Women in AI - Top 10 Indian Women Empowering the World of AI
Know The Women AI Leaders From India, Excelling In The Tech World.
A decade ago, very few Indian women used to choose the tech field as their career. Even after owning 100 times better technical intelligence, so many Indian women lost themselves in the crowd. Their intelligence remained limited and unrevealed under the stacks of certificates. Here, always the barrier has been the fear of not getting adopted by the fast-track corporate culture.
But times have changed. The world can witness and learn from the Indian women leaders in AI today, who provide the best technical power to global technology. Women in India are only known for their orthodox lives in-home or how well they do the daily chores at home, and they have broken into the world of technology and even led it with ideas and tech solutions.
Women leading data and AI in India today are empowering the top giant firms like Wipro, Infosys, Accenture, and many more. When I'm talking about top giants, it does not mean they are only IT. But they are in R&D, Data Analytics,Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, Blockchain, Robotics, and many more. So Indian women in AI are becoming a legend for the entire world.
AI - powered Technology is not a man-oriented designation anymore. Women are leading AI, Machine learning, and computer vision, and this shift in society cannot be unseen.
From where it started? The Idea of Women Leaders In AI
Accenture has always worked on gender equality and aims to achieve a gender balance workforce by 2025. The Accenture Vaahini has given many opportunities to upskill and re-skill at Accenture's AI.
The panelists said that the edtech online platforms offer virtual courses and certification, changing the world and women to be a leader in data science and AI.
The technology sector has a lot of gender gaps. Science, Technology, and Engineering have gender issues with primary men, which is critical to address. The only way to remove this gender barrier in AI is to encourage women to apply for a career in the technology sector. As per the World economic forum, women account for around 22% of AI experts worldwide. These women's AI role models are breaking the gender stereotype in technology. So young girls and other women are getting the courage to pursue a STEM career. So, we can say that the thought or the journey of 'women in AI' achieved its initiation from Accenture, in India.
Here are the top Indian women in AI or better to say top Indian women leaders in AI to address.
List of Top Women Leaders of India Making A Huge Difference In AI
1.Hardika Shah
"A true attestation of our sustainable business model and the vast MSME market opportunity ahead of us. This fresh equity round will energize us to scale faster to continue doing what we do best, bringing more small business entrepreneurs into the fold of financial inclusion." Hardika Shah.
She is the Founder and the CEO of Kinara capital. Hardika has 20 years of experience in management consulting with Accenture lead teams and executes large global AI projects in the EU, U.S, and the Asia Pacific. She was a pro-bono mentor for a decade serving multiple universities and the best social entrepreneurship program.
Kinara provides financial services to its customers by its app, with 110 branches, and is present in 90 cities all over India. They use AI and ML to move applicants from loan decisions to payment in 24 hours, and the platform offers loans ranging from 1,000 to 3,000. It changed the small business lending in India by 'No property collateral loans' to new entrepreneurs.
Kinara capital has given 400$ million in 75,000 collateral-free business loans. These loans have enabled much financial inclusion, which aids the growth of small businesses to be established in India. This is indeed a remarkable work in SME financing and was even awarded as the bank of the year (ASIA) by the world bank/IFC.
She has set an example for all the Indian women in AI.
2. Aunkita Nandi
Aunkita Nandi is the co-founder and director of Tier-5 technology solution Pvt Ltd. She started the Tier-5 at 25 with Jon Vaughn in 2016. In less than 6 months, Tier-5 was launched in Kolkata with its office in US Indiana. They invested around 5 lakhs (Approx. 8,000$) with two employees and rented computers. One was a developer, and one was an HR personnel.
Tier-5 is a service-based company and got its first few clients from Facebook marketing. At the end of the first year, Tier-5 added 15 employees. Today they have a workforce of 100 employees. In 2019 they became a product-based company with 21+ products. Small and medium-sized businesses buy Tier-5 products online or can subscribe. Their products consist of AI-powered technology to speed up and ease the business process, mainly marketing and social media management.
3. Ishu Jain
"Women have the skill required to be at the top or should ideally acquire the quant plus coding skills needed" - Ishu Jain.
Ishu Jain is the director and head of central analytics at Swiggy. She has 15 years of excellent knowledge in analytical insight and ML models for organizations like Genpact, Fractal, Swiggy, and Target.
When it comes to the list of top women in AI, in India, then the list can't be completed without the mention of Ishu Jain.
