NASSCOM Clarifies The Claims Made By India.com To Be Fake

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June 18, 2021

NASSCOM clarifies the claims made by India.com to be fake

NASSCOM clarifies on Twitter that the article published by India.com does not come from any official NASSCOM reports. Yesterday, India.com posted an article mentioning NASSCOM as the source, according to which IT giants like TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Cognizant were planning to terminate more than 3 million employees in India by 2022.

We would like to clarify that the data points shared in this article by @indiacom are not from any NASSCOM report.

The industry has & will continue to be a net creator of jobs & is committed to people-centric innovation, & relentless talent focus. https://t.co/aOF4PVdg5X
— NASSCOM (@nasscom) June 18, 2021

This decision was taken as it would help the companies to lay off a monthly burden of $100 billion, which includes salaries and other overhead costs, and to increase Robot Process Automation (RPA), claimed the article.

The article ignited a havoc among 4.3 million IT-Sector workers of the country as their job security was in menace. Today, NASSCOM in a tweet, rejected the claims of India.com. The Tweet also mentioned that there is no such risk of large scale layoffs, rather the industry is growing and will continue to create more jobs. India.com faced severe backlash from the twitteratis.

Seriously don't get why publications don't verify data and use the right source! Not only r tech cos increasing workforce, but we have more demand than supply in several emerging areas like data analytics etc. We need keep up and upskill fast .. the jobs exists. https://t.co/CKKDK5HEK7
— debjani ghosh (@debjani_ghosh_) June 18, 2021

President of NASSCOM, Debjali Ghosh also gave her reaction on Twitter. She mentioned, “Seriously, I don’t get why publications don’t verify data and use the right source!” She added that the country has more demand than supply in several sectors like data analytics. The country needs to keep up and upskill quickly to meet the demand.

Apna Raised US$70 Million From Insight Partners & Tiger Global

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 18, 2021

Apna, a leading job network platform from India, has raised $70 million in its Series B funding round led by Insight Partners and Tiger Global. Participants also include existing investors like Greenoaks Capital, Lightspeed India, Rocketship VC, and Sequoia Capital India.

Apna’s unrivaled market leadership and remarkable business growth is the primary reason for this funding. Within 16 months, the company has raised over $90 million and is currently valued at $570 million. Apan plans to use the fund to expand into different parts of the country within six months to boost India’s economy, which is still affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company aims to amplify its ed-tech platform for skilling by continuing to invest in hiring extraordinary talent and building top-notch engineering and product capabilities. In the coming year, the firm intends to enter international markets like the United States and South-East Asia.

Nirmit Parikh, Founder and CEO of Apna said, “At Apna, we are determined to take a fresh approach towards solving employment and skilling challenges for billions. Over the last month itself, Apna has facilitated more than 15 million job interviews and work-related conversations where users have helped each other to start a business, find a gig or learn a new skill.”

Currently, the Apna app hosts 60+ dedicated communities for skilled professionals like painters, carpenters, sales agents, and many more. In addition, the app enables its users to find local job opportunities and practice for interviews. Apna’s data science-led algorithm matches candidates with employers after considering their skills and experience. This has eliminated problems like relevancy and candidate volume for the employers.

India’s leading companies, such as Zomato, Delhivery, Burger King, Bharti-AXA, Shadowfax, Teamlease, G4S Global, and 1MG, rely on Apna for all hiring needs. The Company also works alongside UNICEF Yuwaah and the Ministry of Minority Affairs of India to provide quality skilling and job opportunities to candidates.

AI Startup Lexion Raised $11 Million In Its Series A Funding Round

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 18, 2021

The Washington-based startup Lexion announced it had raised $11 million in its series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures along with Madrona Venture Group and Wilson Sonsini. Earlier, the company had raised $4.2 million to develop cost-effective AI-powered management solutions for enterprises.

Gaurav Oberoi, CEO of Lexion, also mentioned the joining of Kanu Gulati from Khosla Ventures as a board member. Lexion intends to use the funds to enhance its AI-driven products. The company was founded in 2017, but it holds immense expertise as it emerged from Microsoft’s co-founder’s AI research institute named Allen Institute for AI.

