Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Divyabh Mishra, CEO of CrowdANALYTIX (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now?

Divyabh Mishra: Right now, we are close to $6 million. This year could have been a lot more, but everyone has had a hit this year – at least in the first half of the year. Nobody was sure where things were going. Things are picking up though. It has been a trend in the right direction.

Earlier, companies like Walmart and Home Depot were interested in us, but the smaller guys didn’t care much about a lot of the things that we do. But now, 40% of retail is expected to go online and that has increased in both B2B and B2C. We are hoping to do well next year. 

Sramana Mitra: One thing that makes me wonder about the thing that you described is that you built a valuable community of data scientists. I am not convinced that the business model that you are using is the best monetizing model. I think you can monetize better than what you are doing. 

Divyabh Mishra: I think so as well. The biggest hurdle I face is that I have two audiences. One is the community that is interested in me because there is variety. One thing data scientists hate is addressing just one type of problem. You have a Ph.D. in Mathematics and you join Walmart and you are doing the same thing all your life. That is boring.

I am allowing them to do whatever they like. On the other hand, the customers or investors are telling us to focus and do one thing again and again and to do it really well. I have to keep feeding the community and I do that by giving them problems that may not have an end goal other than to keep the community excited. Some of those do convert.

Think of this as an engine that gives the ability to quickly churn out and do experiments, which is why Macnica got interested in us. In the Macnica platform, we build efficiency because we have a community. 

Sramana Mitra: Last question. Where are the open problems? Retail is one that you have cracked well. You are about to do some IoT stuff. What are the other chunks of problem domains that you want to go after?

Divyabh Mishra: I can only talk based on my experience and exposure. The first thing that I would do is I would look for companies or industries that are inefficient in a way that they are a low-margin, high-volume business.

Any low-margin, high volume business will benefit even with a 1% improvement. We are doing something similar for the Macnica business itself. They are a distribution business. We are looking at all activities in their operations that are manual repeatable tasks.

That is where you look for opportunities for automation. Once you find that, the technology exists today. If I would do this again, I would not come up with this generic crowdsourcing type of thing. I would pick one of those problems. There are plenty of those out there. Businesses are still inefficient.

In procurement for example, there are a lot of options. We have spoken to a lot of different companies that do a lot of contract work. You have to submit a lot of lengthy contracts. Most of that contract is repeatable. There are many pieces of that contract that a machine may do right much better. That is how I would approach those things out there.

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t you take a look at my PaaS writing. I think this company has high potential, but I think your strategy is flawed.

This is not to take anything away from what you have achieved. You have achieved a lot but I think you can extract a lot more value out of this business just by making changes in how you monetize and how you play the game. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Divyabh Mishra, CEO of CrowdANALYTIX
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