A Discussion with Radha Ramaswami Basu, CEO and Founder, iMerit

Pamela Rucker: Hi, I'm Pamela Rucker, an instructor for Harvard Professional Development. I focus on coaching executives in the areas of leadership, strategy and innovation. Welcome to Leading With Passion, a series honoring innovative small business leaders using very unique capabilities to improve people's lives.

Today, I'm joined by Radha Ramaswami Basu, founder and CEO of iMerit, a leading artificial intelligence data solutions company. Radha is widely recognized as the leading global technology entrepreneur and mentor, and an early pioneer in the development of the Indian software industry. Radha, welcome to the program.

Radha Ramaswami Basu: Thank you.

Pamela: You were talking earlier and you said to me that you attended an all-male school in a time when women weren't really expected to do that. Can you tell me a little bit about your background, your childhood and how you got interested in engineering work in general?

Radha: So I'm from the southern part of India, Tamil. That's the Ramaswami in my name. And I went to an all-girls school run by Irish Catholic nuns. And, when I was there, my family is very much, my father especially, believed in math education for women, certainly not engineering.

And I got interested very much in the application of these sciences. And I said, "Oh, what's the best way to do this engineering?" And one of the things is when you don't know what you're going to get into, it's easier to take that risk. And so, I was like, "I'm going to join engineering."

And I applied. Nobody at home knew that had applied into engineering. And it's a bit of a funny story because the way they found out is my name came in the newspapers and my picture. And it was because I was the first woman to be in the top of the class that was tested. And we hid the paper from my dad because I knew he'd be really concerned and ended up in, I would say, pretty much all-boys... from an all-girls to an almost all-boys, 2,780 boys, and they were boys and 17 girls.

Pamela: Wow.

Radha: Would you call that an all-boys?

Pamela: Yes.

Radha: That would be all boys.

Pamela: So you go from an all-girls Catholic school to an all-boys school. How did you respond to actually being dropped in that environment?

Radha: In the beginning, it was sort... You talk about culture shocks. This was a culture shock in the very city I grew up in.

Pamela: Yeah.

Radha: It was a culture shock.

Pamela: Yeah.

Radha: I think that initial two years, bunch of two years, was really important for me in the kind of the founding of my brain, my attitudes and stuff because my best friends were young fellas in the school who became very naturally... It wasn't even acceptance anymore. I looked forward to this.

Pamela: Yeah.

Radha: And I looked forward to being female and using my female wiles, if you want to call it that, in being able to operate in that environment and having the support and the nurturing and encouragement of my classmates. A few of them, in fact, turned out to be almost all my friends were boys except a couple of girls.

Pamela: Yeah. And it's interesting that you say that these were people that you became lifelong friends with. You got comfortable talking to them early on in life because we know from research that one of the things that happens with women is we might be equal to or better than men in a lot of leadership areas, but one of them is we struggle in our network. And that affects how we see things, how we might lead with strategy.

And so, at an early age, being dropped into an environment where you were in a male-saturated environment and having that network clearly built your confidence in being able to speak to rooms full of men. So that's probably something you saw yourself drawing on as you even moved throughout your career.

Radha: Absolutely. I think it's a very good point you make. It became natural. So I don't think anymore when people say you're in a room full of men as like, "Oh yeah, that room was full of men." But it was something I got used to. And when it becomes natural, then, you can build your passions on top of that. And you're not always thinking about how am I going to do? It's just something that you do. And it happens.

Pamela: It happens.

Radha: And it also allows, I think, very important and I do this a lot when I'm doing the mentoring, is to say, "Feel comfortable in being in a room full of men, half of men, full of women. That's the way the world is. And feel comfortable in it and feel confident in it. And so, that definitely came out of my college environment.

Pamela: It's so important that you say that too, because a lot of people feel like they've been otherized when they're the only one that's there, but when it becomes a part of your norm, you become more confident. And one researcher says, "Confidence comes to those who perceive reality correctly."

Radha: Yes.