In a very short time, the start-up gained popularity in the contract lifecycle management (CLM) sector due to its innovative AI-powered CLM solutions. As a result, Lexion was also given a spot in the top 100 promising private AI companies worldwide for two consecutive years.

Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, said, “We invested in Lexion because their team has the rare combination of deep technical expertise in building sophisticated AI systems and a proven track record in delivering SaaS applications that solve real problems.” He further added that the amalgamation of high-end technology with simple and practical applications is how AI will be implemented in the corporate sector.

Lexion AI-powered product aims to save professional time by digitizing contracts and organizing them. The debut product launched by Lexion was LexiconMD, which helped doctors to dictate their notes into e-medical records. Their latest product, Lexion AI, is a speech recognition platform that has accuracy comparable to transcription done by humans.

The CEO refused to talk about the number of customers Lexion has but said the firm’s median customer has around 1,000 employees and a legal department of a few lawyers. The range extends from companies with 100 employees up to companies with more than 10,000. In the past few months, the company’s revenue has increased up to 400%, and it aims to triple its revenue by next year.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Becomes The Chairperson Of The Board

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 18, 2021

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that Satya Nadella would be replacing independent director John Thompson and become the Chairperson. The company’s board called for a unanimous vote, which led to this decision.

The success and vision Satya Nadella has shown in the past seven years is the prime reason for this decision. When asked about the key role of Nadella, the company mentioned, “Leveraging his deep understanding of the business to elevate the right strategic opportunities and identify key risks and mitigation approaches for the board’s review.”

After becoming The CEO in 2014, Nadella helped Microsoft regain its title of the world’s most valuable company. Currently, the company stands second, right behind Apple Inc., with a growth of over 600% in stocks.

He then predicted that the company’s annual cloud revenue would increase three folds in just two years. Nadella then helped create a plan for Microsoft to achieve this goal by streamlining the company’s attention on its cloud services, ditching its mobile ambitions.

The tech giant is now focused on cloud computing services to power other company’s software. Under Nadella’s leadership, the company is expected to grow even further in this domain. The board praised Nadella for achieving 14% revenue growth in the tender year of 2020 despite several challenges. Satya Nadella is one of the company’s top individual shareholders, with more than 1.6 million shares.

This development happened one year after the co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, stepped down from the company’s board. A Microsoft spokesperson said that Gates left the board after an investigation that accused him of harassment of an employee.

Ex- CEO of Symantec, John Thompson, replaced Gates as the company’s chairperson in 2014; on the same day, Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft after replacing Steve Ballmer.

Alphabet’s Waymo Raised $2.5 Billion In Second Funding Round

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 18, 2021

Waymo, formerly known as the Google self-driving car project, announced a second external funding round, which has raised $2.5 billion for the consistent advancement of its autonomous driving technology.

According to PitchBook, an investor website, the company is valued at over US$30 billion, though the figure does not include this very recent second round of funding. For many years, Waymo has been dependent almost exclusively on the generosity of its corporate parent, Alphabet.

In March 2020, it announced its first external funding round of $2.5 billion, which in a few months grew to $3.2 billion with the addition of a few more investors. The same group of investors returned to participate in the second round of funding, which includes Fidelity Management and Research Company, Magna International, Silver Lake, Temasek, Andreessen Horowitz, AutoNation, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Mubadala Investment Company, Perry Creek Capital, and Waymo’s parent company Alphabet along with a new participant, Tiger Global.

The company says that this funding would further help its mission to bring self-driving vehicles into diversified markets. Currently, Waymo’s self-driving taxis are publicly available only in Arizona in an approximately 100-square-mile service radius that includes the towns Gilbert, Chandler, Tempe, and Mesa.

The company also allows passengers to ride on fully driverless vehicles with no safety driver on the front seat in a specific area of about 50-square-mile. The company’s chief technology officer and co-CEO, Dmitri Dolgov, said, “Experience has taught us so much, and we agree with those experts who say there’s no greater challenge in artificial intelligence than building and deploying fully autonomous technology at scale.”
Yesterday, Cruise announced it received $5 Billion funding from General Motors. The increased cash flow in the autonomous driving vehicle industry skyrockets the expectation for results, which will be seen in the near future.