At the start of her career, she worked as a data scientist at Genpact. Later she worked at Dell deploying production ML models across geographies while setting a vendor ecosystem. Then she moved to fractal, where she learned to manage P&L in analytics consulting. With so much experience, she learned escalation management, client management, change direction, and many more.
Ishu Jain applied all her skills and experience at Swiggy for central functions. She started to optimize delivery and expanded its scope eventually. She has even specialized ML algorithms like unsupervised, supervised learning,forecasting and recommendation systems, etc. She loves to do all of this in ML by seeing insight from data for feature engineering, looking at results, and debugging.
Ishu Jain leads a team of 100+ data scientists and analysts for functions like geospatial analytics, delivery network optimization, payout structure, fleet assignment and demand and supply forecasting.
4. Lakshmi Vaidesswaran
Lakshmi Vaideeswaran is the VP at Tiger analytics. She is a pioneer in technological development and commercialization with 30 years of experience. She offers her clients high value from their customers by tiger analytics.
She has received the "Women In AI leadership award for Tiger analytics." Tiger analytics provides data analytics, consulting solutions, marketing, risk analytics, planning, and operation solutions. Tiger analytics excels in data engineering, data science, and business analytics. They even offer consumer packaged goods, banking, financial services, insurance, and solutions to retail industries.
She was even added to the list of Top 50 STEM scientists in the country by the confederation of Indian industry.
5.Neharika Agarwal
Neharika Agarwal is the vice president and the head of business intelligence and analytics for Bharti Axa Life Insurance. She has 12 years of experience in integrating data analytics and technology for decision-making and implementation of strategies. She excelled in solving customer issues for industries like FMCG, BFSI, and automobiles. Nehariks is the leader of 14 data science members and reports at Bharti AXA life insurance. She has even established a center of excellence culture inside the organization.
6. Manisha Bantia
Manisha Bantia is the VP of data analytics at Fiserv global services and has 20 years of experience in the technology industry. Currently, she is the Vice president of the Artificial intelligence center of excellence at Fiserv global services.
She has a team of 250 members for digital analytics with AI visualization for generating business insight for their clients. Manisha's responsibilities are identifying the primary issues, providing a solution for issues, and interpreting business. She even impacts businesses by integrating the power of emerging technology. As the leader, she is responsible for all the analytics solutions and product services for Fiserv client advisory. Thus she has also become renowned personnel in the list of 'women in AI.'
7.Kamiya Motwani
Kamiya Motwani is the 2nd senior data science manager at Walmart global tech, India. Currently, she is building a team of data scientists who work primarily to build an optimized recommendation engine for the grocery domain, providing personalized substitutes that start from building a state-of-art neural network model and substitution for out-of-stock items during order fulfillment. Kamiya has even worked a lot on click prediction for advertisements and has experience building machine learning from data. Before holding a prominent position in Walmart, she worked with top organizations like Oracle corporation and Yahoo Inc.
8.Divya Mittal
Divya Mittal is the director of data science at American Express. She has 11 years of professional experience in financial service and banking, managing credit risk in the customer life cycle from credit underwriting of new customers.
Divya works hard to make data-driven credit decisions for small and mid-corporates by developing strong decision science models and innovation in underwriting. Till the prediction model of existing customers and other high-valued collections during the Indian banking crisis 2019-20. She can be considered the most powerful one on the list of top women in AI when it comes to banking and financial services AI innovation.
9.Preet Saxena
Preet Saxena is the group leader of global analytics practice at Concentrix. Preet has 14 years of experience in research analytics (delivery and solutions), production, and consultation. Now she is leading the center of excellence for social and brand analytics, moderation analytics, content evaluation, and people analytics. She was the leader in the 2019 Everest group - analytics services PEAK matrix.
10.Sandhya Gopalan
Sandhya Gopalan practices AI, MLops, and data and analytics practices at EY. At EY, she creates, builds, and deploys AI and ML at a large scale for global clients across various sectors. She even scaled MLOps solutions and built target architecture with working client enterprises, data architects, businesses, and CDOs. This has enabled data-driven transformation for sizable financial service clients.
In A Nutshell
So, women leading AI are not just coming out of their zone but are creating a milestone and a story inspiring many women who aspire to work in the technology field.
But still, there is a tiny percentage of women in AI leadership. Facebook's diversity report says that 22% of technical departments are women, and 15% of their work is in AI research. Google's diversity report says only 10% of women work with machine intelligence. Thus, encouraging women to learn new age technology like AI and ML or any other technology so women can lead the future of AI.
