adapt from existing legacy models to the evolving, disruptive trends and technologies. It is truly a case of transform or perish.
Overcoming the Data Science and Data Management divide
An abundance of talent on the technological front permeates the Indian tech sector. However, there is a real need for an analytical mindset from a business point of view. Piyush Agarwal from Cloudera emphasizes on an effective handshake of the Data Scientists and IT teams with that of the business leaders to generate business value. Cloudera aims to achieve this integration with Cloudera Fast forward Labs.
Machine Learning in Blockchain
Data scientists today have to deal with a lot of problems with bad data. In one of the sessions, Vikram Chaudhari and Manish Kumar from Vsquare Systems share their thoughts on how blockchain and Machine Learning can fully compliment each other. Blockchains are designed to be immutable, distributed ledger — and a convergence of ML with blockchain can really benefit data quality and data integrity. With the growing use of ML to govern the chain, the scope to enhance security will also increase significantly.
Importance of Data Preparation and Data Quality
As the race to implement AI solutions reaches new heights, it is key to note that the data informing those tools is of paramount importance. Time and again, quality of data has been emphasized by organisations small or large. Good quality and the right set of data — both internal and external — will enable firms to prepare better models thereby enabling them to deliver better results.
Industry 4.0 — The Evolution of the Industrial Sector
The fourth industrial revolution has tremendous potential, however, the transformation isn’t going to happen overnight. Manufacturers need reliable, standardized data to realize the full benefits of AI, big data and predictive maintenance. Vikas Dhawan from Parkar Consulting sheds light on how data is affecting industries & how different industries can benefit with increased production output, lowered cycle times, lower cost of production and so on. Small and medium-sized enterprises have the biggest opportunity to leapfrog to the next technology and benefits can be huge for them.
Wrap-up
Pune Data Conference 2019 was a success! This conference brought the local community together to knowledge share and connect technology advances to real world use cases. On behalf of the Clairvoyant team, thank you to all attendees, speakers, and sponsors for making PDC a valuable experience! Looking forward to the next one!