How data & tech are changing business landscape

Technology, especially artificial intelligence and machine learning, is enabling businesses to offer services hitherto unimaginable, and that too in every sector.
Marut Singh, CTO at used-car marketplace Cars24, said they use AI and ML in almost every part of the car buying journey. “We use it to realise the price of a car, we use it to forecast which cars would sell faster, to understand how much money we have to spend on a car in order to be profitable, to figure out the credit profile of a person and whether to give them a loan via our NBFC business,” he said.
The accuracy of predictions using AI and ML models, he said, are heavily dependent on the quality of data, and so they take data collection very seriously. “Data sciences is 80% data and 20% science,” he said.

Praful Poddar, senior VP of product management at Shiprocket, an e-commerce enablement platform, said technology is slowly transforming the retail business in India by allowing small sellers to take on the likes of Amazon and Flipkart. “Nowadays, buyers want instant gratification after getting used to one and two-day delivery times. The only way a small seller can compete in this market is to use tech,” he said.
To enable this, Shiprocket has 45 warehouses across the country and the company tells sellers how to store products, what quantity to store, and where, so that they are closer to buyers. “In the end, the buyer experience is almost the same as you find at places like Amazon and Flipkart. And all of this is only possible thanks to technology and automation,” he said.
For example, how do you prevent businesses from having to incur twice the shipping costs and no revenue when a customer returns an order placed via cash on delivery (CoD)? Poddar said you can use data and AI/ML to figure out that certain buyers should be made to give a Rs 100 token amount if they place a CoD order, or a system could be implemented where the buyer is made to confirm twice (via a call maybe) if they choose a CoD option. Simple measures like that can make a big difference to a business’s bottom line.
Technology has become central to the healthcare sector too. Pristyn Care specialises in elective surgeries. They have their own surgeons and clinics, and they partner with hospitals in 40 cities across India. “When a patient reaches out to us, we first identify the problem, then schedule an appointment with the surgeon at the clinic, and once a surgery is required we do price prediction for that surgery based on various parameters like location, possible outcomes, etc. The patient is free to choose which hospital he or she wants to have the surgery in. We also take care of the insurance process,” said Gaurav Bagga, senior VP of product & engineering at Pristyn Care.
To offer these services, Pristyn had to build 20 subsystems (digital products) that are being used by a variety of stakeholders. The patient experience, Bagga said, is broken at hospitals. “For example, people don’t know what the right price is for a surgery. Even at a single hospital the price for a surgery can vary depending on the patient’s insurance policy. Pristyn has all that data. This is where our tech-enabled platform comes in to clearly lay out the different prices for surgeries at hospitals,” he said.