In today’s episode we have Chitra in conversation with Lekha Bajpai where she shares –

• Tech veteran of 30 plus years
• Started her career in Calcutta with Deep Tech across many sectors like manufacturing, commercial apps, engineering aps and supply chain
• Inspired by her father to study engineering
• First project on inter machine communication protocols, the excitement of innovation 
• Working on an experiment to build a control system to ship coal
• Showcasing use cases to the business
• Supply chain software solutions – building was easy, convincing users and allaying their fears was the big challenge to roll out the solution across 350 locations in India
• Developed strong experience with ERP implementations leading to building of data warehouses, BI reporting and monitoring apps for execs
• Experience at Kantar with challenges in data preparation and processing, working with just CPU’s, expensive cloud resources
• Helping apps scale, developing market research products to support the entire data life cycle from collection to dashboards
• Encouraging POC’s and learning with data techniques 
• Approaching AI today – Bring Your Own AI to work, encourage usage, take risks and also take care of Data privacy, protection, governance & compliance
• Data bias challenges for India
• Advice to young folks aspiring for a career in AI – discover different AI personas, understand business catalysts, use AI tech, drive adoption of AI, besides only aspiring to build/develop AI



M.Tech BIT Messra, Greenbelt Six Sigma, Strategic IT Management (IIM Ahmedabad), Enterprise Architecture, Certified Process Professional, Certified Data Scientist

With over 30 years of technology leadership experience, Lekha has been a thought leader and mentor in driving digital transformation and process automation across end-to-end processes and analytics.

As a CIO/CTO and a Strategic Leader, she has led technology strategy functions for multiple units in APAC and MENA, as a member of the Executive Committee of Kantar IMRB. Delivered technology products and solutions to global & local clients, transforming IT into a strategic business partner.

Worked on cutting-edge Technology adoption and Innovation, including cloud, big data environments, data warehouses & data lakes, to drive business improvements. Expertise spans across IT Strategy development & execution, Product & Application management for large scale applications & products on mobility, e-commerce, business analytics, social text analytics, chatbots, and image analysis using AI/ML and deep learning algorithms. 

Has Architected enterprise platforms for analytics delivery across diverse domains – Supply chain management, Logistics, Warehousing and freight forwarding, Chemical consultancy, Civil contracting, Manufacturing, Market research, Media and digital research, Social media analytics, Digital marketing and EdTech & Job Tech.

Achieved Process Excellence within multiple organization and setup measure to monitor business process and growth. Achieved IT security processes like ISO27001 across various organizations. Streamlined IT services delivery across APAC using ITIL processes, Agile methodology & CMMI framework emphasizing on service availability and performance measurement.

Accreditations and Contributions:

Awarded the “Innovation Leader” Award by World Innovation Congress, featured in CIO Magazine “Top 30 – Ones to watch”, CIO & Leader Magazine as “11 Most Powerful Women in Tech in India” and a few others. Case study published in CIO Decisions & Network Computing, Logistics Magazine, Dataquest, & CIO Magazine. Presented technology papers at the Market Research Society of India (MRSI) on new age Technologies and won awards on “Best Analytics product” & “Best E2E Process Automation”. Actively involved as a technology expert speaker on multiple tech forums and colleges, project guide, evaluator, mentor for data science & technology students.