Interview with Satyakam Mohanty, CEO, Lymbyc Solutions

We are living in fascinating times, where digital assistants plan meetings, chatbots work close by people as teaching assistants, and your bag would now be a self driving luggage as exhibited at CES, 2018. The implications are simply beginning to be felt in the working environment. Artificial intelligence isn't here to replace people. It is here to improve all that we do. Lymbyc harnessed the combining potential of AI and ML with Human cognitive intelligence to enable business pioneers with logical insights for the purpose of decision making. Thus, Leni – World's first Virtual Analyst, An AI-ML powered platform was created. Analytics Insight was glad to speak to Satyakam Mohanty, CEO, Lymbyc Solutions, who discussed how Lymbyc consolidates the advantages of machine learning abilities as well as cognitive human capacities to deliver an intelligent interactive interface that can comprehend your business issues and help you in your decisions.

With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since inception of the company?

In 2012, I had more than a decade of experience in this space, and I could see the burgeoning gaps in this sector around emerging technologies (Big Data, AI) and shifting business/consumption models (from partner based to self-service), and I wanted to address those gaps. This led to the establishment of Lymbyc in 2012.

Lymbyc was conceptualized with a vision to empower the business leader with insights available at the point of decision making and in real-time as opposed to human-centric processes which runs into weeks and months. The inspiration for which came from the limbic system, a part of the human brain that powers our emotions and instincts – the reason behind 'why' we do what we do. Bringing this analogy to businesses, we felt that although organizations have many resources and tools at their disposal, it only gives them insights on the 'hows' and 'whats', these tools failed to give answers to the 'whys' which was critical to solving business problems – and this was the gap Lymbyc filled with its new solution.

In late 2017, we launched "Leni", a virtual analyst powered by its AI-based Insights platform. Leading to the launch of Leni, Lymbyc has also created intellectual properties; with a couple of patents filed for big data framework and querying language.

Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

Lymbyc has continuously proved its mettle in the industry with a number of accolades and recognitions in its name. These include – "Most innovative Data science Product" by Aegis, "The top 10 emerging Analytics startups in India to watch out for in 2018" by Analytics India Magazine, CIO Review 20 most promising Artificial Intelligence Solutions Provider 2018, Top 10 in Business World Magazine's Workplace Experience Ranking 2017, ESOMAR-Market Research Society of India (MRSI's) MR Tech Excellence Award and being featured in the Gartner's Market Guide for Data Science and Machine Learning Providers for four consecutive years.

What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

In recent years, innovating in business models has been very popular, but the hardest (but also the most effective) way is when we create breakthrough technology or solution IP. Since we wanted to focus on the fundamental process of insight generation itself rather than solving for point problems – we looked to solve the fundamental process of how analytics and insights are created and consumed. We had to, therefore, create new methodologies and technologies. This subsequently led us to create Leni that has been recognized as the world's first virtual analyst which is capable of approximating a human data scientist. Currently, there is no exact parallel to it in this space and that makes our solution stand out from the overall competing solutions.

What's your growth plans for the next 12 months?

Now that we have our world's first virtual analyst, Leni, our plans are centered on taking it to as many clients around the world as possible and as fast as possible. So, we will be looking to do it both organically as well as through select industry partners.

In terms of capabilities, we plan to impart more cognitive skills into Leni, to make her more intelligent. This would include:

•   Enabling processing of AV and image-based data.

•   Adding more prescriptive capabilities and recommendation of actionable strategies.

•   Adding more use-cases such as Sales force effectiveness, Pricing analytics, Campaign analytics and Competitive Intelligence across existing industries as well as new industries including retail, e-commerce etc.

How has the adoption of AI (in business decision making) in India/US evolved over the last few years

Businesses around the world demand actionable insights, available at the tip of their hands. This has led to the accelerated adoption of AI and underlying technologies. From substituting manual processes to complementing human analysts, AI has surely come a long way. There are some factors that are expected to drive the adoption even further:

Pace of decision making – Current insights infrastructure is not conducive to the pace at which decision makers want to make business decisions

Need for self-service insights – Decision makers demand access to actionable insights on the fly, to make the insights process more autonomous

Emergence of Voice Search – Major industry leaders are investing in voice search technology leading to increased sophistication of voice-recognition systems, and in turn increasing the demand for voice search among business users as well

Demand for NLP – Today consumers want to jump right to the information they are looking for, thus removing the need for much of the extensive training and custom configuration mandated by legacy software vendors

Would you like to highlight a few use cases where analytics has benefited the organization tremendously?

Leni, our virtual analyst, has helped analytics practices of enterprises to deliver insights faster, at scale, and bring end-user connectivity and engagement. Leni has helped bring in efficiency in traditional analytics processes, by giving end users the ability to ask ad-hoc questions on the fly, reducing time to insights from weeks to seconds.

The Global Medical Affairs team of a Pharmaceutical Giant was faced with traditional analytics processes. They used static dashboards to generate insights. Leni helped them to streamline their insights infrastructure, making it more responsive, integrated and autonomous. Through Leni, users could ask questions in plain English and receive actionable insights across KPIs, and also receive business alerts and signals for autonomous insights.

Global Product Strategy team of a large CPG company was unable to gain access to actionable insights because they were coming from multiple datasets. They were especially lacking access to predictive and prescriptive insights. Leni enabled end users to integrate their insights infrastructure and ask ad-hoc predictive and prescriptive queries on the fly.

How C-suite executives can leverage data to deliver business value to their organizations?

Data coming in from different sources and its analysis, can help C-suite executives gain a better visibility into all the different aspects of their business

C-suite executive can leverage data and analytics to make informed business decisions. With AI and analytics, they can get access to insights at the point of decision making, in real-time.

Additionally, C-suite executives can simulate different market scenarios to create multi-pronged strategies that impact their businesses. They can also stress test those strategies against the different market scenarios to select the strategy resulting in the most improved outcomes.