OpenAI chief Sam Altman recently published a blog titled “The Intelligence Age,” in which he says, “It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.”

Altman credited ‘deep learning’ as the driving force behind AI’s rapid progress, saying that humanity has discovered an algorithm capable of learning from massive datasets with increasing precision. He said, “In three words: deep learning worked.”

“In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it,” he quipped. He believes AI can solve complex problems, including climate change, space colonisation, and fundamental physics.

“That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems,” said Altman.

While speaking at Cypher 2024, Vignesh Subrahmaniam, group manager of data science at Intuit, discussed deep learning and generative AI, expanding on Altman’s thoughts.

Subrahmaniam began by quoting Scottish philosopher David Hume: “By this means, all knowledge degenerates to probability”. This quote, made nearly 300 years ago, captures the essence of how generative AI functions, as it relies on probability to generate new data based on existing data.

At its core, generative AI learns the probability laws that govern data generation, simulating data in a way that mimics human patterns. Subrahmaniam explained this concept by asking the audience how they would simulate new data points based on a provided dataset. The key, he revealed, lies in understanding the underlying probability distribution of the original data.

“Generative AI essentially learns the probability laws that drive human or natural data,” he explained. For instance, it can generate new images of cats from an existing dataset or compose new music based on a sample. “By providing the text of a song or a picture, generative AI can create something new that aligns with human expectations,” Subrahmaniam added.

The Pillars of Machine Learning 

Subrahmaniam explained the three pillars that form the foundation of machine learning are gradient descent, automatic differentiation, and stochastic approximation. 

He said that gradient descent—first formalised in the 1970s, in the paper “Minimization of Functions Having Lipschitz Continuous First Partial Derivatives” by Larry Armijo—remains a key optimisation technique used in machine learning models today. “It’s the basis for minimising functions with continuous derivatives,” he explained. 

Automatic differentiation, a technique that allows for the exact calculation of derivatives of complex functions, enabled researchers to improve models without suffering from approximation errors. 

Finally, stochastic approximation enables large scale parallel computation of these derivatives across millions of processors, allowing models to scale to new heights. 

“That is the reason why GPU’s are so powerful. The technology we have enables the parallelisation of the computation of these derivatives at scale, through multiple simulations. That is essentially why we can ‘learn’ extraordinarily complex functions at scale,”said Subramianiam. 

What’s Next? 

One of the most exciting developments in AI today, according to Subrahmaniam, is the rise of language models. “Human language is essentially a sequence of tokens, and language models assign probabilities to sentences or sequences of words,” he explained. 

These models, such as those used for text generation, have changed the way we interact with AI. By generating the next word in a sentence or filling in missing words, AI systems can now produce coherent, human-like text. 

However, Subrahmaniam believes that to reach ‘Superintelligence,’ we need a fundamentally different mathematical model that relates to human reasoning. “We don’t have that yet. Right now, it’s generated. So it’s called generative AI. It’s not called reasoning AI,” he concluded.

Intuit, the global financial technology platform behind Intuit TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp, recently concluded the Women in Data Science (WiDS) conference held at their Bangalore office on June 27. 

The event brought together over 130 data science professionals from academia, startups, GCCs, and IT services. The insightful sessions featuring a variety of speakers, including leading data science experts, left the attendees feeling empowered and inspired.

The event was dedicated to empowering women and fostering innovation in data science. WiDS, initiated by Stanford University, began as a one-day conference and has grown into a global data science movement promoting diversity and inclusivity. It  features conferences, workshops, presentations of papers, podcasts, and programs for future data scientists, reaching over 100,000 professionals annually.

The conference kicked off with a welcome note by Anusha Mujumdar, an AI leader at Intuit, setting the stage for a day filled with insightful presentations and hands-on learning experiences.

Keynote: The Journey of Secure Multi-Party Computation

The keynote address, delivered by Arpita Patra, associate professor at the Indian Institute of Science, focused on the practical applications of Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC). 

Titled ‘From theory to practice: The marvellous journey of mighty MPC’, Patra’s talk explored how this cryptographic protocol has evolved from a theoretical concept to a powerful tool in real-world scenarios. It enables multiple parties to jointly compute functions over their inputs while keeping those inputs private.

Tech Talks: Advancing Voice Assistants and Algorithmic Optimisation

Neela Sawant, senior applied scientist at Amazon, presented a tech talk on improving in-car voice assistants for better navigation. This presentation delved into the challenges and solutions in enhancing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and natural language processing technologies specifically for automotive applications.

Later in the day, Koyel Mukherjee, senior research scientist at Adobe Research, discussed ‘Optimising costs, quality and performance – one algorithm at a time’. She explored the techniques for balancing these crucial factors in algorithm development and deployment across various data science applications.

Hands-On Workshop by Intuit 

A key highlight of the conference was the hands-on workshop led by Damitri Kundu, Senior AI/ML Scientist at Intuit, and Sravyasri Garapati, Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Intuit.

The workshop, ‘Mastering the art of automated prompt optimisation in language models’, provided participants with practical skills in fine-tuning prompts for large language models, an increasingly important skill in the era of generative AI.

Paper Presentations: Emerging Research in Data Science

The conference also featured several papers by students and professionals, showcasing emerging research in the field.

1. Niharika Joshi from BMS College of Engineering presented the paper titled ‘Tackling data challenges in energy domain: Synthetic data is the answer’,  addressing the use of artificially generated data to overcome the limitations in real-world energy sector datasets.

2. Harini Anand, a senior at PES University, discussed ‘Bitcoin price prediction using LSTM and VADER sentiment analysis’, combining advanced time-series analysis with natural language processing techniques to forecast cryptocurrency trends.

3. Yashaswini Viswanath, senior specialist in data sciences at Mindtree, explored ‘Machine unlearning for generative AI’, a topic that addressed the challenges of selectively removing information from trained AI models.

4. Sanjana Adapala from BITS Pilani, Hyderabad, presented on ‘Lighting estimation in virtual environments using generative models’, showcasing applications of AI in computer graphics and virtual reality.

The WiDS conference in Bangalore provided a platform for knowledge sharing, networking, and inspiration, highlighting the significant contributions of women in the rapidly evolving field of data science. 

By bringing together experts from academia and industry, the event fostered collaboration and encouraged the next generation of data scientists to push the boundaries of innovation. 
Watch out for the next edition of the Women in Data Science Conference at Intuit in India, where industry pioneers share cutting-edge knowledge, empowering you to thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape. Learn more at Intuit careers.

Intuit, the global financial technology platform that makes Intuit TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp is back with its inspiring ‘Women in Data Science’ (WiDS) conference, scheduled to be held in Bangalore on June 27. The event is dedicated to empowering women and fostering innovation in the realm of data science. The Women in Data Science (WiDS) conference has become a global movement in promoting diversity and inclusivity. 

WiDS, initiated by Stanford University, began as a one-day conference and has grown into a global data science movement. It now features conferences, a datathon, podcasts, workshops, and programs for future data scientists, reaching over 100,000 professionals annually.

The event promises to be a convergence of brilliant minds from academia and industry, offering talks from distinguished visionaries, presentations by the industry’s leading female data scientists, and ample networking opportunities. 

Though the spotlight is on women, the conference is open to all genders to foster inclusivity and collaboration. 

This year, the theme for paper presentations is ‘AI for Content Generation and Personalisation’. There will be discussions around ethical AI and AI applications in fintech, healthcare, and business analytics, besides experimentation with generative AI, and content generation in advertising and marketing.

Intuit is globally recognised for its user-friendly applications and commitment to leveraging technology to solve financial challenges.

There are limited spots; register here. 

Under the Hood

• The day starts with a warm reception and breakfast at 8:30 am, followed by a welcome note from Anusha Mujumdar, senior manager (AI/ML) at Intuit, at 9 am and a keynote session by Arpita Patra, from Indian Institute of Science. 
• The day features tech talks and workshops, including Neela Sawant from Amazon on in-car voice assistants and Shreya Khare from Microsoft and Sravyasri Garapati from Intuit on automated prompt optimization.
• The event’s afternoon sessions will spotlight cutting-edge research through paper presentations. 
• Chaitanya L from BMSCE will tackle data challenges in energy; Harini Anand from PES University will discuss Bitcoin price prediction using LSTM and VADER. Yashaswini Viswanath from Mindtree will explore machine unlearning for generative AI, and Sanjana Adapala from BITS Pilani will present on lighting estimation in virtual environments using generative models.
• The day will conclude with an awards ceremony celebrating the contributions and achievements of the participants. 

Through this event, Intuit aims to bring diversity in hiring and foster a vibrant community of analytics, AI, and data science enthusiasts in Bangalore. The WiDS conference at Intuit stands testament to the growing influence and recognition of women in the tech industry, offering a platform for learning, inspiration, and networking.

There are limited spots; register here. 

Intuit is certified as the Best Firm For Data Scientists to work for by Analytics India Magazine (AIM) through its workplace recognition programme. 

The Best Firm For Data Scientists certification surveys a company’s data scientists and analytics employees to identify and recognise organisations with great company cultures. AIM analyses the survey data to gauge the employees’ approval ratings and uncover actionable insights.

Intuit’s AI Excellence

“At Intuit AI, I am inspired everyday by the exceptional team of ML scientists and engineers I work with. We are dedicated to pushing the boundaries of machine learning and AI to deliver outstanding benefit to our customers. Our teams harness deep algorithmic craft, innovative thinking, and cutting-edge engineering practices to build models and systems that empower millions to thrive financially. We are committed to nurturing our teams, fueled by mentorship, access to the latest tech stack, and a vibrant AI culture. Intuit stands out as the best environment for those looking to make a meaningful impact in AI and data science” said Anusha Mujumdar, Manager 2 Data & Analytics at Intuit.

Intuit’s Customer-Centric AI Approach

“As a member of Intuit’s AI team, I am proud to work alongside a remarkable group of technologists. We are at the forefront of cutting-edge innovation in AI, including GenAI. We also take Responsible AI seriously. What sets our team apart is our unwavering focus on the customer. We are constantly dedicated to creating products that make our customers’ lives easier, allowing them to save both time and money without any hassle. Our product is delivered with utmost confidence and a commitment to excellence” said Mithun Ghosh, Manager 2 Data Science at Intuit.

Addressing the Talent Crunch in the Analytics Industry

The analytics industry currently faces a talent crunch, and attracting good employees is one of the most pressing challenges that enterprises are facing.

The certification by Analytics India Magazine is considered a gold standard in identifying the best data science workplaces and companies participate in the programme to increase brand awareness and attract talent.

Best Firms for Data Scientists is the biggest data science workplace recognition programme in India. To nominate your organisation for the certification, please fill out the form here.

Intuit India recently concluded the Women in Data Science (WiDS) conference held at their Bangalore office on June 20. The event brought together over 80 data science professionals, who left feeling empowered and inspired by the insightful sessions that took place. WiDS featured a variety of speakers, including leading data scientists, entrepreneurs and educators. 

The year marked a significant milestone as WiDS introduced an engaging mentoring session with accomplished women leaders in the data science field, giving the participants an opportunity to gain insights and tips for excelling in the industry from the leaders themselves.

The event consisted of a variety of informative tech talks, keynote sessions, fireside chats, networking sessions, and much more. 

Here is a quick synopsis of the sessions – 

Keynote – Data Efficient Matching

The WiDS Ambassador Note was presented by Sravyasri Garapati from Intuit, followed by an enlightening session on ‘Data Efficient Matching’ by Soma Biswas, an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and a senior member of IEEE. 

Data Efficient Matching involves the effective pairing of data across diverse sources or entities despite having limited data at hand. It tackles the difficulties posed by sparse or incomplete information by leveraging sophisticated methodologies like machine learning, probabilistic modelling, and data fusion. 

The objective is to streamline the matching procedure while minimising data requirements, enabling successful matching even when only a small amount of information is accessible. This approach finds applications in various domains, such as identity resolution, recommendation systems, and data integration, where efficient matching plays a vital role in ensuring precise and dependable outcomes.

