Mythily Ramesh has 30 years of experience in her career. She completed her BE Computer Science from College of Engineering, Guindy and MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. In her 20 year successful stint in Wipro she grew from a Customer support executive to a Senior Vice President. Her career spans product management, marketing, Business Head and Quality. As a certified Black Belt she drove the Six Sigma initiative in Wipro and was successful in moving the organization from 1.7 Sigma to 4.7 Sigma and reducing the order to collection cycle from 365 days + to 120 days. 

Can you tell us about your AI journey?  

We started focusing on AI/ML data services in Computer Vision, NLP, and structured semi-structured data about five years ago. Right now, we do work for self-driving cars, image and video annotation and labeling, LIDAR annotation, semantic segmentation, etc. Anything to test, train, validate and handle real-time exceptions while implementing AI and genAI algorithms. This needs HITL (Human in the loop) and RLHF (reinforced learning with human feedback) to train the Gen AI transformer models. 

I started this journey when I graduated from engineering in 1986, where I did my final year project in AI in Expert Systems in PROLOG language on diagnosing Hodgkin's disease. After that, the last five years have ensured knowledge gathering in this and now have 4500 people in my town from 9 centers working in cutting edge technology services.

How was NextWealth born?

NextWealth started about 12 years ago. We realized that all the top organizations recruit from the top 10 cities in India. They are faced with the challenges of the availability of talent and high attrition. At the same time, there are over 250 towns (Tier 2/3/4) in India, with 60% of the colleges in these places and many graduates graduating from here. They are first-generation graduates with loans against their education. They aspire to work in an IT/BPO organization. However, local job opportunities are limited. For every 100 who graduate, 30 migrate to the city looking for a job, but 70 stay back - this is the 70 we look to leverage. Demand is in the city, and supply is in the small towns, and we thought, why not take the job to where the people are rather than people going to where the jobs are? Hence, we started with the purpose of generating employment for graduates in small towns with a specific focus on women. 

How can technological advancements be included in a country like India, where the number of villages is higher? 

It's not cities or villages. It is cities, towns, small towns and then villages. We have to address all the cities and the villages. In a connected country with telecom service providers in every town and village and almost every person of adulthood in towns having mobiles, the power situation is much better now in these places and with COVID enabling work from home and combined with the aspirations of people here - technological advancements are pretty straightforward. People can do international courses, study, or work from wherever they are today.

In India, where there is immense talent concentration, data quality and data management maintenance still need to be improved. Can you explain how your organization is tackling this?

We look at automation as far as possible for bringing in data quality. We look at the Human with the Human in The Loop concept of validating the automation and training the automation algorithm to deliver superior quality and efficiency.

Describe some challenges you have faced in reaching where you are now. 

There were many challenges on the journey. In the initial years of my career, I would be the only woman for a customer meeting many times, and the customer would ask what the organization's encouragement towards diversity was. There has been subconscious bias towards women in terms of people not allowing you to talk or not making allowances for you. When my kids were born, balancing work of 12 hours or so and a home front with no parental or in-laws support was very tough (they were in other cities). For the last ten years, I have been managing a start-up, trying to scale it and managing the older people at home and again, a balancing act. With both my husband and I in high-profile jobs, we had to constantly juggle our travel, kids, and parents taking care.

What do you want to say to women who wish to build careers in AI and other tech-related fields? 

This exciting field will penetrate every aspect of our lives professionally and personally (like UPI has become an integral part).

• Be a sponge and learn
• Look at opportunities, starting with simple ones, to apply to the work you do
• I feel AI needs a combination of the right brain and left brain, and women are best suited to do this.
• Opportunities to excel in this field even when working from home, so try and leverage.