There is a price to be paid to be the first.

Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-founder and Group CEO, Fractal Analytics, and winner of the Dataquest Path-breaker of the Year award for 2024, looks back and analyses the dots that led the company from data to AI, from analysis to predictions and from plain AI to Gen AI. Excerpts from a chat with Editor Sunil Rajguru.

- Pratima H

SRIKANTH VELAMAKANNI
Co-founder and Group CEO, Fractal Analytics

As a company that is over 20 years old, it seems like a long journey- especially how the country has gone from the smartphone revolution to the pandemic. Can you share your story from the inception till today?

We started in 2000, during the peak of the Dotcom bubble. The initial idea was not even about being an AI firm but about helping consumers make better decisions on what they buy. Then we took a pivot of helping companies make better decisions. We knew we were good at human behavior, Maths and Psychology. All that came together to help companies. Initially, we did not know, how to make money with this model. But we were the first-of-its-kind analytics company in the world. There is a price to be paid to be ahead of the curve. But we had some very good clients which gave us interesting problems-like automated credit lending. We built the first statistical scorecard for ICICI for credit choices in India. It was revolutionary at that time. Then we helped Unilever to handle the 2008 recession- we used the science of data to carve the right offers for customers as per what data told us - on what would resonate well with customers. We cut our teeth into these areas with these customers. Soon analytics became more and more interesting. The idea, throughout, was - can we predict, and can these predictions help companies with decisions?

What led to the move to Al?