Structured Data to Analytical Text Generation

Google researcher Preksha Nema delivered an insightful speech on ‘Structured Data to Analytical Text Generation’. Nema’s research primarily focuses on understanding and generating purposeful ads, particularly in multilingual and low-resource contexts. In 2017, she received the Google PhD India Fellowship. 

Structured data to analytical text generation refers to the conversion of structured data, such as organised databases or spreadsheets, into comprehensible analytical text through natural language processing (NLP). 

This process employs NLP methods to translate numerical information into meaningful narratives or summaries. By extracting significant findings and trends from the structured data, this technique allows for the creation of concise and coherent textual explanations, enhancing comprehension and interpretation of the original data. It proves to be an invaluable resource for data-informed decision-making, generating reports, and effectively communicating intricate information to diverse audiences.

Role of Analytics in Data Governance

Kalapriya Kannan, representing Hewlett Packard Enterprise, discussed the ‘Role of Analytics in Data Governance’. Her expertise lies in machine learning, natural language systems, and their applications. Analytics plays a pivotal role in the realm of data governance by facilitating efficient management and utilisation of data assets. It harnesses the power of insights derived from data to establish robust policies and procedures governing data quality, integrity, and usage patterns. 

Through the application of analytics, organisations can identify irregularities within data, track its origin and evolution, ensure adherence to regulatory requirements, and make well-informed decisions based on reliable and precise information. 

Analytics further aids in the continuous monitoring of data governance processes, measuring performance indicators, and driving ongoing enhancements in data management practices. Ultimately, analytics empowers organisations to optimise the value of their data while upholding its integrity and security.

Fireside conversation – Gender Bias in AI – Whom Do We Blame: Data, Model, Applications or Society?

An interesting fireside chat on ‘Gender Bias in AI – Whom Do We Blame: Data, Model, Applications or Society?’ featured Kalika Bali from Microsoft Research in conversation with Shreya Mukhopadhyay

The topic delved into the attribution of responsibility regarding the presence of gender bias in artificial intelligence. It examined whether the culpability lay with the training data employed, the AI models utilised, the applications that utilise them, or the societal prejudices ingrained in the data. 

This discourse highlighted the intricate interaction among these elements and underscored the importance of shared accountability in acknowledging and rectifying gender bias within AI systems. “I had the privilege of participating in the fireside chat, unsure of how the audience would respond. To my delight, numerous individuals approached me, eager to contribute and learn more about making a social impact. Their genuine curiosity and willingness to take action left me truly thrilled,” said Bali. 

Kalika Bali from Microsoft Research in an engaging conversation with Shreya Mukhopadhyay

Responsible AI in Gaming

Rukma Talwadker from Games24x7 delivered the closing keynote on ‘Responsible AI in Gaming’. “I had an incredible opportunity to present my research on identifying excessive gameplay patterns during an amazing session. The engagement and appreciation from the audience were truly gratifying. Kudos to Intuit for organising a well-executed event with excellent session choices,” said Talwadker.

Responsible AI in gaming involves ethically and thoughtfully incorporating AI technologies into the gaming sector. It encompasses principles like equitable and inclusive portrayal, transparent algorithms, and mitigating adverse effects. Game developers aim to craft AI-infused gaming experiences that celebrate diversity, prevent bias, safeguard user privacy, and prioritise player welfare. Responsible AI in gaming strikes a harmonious equilibrium between innovation and ethical standards, ensuring that AI enriches gameplay while upholding players’ rights and values.

The conference concluded with a highly impactful mentoring session, leaving all participants enriched and empowered.  With engaging discussions and meaningful connections, WiDS served as a catalyst for personal and professional growth for participants, solidifying its place as a remarkable gathering in the field.

Watch out for the next edition of the Women in Data Science Conference, at Intuit where industry pioneers share cutting-edge knowledge, empowering you to thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape.

The world has always been in awe of the power of tech geniuses and their ability to shape the future with their innovations. But what’s even more impressive is that even these brilliant minds cannot deny the power of love.

As per survey, 84% of entrepreneurs rely on their spouse or partner for emotional support, 73% said their spouse or partner helped with the financial management of their business while 68% reported that their relationship with their spouse or partner had improved since starting their business, highlighting that no matter how successful and accomplished one may be, they still need the love and support of their significant other to thrive.

Let’s take a look at some inspiring love stories. 

Read more: 7 Most Influential Tech Leaders in Style [Part 1]

Priscilla Chan

Born to Chinese parents in Masacheusetts, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg (cofounder and chief of Meta) are high school sweethearts who got married in 2012 and have often acknowledged the importance of shaping each other up, both personally and profesionally. Priscilla is a pediatrician. But what sets this power couple apart is not just their individual success, but their shared commitment to making a positive impact on the world.They have established the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organisation dedicated to enhancing global health and education.

Anjali Pichai

We can not talk about love and not mention the Pichai couple. Sundar and Anjali Pichai are one of the most celebrated couples of the Silicon Valley. Like her betterhalf, Anjali also pursued a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from IIT-Kharagpur where he met Sundar. She currently works as a business operations manager at software firm Intuit. Sundar attributes his achievement as the chief of Google to the fact that he remained with the company even though he received lucrative opportunities from Yahoo and Twitter, all thanks to Anjali’s persuasion to stay back. The couple has two children – Kiran and Kavya.

Zachary Bogue

Zachary Bogue has been married to the co-founder of software company Sunshine and former president of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer for over 14 years now. Bogue is the managing partner and co-founder of investment firm DCVC. 

Bogue is a strong advocate for the potential of deep tech and environmental science to address some of the most persistent real-world issues. Mayer’s estimated net worth is approximately $680 million, while Bogue has amassed over $300 million. 

Sean Eldridge

Canadian-American political activist Sean Eldridge married Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. He founded and leads a liberal advocacy group named Stand Up America. Prior to this, he worked as the political director of Freedom to Marry that worked towards legalising same-sex marriage. In January 2011, Eldridge and Hughes announced their engagement at a gathering that supported the same cause. The couple has a son together. In 2014, Eldridge ran for a seat in Congress representing New York’s 19th district but lost to Republican incumbent Chris Gibson. Together, they are working towards living in a world where everyone has equal rights and opportunities.

Lucinda Southworth

Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page found his love in an equally competent Lucinda Southworth who is a research scientist and the sister of model and actress Carrie Southworth. She obtained her PhD in biomedical informatics from Stanford University and has worked as a research scientist at various institutions, such as the National Institutes of Health. They have contributed significantly to philanthropic causes such as Parkinson’s disease research and clean energy initiatives by donating millions of dollars. In spite of their popularity, both Larry Page and Lucinda Southworth like to maintain a low-key lifestyle and avoid the limelight as much as possible.

Miranda Kerr

One of the richest and most stylish couples out there, Miranda Kerr is the wife to entrepreneur and the Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel. Kerr gained fame in the early 2000s as a Victoria’s Secret Angel and is now one of the top-earning models globally. Additionally, she founded a wellness business called KORA Organics. Spiegel and Kerr started dating in 2015 and became engaged in July 2016. They now have two children: a son, Hart, and a daughter, Myles. Kerr has been noted saying that Spiegel inspired her to take on bigger challenges: ​​’Why are you spending your energy working for other companies when you should be focusing on your own? You need to take a risk. If you believe in this, put everything into it.” 

Natasha Bassett
When it comes to matters of the heart, our Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has had his fair share of missteps. After weathering multiple heartbreaks, it appears that Musk is reportedly dating Elvis (Elvis Presley’s biopic) star Natasha Bassett as of last year. The 30-year old Australian actor has featured in films like Spy Intervention, The Pale Door, 12 Mighty Orphans and more. Earlier, He tied the knot with Justine Wilson in 2000 and had six children with her before their split in 2008. Musk went on to marry actress Talulah Riley on two occasions, but both marriages eventually ended in divorce. He also dated actress Amber Heard, followed by a partnership with musician Grimes, with whom he had two children. Musk also became a father to twins with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at his company Neuralink, in 2021. Musk has always been vocal about the importance of having a companion and longs for his true love.

Gender equality in tech has always been the hot potato no one wants to deal with. Although companies world over wax eloquent about equality and diversity, gender minorities like women and non-binary individuals continue to face significant obstacles such as underrepresentation, underpayment, and discrimination. 

AIM, over the past one month, has been reaching out to tech biggies like Accenture, SAP, Tech Mahindra, Nagarro, IBM, Intuit, Sabre, Walmart, TCS, and Syska, among many others, to understand the ground realities of gender inclusivity at the workplace. The results are baffling.  

The survey aimed to determine the level of diversity and inclusivity at various companies. We included questions to gauge the gender ratio – whether or not there were queer employees and in what ratio – and also the number of differently-abled employees, if any. We also sought to find out if any discrimination against women, non-binary, and transpersons was observed during the recent layoffs. We tried to understand whether companies are doing enough to create an inclusive and diverse workplace. Lastly, the survey asked how the tech industry can work towards creating a more equitable work environment for all genders. 

Most companies acknowledge that there is no set end goal when it comes to diversity and inclusion efforts, it is a continuous progress that they are striving for. 

As per Prachi Rastogi, Diversity and Inclusion Leader, IBM Asia Pacific, to promote gender diversity, IBM India has achieved gender parity not just at the junior levels but also at managerial levels. “IBM India is making extensive efforts to make the onboarding of transgender employees smoother, including preparing infrastructure and sensitising employees on engaging with diverse personalities,” she told AIM.  

Out of all the companies that we reached out to, only three were forthcoming in sharing their gender ratio. Nagarro has a male-to-female ratio of  3:1, but aims to have 25% of women in leadership positions by 2024 and 33% by 2026. The company also has a share of differently-abled individuals. 

At Fiserv, women make up 41% of the global workforce and 27% of leadership roles. Fiserv’s Vice President and Expert Engineer of Data, Analytics and AI, Manisha Banthia, told AIM, “We hire a diverse talent, supporting women’s careers through upskilling, mentoring, networking, and other programs that foster a culture of inclusivity.”

“Leaders play a key role in driving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and supporting gender diversity, especially in the post-pandemic hybrid working world. It is important to teach the next generation to appreciate diversity and encourage individuals to be allies,” Shruti Tandon, Managing Director of People Enablement at Nagarro, told AIM. 

Intuit has 33% of women in tech roles globally. Along similar lines, Sona Samad, Staff Engineer, Intuit, told AIM, “Intuit offers benefits, such as hormone replacement therapy and gender-affirming surgery reimbursement, as well as various support programs to address personal challenges of employees from the sexual-minority segment.”

In the engineering vertical, AIM Recruits found out that Accenture has a male-to-female ratio of 1.43: 1, with 43,504 males and 30,501 females. Walmart has a much higher ratio of 3.21: 1, with 3,469 males and only 1,079 females. SAP has 1,717 males and 799 females.

The Bitter Pill

The tech industry has been predominantly male, making it challenging for women to break through and negotiate higher salaries. According to the latest “Women in Tech” report by AIM Research, the tech industry in India has a total of 4.6 million employees, of which only 1.3 million (29%) are women. Globally, only 5.31% of women work in STEM fields, while 1.42% are non-binary and 1% are openly transgender as of 2022. 

A recent study by IBM showed that 13% of women hold executive and board-level positions, with women making up 14% of board members. However, there has been a decline in the representation of women in senior leadership positions globally, with only 14% in Senior Vice President roles and 16% in Vice President roles. This is lower than the figures in 2019. 

According to Statista, the proportion of women employees at the technical positions at major tech companies range from a mere 23% at Microsoft to 29% at Amazon. The Global Gender Gap Report states that the representation of women in the workforce is alarmingly low in certain sectors. For instance, only 14% of the cloud computing industry, 20% of engineering, and 32% of data and AI comprises of women.