Pamela: That if I know the reality is that I have a voice and I can add value, it's a lot easier for you to step up and offer your opinions and your ideas if you're not worried about the fact that I'm different and so clearly this is something you had to do early on, but I wanna rewind because you said two things that made me think. One was your dad didn't know. He wanted you to go into math, he didn't know, and he found out because your name was in the paper so how in the world did you convince him to leave this all-girls Catholic school to go to this all-boys school for engineering?

Radha: You know, it's happened to me a few times in my life when I had to really convince people to make sure that things can happen. And with my dad was particularly hard. I come from a very conservative, traditional, I would say, very loving, traditional Southern Indian family and so he believed that girls, he loved education. Do your math, get married. You can be a teacher, whatever. And here I'm sitting there, I'm the youngest of three girls. My sisters were nine and 11 years older to me and had done what he wanted them to do and one was in English, one was in math, and he's like, "Engineering?" And the first thing he said to me is, "That's for boys." He was a mechanical engineer and pretty well known, headed up the South Indian railways. And he is like, "That's for boys." I'm like, "Not really, there are some girls in engineering," and I had a couple of examples and somebody had worked on a satellite and I was like, "That's for girls." He goes, "Very few girls." We got into this and then he was like, "No." And never give up.

That's one of the things you, I think you know later on in my life, persistence. And I figured I'd keep at it, I'd keep at it. Was right up to the end and kid you not, and had my brother-in-law, my oldest sister's husband helping me, egging me on and the day before, the night before, I was the last day of paying my fees and the fact that the head of my engineering university was a fellow Rotarian of my dad's and he was like, "Mr. Ramaswami, you cannot possibly think this is just for boys." And he says, "I understand, it's mostly boys. We'll take care of her." My dad said, "No."

The night before he said, famous words, "Do what you want." I was like, "Yes!" It actually meant I am upset with what you're doing and you know, I'm kind of not caring. I'm not gonna be part of this decision, but he did say, "Do what you want." So I went the next day and I paid my fees and I had an envelope with my brother-in-law's money and I paid my fees. Then that evening he said, "So what'd you do?" I said, "I did what I want. I registered."

Pamela: I did what I want.

Radha: Yes, I did what I want. And he looked at me and he's thought to himself. He told me later he thought to himself, "I did say that to her." So it's important also as we talk about AI, because we talk about technologies and things like that, it's to be an entrepreneurship. It really is having that dream and going out to do it.

Pamela: Because I see in this story of the beginning of some themes, right, so one of them is being in these places where you are by yourself, there's not many people like you, and then also having to have the courage to step up and go for what you believe in when there really isn't a mold for you to follow. There isn't anybody for you to actually look at, but to believe enough in yourself and what you bring to the table that I'm gonna stand up and do this even if it's not what you had thought that I should do. So, okay, you win the battle and you're able to go to school, what happens after that? How do you manage in school?

Radha: So as I said, the first year or two we had to, it was a five-year engineering at that time, not four years. Five years because the first two years it was called general engineering and you did everything from carry a theater light to do civil engineering surveys, work in a smithy shop, so I had to like hammer and get the stuff into the fire and then hammers things. Build things, carpentry, all of the things that engineers at that time were supposed to, it's not the software stuff we do today and the technology stuff we do today on laptops and things, really builds resilience. You think, "Oh, I can't do that." And then you say, "Well, you know, we are gonna get through engineering and not fall flat on your face, you better go do that." You learn to cultivate relationships, to learn from others, while you share some of the things you do well. So I had friends who did very well in smithy and carpentry and they would help me, and I did well in math then physics and I helped them and you know, we became, it was sharing and that this happened and I think that that helped also to look at things that would look very hard to do and I tend not to think a lot about, "Oh my gosh, that's really hard to do." I just kind of go in and do it and I think part of what happens to us is we face an obstacle and there's stuff all over the place. A barrier, you think, "Oh my gosh, that's so hard." And then you go off and do it. And also we run worries about what if you fail? It was hard to worry about what would I do if I failed? But imagine going back to my dad and saying, "I failed."

