With the prime responsibility of keeping the Dubai Investments group of companies at the forefront of cutting-edge technology, Venkatesh Mahadevan, CIO of Dubai Investments, stresses the importance of organisations equipping themselves with innovative and efficient tools and technologies for their digital transformation journey.
Mahadevan, who has had leadership positions with top Fortune 100 companies such as Motorola, Coca-Cola, and Procter & Gamble and is now part of several startup forums in the Middle East, discusses the biggest challenges that startups might face venturing into the AI/ML industry and has a word of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Which emerging technologies are you investing in to help your sales teams be more effective?
As an organisation, we invest in several technologies as we embark on our digital transformation journey. In sales and marketing, we are looking at a combination of Microsoft and Salesforce technologies.
We essentially make the customer interface, customer interaction, and last-mile issues easier for an organisation and the customers to interact with us and get an idea of our offerings.
It’s been very effective, and we have built a strategic organisational framework based on these two technologies right now.
How do you use analytics to help you address specific business challenges?
We are a complex organisation and have multiple enterprise solutions running across the group. While one size may not fit all, we have laid an enterprise intelligence layer on top of all the systems that collect data and convert them into analytics.
We are giving the management a “cockpit view” based on what they want to see. For example, a unit’s general manager might want to see his sales performance, while a CEO would like to get a much larger view of how a group is performing, and CFO might want to have his dashboard.
We have defined KRAs for each of these units and functions, and based on that, dashboards are being designed. Analytics result from data we cull out from these, which are then converted into information. It’s been very effective, and we have been using analytics to make business decisions.
What are the biggest challenges startups might face while stepping a foot in the AI/ML industry?
The startup industry is growing rapidly, and many exciting ideas are coming out.
In the space of AI, machine learning, and analytics, while the excitement may be to bring a product quickly to the market that does a lot of work, startups need to focus on one area. Since most startups have a lean team, it becomes a challenge to take a horizontal view as investment criteria become huge.
Focus on one particular area, make it grow, do a business case and present it to the market. Stay focused on your idea, find out what value you are delivering to your investor and customer. What you bring to the table from a solution point of view is important. It doesn’t have to be state-of-the-art solutions.
Entrepreneurs are forward-thinking, so they might think of a bigger problem to solve, which is great. But sometimes, you need to look at small nuggets that need to be attended to, and if you focus on that, it will be helpful to the startup ecosystem in a big way.
A word of advice for the emerging startups who want to make it big?
Startup founders should reach out to people who can mentor them. I am part of a few forums where startups pitch their ideas, and I always tell them you may not find an investor in the room, but you will surely find a collaborator, a mentor, or a friend who will tell you what you need to do, and help you. So reach out to people whom you believe can contribute to your idea. It’s good to take along the right people on the journey.
*The second edition of the Enterprise Cloud And Data Center (ECDC) Forum will be held on May 25-26, 2022, in Dubai
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