The gender pay gap in the tech industry tends to widen with increasing years of experience, as women are underrepresented in key leadership positions. This results in less bargaining power for women and contributes to lower average and median salaries for female employees. Women in tech earn a median salary that is 17% lesser than their male counterparts in India. 

AIM Research states that women hold the lowest share of Director-level positions, and only one in five CXO positions.  Across different sectors, women hold only 8% of leadership roles. This disparity is partly due to the low participation of women in STEM fields, limiting their opportunities to enter the expanding technology industry.

And even if we choose to ignore the other parameters, reports show that a staggering 90% of the respondents experienced some form of discrimination and 100% have reported emotional, physical or sexual harassment at tech workplace. This means that every single woman and gender non-confirming person has experienced harassment at workplace at some point in their careers.  

Gender inequality is a multi-layered issue that affects everyone. Each layer has unique manifestations that impact people differently, and it is crucial to acknowledge and comprehend them to address the issue effectively.

Credits: Designer Scarlett Musu &  The Equality Institute

Queer Community at Stake

While we have supporting data on women in tech, there is a concerning lack of reliable data on the representation of LGBTQ+ members or non-binary individuals in the Indian tech. This lack of data makes it challenging to address the issues faced by this community in the industry. The main reason for individuals choosing to keep their sexual orientation or gender identity private at work is the fear of prejudice or discrimination, leading to difficulties for companies in accurately measuring their workforce diversity.

Pooja Jana, Assistant Vice President at Wells Fargo, had a smooth coming out at work but most don’t meet the same fate. “Organisations should have policies and benefits in place to support LGBTQ+ employees and empower the community. Wells Fargo offers various programs, sensitisation workshops and so on for the same”, Jana told AIM. Wells Fargo also happens to be a firm with a high share of women leaders in tech, as per research. 

Despite the decriminalisation of homosexuality in India with the removal of Section 377 in 2018, the issue of the rights of sexual minorities remains sensitive in the country. While most employees prefer to keep their orientation private, some companies don’t gather information on LGBTQ+ identity because there is no legal requirement or pressure, and the absence of standard definitions and measurements makes data comparisons across companies or industries difficult.

Endless Search for Inclusivity

Though there are efforts by some companies to create more inclusive workplaces, many are still struggling to promote diversity and transparency. This was evidenced by the lack of participation in the survey. Although most companies cited confidentiality issues for not sharing the figures, the real reason could be their below-par diversity and inclusion efforts. Additionally, companies may have concerns about the potential backlash from stakeholders if their efforts are perceived as inadequate.

Another reason could be that these companies do not track or measure diversity and inclusion metrics, making it difficult for them to provide accurate data. Finally, some companies may not prioritise diversity and inclusion efforts, leading them to opt-out of such surveys.

The Road Ahead

Despite the facade of inclusivity, many women and other sexual minorities still face the blatant casual sexism. Unconscious bias and stereotyping continue to persist, impeding their growth in the workplace. And to add insult to injury, the dream of equal gender pay is still far.

Companies may be quick to monetise Women’s Day, just like they do with Pride Month, but we must not let these celebrations be reduced to a mere marketing ploy. Amidst the sea of iconic women’s leadership stories that flooded our feeds yesterday, it’s important to not let them distract us from the harsh reality.

The Machine Learning Developer Summit 2023 has come to a close, with some of the industry’s leading AI and ML practitioners from companies like Google, Intuit, Optum, Genpact, and more coming together to offer valuable insights on the state of the industry today. 

MLDS 2023 was a developer’s paradise. From tech talks on state-of-the-art techniques used by tech giants, to workshops that build practical knowledge of industry-leading tech, to paper presentations that offer a look into the cutting-edge of ML research in India, the conference offered something for every developer and data scientist.

Rajeev Balakrishnan, a developer attending the summit, had this to say about his experience.

“As a developer, I feel like I am in my element. I’m very comfortable in the environment that MLDS creates for developers, and I feel like I am in my community and feel the need to upskill and catch up with the rest. MLDS allows developers like me to get valuable insights from some of the most well-known industry leaders.”

The conference featured a multitude of talks over the course of two days. From describing an approach on how to integrate ML into everyday workflows, to a session on solving for a information-centric approach on AI, to a talk on topic modelling functionality using generative AI, speakers brought a lot of insights to the table about the growth of the AI and ML industry. 

Some developer favourites included Parikshit Nag’s talk on the art of personalisation which showed ML engineers how to deploy a recommendation engine for product design, and Soumen Ray’s talk on AGI and humans’ evolution in the next decade, which explored the concept of a general intelligence and the impact it can have on humanity.  Other notable talks include Amit Kumar’s session on how developers can use NVIDIA’s solutions to build and deploy accelerated data science solutions, and Rohit Shetty’s talk on using low-code tools to upskill citizen data scientists to keep them updated with latest industry trends. 

We also had a handful of workshops during the event that allowed developers to get hands-on with new technologies in computer vision and methods to train new algorithms. They also learned about using transformer models for computer vision, automating analytics for a better data pipeline, and how to use cloud services to scale MLOps.

MLDS also provided a platform for AI and ML researchers to present their research papers. Industry leaders from the research wings of companies like Elsevier, TATA Elxsi, Siemens, Bio, Intel, Uber, and more came to present their papers to the ML community. These sessions were very lively and involved a lot of questions from inquisitive developers in the audience. 

Some fan favourite papers included an approach beyond traditional vibration classification, clinical relation prediction using a graph-based model, a new clustering technique for faster processing of large unstructured data, and a new way of building a real-time ML inference platform for AIOps. 

One of the biggest crowd-pullers for the conference was the talk by Sudalai Rajkumar, a data science superstar and 4x Kaggle Grandmaster. He spoke about AI in Web3 and its applications. Alongside this talk, the team behind MachineHack featuring Abhijeet Katte and Krishna Rastogi spoke about how to build your own brand as a data scientist.

To cap off the eventful conference, MLDS hosted Abhinav Bindra, the Golden Boy of Indian shooting and tech entrepreneurship, for a fireside chat on his journey as an Olympic gold medallist. The former world champion spoke about his journey to becoming one of the world’s best shooters, and the interesting intersections between tech entrepreneurship and training for an Olympic sport as precise as shooting. To acknowledge the up-and-coming stars of the Indian data scientist community, MLDS honoured 40 of the country’s top data scientists with the 40 Under 40 Data Scientists awards distributed by Mr. Bindra.

Abhijeet Katte, Chief Growth Officer at MachineHack, expressed his feelings about the conference, stating, 

“MLDS is all about the technical side of the machine learning community, and it’s a great place to interact with the developers of the industry. The talks are also enriching and can give ML practitioners the competitive edge they need to make their next big project.”

If you didn’t have a chance to attend this premier conference for developers, don’t worry! We have more exciting events coming up, with the next one being The Rising 2023, which aims to shine a spotlight on women in tech. Our flagship conference, Cypher, will be announced later this year, so stay tuned to AIM to know more. 

Data entry forms the most fundamental step in managing one’s personal or business finances. Any errors in this step would percolate through the entire process creating a chain reaction that requires significant effort to undo. For example, data entry with no verification steps has an error rate as high as 4 per cent. Once entered, the error rate for data, without any further verification, is 400 per 10K entries—a huge number affecting even small datasets. 

Another instance includes paying all your employees a wrong salary, having multiple to and fro with your bank to revert the error, or dispatching a wrong amount of items and then having to recall shipments. The consequences are dire. 

This is where Intuit’s FEDS (financial error detection service) comes to the rescue. It alerts the customers of any error made during the entry of financial data — be it creating invoices, payroll stubs, or even personal financial needs. 

The team has developed a generalised solution that addresses financial error detection problems to quickly onboard an error detection use case for any new features in the product, thereby benefiting customers across multiple Intuit offerings. 

Errors in business finance

Errors made during data entry are chiefly of two types: 

• Typographical errors typically include inputting an extra digit or a digit on adjacent keys or swapping adjacent digits in the number. For example, when a customer is entering information into an invoice, they may intend to enter $1234.56 but may accidentally enter $1324.56 (digit swap) or $1237.56 (adjacent error). 

• Contextual errors usually occur while copy-pasting the wrong value from a different source. For example, copying the salary amount from one employee’s paycheck to another. 

Intuit believes such errors, a subclass of anomalies, can be identified and, most importantly, prevented at the source. 

Inside Intuit’s FEDS

To tackle data entry errors, the Intuit team has developed a generalised AI service called FEDS (financial error detection service), which allows product owners to build AI-driven error detection models automatically via configuration. This offering helps scale the speed of integration with products to serve use-cases at scale, reducing the time and effort required compared to a bespoke model. 

Intuit’s FEDS consists of two major components: 

• Simulation Kernels: These kernels have been developed to simulate data entry errors according to real-world expectations for a particular use case. This helps in both training and evaluation of the final model.

• Error Detection Kernels: Several classification kernels have been built on modified Z-Test, likelihood ratio test and deep learning-based context embedding approaches to detect errors based on training data.

Z-Test kernel uses Z-score to detect large deviations in the input values of the customers from a computed central measure. In case of data insufficiency, an Empirical Bayes-based double shrinkage estimation approach is used to compute the central measure that minimises the estimation variance.

Following Neyman Pearson Lemma, the Likelihood Ratio Test has been shown to be the most uniformly powerful statistical test for a given false positive rate (alpha). LRT kernel uses the ratio between log-likelihoods under the null hypothesis and alternate hypothesis to arrive at an optimal threshold to perform classification.

The context embedding algorithm assumes that the data being entered in a given context isn’t i.i.d. (independent and identically distributed) data, i.e., for a given context, the data being entered is dependent on past value. 

For instance, the salary or bonus of an employee is likely to be the same or similar to that of the last few weeks. Thus, users can take advantage of the context of nearby data entry points to evaluate the likelihood that a new entry is valid or not. A 1D Convolutional Neural Network is used for the character-level embedding of the input value to capture any possible typographical error. This embedding is concatenated with the overall summary embedding to create a joint embedding, which is used to train a gradient boosting classifier for error detection.

Both these components are extensible, and newer kernel approaches can be integrated easily. This also helps decouple the data scientist’s efforts from the deploying efforts, thereby removing any blockers.

The outcome

Intuit said while evaluating the performance of such a system, they generally look at two parameters—false positive rate (false alarms) and true positive rate (recall). Further explaining, the team said that they want their system to have a high recall while maintaining a low false alarm rate, creating a smooth experience while ensuring their customers feel confident in using the app features. 

In use cases where the assumption of data being i.i.d. is violated, Intuit found that the contextual embedding approach outperformed the other numerical methods in detecting data entry errors. Consequently, they could confidently identify more errors while maintaining the same level of false alarms or interruptions due to false alarms that could be minimised for a certain preset recall value, ensuring a smoother experience. 

Furthermore, generalized AI services reduced the time for productising models by nearly 15x. Developing this capability for a specific use case normally takes about 12+ weeks. On the other hand, FEDS reduced this development time to just a few days. This greatly reduced the turnaround time to enable error detection by the PD team for any new feature being developed. 

Towards financial freedom 

Intuit is a global technology platform that helps consumers and small businesses overcome their most important financial challenges. The company currently serves more than 100 million customers worldwide, where it looks to enable its customers to achieve financial freedom—from running their own businesses to managing their personal finances. 

The team believes that their offerings are developed, keeping in mind the entire gamut of their customers’ needs, helping them support even in the areas they least expect. It believes this helps instil more confidence in their ability to conduct their business and improves the overall experience and productivity. 

About the Team

Vignesh Subrahmaniam, PhD., is a Principal Data Scientist in Intuit India. He has 12+ years of experience in ML research with a focus on building innovative products and services that leverage AI / ML.

Arkadeep Banerjee is a Senior Data Scientist in Intuit India and has over 7 years of experience in building AI/ML solutions for Fintech, Retail, Pharma and Manufacturing domains.