DataRobot Adds Snowflake Integration & Automated Artificial Intelligence Reports

By

Manisha Kalagara

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June 18, 2021

DataRobot, the Boston-based data science company, integrates with Snowflake to streamline artificial intelligence reports. The latest DataRobot version 7.1, the company’s second major enterprise release, introduced MLOps management agents, time series model enhancements, and automated Artificial Intelligence (AI) reports. The company also mentioned that the goal is to guide business outcomes for enterprises through AI and to speed up the customer’s time to value (TTV).

This version of DataRobot has instigated MLOps management agents that engage with lifecycle management for AI and machine learning models. These MLOps can detect the model’s current state regardless of their modeled conditions or current running background. They can also automatically retrieve the model artifact and deploy or replace the model directly in their environment.

Version 7.1 renders push-down integration for the Snowflake and also improves the time series Eureqa model. With this, the Snowflake customers can see into automatic discovery and compute features in the snowflake data cloud. And can also run forecasting models on Eureqa.

The intriguing aspect of the new version is that it gives the leverage of turning deployed AI models into AI apps even without the baggage of coding. Scoring new data, performing what-if scenarios, optimizing the output by running simulations to obtain inputs, automated time prep for time series, and automatic identification of model projects, nowcasting, prediction and scheduling interface are the added advantages of the app builder.

“We’re thoroughly committed to creating a platform that empowers every individual from the most advanced data scientists to the everyday, non-technical business user to take advantage of AI. By easing the model lifecycle process and cutting down the time to value, this latest round of enhancements gives enterprises the tools they need to build better, manage, and see value from their AI projects,” says DataRobot SVP Nenshad Bardoliwalla in the press release.

Compose.ai Raises US$2.1 Million To Help Write Faster

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 18, 2021

Compose.ai raises US$2.1 million to build its own language model that would help others write faster. Compose.ai intrinsically is an auto-complete that works while web browsing.

The company is also developing an artificial intelligence, which would recognize and learn the voice of the user in order to provide a quicker and better response. Landan Sanford, Co-founder of Compose.ai, said that he believes in the coming five years, people won’t type every word they want to write.

Compose.ai is developing a Google Chrome extension that the customers can access without the need to get corporate permission. While explaining the working for their algorithm, Sanford described it as a multi-tier product.

The first tier learns from reading the web itself, learning English. The second tier deals with particular domains, like email. The third tier learns a user’s voice, and the fourth tier will be related to a company’s generalized approach to language.

It is a very interesting concept as this would enable the company to provide its workers a common language model that could offer word-choice and linguistic preference when they write. After the funding, the company is planning to hire a few experienced engineers to work with them.

Compose.ai Co-Founder Shuffett said that they wish to stay small for now. The start-up currently has three full-time employees and a few contractual workers. The product Compose.ai wants to create is not something simple. The founders said, “the personalization work that its product will execute for customers can be expensive if done incorrectly.”

They also added that they could, in the future, introduce an economical US$10 monthly subscription, but if executed in a naive fashion, the company might have to spend US$500 in technical costs to support the same subscription. But Compose.ai is confident that their subscription plans will perform well in financial terms.

RCMP Violates Privacy Act By Using Clearview’s AI Facial-Recognition Technology

By

Dipayan Mitra

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June 17, 2021

According to Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) used Clearview AI facial recognition technology, violating the country’s Privacy Act. The Privacy Commissioner has submitted a special report about the same to the Parliament.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner said that this AI technology allowed RCMP officials to compare Canadian citizen’s photographs with more than three billion images Clearview had acquired from the internet without the consent of the users.

The company’s method of image gathering represents a violation of the ‘Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).’ In addition, the association of RCMP with Clearview puts the police in contravention of S.4 of the Privacy Act, said the OPC.

Dr. Brenda McPhail, Director of the Privacy, Technology and Surveillance Program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), said, “Police aren’t allowed to use surveillance tools, if the information that feeds, creates or forms the basis for that tool was unlawfully acquired.” He also added, “It would mean that those bodies, that are duty bound to enforce our laws, would have a loophole that would allow them to break them, sort of at a whim.”

