Smart business is the future of the world as companies delve deeper into the regular practice of using AI and business intelligence along with data engineering in their operations. SG Analytics is a leading provider of intelligent insights to businesses around the world. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Sushant Gupta, Founder and CEO,SG Analytics.
What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?
Founded in 2007, SG Analytics – a global insights company is a leading provider of tailor-made insights to businesses across the globe, including F500 companies. Headquartered in Pune, the company has its presence across 7 locations, including the USA, the UK and Switzerland. Our biggest USP is our ability to leverage our research DNA along with our expertise in analytics, business intelligence, data engineering and visualization to provide solutions and actionable ‘differentiated’ insights that help our clients move the needle in their businesses. At SG Analytics, context is everything and every analytical project we execute is embedded with a subject-matter expert from research to ensure we are both technically and contextually on point in our delivery.
How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?
In the future, our focus will be on utilizing ML and AI to augment automation. Our goal is also to leverage the technologies and get our clients’ insights that are undiscovered and increase the possibility of AI to make the decision-making process sustainable. While deploying the solutions, we will keep, as we always have, certain key parameters in mind such as business value, ease of use, agility and flexibility and reduced time to insight. Meanwhile, we will expand our scale and will continue to concentrate on the company’s core competencies. After all, that is where we offer the most value to our customers.
How is the big data industry changing? What are some of the key technology transformations in this space?
Over the past few years, the big data industry has been focused on providing solutions to capture and streamline the right sets of internal and external data that a company would look to exploit. The current focus is on monetizing this huge pool of data that has been gathered using a combination of ML, AI, and next-generation visualization tools to generate insights relevant to internal and external consumers. Given the stupendous growth rate of data, there is also a concerted movement of big data systems to the cloud to make use of economies of scale. One of the key technology transformations that are being actively pursued by companies is the creation of data marketplaces. The vision here would be to create Amazon-style marketplaces that facilitate effective matchmaking between data producers and consumers within the company. The goal is that eventual consumers would be internal product teams who use this data to create new revenue streams through innovative data products.
Where do you plan to expand and see yourself going from here?
As we, at SG Analytics, speed along the trajectory of our growth and move toward our bigger and bolder goals, including going public in the next three years, our goal is to provide new and unique insights that will help businesses i.e., our customers to grow further. Our rich expertise using technology, research techniques and analytical modeling provides insights into customer behavior and allows businesses to drive outcomes. Our fast-growing data analytics practice helps global customers (from media & entertainment, technology, automotive, and engineering sectors) identify patterns and trends that lead to identifying predictions and business benefits.
What is your roadmap for the data analytics market?
We plan to move deeper into the technology and healthcare sector, data governance, ESG and productization. We also plan to grow further in the US and the UK, and develop a talent pool that is global and contextually and technically agile in nature.
What is your leadership mantra?
‘Life’s Possible’ is the beacon for our future growth, be it business or people, and our five values: leadership, accountability, co-creation, fun and excellence are the guiding forces. Keeping in line with this, we promote excellence and fun not just in our business activities, but also in our initiatives to improve the quality of life of anybody and everybody who connects with SG Analytics. ‘Life’s Possible’ captures our holistic approach toward work and life.
The industry is seeing the rising importance of big data analytics. How do you see these emerging technologies impact the business sector?
Organizations seek big data analytics solutions to simplify their end-to-end workflow and make more accurate decisions based on data-driven insights. We expect two important themes to emerge: augmented analytics and automated insights. Augmented analytics will help businesses automate the identification of data types, model data from a source and automate suggestions. We expect to see smarter automated analytics workflows and natural language processing, allowing business stakeholders to make confident decisions based on data-driven insights and drive the best possible outcomes without relying on IT or data and analytics experts. Business users, for example, could simply ask questions just like you would in a normal conversation and get instant answers explained in natural language. On the other hand, automated insights will use big data analytics to dynamically spot patterns and trends in raw data and then describe those findings in plain English. Such solutions author insightful, personalized reports around data at scale. In a nutshell, instead of users spending time determining which insights are more impactful for their business, automated insights will highlight key findings for them. The system will be able to track changes and build a narrative that’s digestible to the user, point out key findings, and make it easy to deliver through platforms that are consumed the highest.
Can you throw light on the latest employment trends in key sectors?
Thanks to the pandemic, work from home has now gone mainstream. Even if companies don’t work from home absolutely, many will consider hybrid work. That’s because 2020 opened our eyes to just how much modern organizations can achieve without coming to office. Thanks to a plethora of collaboration tools and robust cloud infrastructure, teams can collaborate seamlessly, wherever their members may be. That said, while work from home took the world by storm, it’s only possible for knowledge workers like corporate lawyers and, yes, data analysts. What about scientists who work in labs? The good news is, as the world recovers from the pandemic, presence-based sectors like hospitality are hiring again, trying to make up for the dramatic losses. However, the trend that stands out is hiring to empower rapid digital transformation. After all, the pandemic made it clear that it no longer is a nice-to-have, but a necessity. Data analytics, digital marketing, and cloud computing remain in high demand. Digital skills, in fact, are now considered by many to be entry requirements. But all along, skills hard or soft, a necessity in hiring is diversity, equality, and inclusion. Companies don’t just wish to be rich financially, but also socially and culturally.
