Vahan Inc. is an AI-driven digital assistant that helps area gross sales groups and frontliners do higher work at scale. Vahan’s AI-based chatbot known as ‘Mitra’ permits employers to rent employees in massive volumes in a quantity of industries throughout India. This digital assistant is totally customisable to align with employers’ help, coaching, communication, and reporting wants.
Vahan is a expertise firm headquartered in Bengaluru that helps firms corresponding to Zomato, Swiggy, Flipkart, Uber, Shadowfax, and many others., rent blue-collar employees and are on observe to grow to be India’s largest recruitment platform.
Analytics India Magazine caught up with Anuj Gupta, who gave insights concerning the use of AI in industries and the way Vahan is utilizing AI. Anuj Gupta has a PhD in Computer Science from IIT-Delhi and a MS in Mathematics and Computer Science from IIIT-Hyderabad. He has served as a software program engineer at Infosys, Financial Software and Systems Pvt Ltd, as Data Scientist at Droom, Director of machine studying at Huawei Technologies and labored within the AI staff at Intuit earlier than heading machine studying at Vahan Inc. He has additionally authored a guide known as “Practical Natural Language Processing Book [O’Reilly]”.
AIM – How is India shaping in analytics, AI and ML? What would you say are our strengths and weaknesses on this context?
Anuj Gupta – India is shaping very nicely to take benefit of the AI wave. First, we have to perceive that AI is a broad time period encompassing your entire spectrum, from analytics to synthetic basic intelligence. India has all the time been very sturdy in information, analytics, predictive analytics, and we have been very fast to leap on the DS/ML bandwagon and leverage it. Today in India, everybody, together with academic institutes, startups, MNC, IT providers, Govt of India, even conventional companies, is making an attempt to take advantage of of AI. Our largest energy is 1.3 billion people who find themselves tremendous aspirational and keen to chop their enamel on deep and sophisticated applied sciences like AI. Having mentioned this, we have to guard in opposition to trivialising it. We have seen this with engineering, IT providers, and cloud expertise in current instances.
AIM – What is the enterprise mannequin of Vahan Inc.?
Anuj Gupta – Vahan helps organisations rent Blue Collar Workers (BCW) at scale and velocity. This is a good win-win for each – the job seekers and the employers. Our product is rising because the employment alternate for over 300 million blue-collar employees in India. We are inserting 10K+ folks a month now, and 97 per cent of those that discover jobs by us achieve this in 7 days.
The blue-collar gig economic system is powered by large progress within the demand for versatile staffing from India’s e-commerce and logistics sectors. Organisations have been struggling to recruit blue-collar gig employees at scale. These organisations needed to undertake modern strategies to rent employees, recruit them sooner, and even retain them. Today now we have a complete demand of 300K jobs to be stuffed every month!
AIM – How is Vahan leveraging AI?
Anuj Gupta – We are utilizing AI and tech to reimagine the entire expertise and hiring lifecycle of blue-collar employees—proper from screening and vetting job seekers for key expertise beneath 10 minutes, matching customers to probably the most appropriate jobs, all the way in which to optimise operations. All that is powered by AI expertise. Thus, we offer vetted results in the employers. Another key space the place we use AI is decreasing workforce attrition and growing general employee productiveness. This is an issue that plagues most employers that rent blue-collar employees. Using our methods, we will predict attrition earlier than it occurs and scale back churn by as much as 40 per cent.
AIM – What is the demand for blue-collar jobs pre- and post-pandemic in India?
Anuj Gupta – Gig work noticed an enormous increase through the COVID19 pandemic; it has reworked the way in which employers and job seekers take into consideration the low-skilled phase. There has been a powerful shift in direction of gigs in comparison with full-time employment.
India has over 250 million blue-collar employees, and the pandemic acted as a key catalyst in blue-collar jobs. COVID19 introduced massive (and, possibly everlasting) adjustments in consumer behaviour, not simply millennials but in addition different consumer cohorts corresponding to senior residents and homemakers. Most of them now need their each day provides to be delivered to properties. Due to the sturdy tailwinds from the pandemic, the best demand for blue-collar employees is predicted from the logistics and e-commerce sectors, as constructing environment friendly supply channels is necessary for web companies.
AIM – Please elaborate on the tech stacks utilized by Vahan.
Anuj Gupta – We use a hybrid tech stack to serve our various wants.
In databases, it’s largely PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch and Redis. On the programming languages entrance, we largely use Node JS, Python, Java, Android (Java & Kotlin), HTML, and CSS. In phrases of frameworks, it’s Spring Boot (Microservice), ReactJS, Angular, and Flask. On the machine studying aspect, we closely use PyTorch, scikit-learn, NumPy, Pandas, FastAPI, and Airflow. For internet hosting, it’s AWS and Docker.
AIM – How has Vahan made a distinction in folks’s lives?
Anuj Gupta – Vahan helps tens of millions of Indians discover their subsequent gig work. Last 12 months, we positioned 65,000 folks. We are on observe to grow to be India’s largest recruitment platform subsequent 12 months. On the job seeker aspect, our expertise leverages present consumer behaviour. We will not be making an attempt to alter the way in which folks discover jobs, largely by networks and pals. Instead, now we have productised this human-driven strategy and made it super-efficient utilizing AI; and that’s been our success story. We additionally focus very extremely on decreasing turnaround time, so about 97 per cent of the individuals who get positioned by us get a job inside seven days.
AIM – Who are your target market and opponents?
Anuj Gupta – Today, on the B2C aspect, it’s an Indian on the lookout for a blue-collar job; on the B2B aspect, any organisation trying to rent a blue-collar/gig workforce. We shall be dwelling within the APAC market within the subsequent three-five years. Today, we’re at the moment targeted on jobs, however sooner or later, we need to construct a monetary wellness platform that may additionally help folks getting loans to begin a enterprise and help with upskilling alternatives so folks can develop of their lives and careers.
There are many different gamers on this house – Apna, GoodWorker, Kromo, Naukri, OLX, and many others. Most of these platforms are targeted on producing leads at the highest of the hiring funnel.
There are three key points on this house:
(a) Over 50% of job candidates don’t meet fundamental blue-collar job-specific necessities
(b) Attrition may be very excessive; most workforce churns in 3 months.
(c) Clients should work with an extended tail of mom-pop HR companies for his or her provide.
We remedy these points by a human-centred, AI-powered worth chain between job seekers, recruiters and employers.
AIM – What lies forward for Vahan?
Anuj Gupta – Like I mentioned earlier than, our product is on its technique to changing into the employment alternate for blue-collar jobs. It leverages present blue-collar employee behaviour of discovering jobs through their community. Today we’re inserting greater than 10,000 folks each month, rising at 25-30 per cent per 30 days. While we’re at the moment targeted on placement, within the medium to long run, we see ourselves changing into the central platform for blue-collar employees serving their wants from job search, upskilling & vocational programs to their monetary wants. The alternative is very large.
https://analyticsindiamag.com/interview-with-anuj-gupta-head-of-machine-learning-at-vahan-inc/
