#232 How are Businesses Really Using AI? With Tathagat Varma, Global TechOps Leader at Walmart Global Tech

There’s been a lot of pressure to add AI to almost every digital tool and service recently, and two years into the AI hype cycle, we’re seeing two types of problems. The first is organizations that haven’t done much yet with AI because they don’t know where to start. The second is organizations that rushed into AI and failed because they didn’t know what they were doing. Both are symptoms of the same problem: not having an AI strategy and not understanding how to tactically implement AI. There’s a lot to consider around choosing the right project and putting processes and skilled talent in place, not to mention worrying about costs and return on investment.

Tathagat Varma is the Global TechOps Leader at Walmart Global Tech. Tathagat is responsible for leading strategic business initiatives, enterprise agile transformation, technical learning and enablement, strategic technical initiatives, startup ecosystem engagement, and internal events across Walmart Global Tech. He also provides support to horizontal technical and internal innovation programs in the company. Starting as a Computer Scientist with DRDO, and with an overall experience of 27 years, Tathagat has played significant technical and leadership roles in establishing and growing organizations like NerdWallet, ChinaSoft International, McAfee, Huawei, Network General, NetScout System, [24]7 Innovations Labs and Yahoo!, and played key engineering roles at Siemens and Philips.

In the episode, Richie and Tathagat explore failures in AI adoption, the role of leadership in AI adoption, AI strategy and business objective alignment, investment and timeline for AI projects, identifying starter AI projects, skills for AI success, building a culture of AI adoption, the potential of AI and much more. 

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• Walmart Global Tech
• Connect with Tathagat
• [Course] Data Governance Concepts
• Related Episode: How Walmart Leverages Data & AI with Swati Kirti, Sr Director of Data Science at Walmart
• Rewatch sessions from RADAR: AI Edition

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