Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Nagpur had the privilege of hosting Mr. Mandar Mungee for a guest lecture on January 02, 2021. Mr. Mandar is an experienced professional and is currently working in the field of Telecoms and SaaS.

The following is an excerpt from an interview with him-

Q1) What are the basics to be adhered to while working in business development for an up and coming start up or scale up?

Ans. The basic difference between working for a start-up and working for a large enterprise is that the ball is always in your court. When someone is working for a large enterprise, he always has the option to say that it wasn’t under my department, however that’s not the case with a start-up. In a start-up, irrespective of your department, the ball is always in your court.

Q2) How do you see the future of robotics panning out in India, after the pandemic?

Ans. The circumstances caused due to Covid-19 will play a role of a catalyst, whatever was going to happen may be in next 10 years, will happen in less than 5 years. We will see both soft robotics and hard robotics. Soft robotics is something related to robotic software automation which a person cannot see, and hard robotics is which he can see and use it in warehouses and logistics etc. So, all that is going to assume a lot of significance and importance in next 5 years.

Q3) With AI becoming smarter by the day and learning the human behaviour, do you see a future where the machine would know what a person wants before the person wants it?

Ans. That’s what is being said about big data, it’s all about the anticipation and prediction. The intent of doing AI and big data analytics is really to predict and anticipate, which is largely the intent. There are high possibilities that it will achieve that to a very large extent, in fact in many of the current application, for example in a telecom company, AI is mainly used in managing churn. The AI algorithm is able to predict three months in advance if a certain line or a circuit is to terminated or disconnected and if there is a prediction as such, then one can work on it. This whole anticipatory and predictive feature of AI is already here and one can see them play out in various cases and in multiple industries.

Q4) In a labour-intensive economy such as India’s, with the high level of unemployment. Do you see a balance, where AI and human can work together without cutting the employment level rather making it more advanced?

Ans. It will eventually happen. Co-existence of AI and humans will only push human beings to go beyond their capabilities, to perform task that are more challenging. With the existence of AI, humans will be compelled to perform better so there can be a balance between them.

Q5) Since everything these days has moved online, so have our seminars. So how was your experience at IMT Nagpur?

Ans. It was a very good experience. All credits to the team that has found its way of working around these situations. The flow of information was fast and flow of communication was also consistent. Given the circumstances, and considering virtual platform, the team performed as well as it could have.