Tirthankar heads the Data Science department at the billion-dollar financial services arm of the multi-billion dollar Aditya Birla Group. As a Big Data leader and a digital native, he is focused on bridging the data science and engineering gap inside the business empire. ABFL as a whole is equally committed to digital innovation, and their investment in new projects should serve as a model for others.

As the company's annual general meeting in Budapest was approaching, Tirthankar was worried about a project. For a long time, the ABFL CXOs had struggled to get timely business insights. Off-the-shelf BI tools were too complicated, and business analysts had a TAT of one week. His idea was to build a natural language, search-powered custom tool, and its prototype was going to be in the spotlight. He had one week to build it after the agency he had hired previously failed to deliver.

In his first attempt to complete the prototype, he brought the agency to his office, but it quickly became clear the team had picked up something they couldn't deliver. All the different services companies in his vendor list couldn't help either. He tried reaching out to his ex-colleagues at multiple companies to no avail. But then he found Ankit, a leading data scientist, but also a previous Indiez customer.

Ankit had been working with Indiez as a customer and a community member for a few months, and was well aware of the speed at which community members could design and build. He immediately connected Tirthankar with a Indiez, and in a day's time, Tirthankar had a team that would ultimately be is final option — time was running out. Little did he know just how good the final product would be.

We had one week to build the prototype, and its success depended on a reliable NLP solution and stunning designs. We assembled a 5-member team comprising a Product manager, UX designer, Visual designer, Data scientist, and Full stack developer, and assigned a clear cut goal for them. The product manager kicked it all off by defining the exact scope of the project.

The first couple of days included rigorous product design in parallel with cleaning the data sets and architecting the best fit NLU model. Having designed AI products in the past with the people who built Siri, the UX designer knew the right pain points to address. On top of implementing the expected, he brought a completely new dimension of social collaboration to life, and introduced an 'insight cards' driven approach. Meanwhile, the Data Scientist architected a fully custom model using everything he learned from his previous experience filing two patents in the same domain.

And in one week, Tirthankar witnessed the insanely fast, remote collaboration over Slack, Skype, and Google Docs, and a prototype that was beyond all expectations.

The audience was dazzled by the power of the prototype, and Tirthankar received a standing ovation from his colleagues. The accuracy of the model and the additional feature of social collaboration were both appreciated, and Indiez was set to be an Innovation Partner for ABFL.

The project was commissioned instantly, and all managers leading multiple digital initiatives wanted to get in touch with us to complete projects in their journey forward.