Pamela: Absolutely.

Radha: I cannot do engineering. Oh, I was not gonna let that happen. So then you kind of plunge in, barge on, and again, I come back to those relationships that have stood me over the years and I'm really hyped.

Pamela: Let me jump in there because I feel like what you're talking about is this idea of collaboration and one of my favorite definitions talks about collaboration being a natural byproduct of people who are mildly obsessed. That it's not necessarily that I'm forcing the collaboration, but there's something I'm so obsessed about doing that I naturally reach out to you because I think you can help me. So now we're adding to this theme that I'm not like anyone else. I'm going for my dreams and taking some risk. I'm learning to network and collaborate, all of these things that are building up toward what you're going to do later, but this is all back in India, right? So how do you get to the U.S. to start doing what you're doing?

Radha: Another little battle, or major battle. And I laugh about it now because I think back on it with so much affection and I really, really thank my family, my parents, my older sisters, my brothers-in-law and everybody for just putting up with this girl who did everything that young Indian ladies don't do. So I came out of this and I heard a talk by a very, very well known person, in fact, who later became my thesis advisor, Dr. George Becki, about medical electronics. Electronics and communications had just kind of started, it was becoming effective and he talked about the applications of electronics and medicine. I was like, "That sounds really good, and that's what I wanna do." But there was nowhere I could do that in India.

So it's like, "Oh, okay, I will get my master's and I will go to the university that Dr. George Becki is in." What university is that? Oh, University of Southern California in Los Angeles. And I was like, "Yeah, that's where I'm going. I'm going to California." And my father was like, "What?" Okay, "I am very proud of you for having gone through engineering. You've done really well, now get married and go." I said, "Who am I gonna get married to?" He said, "Well, you know, arrange marriages in India." That does work very well. I'm like, "Me? Arranged marriage?" Even my dad thought, "No, I don't know. I don't know about this poor guy, I couldn't arrange."

I persisted and he said, "Okay, I'm not gonna help you." You needed help to get passports and stuff. So I went and got my passport and I was like, "I have my passport here." They came in for the police check and my mother told them I was a good girl. I think police were like, "She's getting a passport without her father sponsoring it?" And so I got my passport, then I got an assistantship and I was like, "I really want to go, I really want to go." And finally he said, the "Do what you want."

Pamela: Do what you want.

Radha: And I am convinced now, it didn't seem that way, Pamela, but I'm convinced now that that rings in my ears, in my head, do what you want. Do what you want. He meant it in a different way, but that kind of became a little mantra so I told my mom, "I'm gonna go, I'm gonna do this." And my mom was like, "Be really careful." She was so good, such a strong proponent, had not finished high school, such a strong proponent and believed in me, but was also worried. So, yeah, I ended up in the U.S. At that time, you could only, the government of India just allowed $8 because it was a foreign exchange crisis. And I was like, "Yeah, $8, I'll be fine because I have an assistantship." Little did I know that in the U.S., this is part of cultural differences. You have to get a Social Security number and then it takes 30 days, so it's like 40, 50 days before I got my first paycheck.

Pamela: Ooh.

Radha: $8.

Pamela: Ooh. $8 for 50 days.

Radha: But I had, except for the first couple of days, I had a room in the dorm, in the graduate students dorm, but then I had to get through food and all of those things.

Pamela: So what did you do?

Radha: So again, some learnings that really help in today's world in starting companies and things like that because when you have a young company, you kind of make do, you do everything, right?

Pamela: Absolutely.

Radha: You know how to conserve that stuff and make the best use of your funds.

Pamela: Yes, absolutely.

Radha: You're not going to fritter it away. And so I took the $8 and my first experience was going from the hotel to the university. I got on the bus and he said something and threw me off. I didn't understand what he said, the next stop. Then I got on again, and later I realized, he said dime and I know what a dime was. He threw me off and then somebody told me that he was asking for a dime. But I had done this three times and I was like, "Huh, I'm four stops to the university, I'm almost there." And I got through without paying a dime and leave alone three dimes and so I came back the same way. I went to university next day, did not pay a penny to get to the university and back for three days.