A study by AIMResearch shows that the number of data science/analytics jobs in April 2022 saw a 30.1% jump compared to last year (April 2021). Not just that, even the median salary of these data scientists in India has increased to INR 16.8 lakhs per annum, a surge of 25.4% compared to 2021. Data science continues to be an in-demand and lucrative profession, with many aspirants making a beeline for it. However, for several reasons, hiring the right talent for the analytics profession continues to be a challenge. 

In fact, it’s a challenge for professionals to land the right analytics job, given the extremely competitive environment. The basic requirements to excel in this field include having relevant degrees and of course a good understanding of mathematics, statistics and AI.

As a global technology platform company, Intuit helps customers and communities overcome their most important financial challenges. The company serves millions of customers worldwide with cutting-edge technology products like TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, Mailchimp, and Mint. Intuit believes that everyone needs to have the opportunity to thrive and we never stop working to find innovative ways to make that possible. Intuit’s biggest USP is its strategy of being an AI-driven expert platform, solving problems with customers and a platform-focused mindset. The data science team at Intuit plays a big role in delivering this strategy every day. 

In order to provide professionals with the necessary guidance to make a career in analytics and data science, Analytics India Magazine is organizing Deeper Insights Series: #AMA webinar session with Intuit Data Science Hiring leaders on July 21st from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM. 

This webinar will be the perfect opportunity for aspiring and current data scientists and AI enthusiasts to understand what most tech companies look for while recruiting for analytics positions, the data science work culture at Intuit, open positions at Intuit and the advanced data science skills required to succeed in the current era. 

Date: 21st July 2022

Time: 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Register Now

What will the webinar cover

The webinar will touch upon the following areas

• Traits that Intuit leaders look for while recruiting data scientists
• The data science work culture
• Data science open positions
• Advanced data science skills required to succeed in the current era

Who should attend

This enriching webinar is perfectly suitable for:

• Analytics and data science working professionals looking for a switch
• Data engineers and senior data scientists
• Aspiring data science candidates
• Machine learning engineers
• Developers, coders and programmers
• Engineering / Technical College graduates
• Data science and AI enthusiasts.

Date: 21st July 2022

Time: 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Register Now

Speakers 

Radhika Kannan, Technical Program Leader, Intuit AI

Radhika comes with expertise in delivering critical and highly scalable products. She has solid experience leading large teams and setting/influencing organizational tech vision and strategy for creating business impact. She has a proven track record of building highly efficient teams from the ground up and working with senior executives and customers across regions. Currently, she leads analytics, AI, and data programs at Intuit India. She has worked with prominent brands such as Philips Ambilight TV, NetApp Infinivol, Amazon Prime Video – Streaming Partners, Global Expansion and Localisation, X-Ray, Live Streaming, and Amazon India Payments & Affordability Initiatives.

Rissey Babu, Technical Recruiter, Intuit

Rissey is a talent acquisition professional, having been in the industry for 14 years. He has experience of placing candidates across the board, including the executive level. Rissey is a strong recruiting professional skilled in full life cycle recruitment with a passion for providing a great candidate experience throughout the process. Currently, he leads hiring for engineering, product management, program management, product design, data engineering, data science, and machine learning at Intuit India.  He’s with leading tech brands in the industry such as Amazon, Aditi Technologies and some new-aged start-ups to cater to their hiring needs.

Date: 21st July 2022

Time: 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM

 So, if you are looking to make a career in analytics & data science then register now for this webinar session.

Intuit, an accounting software provider, has decided to pull its QuickBooks product from India after a decade of operation here. QuickBooks’ products and services for accountancy and small businesses will no longer be available from January 31, 2023. The company stated that it is not accepting any new subscriptions in India – it applies to all the services like QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Online Accountant, QuickBook Time, and QuickBook mobile app. It has further asked its customers to download their data and transition out of the product.

This development seems too sudden, and the company has not offered any specific reason for it yet. “​​This difficult decision to discontinue QuickBooks has been made as the company can no longer deliver and support a product that meets the needs of customers in India,” the official statement says. The company has four million customers globally, with less than 1-2 per cent in India.

For now, Intuit’s decision to pull QuickBooks from India, which affects 30,000 businesses, is seen to be a great opportunity for competitors like Zoho and Tally to fill in.

Intuit QuickBooks’ India journey

QuickBooks’ suite of offerings includes cloud accounting, inventory management, cash flow management, and invoicing. It also provides an online practise management solution for chartered accountants through QuickBooks Online Accountant.

Intuit introduced QuickBooks in India in 2012, but even before that, the cloud-based accounting solution was running in alpha and beta versions for 12 months. When it entered the India market, QuickBooks positioned itself to target 2 million broadband-connected small businesses. At that time, Tally was QuickBooks’ biggest competitor, having a strong presence in the small and medium space.

Over the years, QuickBooks gained popularity in the Indian market. Some of its selling features include affordability, accessibility, ease of use, ease of installation and maintenance. In an earlier interview with Analytics India Magazine, Saurabh Saxena, India site leader and vice president, Product Development at Intuit, said that the India team has been responsible for building several foundational capabilities of QuickBooks Online Advance products, like workflow automation platform, reporting platform, roles-based access, power tools for power customers, customisation, among others.

In one of the major milestones, QuickBooks was made GST compliant in 2017. This helped customers to create transactions with the new GST tax rates without disruption and customise invoice templates to display specific information.

In the latest development, Intuit India announced an agreement with Visa in March this year to strengthen business propositions for SME customers in India. It was touted to be the first of its kind for Intuit QuickBooks in India. This agreement was to develop joint value propositions and thought leadership in the SME space.

Possible reasons for QuickBooks withdrawal

Like several other industries, SMEs are rapidly digitalising their processes – digital bookkeeping, payments, inventory management, and delivery. SMEs are boosting their investment in technology.

Despite the opportunities that this field offers, it also has unique challenges which may be difficult to traverse. Given what constitutes SMEs – from local grocery to suppliers to big brands, creating a one-fit solution does not make sense. It is important for SME-focused players to have specific knowledge of the requirements and the understanding of challenges to offer appropriate solutions.

Over the years, several homegrown accounting software vendors have entered the market – Zoho being one of the prime examples. The Indian government’s AatmaNirbhar Bharat campaign may have played a role in promoting these homegrown businesses.

Huge opportunities for competitors

Soon after Intuit made the announcement regarding QuickBooks, Zoho announced that it is open to supporting and serving customers of QuickBooks and helping them transition smoothly to their platform.

“Zoho Books has been in the market since 2011. We have a very strong customer base in India which is rapidly growing. We are hyper-focused on strengthening and expanding our operations in the country. We are fully committed to helping businesses take care of their finances and fulfil their GST and any other regulatory-related obligations. We will work continually to serve businesses by providing them with a world-class, future-proof financial management solution which they can rely on while growing their business. We would be glad to support QuickBooks customers in India looking for an alternative solution. We have a dedicated team focused on making the transition as smooth as possible,” Prashant Ganti, head of products – Tax, Accounting & Payroll, Zoho said.

Another major competitor that has been around in the market even before QuickBooks is Tally. It currently commands more than 75 per cent of the market share and has 2 billion users. Apart from accessibility and ease of use, Tally’s popularity mainly comes from the familiarity factor and user acceptness. With the exit of a major competitor, Tally’s popularity is set to soar even more.

Online accounting software for small businesses from Intuit – Quickbooks – will be discontinued in India after 10 years of trying to crack the market. In an official statement, Intuit informed that from January 31, 2023, Quickbooks Online products will no longer be available in India. “Accordingly, we are no longer accepting new subscriptions in India at this time. This applies to all subscriptions for QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Online Accountant, the QuickBooks mobile app, and QuickBooks Time,” the statement said, as reported by Moneycontrol.

All the existing paid subscribers will be switched to the free plan by Jul 31, 2022; this will help companies to continue with Quickbooks till January 2023 with no charges applied. Customers with an annual subscription will be offered a refund for the unused portion of their subscription. The company has asked companies to download their data out of the product at this time to avoid losing it. Quickbooks has been available in India since 2012 and rolled out its GST-compliant version in 2017. It also offers an online practice management solutions called QuickBooks Online Accountant for chartered accountants.

The shutdown of QuickBooks in India will not impact parent company Intuit’s presence in India, where it has more than 1,300 employees, the company said. Intuit counts Zoho and Tally among its competitors.

In its quest to offer financial freedom to people, Intuit is home to products that include TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp. What makes all of these products special is that they have successfully integrated AI and data on the side of their customers.

“Our products deliver simple, delightful solutions across the full range of our customers’ financial lives–and we are proud that millions of customers worldwide turn to Intuit to make the most of their money,” said Prashanth Seshadri, Group Manager of AI & Data at Intuit. 

Seshadri has a rich experience of over two decades in big data, ML, data science, project management, and others. He joined Intuit in 2018. Before that, he worked with companies like Verizon Labs, Amazon, NetApp,and others. 

Here’s a quick overview of Intuit’s product ecosystem:

“At Intuit, we fall in love with the customer problem, not the solution, and are continuously looking for better and faster ways to serve them better. Technology has always been a huge enabler, aiding better customer experiences,” said Seshadri. 

The secret sauce behind building cutting-edge products 

“One of the secrets of our success is our unique culture of innovation and experimentation that brings together customer obsession with design thinking,” said Seshadri. 

Further explaining, he said that, at Intuit, they have two core innovation principles – the first is Customer-Driven Innovation (CDI), and the other is Design for Delight (D4D). 

CDI involves a method where Intuit zeros in on the intersection of any important unsolved customer problem that they, or their partners, can solve well – and build unique, durable solutions. D4D, on the other hand, starts with understanding customers’ needs, goes broader in seeking possible solutions, and uses rapid experimentation and data to find a solution. 

Intuit technology stack

Seshadri said their tech stack is as modern as it can get and is a constant journey of building and modification. Their agile and nimble approach renders operational ease and enables their teams to break down barriers and make solutions more scalable, seamless, and affordable. 

Intuit is one of the first companies to have migrated to the public cloud. Seshadri said they had migrated over 400 applications with complex frameworks and highly sensitive information in six years. 

The company uses native cloud technologies like Kubernetes to build a modern developer platform that offers continuous integration, delivery, and operations to accelerate developer productivity. “With this, we contribute to the community by powering open-source solutions such as Agro CD for Kubernetes,” said Seshadri. 

When it comes to managing big data, Intuit uses technologies like Kafka, Aurora, among others. Its application development follows a microservices approach with Spring Boot, GraphQL, React and Flutter. “We have a great focus, observability and operational excellence. We use the latest technologies like open telemetry, leading the way toward scaling, building and deploying AI capabilities in the public cloud. We have moved to AWS 100 per cent,” said Seshadri. 

Intuit said this migration to the cloud had been an enabler for delivering its vision of being an AI-driven expert platform. Currently, it is experimenting with serverless computing, open-source, and containers to move with even greater speed to deliver on its goals and for its customers. 

Hurdles ahead

“There are multiple AI and data science challenges, but the most prevalent one is clean data. So how do we make sure that the AI models built by data scientists are well-labeled, clean, accurate, latest, and built with lineage?” shared Seshadri.

He said every company has a data lake built by its engineering and analytics team. However, there are thousands of data tables, and not all have clear documentation. “Searching from these massive data sets is a persistent challenge,” said Seshadri. 

“Another challenge is the cost of implementation,” he explained. “AI models with heavy compute powers also drive high operational costs. Therefore, a clear success criterion for AI models includes having clear metrics or KPIs for every model we build. Hence, it is critical to have built-in metrics that will provide the necessary clarity to prove that the model generates value post-processing massive datasets. It is important to have a cost-benefit analysis before investing in AI.” 

Other challenges in AI include the return of investment, non-actionable insights, data privacy and security, explainability, bias within datasets, data scarcity, and much more.  

The question is—how does Intuit continue to overcome these hurdles. 