According to the report, RCMP continuously misled the OPC, firstly by denying usage of the technology. Later, RCMP said that the use was restricted to locate and identify children who have been victims of cyberbullying and online sexual abuse.

They later, in a statement to OPC, said that only 78 searches were made, but after investigating Clearview’s records, it was found that The RCMP searched more than 520 times. RCMP argued that the difference in data is because of multiple searches of the same individual, but the truth behind this statement is ambiguous. After investigation, it was found that only 6% of the searches were concerned with identifying victims of online sexual abuse.

PwC To Spend $12 Billion On Hiring, Expanding Expertise In AI And Cybersecurity

By

Dipayan Mitra

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June 17, 2021

PwC has decided to spend US$12 billion by 2026 to expand its expertise and hire 100,000 new jobs in different areas like artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity. Mr. Rayan said that the investment aims to better advise companies that face increasing inspections from investors on issues such as data privacy, sustainability, and diversity. “It’s important that our people have those skills,” he added.

PwC in 2019 said it is willing to invest US$3 billion in employee training and technology in a span of four years. Last year, the company said it had created more than 8,000 new jobs and had already hired 63,000 people worldwide to fill existing positions.

PwC, while declining to comment on the attrition rate of the company, said it had spent US$7.4 billion on talent acquisition and other areas. Many US-based companies are failing to fill existing job positions as potential workers are on edge. This US$12 billion investment of PwC is also to increase their market share, which is slowly decreasing.

On Tuesday, PwC said it aims to hire highly experienced workers in specific areas like governance, social and environmental issues and encourage introducing new products that involve Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Mr. Ryan also said that they are planning to acquire a few companies to expand their expertise.

In addition, the company is ready to spend US$1 billion on a global scale on technology to improve audit quality, which would help auditors to assess a broader range of risks, including cybersecurity.

Mr. Rayan said, “We believe this is critical to meet the need for increasing expectations on us as the audit becomes more complicated and as things like ESG get broader and brought into the audit.”

PwC is planning to train 55,000 employees on ESG issues and companies’ vision of net-zero carbon emission. According to the company’s annual reports, from 2010 to 2019, it witnessed 5% average revenue growth.

FedEx And Nuro Collaborates For Delivery In Houston

By

Dipayan Mitra

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June 17, 2021

FedEx and Nuro collaborate to test AI-based delivery vehicles. The companies said they have been testing autonomous delivery vehicles since April in Houston. Nuro R2 is the vehicle that delivers packages as part of a multi-year multi-stage contract to pilot autonomous last-mile deliveries.

A Nuro spokesperson said this partnership aims to reduce human interference in costly and complicated deliveries. Nuro, in the past, has also partnered with Domino’s for autonomous pizza delivery in Houston.

Though none of the companies said the number of vehicles they have been testing, the two companies said that they have tested and deployed Nuro’s vehicles together. This collaboration will help FedEx and Nuro to consider a vast array of used cases such as multi-stop and booking-based deliveries.

In the later phase of this collaboration, Nuro will give FedEx access to Nuro’s next-gen self-driving car, which will result in the massive rollout of Nuro Bots in different markets. The first version of Nuro’s delivery vehicle named R1 started shipping in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2018.

Rebecca Yong, VP of Advanced Technology and Innovation at FedEx, said, “FedEx is built on innovation and remains an integral part of our culture and business strategy. We are excited to work with industry leaders like Nuro as we continue to explore the use of autonomous technology within our business.”

The new R2 version comes with many new features like temperature control, increased cargo space, and a longer range. In November 2020, after its Series C funding round, Nuro’s total funding exceeded US$1 billion since its establishment in 2016. The financing round was led by T. Rowe Price Associates, which also included new investors like Baillie Gifford Fidelity Management & Research along with existing investors like Greylock and SoftBank. This partnership with Nuro is not FedEx’s debut in this field of autonomous delivery. In 2019, FedEx launched its FedEx Sameday bot concept for door-to-door delivery.