Pamela: Each time getting put off and then come back.

Radha: It just put off. It took a tad bit longer than I wanted it to, but I had time in my hands.

Pamela: You got where you were going?

Radha: I got where I was going, it was free. I got free rides and I felt very good. The hotel I stayed in, that was quite an experience. That's where I think you have to know where, how far you take the risk into. It was Figueroa Hotel downtown Los Angeles and it was, I felt very unsafe. And then I had stuff against the door. But I'll tell you many years later, the beauty of it, and this is the beauty of life when you kind of just go where you want. I took a company public on Nasdaq, a tech company, and one of my first investor meetings, I think was when in LA, the first investor meeting in LA, I was in this huge multi-story building. I think it was on the 27th floor and I think it was T Rowe Price, if I remember right. I looked down, I kid you not, and here was the Figueroa Hotel.

Pamela: Oh.

Radha: Pamela, my heart just... I was taking a company public on Nasdaq.

Pamela: Look how far you've come.

Radha: And I was like, "Oh my gosh, I remember you." And I thought to myself, and sometimes you have to look at these things and say all these hardships that they give you something in life and it turns into the lemonade that you're looking at, the gold that you're looking for, and I don't mean wealth alone, but the gold you're looking for, and I thought to myself, "You were the first place, Figueroa. Without you, I would not be here."

Pamela: Yeah, and I think a lot of times we forget that, right? But some of the hardships we go through are designing capabilities in us that we're going to need to leverage later on. I heard you talk about this earlier, not just did you have to figure out how to get to school and where to live, you had to figure out how to eat and you had a cool story about how you figured out how to eat as well. All of these things, I think, built capabilities in you when you were dropped into a place and you don't know where you're going and you have to make it work.

And the thing that stands out to me, particularly as you think about the company you lead with AI, is that's where we are right now. We all feel like Radha getting off the plane. Like, I don't know where I am. You hear everyone talking about it. Everyone saying you should do something with it, but I can't find my way. I need someone to help me, and you know, I love the story about someone asking for a dime. You don't know what a dime is. We often feel like that, that people are asking for things. I don't know what it is. I need someone to tell me. I need someone to show me the way. And so I don't know if you knew that that was a gift you had in your life back then, but clearly you saw it repeating itself over and over and over again until now you're helping people do this with AI. How do you go from the student on the bus to the company that's now trying to leverage AI? What kind of stops did you make in the in between and how did you sort of leverage those capabilities again and again?

Radha: Student on the bus, I like that. The student on the bus learned about the little engine that could and you go forward and I learned about how to, I know this sounds quirky and it sounds like, "Oh, she's so great." No, it's not. Like look at barriers and say, "Okay, how am I gonna break you?" No food, or just $8 to get by. By the time I knew, by the third day I needed it for 50, 60 days, like what am I gonna do? So I went round in the university and was the first times I learned about the importance of technology. I went in, used the technology to find out where the orientations of different departments of the university were. I created my, the equivalent of my spreadsheet. We didn't have Google sheets then, spreadsheet, no Excel. And I said, "Okay, for this, I will go for lunch to this place," and every time I learned about new people, they learned about me and the networking happened and I got free food and I learned about doggy bags. Only in the U.S. do we have doggy bags. Well, I was the doggy that took the bag back home.

Pamela: Right, right.

Radha: But also, I think it really is important because you set the tone and we created a program around it for international students, many of whom who came without much money, and we created this way of international students interacting with departments, not just their own department, being part of the whole cosmopolitan nature of the university and they got free food. And from the next year onwards, that's how we welcomed international students. I became the President of the International Students Union. I was like, "Okay, now we have a program."

