Nitin Seth’s new book cautions ‘less is more’ on AI

By Ritu Jha-

Two extraordinary phenomena are unfolding simultaneously in the tech world – the emergence of a data-first world and the dawn of the AI age. Their convergence is creating immense and boundless opportunities that are disrupting the tech job sector.

Nitin Seth[Above top photo] says companies will need fewer data scientists and in the next 20 years, artificial intelligence may impact 40% of job availability in various sectors.

Seth breaks it all down in his new book, Mastering the Data Paradox: Key to Winning in the AI Age. Seth, co-founder and CEO of New Jersey-based Incedo Inc., recently launched the book at the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto, Calif.

Seth spoke to indica about his foray into the literary world and the dynamics of data and AI. When asked about the target audience, Seth said that he wanted to make data topical and easy to understand for the common person.

“For the common person or small businesses, enterprise-based small companies, data is a very essential skill that everybody needs to have,” Seth said. “Today data is seen as a specialist topic. Through this book, I have tried to make that specialist topic a general topic, and a common person’s topic. I’ve tried to write it in a very simple language.”

Seth said that as long as data continues to be a specialized topic, which most people don’t understand, its problems will continue.

“Data and AI are not separate things, they’re like a mirror image,” he said. “AI happens because of data. We are still in the early stages of AI and very interesting experiments are being carried out, but we haven’t yet gone into production. And to do that at scale, data becomes very important. The possibilities are tremendous but we will need to solve all the issues with data. In this book, I have taken a look at the trifecta – digital, data, and AI. They go together.”

Data driven 

Seth says he spent three years writing the book and he’s worked with data in different ways over the past three decades.

“Data is enigmatic, it is always a huge opportunity, but it has always been challenging to realize that opportunity. Over the last couple of decades, that opportunity and challenge has become more pronounced as data has moved from being a scarce commodity to being abundant and overflowing. So that has changed the dynamics, and made it a lot more complicated.”

Seth has compiled an impressive resume. He has worked as director of McKinsey’s Global Knowledge Centre in India, as the managing director, country head at Fidelity International in India, and the chief operating officer at Flipkart. He has also written Winning in the Digital Age.

He said data has been a critical factor in his career.

“I think it started with the McKinsey Knowledge Center because when I was there, data was exploding,” he said. “It was an opportunity to change the consulting profession quite dramatically. McKinsey is a very successful firm, and successful firms can also be very arrogant. The knowledge center was initially the back office, but it was capturing all the data. And I ensured that data became the source of value. We converted the data into products, offerings, and platforms, which transformed the McKinsey business model quite dramatically. That was the period where I saw the possibilities.”

The initial explosion of data happened during the 2000s at McKinsey before Seth moved on to Flipkart. There, he says he probably had the best technology team in India. At one point, that team had at least 10 Indian Institute of Technology gold medalists.

“We tried building this data platform, but the trend of data was not there,” he said. “Flipkart was a company that really pioneered it in 2016-17. We were able to use that to our advantage in that phase, and push back on Amazon and win. Our success was completely anchored on data because we did not have the resources of Amazon.”

As an example, Seth said Flipkart had just a handful of fulfillment centers, while Amazon had more than 25.

“How would you compete with that? We used data to do a segmentation that the customer expectation of service is very different according to the product category,” Seth recalled. “For mobile phones we had one warehouse in Bangalore, and we would airship it to other places because that meant a lot to our customers. But for other categories, our delivery was 10 days. Because we could not deliver as fast as Amazon. All of this was based on data. Otherwise, Flipkart could not have competed with Amazon. We competed and won against Amazon with a fraction of the resources.”

It hasn’t all been a smooth road for Seth, a topic he covers in the book.

“We tried to create this data platform to bring all of Flipkart’s data in one place. And that was a great failure. Because when we tried bringing so much data together, it just did not work. We tried to solve it as a technical problem. And even the best engineers could not solve it. The way we solved it was less is more.”

Less is more

A major theme of the book is that “less is more.”

“I saw how by trying to do more, we created a problem and we solved it by doing less. Later I moved to the U.S., and I’m serving the largest companies in the world, the largest banks, and telecoms. I saw the same problem that we had in Flipkart. They were trying to build this big platform, putting in hundreds of millions of dollars, and it didn’t work. They were missing the focus. They don’t realize that when data becomes too much, it is difficult to handle, because data quality becomes a very critical issue. So, the answer is less is more, and you have to put a very sharp focus on the business outcomes. In Flipkart, it was a startup, so we saw a problem and we solved it. But in larger companies, it’s not very easy to solve.”

Seth made a rather grim prediction about the degree to which AI will eliminate jobs. He says within the next five years, there may be a 3% to 5% loss in job opportunities. In 10 to 20 years, he expects at least a 40% loss in jobs.

“I don’t think we have begun to fully understand AI and how to do things about it. That’s a subject I hope to cover in my third book.”

Tech pundits and venture capitalists discussed mastering data, AI, and investment during the ‘Mastering the Data Paradox: Key to Winning in the AI Age’ book launch, held October 4 at Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto, Calif.

Seth says adopting a “less is more” outlook could help humanity to arrive at the right solution.

“Tracking of data can help to some extent because to solve any problem, first you need to track it. It is not clear whether this is a solvable problem. But that does not mean that we should not try solving it. So I think that’s also why I argue for less is more. If we keep feeding this frenzy, it will mean more data centers and more energy consumption. The only way to achieve sustainability is less is more in every aspect of life. And that needs to go into data as well.”