The company believes that customers are at the helm of all aspects of their product.”We’re working on building a solid self-service foundation that delivers clean data and reusable insights. As far as end-to-end customer experience is concerned, we start with understanding what the customer is trying to accomplish and then build experiences that have connected data and AI built-in so we can deliver personalized and timely customer benefits. We also remain focused on measuring when, and how well, we’ve delivered the benefit using a feedback loop” said Seshadri. He said that speed is another important factor.

“We’re improving the velocity of learning via investments in experimentation capabilities. We are also evolving from building bespoke solutions to reusable AI services. Using reusable AI services (RAISE), we’ve democratized AI and removed data scientists’ dependencies for similar use cases,” said Seshadri. Using RAISE, they managed to reduce the time for productionizing models by nearly 15x. Some of the RAISE components built are the Financial Error Detection service (FEDS) and Propensity Model as a service (PMaaS). “Our focus has also been on streamlining the integration of platform capabilities and making them composable to shorten development cycles from months to days,” he added.

Intuit India

Today, Intuit’s India office contributes nearly 22 per cent of its engineering talent. It is a centre of excellence for product development, technology and engineering innovation. “Our engineering teams in Bengaluru drive end-to-end product development and management for some of Intuit’s high-value products such as QuickBooks, TurboTax, Lacerte, and Virtual Expert Platform. These products are in addition to supporting platforms such as Billing and Developer Experience, which leverages the power of Cloud, AI, and ML,” said Seshadri. 

Intuit India has also created new opportunities with products like QuickBooks Online Advanced (QBO Adv) targeted toward the global mid-market business segment. 

Seshadri said their engineering teams are experimenting with the latest cutting-edge technologies like AI/ML, cloud-native technologies, open-source and others. 

The India team has built many foundational capabilities of the QBO Adv product here for Intuit. This includes workflow automation platform, reporting and insights, connect apps/services, role-based access, customisation and power tools. 

On a hiring spree 

Intuit India is a thriving microcosm with 1,300+ employees. The AI team witnessed a 46 per cent growth working toward delivering on their AI-driven expert platform strategy and providing customer benefits.

Intuit is actively hiring candidates across various roles, including senior manager data scientist, principal data engineers, data science staff, and senior data engineers. “We want to leverage the large pool of skilled technology talent available in the country and invest in growing key tech capabilities that will drive innovation for their global products and platforms to cater to our 100 million customers worldwide,” said Seshadri. 

He said Intuit India is unique as it empowers engineers to do end-to-end development. Additionally, the company teaches them marketable skills like design-thinking, which sparks innovation to solve global and India-specific challenges. “We are looking for candidates who would be skilled to do so,” added Seshadri.

The perks 

“Our employees are at the heart of all we do and who we are at Intuit,” said Seshadri. The company invests in programs and hands-on opportunities to enhance the capabilities of its people to become leaders and influencers of the future.   

Self-learning platforms like Degreed and classroom sessions through Tech Learning at Intuit have been created by an in-house tech learning team to sharpen engineers’ skills. Sessions include AWS workshops, agile workshops, Spring Boot, AI/ML, Java, Big Data, and Python. 

Intuit has also partnered with premier institutes like BITS Pilani to enable employees with technical expertise, nurturing innovation and critical thinking. “This is a critical aspect in developing skills essential for current and future needs. This has proved to be a differentiator for attracting and retaining top talent,” shared Seshadri. Currently, 37 employees are pursuing M. Tech in data science programmes in BITS Pilani. 

In addition to this, the company provides a tuition assistance benefit for employees who want to pursue education related to their current role and upskill. Intuit also has tech communities, organizes events, and promotes best practices through InnerSource, an open-source software platform. 

Click here to apply. 

At present, many companies are heavily investing in big data and AI. But, the question is, how effectively are they using data? In an exclusive interview with AIM, Intuit India Site Leader and Vice President of Product Development Saurabh Saxena shares fascinating insights into the world of data science and AI — while discussing facets of his learnings, experiences and leadership style. 

Companies need to change their approach and look at data as a product. Saurabh emphasizes on an approach, known as data mesh, which favours pushing data ownership and responsibility to local domain teams. The teams will be stewards of data and support documentation for quality.  

Intuit’s vision is to produce clean, interoperable and re-usable data through distributed data ownership. These connected data products create a network of our data ecosystem, enabling productivity gains for consumers and data engineers.

Intuit was recently recognized as number one among the 50 best firms in India for data scientists to work for – 2022 as part of the fourth annual list released by AIM. 

Leader’s talk 

At Intuit, Saxena focuses on the company’s growth journey, in line with their strategy of becoming an AI-driven expert platform, delivering best-in-class results for each stakeholder group, including employees, customers, and shareholders, to measure success. He also leads product suites of QuickBooks (QB) Online Advanced, QB Desktop, QB Enterprise, point of sale, and Intuit market—aligned with business goals—positioning Intuit for long-term development.  

Interview excerpts: 

Q: Can you tell us about your contributions and initiatives toward the company’s growth. What are your key takeaways from the experience?

Our engineering teams in Bengaluru drive end-to-end product development and management for Intuit’s high-value products – Lacerte, QuickBooks Desktop, TurboTax Desktop, Billing, Virtual Expert Platform, Developer Experience, etc. Leveraging the power of AI, ML and cloud, Intuit India has been creating new opportunities with products like QuickBooks Online-Advanced, targeted toward the global mid-market business segment.  

Some takeaways we have observed are:

• While we were already working towards solving for small business growth through omnichannel commerce, the pandemic has only accelerated this journey to virtual/digital platforms. 
• The power of a global collaborative platform mindset is about evolving from a mindset of just building products and features to building a set of capabilities and building blocks upon which the products and features are built, contributing to innovation at scale. 
• The power of AI and data and its role in building stronger customer experiences. We believe our AI-driven expert platform will revolutionize experiences for customers and help people make the right financial decisions for themselves, their business, and their families. People across the world will be able to instantly access the skills, insights and expert advice they need, while at the same time, experts will gain access to new clients they wouldn’t reach otherwise.
• Open platform contribution through open source and inner source. Open source is an important part of Intuit’s engineering culture. We rely on open-source tools and give back to the community by actively participating and sharing our projects. Members of our engineering community have open sourced many projects, including tools to speed up UI design, enable web services testing, and power productivity at scale. The inner source is the use of open-source software development best practices and establishing an open source-like culture within organizations. Programmers share our work with a wide audience instead of just with a manager or team. We can contribute to a range of projects, not just those directly connected to our team. This open culture empowers us and promotes speed and innovation.

Q: What are some of the daily challenges you face as VP of product development? How do you approach them to ensure work goes smoothly as planned?

A: Given the current environment, the most important consideration is our continuous journey to transform the workplace, keeping factors such as cross-team collaboration and our energizing and inclusive culture at the forefront. So one of my priorities is to reiterate and effectively and safely operationalise our hybrid workforce/workplace strategy, which will enable us to – create a sense of connectedness and belonging; spark creativity and innovation; solve for speed, agility, and productivity, and help us attract and keep top, diverse talent without affecting the productivity of our teams. 

Second, it would be to align and prioritize what’s most important to our teams. For example, we have a leadership playbook to enable our managers to lead with a clear vision, build a high-performing culture and drive winning results. A key part of this exercise would include allowing teams to take ownership of the outcomes, championing a culture of inclusion and innovation, encouraging teams to say no if something isn’t a priority, and creating a culture of autonomy to maintain a high say-do ratio. 

Lastly, it would be to promote being nimble, having a growth mindset, and quickly adjusting to the customer needs and strategy changes. There are no failures in tech disruption, only learnings and experiments, so an important priority would be to enable teams to focus on the ‘Fail Fast and Learn Faster’ philosophy. 

Q: How have your roles and responsibilities changed over time, especially during the pandemic?

A: If the pandemic has changed anything, it’s that I’ve only become more connected with my teams. It has also allowed me to learn the hybrid style of working and how to balance flexibility and productivity with the connectedness and innovation created through collaboration and in-person interactions, which is critical to our culture. 

It has also allowed me to reflect on the importance of our employees’ well-being/wellness more than ever before. At Intuit, we understand just how important wellness is. We have expanded our ‘Wellbeing for Life Program‘ to support anything that falls under physical, emotional, or financial well-being and any expenses our employees may need to support their family’s needs. Our team also designed a simple, intuitive wellness playbook that brings together resources to create awareness and equip managers to support their own and their team’s balance and wellness.

Q: Can you shed light on the skills required to thrive in turbulent times and strategies implemented to bring tangible benefits for employees? 

In a world where skills need to be constantly updated, Intuit seeks to solve challenging and meaningful customer problems, always evolving with new technologies, elegant and intuitive design and UI. We look for talent who have high learnability, a passion for deep customer understanding, innovation while being creative, and talent with an ability to work in fast-moving teams.  

Some of the core skills are being curious, doing breakthrough innovations in constrained environments, and aiming for simplicity in our product and organizsation. Next, it’s about the mindset to operate boundary-less, with a lot of compassion, demonstrating the highest level of ownership and accountability. Finally, it’s about operating with high velocity and having the platform mindset to drive that. 

Engineers, data scientists and product managers must have a solid, in-depth background in technical abilities like programming and a grasp of analytical tools; in terms of non-technical talents – business acumen, problem-solving ability, soft skills, and a will to create with speed determine success. At Intuit, we prioritize recruiting people with the appropriate skills and experience, but we also look for additional traits, such as a customer-centric and innovative mindset. 

In addition to relevant skills, we also look at how potential talent aligns with our values to ensure we have people who are the right culture fit for us. Some of the significant roles where Intuit is seeing growth are software engineering, product design, product and program management, data science, risk analytics and business analytics roles. The complementary capabilities that will see growth include artificial intelligence/machine learning, data science, cloud, open-source and natural language understanding (NLU).

Inside Intuit 

Intuit India has a team of over 1300+ people and is essentially a microcosm of Intuit, a global technology platform that helps its customers and small businesses overcome their most important financial challenges. The company serves over 100 million customers worldwide with TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, CreditKarma, and Mailchimp. 

In FY21, Intuit had about 30 percent of women team members in technology roles globally, and now the company is looking to make it 35 per cent by FY23. “Diversity isn’t something we do—it’s who we are. Our commitment to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) is foundational to our company. We are one strong step ahead in building an organization that represents the diverse world we live in and the customers we serve,” said Saxena. 

Intuit has some world-class inclusive and employee-friendly policies, alongside networks and communities like Tech Women@Intuit, Intuit Women’s Network, and Pride community. For more than a decade, the company has been on the list of India’s Best Companies To Work for.Also, it has been recognised as a ‘Gold employer’ in the India workplace equality index (IWEI) 2021 for two times in a row. 

Intuit plans to expand in India, leverage the large pool of skilled tech talent available in the country, and invest in growing core tech capabilities that will drive innovation for their global products and platforms. “We need great talent across levels to change the dynamic, reshape conversations and motivate the younger generation to join and excel in the tech world,” said Saxena. 

Intuit is currently hiring for various roles in analytics and AI. Click here to apply. 

Time and again, data science has been touted as the hottest career option in the 21st century. But, do you know what goes on in the life of a data scientist? 

To understand this, Analytics India Magazine got in touch with Sadaf Sayyad, data scientist at Intuit, who walked us through a typical day at her work, alongside sharing interesting instances, career growth, and the impact she is adding to the team and the ecosystem. 

“For a data scientist, a typical day depends on the phase of the project one is working on. But, on a high level, my day starts with checking emails and messages for any urgent tasks. Then, we have a stand-up meeting to discuss the progress of the project and blockers followed by planning my day,” said Sayyad. 

Further explaining, she said that the tasks include finding data sources, cleaning data, performing exploratory analysis, designing the ML-based system, which includes inputs, outputs, success metrics, building and experimenting with different ML models to optimise the target metrics, designing and conducting experiments to prove model performance in production, representing the model results and insights to business stakeholders and collaborating with machine learning engineers for the deployment of models. 