I bring that up because so much of that, so from me from that point onwards, technology became an absolute harbinger of everything I did and I got my master's, then I joined HP Labs. HP Labs was sort of the crisp bowl of all technology then because it was the first created in Silicon Valley and there were giants of technology, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who actually ran the company. How fortunate is that. And you saw things spring up and you saw what entrepreneurship is about and I learned from that. I grew up in the old HP and I spent 20 years there. It also helped me when I was in technology to look at the business side.

So it was an ultrasound imaging. I developed transfusers and technologies around that and it was the beginning of the imaging business. There was no business at that time and I learned how to start the business, so I said, "Oh, we have to sell it." They said, "So." We're like, I said, "Okay, I'll go into sales." They look at me like, "Are you crazy? You're an Indian girl, you wanna go into sales? There're not that many people, women in sales." And we only have an opening in the Southern sales region of the United States. Now you picture that. Indian girl, Southern sales region, but then you learn about business. I would go in into the doctors, the hospitals. I learned more about those products and those technologies and their utilization and absolutely has helped me til now.

So we use something at iMerit now, which I'll talk about called the three T's: Technology, talent and technique. And in AI, bringing those three together and the fusion is so critical. We'll talk more about that. But I learned that right then. We had the technology, create ultrasound imaging technology, transfusers, we had patents and stuff like that, and then you learn the technique of how to do pre-processing, post-processing of images, convolution, deconvolution around the point, all these tech terms, but then how? What was the technique in which doctors applied it and the talent needed to use these technologies? Because ultrasound is very new and doppler is very new there. And then I decided, so I work in the Southern sales region, it was quite an experience. They would say, "Yes ma'am, no ma'am." I'm like, "You teach me sales and I will teach you ultrasound." We became the best sales region in the United States.

Pamela: Oh, wow.

Radha: And they were like, "Yay! This works. You teach us ultrasound." Sharing, collaborating, I knew nothing about sales and that's some of the best sales guys and sales manager and they taught me and I taught them this. C

Pamela: How do you then go from clearly learning your way around the industry and understanding how it works to more global impact with the work that you're doing, and then also starting things in the Indian software industry? How do you make that migration?

Radha: So when we were doing ultrasound imaging in the U.S. and we became the best sales region, I said, "You know what? I wanna see how this can be globally." And HP was so great in listening to all my crazy ideas and saying, okay, giving me the chance to go do it, "Okay, go take the risk. Go run diagnostic medical in Europe." I landed in Germany and there, talk about women, I had German guys working for me and they were like, "A woman manager? Are you kidding me?" And that too, an Indian woman.

First six months were hard and then I said, "Look, do you want to be successful in medial diagnostics and medical product group and in ultrasound?" They're like, "Yes." I said, "Then, okay, yeah, listen to me. I'm the expert at it. I designed these things." And we would start working with the German physicians and then in other parts of Europe and suddenly I found, here's another thing, Pamela, sometimes the barrier, you can use your own ways of getting around it, right? I found like in Italy and Spain, I have to admit, I was, I could talk my way. The sales team and our clients were like, "Oh my gosh, a woman in engineering, in technology leading this? I have to meet her." I would go in, so I kind of used the fact I was female. So I won't say that in a bad way, but you know, we have our strengths, we have our differences, use them. Use the fact that you're female, don't hide it. I always say this to people.

Pamela: Embrace who you are.

Radha: That's who you are, you're authentic. I'm very female in my ways. I love being in a male environment. So, okay, I'm good to do this. And there were, I negotiated a big deal in Finland. I kid you not, in the sauna, you know, so I did a lot of these things.

Pamela: And a lot of environments where you weren't normally expected to be.

Radha: And weren't accepted either and you use your ways to shape that environment to bring people in. You don't feel bad because you're female. You don't feel bad because there's nobody else like you. You kind say, "Oh, that makes me unique."

