Transforming the Manufacturing Space through Visual Analytics, ATAI Labs

#NASSCOMCoE #ATAI #NewAgeEnterprises

Embarking on a journey to bridge the gap between manufacturing companies with complex operational issues and new age technology solution providers, NASSCOM's Gandhinagar-based Center of Excellence(CoE) - IoT & AI recently concluded the third edition of the Manufacturing Innovation Challenge(MIC 3.0). Pro MFG Media is the exclusive media partner for the MIC series, organized by CoE, NASSCOM. This series showcases the winning startups.

The Indian manufacturing sector has remained oblivious to modern technologies and transformation for a very long time. However, with the advent of initiatives like Make in India and Industry 4.0, the manufacturing sector has begun witnessing a major overhaul in terms of technology and digital transformation efforts.
Meanwhile, the need for intervention of new age technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep tech, etc has contributed to enhanced operations and productivity, especially for the 'legacy' organizations.

The ATAI Way^TM at MIC 3.0

Winning startups for the challenge were selected on the basis of their innovative technological solutions to some of the complex manufacturing industry use cases put forth by large organizations.

The use case addressed by ATAI Labs during the MIC 3.0 involved post-production quality analysis, packaging accuracy and asset tracking to customers of a renowned ball bearing manufacturer. To address this, the team at ATAI Labs came up with a Computer Vision model in a matter of 10 days, following which the client organization went ahead to set up a separate team altogether for digital transformation which began with addressing quality issues and packaging inaccuracies in the pre-production phase as well.

The beginning of the ATAI journey

With a game changing vision, ATAI Labs came up with a systemic way for designing, architecting, process rehashing and implementing a solution for a given business problem. The step by step blueprint is what the team proudly terms as "The AI Way^TM". What equipped the team in pursuit of their goals were their deep understanding of technology, business environment, and human psychology. And all of it, keeping the core purpose of business transformation as the centrepiece.

Based out of the City of Nizams, ATAI Labs stood out as one of the coveted winners of the MIC 3.0. Started out as a two-member team in 2018 with a vision to support all parts of the supply chain and help manufacturers improve efficiency without any increase in their capex, ATAI Labs possesses as much as 99.99 percent in terms of data accuracy and models. In a brief span of 2.5 years, the visual analytics startup has catered to some of the biggest manufacturers across India.

Shedding light on the kind of investment that companies should be looking at while choosing service providers for visual analytics, Gangadhar Gude, Founder and CEO of ATAI Labs insisted that the training hardware infrastructure and people costs are the two major variable costs involved. Adding on to this, Gangadhar mentioned that "Our team consists of 86 people right now and we've already invested around $80 million into our training hardwares. We went very aggressive as we believed that this is the market."

Elaborating on how large organizations should evaluate service providers in the visual analytics space, Gangadhar underlined the fact that clients should focus on those who understand their pain and not the software or tool they're going to bring. He further stressed that the motto of ATAI Labs has long been about the client not having to figure out their pains.

As a young founder of one of the fastest growing companies in the AI and analytics space, Gangadhar and his team aspire to become a billion dollar company, based out of India and serving the global environment. In pursuit of this, ATAI Labs currently predominantly focuses on Supply Chain and Asset Tracking across various industry sectors across India, Europe and North America.

Sharing the future objectives of ATAI Labs, Gangadhar went on to say that "Our main goal is to work in South East Asia and the African economy because this is where the hunger for digital transformation is very aggressive today."

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