#166 Machine Learning and AI Innovations at WooliesX
Organisations are in constant need of innovation to fulfill their end consumer’s needs. That’s why several companies have started innovation areas to help update and grow their main business. Today we are focusing on starting a Machine Learning and AI initiative within these innovation areas to grow the value they are providing, scale their results and positively impact the rest of the organisation.
We are joined by Ram Radhakrishnan, General Manager for Customer Analytics, AI & Data Science at WooliesX, where he is building world-class capabilities thanks to 250+ data practitioners coming together. Ram is certain that AI and ML are future capabilities able to take organisations to new heights, whether it be solving business problems or providing a unique customer experience.
The AI & ML space is quite big and diverse, but both Ram and Felipe share how they’ve seen a huge rise in the demand for machine learning engineers due to the growing need of scaling and operationalizing models.
When it comes to hiring, the most important skill he looks for in candidates is the right attitude and the desire to always keep learning. WooliesX has a focus on teams and their members and works for them to dedicate nearly 20% of their time towards developing their own skills and knowledge.
Tune in for the full conversation where Ram goes into detail about WooliesX agile practices, their scope of work, growing their teams and what he believes are the most important upcoming skills in the data space.
Enjoy the show!
Quotes:
"We made a very conscious decision that every individual or team member within the data practice will spend close to 20% of their time developing their skills for career progression, cross skill training and just learning new skills within AI and ML."
"When organizations or an area scales really quickly and grows, there are so many opportunities for people to expand their roles, take on new responsibilities and pitch or make a case for the work they would like to do."
"I see this new upcoming trend where data scientists want to learn more and more to do better coding or be able to start productionizing the models they are building. Similarly, the machine learning engineers want to understand how the data science models are being built and how they can have a better knowledge of the models and machine learning algorithms that are out there."
"We are looking for this array of skill sets, and also not just skill sets, but how you use those skill sets to solve real life problems and business problems."
UPCOMING EVENTS!
At Data Futurology, we are always working to bring you use cases, new approaches and everything related to the most relevant topics in data science to help you get the most value out of these technologies!
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