Ashutosh Garg: High-Impact Solutions
Rapid growth of e-commerce has been drawing physical and online retailers towards modern solutions to simplify, secure and streamline digital transactions. Currently, many cloud e-commerce services are available, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, each with varying levels of resource requirements. Cloud-based e-commerce helps manage and scale data storage, hosting and digital commerce applications, such as virtual payments, inventory management and product information management. Often, cloud e-commerce is associated with e-commerce platforms, such as Fabric, Shopify Plus, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Currently, cloud-based solutions for e-commerce allow retailers to manage customer data, product data, inventory data, website hosting, digital transactions and other e-commerce needs. Based on the degree of involvement on behalf of the retailer, these solutions include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS).
Meanwhile, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the recruitment process has not only become simplified but also can provide both candidates and organisations the right choices. Recruitment being a resource and time-intensive process, it is often fraught with challenges. Recruiters have to go through the rigmarole of sourcing and screening candidates to conducting interviews and assessing talent. They have to navigate a wide range of tasks to find the right fit for a company’s needs. Through AI the arduous task can now be simplified, saving hiring managers, time and resources.
Leveraging Cloud e-Commerce and Talent Intelligence technologies, Ashutosh Garg, with expertise and support from partners, founded two startups. Today, Bloomreach and Eightfold.ai specialise in providing top-of-the-line products and services globally.
Ashutosh Garg, the co-founder, was associated with Bloomreach, a cloud marketing platform, as its CTO. Since founding BloomReach in 2009, he, along with other co-founder Raj De Datta, grew the company from a single product and a single client to more than 50 clients and three products. These together generate revenue to power Bloomreach's growth into a multi-billion dollar company. Its state-of-the-art products adapt clients' websites to display information relevant to customers, boosting organic search traffic by 80%. Bloomreach helps company websites market the right products to the right people by utilizing big-data analysis technology in innovative ways.
Ashutosh Garg was brought up in a small town in India. He realised early the importance of education. Since the country spawned a crop of IT professionals, he wished to study Computer Science, but financial constraints drew him away and towards electrical engineering. After his undergraduate education, he wrote a thesis on machine learning applications in office environments. He secured a job in the VLSI CAD (Very Large Scale Integration Computer-Aided Design) field for one year and thereafter at Synopsys. During this period he applied for higher education in the US. He secured admission at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), which helped him further pursue machine learning, computer vision, and the qualities in VLSI. After the completion of PhD, he joined IBM, though he worked for a short period of time at the firm, which led him later to Google. He joined Google's small research team, which, according Ashutosh, then consisted of smart and hardworking people. He was associated with Google for four years.
Bloomreach, Inc.
Ashutosh Garg, a US entrepreneur of Indian descent, worked as a research scientist after earning his Master of Science and PhD from Illinois, US. Initially, he worked at Google as a research scientist.
Thereafter, he started Bloomreach in 2009, along with his partner, Raj De Datta, with the vision of making the web more relevant to consumers. In 2013, the firm, which is headquartered in California, US, bought big-data content optimization SaaS to mobile devices to add smart product recommendations, predictive search, a trending section and cross-device personalization. It acquired Hippo CMS, an open-source Web Content Management company in 2016, creating a digital platform that combines content, search and merchandising. Bloomreach acquired Exponea in 2021, a customer data and experience platform. It received a $150 million investment in the same year from Sixth Street Growth, which took the company's valuation to $900 million. In less than two years it announced $175 million in fresh funding, thereby more than doubling its valuation to $2.2 billion.
The company’s primary products are Bloomreach Engagement, Bloomreach Discovery, and Bloomreach Content. Bloomreach Engagement is a marketing automation software that finds applications in building and personalizing email campaigns, SMS messaging, mobile app usage and other marketing channels. Bloomreach Discovery uses Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to provide customers relevant and accurate search results and product recommendations. And Bloomreach Content is a headless Content Management System (CMS), which allows the creation and management of content for websites.
Bloomreach employs around 850 people and serves many brands, including Albertsons, Bosch, Puma, FC Bayern München, MandM Direct, and Marks & Spencer. The company was listed in the Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America, and the Best In Business honoree in 2022. Also, it bagged the MarTech Breakthrough Award for Best Overall Marketing Automation Platform. It has received a number of distinctions from technology analysts and review platforms, including Forrester, Gartner, and G2.
Today, Bloomreach under Raj De Datta, Co-founder and CEO, has become a global player serving clients in more than 155 countries, in 28 languages and across 19 industries.
Eightfold.ai, Inc.
In 2016, Ashutosh Garg, along with Varun Kacholia, founded Eightfold.ai, a talent intelligence company, with the aim to help people secure the right employment and choose the appropriate career path. Today, the company, helmed by Ashutosh Garg as its CEO, is valued at over $2 billion. Being a talent-intelligence platform, its services are availed of by Fortune 100 companies worldwide to hire, retain and grow diverse workforces.
Inspired by Buddhism's eight practices that guide an individual to wisdom and nirvana, Eightfold.ai's mission is to empower everyone to discover and pursue the right career path. The company through its recruiting software helps prospective candidates to showcase their skills, take pride in their work, enjoy their careers and help others along the way.
Also, the company brings to table the world’s best and brightest in artificial intelligence and human resources to help its customers to create and build their ideal future workforces. Its recruiting software and expertise in machine learning, artificial intelligence, search, personalisation and enterprise solutions are designed to deliver technology at scale to support its mission.
Research shows that about 80% of people apply for wrong jobs and hired for roles they may not be ideally suited. Talent intelligence is the engine that works to pair both internal employees and external candidates with the best roles for them. It helps talent and business leaders to understand what people are actually capable of accomplishing as employees while providing a deeper understanding of what skills they can develop.
Deep-learning AI talent intelligence can define roles, besides integrate internal company data and external data to help talent leaders make better decisions. It self-learns and evaluates skills within organizations and in the larger market to provide the human resources and business leaders a full and current view of the skills they require. Briefly, Eightfold.ai helps organisations to hire and develop top talent - from sourcing to promoting. The AI platform provides a comprehensive talent search for bespoke needs of customers.
Ashutosh Garg's journey has been marked by hard work, dedication and determination, which have helped him lay a strong foundation for the company. He is a prolific writer and has written a book on machine learning and also over 30 papers. Besides, he has more than 50 patents to his credit.
(Photo: Courtesy Eightfold.ai)
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