Why AI and Data are the keys to the Future: find out from Anand Chandrasekaran in the latest episode of CTOtalk

In the February edition of CTOtalk deep dive, Anand Chandrasekaran, Founder & CTO of Mad Street Den (MSD) revealed the crucial role AI plays in transforming a modern business and talked about MSD’s aim of simplifying automation and making any business AI Native.

Anand brings a lot of versatility to the table. He is among the very few people with expertise in Neuroscience, Hardware, Neuromorphic engineering, and Artificial intelligence.

Overall, the session itself was an astounding success with participants appreciating how well Anand presented his insights and revealed the tech stack that powers MSD’s products.

From Chennai to Texas and back: The early journey

Anand comes from a time when getting an engineering degree was a dream of every Indian teen and what better place to become an engineer than IITM. When he completed his degree, he felt as if it wasn’t his calling. Instead, Anand was interested in pursuing research. In a few years, he found himself at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Neuroscience.

Anand himself was amused while telling his story as the irony is not lost on him.

“So, yeah there I was. An engineer with no biology background, entering grad school, and I was working with genetic mutant mice, sticking electrodes into the brain to try to figure out how the brain wires itself up.”

After a few years, Anand still felt that something was missing and continued to dabble in different things where he got into the idea of working on the brains for computers — Neuromorphic Engineering.

Finally, Anand ended up where he started — in Chennai. Along with his wife Ashwini Asokan, Anand founded Mad Street Den and hasn’t looked back since.

AI for everyone

“If we simplify the main objective of Mad Street Den, it’ll all come down to the following 5 words. Generalised AI for every business,” said Anand.

Every business knows that AI is the next big thing and is necessary for their survival in the market. However, not all businesses are aware of how to best leverage AI for their benefit.

Anand asks a simple question. What if that wasn’t the problem anymore? What if making your business AI native could be done in a matter of weeks, days, or even hours depending on the complexity of the system?

Anand’s solution can do that. He states,

“Every business out there wants to use AI. Not every business knows how to use AI. And through blox, what we’re trying to do is give you AI in a box.”

The three fundamental pillars for any data-driven business

Take a look at any data-driven business. The operations will come under one of the following categories.

• Content inventory: If the data on what you need to sell is not there, then you’ve failed before even taking the first step.
• Data organization: Now that you have the data and are aware of what you need to sell, the next step is all about making that data accessible. Data at the right place and at the right time is crucial for any organization’s success. Without that, you are operating in the blind. Making sense of it and ensuring that it’s delivered to the right place also falls under this category.
• Automation and process optimization: From search-related answers to any other functional aspect of the business, automation is crucial.

How does Blox help?

Blox helps you access the benefits of any AI-native environment with a press of a button. The picture below describes it perfectly.

MSD’s Blox is for everyone. But Anand and his team needed a use case example before diving too deep into this. They chose the fashion industry. Its dynamic nature requires adaptability, and most importantly, the ability to scale.

That’s where Vue.ai came to be. The specifically tailored solution falls under the blox infrastructure and has helped numerous businesses in the retail fashion industry throughout the globe. Vue made things so simple that even a non-technical fashion analyst could start generating AI models.

Anand said,

“Continuous working on the tooling and abstraction of the machine learning problem allowed non-technical people, fashion analysts, for example, in our company to start generating models, and plugging them into the production system.”

Watch the full video where Anand talks about the AI modeling and application of machine learning at MSD.