“Depending on the phase we are in, my day involves one or more of these tasks. Apart from work, I carve out time for reading research papers, keeping myself updated with the latest developments, peer to peer learning through lunch and learn sessions and conferences. We also have fun at team outings, games, and even online team games in work from home setup,” said Sayyad. 

Sayyad completed a master of management from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. Her elective courses focused on analytics, data science, and machine learning. Post this; she got a campus placement in Walmart, where she got the opportunity to work on projects in optimisation and machine learning. After that, she worked at LinkedIn in the data science team, where she was responsible for deep-dive analysis and experimentation of features on LinkedIn jobs pages. “This was a stint where I learnt more about key business metrics, stakeholder management, product ownership and power of data insights to drive business decisions,” she added. 

Sayyad told AIM that she would have been a quantitative financial analyst if she wasn’t a data scientist. “I developed an interest in finance during an internship in a hedge fund and would have pursued it further if I hadn’t been a data scientist,” said Sayyad. 

Hoops and hurdles 

“The challenge and beauty of being a data scientist are that every problem you get is likely different. Therefore, the single approach most likely will not work for two problems. This makes our job very exciting as every project is a new learning opportunity,” said Sayyad. 

Further elaborating, she said that on a high level, the steps or processes to follow are similar – i.e. define a problem statement and set clear expectations, ensure we have the right quality and quality of data, and set success metrics. “We build the first version model/solution as a proof of concept to ensure there is merit in pursuing a project. Then, suppose the target metrics look positive, and the cost of building and maintaining a model is worth the benefit. In that case, we go-ahead to build out a production-level model,” added Sayyad. 

Overcoming data science block 

Often data scientists are under pressure or overburdened with work/tasks leading to data science blocks, which could hamper their daily activities. However, Sayyad said that she overcomes this with the spirit of teamwork. 

“This depends on what is the cause of the block. Sometimes the block is due to lack of data; in that case, we communicate with others to find alternative data sources, and if not, talk to business stakeholders about what is the best approach we can use and what is the best we can deliver with the available data and resources. The other block could be when one is struck at a model accuracy, which does not seem to improve even after multiple approaches,” explained Sayyad. 

She said that this is when it might help to get a fresh perspective, and team knowledge helps. And talking to other data scientists about the approach one has taken and what new things could be tried can bring us back on track. 

Motivation at work 

“Knowing that I am working on a product that affects people’s lives in a meaningful way by powering prosperity to small businesses and customers is undoubtedly the biggest motivating factor,” said Sayyad. In addition, as a data scientist, she said that getting to solve exciting problems and learning something new every day is a great motivating factor. 

Career goals 

Sayyad said she wants to grow her technical expertise in artificial intelligence, keep herself updated with the ongoing research and contribute and give back to the AI community. 

“I want to continue making an impact in people’s lives through the power of AI. With Intuit’s strategy being an ‘AI-driven expert platform,’ I couldn’t be better paced,” said Sayyad. 

Work at Intuit 

“At Intuit, my role has evolved from building ML models focusing on the technical aspects and algorithms to extending this to building reusable AI-based systems focusing on improving customer experience and ease of use,” shared Sayyad. 

She said that she had had multiple opportunities to work on some amazing and impactful projects at Intuit, delivering key success metrics for the company and learning and implementing state-of-the-art ML techniques that have helped her grow as a technologist. 

“I am currently working on a project which will help us improve customer experience significantly as they provide resolution to the problem they raise, using the power of AI,” said Sayyad. She said that she uses computer vision (optical character recognition) and natural language processing (document classification and named entity recognition techniques) for this project. 

Previously, she has also worked in multivariate anomaly detection and supervised machine learning problems. 

Work culture 

“At Intuit, I am delighted to work with a team of highly talented people where we learn from each other every day. There is no exaggeration when I say everyone personifies the company’s value of ‘Stronger Together,” said Sayyad. 

Further, she said that the leadership is also very clear about the top-level goals called ‘Big Bets’ and tech priorities, and every project is aligned to these goals, so they always have their eye on the big picture and what they are working towards. 

Adding to this, she said Intuit has repeatedly been in the top three best places to work in the Great Place to Work ranking because of its employee-first and empathy-driven policies.

The AI and data science team at Intuit is currently about 500 members strong, distributed across multiple geographical locations. For example, the team in India consists of data scientists, machine learning engineers, machine learning infrastructure engineers, business analysts and programme managers. 

Sayyad said that there is a lot of encouragement and opportunity for peer-to-peer learning. “We have a cadence of knowledge sharing sessions within our team and have resources available to learn what other members have worked on. Contributing in these forums and sharing valuable feedback is one of the ways we contribute to each other’s success,” she added. 

As per Market Data Forecast, the global fintech market will touch $324 billion by 2026. The growth of the segment is expected to be fueled by rapid digitisation. As of November 2021, there were about 10,775 fintech companies in the US. In India, there are about 1,860 startups, and as of December 2021, the country had over 17 fintech unicorns with a valuation of over $1 billion.

In recent times, technology has paved the way for disruption and transformation in the financial services industry in India. Advancements within the fintech space have fostered innovation and powered fintech companies like Intuit to deliver best-in-class customer solutions.

As a global technology platform company, Intuit helps customers and communities overcome their most important financial challenges. The company serves millions of customers worldwide with cutting-edge technology products like TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, Mailchimp, and Mint. “We believe that everyone needs to have the opportunity to thrive and we never stop working to find innovative ways to make that possible,” said Radhika Kannan, Staff Technical Program Manager for AI at Intuit.

However, Intuit isn’t alone in this space. It competes with a gamut of players, such as Xero, Sage, Square, H&R Block, Blucora, Liberty Tax, Experian, and Equifax, who are as vibrant and dynamic but mostly focus on gaining value from AI implementations. Kannan adds that Intuit’s biggest USP is its strategy of being an AI-driven expert platform, solving problems with a customer and platform-focused mindset. 

“AI helps our customers work better and smarter because we can predict, automate and personalise their experience. Powered by data, this integrated products and services platform is accelerating our speed of innovation,” said Kannan. She said that using AI technologies, some of the applications they are working on include – 

• Leveraging ML to build decision engines and algorithms that learn from rich datasets to transform user experiences (UX) 
• Applying knowledge engineering to turn compliance rules into code
• Using natural language processing to revolutionise how customers interact with products and services 

“We believe our AI-driven expert platform will revolutionise experiences for customers and help people make the right financial decisions for themselves, their business, as well as their families. People across the world will be able to instantly access the skills, insights and expert advice they need, while at the same time experts will gain access to new clients they wouldn’t reach otherwise,” said Kannan. 

Overcoming challenges in AI

“One of the biggest challenges currently prevailing in the industry is properly structuring and architecting data so that AI can be applied and implemented easily,” said Kannan. She said that includes making sure that there is a clean pipeline of data processing and accessibility of data in real-time so that you can provide actionable insights to users.

Additionally, Kannan said that in an ever-changing privacy regulation landscape, companies would need to make it easy for end customers to understand how their data could be used, alongside giving them the freedom to select who they trust with that data.

Like many big data players, Intuit stores copies of unstructured and structured data in a large enterprise data lake. Kannan said that the data lake is important to Intuit’s AI-centric strategy, as data analysts and data scientists tap into this rich data set to build machine learning models and gain insights to deliver personalised customer experiences with their products and services.

She said that this data is managed according to a strict set of ‘Data Stewardship Principles’ that govern the complete lifecycle for data. “These Data Stewardship Principles are working on changing the data culture at Intuit, enabling us to have well-designed, domain-driven data to start building AI,” added Kannan.

Furthermore, she said that setting up the initial strategy and investment into AI as a strategic priority can be a barrier for some businesses. “Often, a compelling business case needs to be developed. In some situations, that business case may need to be based on data that is not available yet because the new product is not yet in production,” said Kannan, saying that it becomes the classic ‘chicken-and-egg problem.’ 

She adds that this is the reason it’s important to document the assumptions in a business case and the assumptions about AI. To solve this hassle, the team at Intuit has created a core set of innovation and design thinking methodologies, known as ‘customer-driven innovation’ and ‘design for delight’ that encompasses these and related issues. “The key in both of these approaches is making sure we obsess about falling in love with the customer problems and not our solutions. By keeping this focus, we continue to remain nimble and flexible in seeking new, innovative solutions to evolving customer problems,” said Kannan.

Carving a niche

Kannan said that at Intuit, they’re focused on powering prosperity for their 100 million customers through AI. This includes

● Financial insights, benchmarks, cash flow forecasts and advice – actionable insights for QuickBooks Advanced (QBO-Adv) customers and cash flow advice to help businesses understand where they are

● Clean, organised data – real-time feedback-driven system for transaction understanding enabling insights in the customers’ first session

● AI advisor – advisory experiences in Mint (personal finance product) moving from a look back to planning ahead 

● Connect with an expert – context-aware digital experts in QuickBooks and TurboTax to help customers proactively, matchmaking for live offerings

● Expert augmentation – bringing ML intelligence and recommendations to experts

Intuit AI and analytics team members regularly participate in premier international forums like KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) to share their ideas, research results and experiences via presentations, workshops and demonstrations.

Intuit’s product portfolio

Kannan said that across their platform, they had put the power of technology and data on the side of their customers. “Our product delivers simple, delightful solutions across the full range of our customers’ financial lives – and we are proud that millions of people worldwide turn to Intuit to make the most of their money,” she added.

Here’s the list of products developed by Intuit

● TurboTax takes the complexity out of the tax code, helping users get the maximum refund they deserve.

● QuickBooks helps small businesses manage their books, get paid fast, manage capital, and pay employees with confidence.

● Mint helps users get a comprehensive view of their financial picture and make smart money decisions.

● Credit Karma helps people find the right financial products, putting more money in their pockets and providing financial expertise and insights.

● Finally, Mailchimp provides an all-in-one marketing platform that empowers customers to start and grow their businesses by helping customers get their business online, market their business, and manage customer relationships.

Tech stack

Kannan said at Intuit, analysts glean insights from customer data available across the ecosystem, and AI teams focus on building customer experiences driven by machine learning, knowledge engineering, and natural language processing, delivering personalised, automated and insightful products.

Further, she said that the team combines AI with human expertise to innovate and deliver unimaginable benefits for our customers along with areas such as –

● Protecting customers from financial loss

● Building personalised smart products with AI-based predictions, recommendations, insights, and workflow automation that are ethical, explainable, engaging, and fair

● Inspiring trust in human expertise and AI-driven insights

The team also focuses on creating reusable self-service AI capabilities to help scale quickly across the company. 

Kannan said that they currently have AWS infrastructure support, including EMR notebooks that can run distributed workloads for large datasets with sizes of the order of TBs, Sagemaker notebooks having CPU and GPU capabilities that can scale according to needs, Databricks, etc. Besides this experimentation infrastructure, Intuit also has their own internally developed frameworks to help abstract the infrastructure details from data scientists. 

Future roadmap

“As we build our AI-driven expert platform, we prioritise our resources on five top priorities, or Big Bets, across the company,” informed Kannan.

She said these five key priority areas go after the biggest customer problems and are the largest growth opportunities for the company. These include revolutionising speed to benefit, connecting people to experts, unlocking smart money decisions, being the centre of small business (SMB) growth, and disrupting the small business mid-market.

In addition to this, Intuit has also charted out some Bold Goals for 2025, including doubling household savings rate and improving SMB success rate greater than 10 points versus the industry and increasing their customers to 200 million, alongside accelerating their revenue growth.

Intuit is hiring! To know more about Intuit or explore careers at Intuit visit https://www.intuit.com/careers/oa/technology/ 

At the fourth edition of Machine Learning Developers Summit (MLDS), Intuit’s Sidharth Kumar discussed in-depth, the features, metrics, challenges, and potential of developing a personal financial management app such as Intuit Mint (formerly known as Mint.com), targeting users in the US and Canada. 

