Summary
The episode titled Season 2 Ep. 16 Amit Prakash of ThoughtSpot on empowering companies to make data-driven decisions, is a fascinating insight into the opportunities and challenges of working with Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help non-data science professionals make data-driven decisions. Ahmed Prakash, the co-founder and CTO of ThoughtSpot, who has a deep technical background, shared his compelling journey from working at Microsoft and Google to founding his company. His company provides AI and search-driven analytics solutions to many well-known companies like Nike, Walmart, and Apple.
One of the primary objectives of ThoughtSpot is to empower business users to understand the significance of data integration and be able to ask questions effortlessly and get answers. Ahmed's team traded through many ideas before building a Google-like interface, enabling users to ask questions in natural language rather than complex programming languages. The creation of this unique interface helped businesses integrate questions and saved them significant time and energy. Ahmed highlights his company's three pillars - building large-scale systems that can handle vast amounts of data, machine learning and AI, and the user experience (UX).
ThoughtSpot's automated insight part generates hypotheses and evaluates them to surface the most interesting business-wise to the user. It uses AI to rank search results based on interestingness, combining multiple sources of data such as statistical analysis and feedback from the users. Ahmed discusses the evolving capabilities of GPT and BERT models in capturing real-world knowledge and ThoughtSpot's future plans to work on NLP solutions beyond these models.
The podcast also shared ThoughtSpot's partnership with Snowflake in building one of the fastest distributed in-memory databases for the enterprise. Ahmed emphasizes the importance of entrepreneurs taking enough time to understand their problem statement and how AI technology can solve real-world problems effectively. Additionally, Ahmed highlights how having great leaders running the organization is the key ingredient to successful management of an organization's engineering team.
In conclusion, the podcast provides an excellent insight into the world of AI and how it provides amazing opportunities to solve real-world problems. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the business context, capturing and representing knowledge efficiently, and focusing on the user experience. The engaging conversation highlights the importance of continuous learning and keeping up with technological advancements to build unique and practical solutions that empower businesses to be data-driven.
