An avid reader, a passionate data scientist and an absolute techie, Abhimanu Kumar is known for his love for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). As the AI market remains in an evolutionary state with a high percentage of AI innovations appearing on the upward-sloping Innovation Trigger, Abhimanu remains optimistic that the AI market is all set to witness a boom – never experienced earlier. As the CEO and Co-Founder of CausalFunnel, Plug-and-play data science platform for eCommerce funnel optimization, Abhimanu speaks on an array of topics. Excerpts from an interview:

Conception of CasualFunnel

“We created CausalFunnel with 10 years of industry experience to solve the problem that technology shifts and market dynamics are creating, especially for SMBs.” Adds Abhimanu that the current marketing and sales strategies depend on third-party data, but the privacy laws prohibit it. “Cookies are essential in every single current analytics tool, but the future is Cookie-less and there is a huge technical gap being created because of it. Data fidelity is going down and even now businesses have blindness to 30% of their data, which is collected by cookie-based tools.”

He also cites the massive digital wave the eCommerce is witnessing as one of the reasons for the conception of CasualFunnel. “These businesses need skilled data-science professionals to be successful in the new digital world, which many companies are unable to afford. CausalFunnel is an answer to that need.”

Flagship Products- Benefits

The company is on a mission to build an AI-powered data science platform that is accessible to every business and is built with future-proof technology that complies with privacy laws.” Website visitor persona and intent prediction created with a disruptive cookie-less data-science technology remain the flagship products of the company. “Our AI is powered with the anonymized cohort data from the industry and the first-party buyer intent data, giving you the most accurate and actionable insights. Our solution is serving 200 million unique visitors every year, driving a 20-50% lift in the rate of orders/leads.”

AI- Challenges Galore

The current state of the art in AI is mostly pattern recognition and machine learning, observes Abhimanu. “If you are an SMB or even one of the blue chips, you can’t afford to pay big bucks to build AI and Data Science algorithms. You can at most look at the data and report that various analytics platforms provide and hope the insights that your business development and intelligence teams discover using it, can grow your business.” But many nuances and insights get lost without a science aspect to this intelligence. CausalFunnel is on a mission to democratize AI and Data Science.

The second big risk factor is the privacy aspect of the data that is taken for granted but is steadily going away. “Platforms like CausalFunnel with their DeepID and Persona Predictors play a pivotal role as it becomes imperative to make a distinction between learning and intelligence.”

Leadership Traits

“One of the traits that I admire in other leaders is humility coupled with decisiveness. Mutual respect and empathy make a tightly-knit team”, according to Abhimanu. “I believe if leaders accurately know what drives their performers, they have an unbeatable team”.

A Word of Advice

“Personally, I believe, fear of failure is good. But getting paralyzed due to that fear is bad. Fear has at times driven great technological advancements. Teams have gone “way beyond the extra mile” due to fear of failures.” He recommends leveraging that fear to drive success and this comes from, among other things, having the right focus.

The Success Mantra

“Professionally, I believe, speedy execution after deliberate attention, and learning fast after failures is a great recipe for personal success. For teams, technical empathy mixed with goal-oriented concrete visions drives successful product executions. CausalFunnel has one of the world’s top expertise in dealing with sparse predictions and is one of the mantras of our success.”

Another aspect to be aware of is Occam’s Razor and statistical aspects of ML, especially for eCommerce products, warns Abhimanu. Deep Learning has not been able to replicate its success in Computer Vision and Natural Language to Business Development and Data Science partly due to its black-box nature. “CausalFunnel is uniquely positioned in this aspect as having worked on both cutting-edge deep learning technology and driving business development using data science has given us unique insights to work with.”