As a principal data scientist at Intuit, Kumar is responsible for augmenting Intuit’s personal finance platform, Mint. At Intuit, he has helped launch several successful AI-based offerings, including cash flow forecasting, automated subscription discovery, automated budgeting for savings maximisation, transaction categorisation, anomalous spend detection, and automated customer cohorts. 

What is Mint? 

With 4 million active users, Mint helps its users manage spending, budgeting, subscriptions, etc. As a personal financial management app, Mint has over a decade of user transaction data of tens of millions of users. The transaction data include bank accounts, money management accounts, retirement or investment accounts, credit card, trading, and other financial services. Besides these, other data also include clickstream, demographic, geolocation, derived features like aggregates and sequences. 

Making decisions and predicting outcomes using these data is easier said than done. Kumar explained the strong and growing competition in the space, coupled with challenges like data completeness, dynamic nature of transactions data, user fatigue, and legacy systems. 

“We had to deal with a lot of legacy systems, which we migrated over to AWS,” said Kumar. Further, they used EC2 inference nodes for real-time scoring (tens of millions of transactions scored per day), along with EMR or clusters of nodes for better processing (train up to 100s and millions of ML models within a few hours or several x 1000 core clusters), on-device or federated learning (iOS), etc. For data storage, Intuit Mint currently uses Hive, DynamoDB, Redshift, S3. In addition, the company leverages Python, Pyspark, R, SQL, and SWIFT (OS) in terms of programming languages. 

Metrics

The essential business metrics include the voice of the customer (VoC), retention, click-through rate (CTR), net promoter score (NPS), profit and loss (PnL), relative rankings, and other capabilities with respect to competition. 

The AI metrics include: accuracy (cash flow); completeness (recurrent transaction discovery); precision, recall and AUC like credit default and anomaly detection; cross-entropy (categorisation); custom (MCMC) for optimisation for savings; AIC, KL-divergence (particularly clustering) etc. 

AI potential ubiquitous extensions 

“Fintech is the next big thing. So, we all know that. The next thing is automating customer profiling and relative spending ranking,” said Kumar.

The potential (along with techniques used) use cases include credit default/late payment prediction (logistic), cash flow forecasting (SVMs), anomaly detection/large transaction alert (GB), transaction categorisation (NN), engagement maximisation via path recommendation (reinforcement), merchant switching (GMM+MAB), spend recommendations (reinforcement), trending patterns and break-down analytics of user or overall (statistical), financial wellness improvement (MAB), CLTV (survival), and marketing optimisation and ad-targeting (NN). 

Kumar explained the techniques behind automated customer cohorts and relative spending ranking (autoencoders + GMM), bills or subscription identifications (FFT), can I afford this? (RF), and automated budgeting (ensemble + custom optimiser). 

“If we provide our customers with a simple way to ask Mint if they can afford a certain purchase in a certain category or merchant, then Mint will be able to provide advice based on the users’ current spending pattern, which will help them make quick decisions on spending,” he said. Mint uses on-device RF (Swift, CoreML, iOS) for feedback learning and a multivariate statistical model for seeding. 

COVID-19 has been challenging for almost everyone across the globe. With people being stuck inside the four walls of their houses and remote work becoming a way of life, employees’ mental health has taken a toll, especially for those whose only escape from problematic homes was work. Alternatively, many complained about burnout and long hours at work. 

Unfortunately, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported that the COVID-19 pandemic had disrupted and even halted critical mental health services in up to 93 per cent of countries across the globe at a time when its need was the maximum. 

However, mental health goes a long way when it comes to maintaining consistency and productivity at work. In line with this, tech companies have introduced initiatives and implemented programmes to ensure that employees’ mental health is taken care of. 

We, at Analytics India Magazine, have curated a list of tech firms in India that have taken initiatives on employee mental wellness. 

Accenture 

For the last couple of years, Accenture has deployed an Employee Assistance programme that focuses on offering professional counselling support to employees and their families. It has a mental wellness portal to provide advice on developing mental resilience. With the onset of the pandemic, Accenture has arranged grief counselling sessions to provide employees with coping with loss. 

Additionally, earlier this year, Accenture upgraded its medical insurance policy to include mental health consultancy reimbursements for dependent family members as well. The company has more than 1,600 mental health advocates who regularly reach out to their peers. This ensures that every employee has someone to go to for discussing mental health issues. 

Thoughtworks 

Thoughtworks’ ‘Do with compassion’ project involves office initiatives designed for employees to promote openness at the workplace and discuss issues around mental health. It includes the following: 

• Sessions have been exclusively designed for team leads to promote empathy and compassion. 
• Basic peer-to-peer counselling sessions for Office Managers, HR and functional leaders. 
• Care programme to support professional and personal development and well-being. The key tenets of the programme are self-care, content sharing, support and assistance. 
• A series on fighting COVID-19
• One-on-one personalised counselling sessions by trained mental health professionals. 
• Focused sessions on wellness. 
• De-stress bytes: stretch, relax and refresh in short virtual yoga, meditation, breathing exercises and stretching sessions. 

Tina Vinod, Global Head of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion at Thoughtworks, said that it offers employees augmented support. The initiative has made them realise that support has to be customised according to personal contexts and their role in the organisation and in their personal capacity. This further needs to be strengthened by having an empathetic leadership, inclusive work environment and the right support.”

InMobi

InMobi has introduced 21 additional days of well-being related leaves that employees can avail at any time during the year. According to Sahil Mathur- CHRO of InMobi Group, these leaves can be used for self-care and recouping days, and even as pit-stops. 

InMobi organises sessions by psychotherapists and psychologists related to centring, body-mind integration, breath-work, and promoting mindfulness. It has implemented a ‘No meeting Fridays’ policy to help employees strike through their to-do lists for both professional and personal enhancements. InMobi organises instructor-led yoga and exercise sessions, helping employees break the monotony of work. Additionally, it provides access to individual therapy sessions to address their challenges. 

Intuit

Intuit’s ‘Well-Mind’ programme benefits its employees to have access to a digital mindfulness platform. It comprises over 1000 self-paced tools and sessions to cater to individual needs. Its Employee Assistance Program (EAP) offers one-on-one counselling with qualified experts. 

Jharna Thammaiah K, Director and India Site People & Places Leaders at Intuit, revealed that Intuit has partnered with qualified experts to provide counselling services to employees for professional guidance and support. Additionally, its programme’ Mindfulness During Covid-19 and Beyond’ webinar sessions aims at addressing various impacts of distraction on productivity, performance, and employee morale and helps identify ways to deal with the pandemic. 

Intuit’s ‘Well-being for Life’ Program has been enhanced to support its employees’ emotional, financial or physical well-being needs, offering them an annual reimbursement to cover expenses. 

CSS Corp 

CSS Corp has a slew of initiatives to leverage technology towards the advancement of mental well-being. It has round-the-clock employee assistance that provides counselling and aid to its employees. Additionally, the HR chatbots automate responses to questions, accelerating resolutions. The tech company has also been conducting virtual mindfulness sessions and digital detox to enable work-life balance. 

Satyanarayanan Visvanathan, SVP and Head HR (Global) and Head of Corporate Quality at CSS Corp, said that while the organisation could march ahead with lots of accomplishments and milestones, the health and well-being of employees is absolutely vital.

Saurabh Saxena is the Intuit India site leader and Vice President, Product Development for the Small Business & Self Employed Group (SBSEG). Having been with Intuit for over 13 years, Saurabh is one of Intuit’s home-grown success stories from Staff Software Engineer to today leading a team of over 1000 employees who deliver key innovations for our products and technology platform that help our customers and communities overcome their most important financial challenges.

Result-oriented and passionate about talent development, Saurabh has successfully built high-performing engineering teams focused on innovation and customer obsession, powering the success of small businesses globally. He leads the product suites – QBO Advanced, QB Desktop, QB Enterprise, Point of Sale, Intuit Market – where he and his team define the strategy, vision and roadmap, driving ~$2 Billion in revenue for Intuit. While the QuickBooks Desktop (QBDT) ecosystem has helped drive key business results globally, QB Online Advanced is a new offering to support the mid-market segment. It is aligned with one of the five Big-Bets positioning Intuit for durable growth in the future.

Instrumental in delivering people outcomes for Intuit India, Saurabh leads by influencing and coaching the top talent across Intuit India and SBSEG to nurture their understanding of deep customer empathy, making it an integral part of our engineering and innovation culture through Intuit’s leadership and manager communities. Saurabh is also the recipient of several Intuit corporate awards, including the Scott Cook Innovation Award, the Intuit CEO Leadership Award, the Intuit India Award, and the CTOF Award.

Before joining Intuit, Saurabh worked with Intel developing data warehousing software to support Intel’s factory automation and Decision Support Systems. He holds a B-Tech degree from the IIT-BHU (Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University). In addition to being an ardent engineering leader, he is focused on deeply understanding what it takes to have a healthy mind and body as a personal passion.

• LinkedIn

Global AI-powered platform and financial software producer, Intuit is popularly known for its products QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint. Launched in 2018, its product QuickBooks Online Advanced enables businesses to manage data access and delegate use of product features, batch invoice transactions, transform data into dynamic reports, and provide account support. 

Recently, Analytics India Magazine engaged in a conversation with Saurabh Saxena, India Site Leader and Vice President, Product Development, at Intuit, to discuss and understand the technology behind QuickBooks Online-Advanced or QBO-A. 

Saurabh also leads the product suites of Quickbooks (QB) Online Advanced, QB Desktop, QB Enterprise, Point of Sale, and Intuit Market. An alumnus of IIT Varanasi, Saurabh has been associated with Intuit for the past 13 years. Before that, he was the Engineering Manager at Intel and Software Engineer at Wipro Technologies. 

Edited excerpt from the interview: 

AIM: How is QBO-A beneficial to small and medium businesses? 

Saurabh Saxena: As a financial management platform, Intuit plays a critical role in assisting small businesses, the self-employed, and customers in determining the best financial management solutions. The key differentiators that make QBO-Adv valuable to small and medium-sized businesses are: 

• Enabling product business fit: AI and ML-based smart features like anomaly detection, smart invoicing, right for me recommendations and suggestions.
• Helping in decision making: constantly generating insights to help businesses surpass goals by 15 per cent. QBO-Adv offered as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) gains intelligence with every new customer, partner, or new data added and mines for patterns and insights to identify new channels for customer growth. 
• Virtual experts: Human and AI collaboration elevates skills and work. As experts use the product, the product gets smarter, which helps businesses unlock a bunch of flexible expertise that expands, contracts with, and even anticipates their fluctuating needs.
• Compatible, customisable and consolidated: QBO-Adv is customisable specific to the industry needs and gains access to a suite of ecosystem offerings (payroll, payments, time tracking, human capital management, advisory services). This move enables customers to keep their data in QuickBooks in sync with the apps they use every day to run their business and ensure data assets across systems are beyond just compatible but consolidated. 
• ERP market disruption: With a tailor-made QBO–Adv, we are going beyond product-market fit to achieve product-business-fit cost-effectively and with lesser complexity. The innovation through QBO Advanced is disrupting the current ERP market, changing how mid-market businesses shop for and use business management tools.

AIM: How do you leverage AI and ML technologies in QBO-Adv?

Saurabh Saxena: QuickBooks uses data and AI algorithms to minimise manual effort and provide cash flow insights. Thus, helping small businesses make decisions to increase cash flow and profit margins. 

Our AI-powered expert platform analyses a company’s financial health, allows quicker payments and connects users with financial help when they need it. AI and ML-based smart features are used to enable product business fit. Few of them being:

• Smart invoicing
• Recommendations and suggestions
• Reducing human errors and fraud with ML-based anomaly detection

AIM: Share details of the tech stack.

Saurabh Saxena: Our tech stack is a constant journey of building and modification. Our agile approach renders operational ease and enables our teams to innovate and transform their applications and services by breaking down barriers and making solutions more scalable, seamless and affordable. We have migrated over 400 applications in six years. 

