Shantanu Kumar is a data scientist at LinkedIn, and was the Head of AI Products at inFeedo, scaling it to multi-million-dollar revenues to be one of the leading employee engagement organizations globally, and a part of YCombinator’s Summer ’20 cohort. He had a stint in Udacity’s data team and is the author of LexScore, a sentiment-lexicon contextualising algorithm. As a graduate of MIT’s New Ventures Leadership Bootcamp, he co-created MiMent, a finalist of the program structured around personalized learning plans for Indian university students looking out for jobs and places to apply their skills. He is now a part of the MIT Bootcamps Alumni Advisory Board. As an active contributor to Stanford Scholar, Shantanu’s research on fake-news detection is voted highest on the platform. A global speaker and guest lecturer, Shantanu Kumar has taught at many B-schools in India and spoken at various AI and Entrepreneurship forums.  

• “Starting & Scaling AI Ventures” is a timely book that discusses options and methods of embarking on commercial AI solutions. The author proposes that the first question to ask is whether it is indeed a problem that requires an AI solution. Today it has become a trend to advertise AI solutions, but the fact is that many problems do not require AI solutions— they are easily handled through other means. This makes it an overkill for the problem at hand. 

• The book lists many “don’ts”, derived from the author’s failures, and provides perspectives and observations on what led to those failures. The book also provides views from many leading experts and entrepreneurs in the field of AI and Data Science. 

• The book is a primer that can be revisited repeatedly during an organization’s journey from starting out as an AI venture to reaching maturity and scale. It also suggests that for many organizations, the AI part of the problem solving may simply be outsourced, without losing the essential character of the parent organization. 

Run time – 37.52 mins.