We use native cloud technologies such as Kubernetes to build a modern developer platform that provides continuous integration, delivery, and operations to accelerate productivity for developers. Through this, we contribute to the community by powering open-source solutions such as Argo CD for Kubernetes.  

For managing large-scale and big data, we are using technologies like Kafka and Aurora. Application development follows a microservices approach with Spring Boot, GraphQL, React, and Flutter.

We have a great focus, observability and operational excellence and use technologies like open telemetry. We are thus leading the way towards scaling, building and deploying AI capabilities in the public cloud and have moved to AWS 100 per cent. This migration to the cloud enables us to deliver on our vision of being an AI-driven expert platform. We are optimistic about the opportunities that the cloud will provide, and we are experimenting with serverless computing, open-source, and containers to move with even greater speed to deliver on our goals and for our customers.

AIM: Share details of the tech components that are being built in India?

Saurabh Saxena: Our India team has built many foundational capabilities of the QBO Adv product here for Intuit. These include:

• Workflow Automation platform, which empowers workflows across various client segments. Examples include invoices, bill approvals, and customer reminders.
• Reporting and Insights: A reporting platform that aids in corporate decision-making and continuously generates insights to assist customers in achieving their objectives.
• Connect apps and services throughout Intuit and the 3p partner ecosystem in such a manner that they all operate together, are integrated, and provide a consistent user experience.
• Roles based access: Customers can define roles and give permissions, so different business users get to see and do what they need to instead of getting access to all or nothing. 
• Customisation: The functionality enables the customisation of forms and reports and vertical-specific 3P apps or features to meet business requirements.
• Power tools for power customers: Bulk actions is a new feature that makes it easier for mid-market clients to enter large amounts of data in bulk, either manually or through imports. Another functionality built to allow is backup and restore.

AIM: How large is the QBO-Adv team at the India Development Centre?

Saurabh Saxena: We give opportunities to our engineers to work independently on projects from start to finish. At the India site, we focus on developing cutting-edge solutions and helping in skilling our talent with skills like design-thinking to bring more solution-driven innovation.

The India development centre leads the end-to-end product development effort for QBO – Adv with a team of around 90 engineers, including specialists in core engineering, mobile, data analytics, Intuit AI, and data platform, as well as skilled designers and product managers, have been working on QBO-Advanced smart solution, which is available as a platform-as-a-service (SaaS).

AIM: What are the advantages and disadvantages of having an India-based team, particularly in terms of tech skills involved?

Saurabh Saxena: Intuit in India is a thriving microcosm with 1,100-plus employees. Being home to nearly 22 per cent of Intuit’s engineering talent, we are a Centre of Excellence for end-to-end product development, technology and platform innovation. 

In terms of tech skills, there is absolutely no difference at all for an India-based team. Our teams in India leverage the power of AI, ML, data science, cloud, open-source, NLP and other key technologies, playing a pivotal role in helping Intuit remain ahead of the curve as we focus on enabling our mission of powering prosperity. 

We want to leverage the large pool of skilled technology talent available in India and invest in growing key tech capabilities that will drive innovation for their global products and platforms to cater to our 100-million customers worldwide. 

AIM: What key points do you keep in mind before hiring for the development centre?

Saurabh Saxena: There’s no denying that in today’s increasingly digital environment, having a basic grasp of computer science is useful for new hires. That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t pay attention to the very languages – human languages – that distinguish us as unique contributors.

Engineers, data scientists and product managers must have a solid, in-depth background in Mathematics or statistics and technical abilities like programming and a grasp of analytical tools. 

In terms of non-technical talents, success is determined by business acumen, problem-solving ability, soft skills, and a will to create. At Intuit, we prioritise recruiting people with the appropriate talents and experience, but we also look for additional traits, such as a customer-centric mentality, which we have instilled in our firm.

Enterprises must look to invest in their existing employees, who know the pulse of your consumers, to channel a flourishing business. 

AIM: What tech trends is Intuit betting on for its growth?

Saurabh Saxena: Large-scale disruption has certainly resulted in the emergence of new technological paradigms over the past year. Supreme customer experiences are the determining factor, based on which there will be a growth in demand for:

• Decision-ready data
• A need for technology and remote work solutions that enable hybrid work patterns
• A desire for simpler operations to manage financial data where intelligence systems like AI and ML are not an add-on but built in the ERP

In the coming decade, nearly every financial function will be optimised or transformed by AI, and finance experts will need to adapt and re-skill themselves to stay connected with their customers. 

Intuit is thus leveraging the power of AI to address consumer issues faster. Going forward, the global AI-powered platform plans to expand its India team and add over 350 engineers by 2022. The roles are said to be in the fields of data science, risk analytics, product management, product design, software engineering and data engineering. If you are keen on knowing further about the hiring process of data scientists at Intuit, refer to this article. 

Intuit, a global AI-powered platform that helps customers overcome critical financial challenges, has announced plans of expanding its team by adding over 350 engineers in the next twelve months.

With India having a large pool of skilled technology professionals, the company is looking to leverage that and grow its key tech capabilities to drive innovation. Intuit is currently working with 1000+ employees in India, and with these new hires, it aims to scale its engineering innovation happening across products. The offered job roles will be in the field of software engineering, product design, product management, data science, risk analytics, and data engineering roles, at entry, mid-level and senior positions. 

According to the news media, Saurabh Saxena, Intuit’s India Site Leader and Vice President of Product Development, stated that the company is looking to onboard professionals who have an innovative mindset to solve some of the pressing financial problems. Thus, Intuit is looking for professionals interested in AI, data science, cloud, open-source and natural language understanding.

Some of the key company goals are — to scale the intelligence of the products using a virtual expert platform and to leverage omnichannel commerce to increase small business growth. Additionally, Intuit is looking to enhance its customer experiences and communications at scale and improve developer productivity.

With a vision of being an AI-powered expert platform, Intuit is looking to expand its team in India in order to address its 100 million customers worldwide.

On the back of a single-minded focus on customer needs, Intuit has made a name for itself for powering businesses with top-of-the-line data-driven products. And this is the result of careful planning right from the hiring stages at the California-headquartered company.

“While data science candidates can come from any educational background, our focus is on hiring talent with the relevant skills and expertise, who will have the same customer-focused mindset that we have cultivated in this company,” says Sanket Atal, MD of Intuit India.

In fact, unlike some companies, Intuit lays a lot of emphasis on candidates with varied backgrounds. According to Atal, they function better in the company setting and even have a better understanding of the customer’s needs.

“At Intuit, customer empathy is at the core of everything we do, and it is this approach that we apply even for our hiring processes,” he says. “We also look to see if a candidate aligns to our company values, which is important to our company culture,” he adds.

So what does the ideal candidate for a data science job at Intuit look like? Let us find out.

Ideal Data Science Candidate At Intuit

Intuit looks for a variety of technical skills in their data science candidates, including a background in AI, past experience working in software development, as well as key projects that they have accomplished. Aside from that, the company is also keen to understand how they work and approach problems.

“Especially with regard to engineering talent, we keep a lookout for candidates who exhibit the right level of eagerness and curiosity to solve problems,” says Atal. “Additionally, the willingness to work collaboratively as part of a team, think outside the box, and their agility and adaptability are other qualities we consider,” he adds.

While it may seem exhaustive, given the pace at which the data science industry moves, these skill sets will continue to evolve as it hinges on customers’ needs in the future. In other words, the company attempts to integrate the customer’s perspective in its end-to-end data-focused customer pipeline and experience. How does that percolate into the overall interview process?

“To factor that, we look for candidates who are innovative, who have expert knowledge of AI and ML techniques to solve complex questions or fuel new business opportunities, and the capabilities to deliver breakthrough benefits to users and customers using individual, enriched, and aggregated data, which can be converted into insights and action plans,” says Atal.

Furthermore, based on the seniority of the position, Intuit also expects its data science candidates to have experience in leading teams who have expertise in data mining algorithms and statistical modelling techniques, such as clustering, classification, regression, decision trees, neural nets, support vector machines, genetic algorithms, anomaly detection, recommender systems, and natural language processing.

How would these skill sets be applied in their jobs once hired?

Data scientists are expected to leverage machine learning to build decision engines and algorithms that learn from rich datasets to transform user experiences. Their daily work pipeline would also involve applying knowledge engineering and turning compliance rules into code, as well as using natural language processing to revolutionise how customers interact with products and services.

“At Intuit, we are reinventing ourselves into an AI-driven expert platform to find better ways to serve our customers and ensure their prosperity,” says Atal. “When we think of a team, we have to think about customer-driven innovation and that forces us to think about the end customer and value. Another aspect we look for are those who have the soft skills that will translate well into success at Intuit,” he adds. 

Hiring Process For Data Scientists

The hiring process at Intuit is anchored around building a team of talented and diverse candidates for every job opening. This includes deploying a team of ‘Awesome Assessors’ to help the company evaluate the candidates.

But who are these Awesome Assessors?

“They are some of Intuit’s top-performing team members and are typically nominated by leadership,” says Atal. “These employees represent diverse backgrounds and departments, and help us avoid group-think in our recruiting and hiring practices,” he adds.

For instance, for engineering roles, the company’s engineers are actively included in candidate interviews as an Awesome Assessor (AA). The candidate will present their craft presentation to the AA, along with one-on-one interviews. Post this, the team decides whether or not to extend an offer within a 24-hour period.

“We are always open to experimentation when it comes to hiring methods. Our two successful sourcing channels are through our Employee Referral programs (30%), through interactions at external tech conferences, and direct sourcing through job portals like LinkedIn and internal databases,” says Atal. “Apart from these, we have organised multiple round tables in the past, especially when our global leaders come down. During these roundtables, leaders share details on what problems Intuit India is trying to solve, specifically those that directly impact small businesses and solve customer problems,” he adds.

According to the company, another great way of engaging with Intuit is by joining the company’s Talent Community. 

“Companies are starting to use the idea of Talent Communities to keep future candidates informed of company news and highlight their own employee work to show the impact that they are creating,” says Atal. “These communities, then, become a rich source of engaged candidates that recruiters tap into as roles become available,” he adds.

Lastly, what insights has his experience in recruiting data scientists at Intuit given him about the general state of talent in the country when it comes to filling these positions?

“India’s pool of candidates with data science capabilities is on an upward trajectory. Data scientists are very keen on solving critical problems that will create a big impact in the industry,” says Atal. “This is why we make sure that we talk about the customer problems we are trying to solve to keep them excited and more focused on our mission of powering prosperity,” he adds.

Intuit has recently announced an investment of more than $8 million through a blog post for different initiatives to support small business owners and self-employed workers. The blog stated that as the COVID-19 pandemic plays out around the world, many business people are struggling to make ends meet and provide for their families. They are facing a loss of income, a lack of adequate savings to weather the storm, and poor access to health care. With shelter-in-place mandates increasing around the world, small businesses have had to close their doors and are running out of cash to pay their employees and their bills.

Intuit is relentlessly working and sending funds to organizations that are trying to control the situation and serving the community such as the United Nations COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Intuit is also extending their play by supporting several NGOs who are delivering funds and healthcare services to the people in need. Through its We Care and Give Back Program, the company is lining up employee donations 2:1 for 15 NGOs in six countries around the world. 

Furthermore, Intuit QuickBooks has teamed up with GoFundMe to set up a Small Business Relief Initiative to help small businesses overcome the challenges faced at present. Through this platform, small businesses can create a fundraiser on the GoFundMe platform where they’re able to share their story with the public and request financial support to help cover employee-related and business expenses.

An instance has been shared in the blog post where a small business owner has lost 97 per cent of his sales and is struggling to pay the distributions. GoFundMe can help change such scenarios for many business owners. As per the post, a local deli in California recently raised $20,000 from donors to stay in business and continued to pay their employees even though the industry has slowed down. 

Intuit is looking forward to finding more partners to boost the capabilities as well as the technology platform that will assist several businesses to acquire funds quickly and survive the pandemic.