Pamela: But I think this is true not just for female, but even small business owners, right, that you have to understand that all of your success won't come from the places you expect. You have to figure out what you're gonna do if you can't do what you always do to be individually successful. How will you forge new partnerships? How will you work with new people? How will you get things done? And clearly being put into these difficult situations didn't hurt you, it made you more resilient. It made you more likely to use that skill over and over again, and what I love Radha, is that you also reached back to let other people do it too.

Radha: Absolutely.

Pamela: One of the things I read about you is that you have almost 50% women in your organization and that's hard to do in any company, much less a tech or AI company. How do you achieve that?

Radha: So one thing I would say that came out of this European experience and then later starting being very early on in the Indian software industry, there was also an opportunity that came out of a plane ride, is the importance of listening to your client. And we actually call it in iMerit, a maniacal focus on clients. I know that's a strange word, but I learned that one of the ways I was different and could be successful in the business world was the uniqueness that I had, or the difference I had, which could be a setback, but by being absolutely focused on the client and not focused on what I was taking forward to them, but understanding their needs, their expectations, and fashioning it towards them. That maniacal focus on client success, client health.

I say this to the company, the customers' right even when they're wrong. Remember that because they know something. You think that's wrong, but they know something about their business and listen carefully. So I'll just talk about our company now. We have this two feet planted firmly on the ground. A maniacal focus on clients. We're as competitive as heck, you know, wanna win clientele, but when you look at what the client needs, and I'll talk about how AI is changing right now, that and focus on it, and we do it with an inclusive workforce. And what joins these two things is technology and the strength of technology that permeates every part of it. In our case, it's AI technology. That is the fundamental premise.

So, how is our company 50 plus percent women? And I think I said this to you earlier, I get this asked this all the time. "How can a company, an AI tech company be 50% women?" And I like to look people straight in the eye and say, "Have you seen the world recently?" We're about 50/50. You know, we're about 50/50. Why in the world, ask yourself the other way, why in the world wouldn't a company be 50/50, especially a tech company forward in AI. Look at what it does for AI. It brings in a huge diversity of views because what does AI do? AI is training models in the way humans are seen. That's computer vision. Humans have huge amount of skills and technology in here in the way you hear. You know, developing an audio AI technology that only has men's voices and white men's voices, it completely fails because, and that's the way technology becomes absolutely goes out because you have all of these diversities and the other thing it does is we are, the other thing about our company is that we are very young. You wouldn't know that looking at me, but the average age of the company is 24.5.

Pamela: Wow.

Radha: Yes. And young people from marginalized, low income, different kinds of backgrounds who have leaped forward and been trained and skilled in tech, in AI, and they are working in global AI and labeling, annotation, contributing to models, model operations, things like that. And now as AI is going into deployment, that's the big thing that's happening. That deployment is happening and the productionizing. And I talk about the different as applications. It's happening across the world and you want that diversity to be there.

Pamela: I wanna touch on that diversity a bit because I know you guys started a foundation to help people from marginalized backgrounds get involved in AI. As you said, it's so important to have their voices heard. What made you do that and how have you been successful with it?

Radha: So after I had had quite a long career in technology, I talked about Germany, and then I had this fantastic opportunity to start Hewlett Packard in India in the late 1980s when nobody, when there was no technology in India and software in India, many companies started and I had started with HP. I came back and I ran a $1.2 billion enterprise solutions business for AI, developed that, then left HP, started a software company, took it public on Nasdaq. And through that I realized that, wow, it's really possible to build global companies when the technologies right from the beginning embrace people, whether it's gender, whether it's young people from different backgrounds, et cetera, that also saw that how IT had changed the face of India, which is where I'm from, and it had created a middle class that was burgeoning, created so much wealth creation, but they didn't touch young people from the low income areas, the Eastern part of India.

So we said, my husband is at Cisco, he left Cisco. I had just taken the company public. Not just, we had taken the company public and I sold the enterprise business and was doing well. And we, he said, "I'm gonna start a nonprofit foundation and we're gonna help young people leapfrog into digital technologies and into having jobs, Participating in the global economy." And that started the Anudip Foundation, which has now trained 450,000 young people.

Pamela: Wow.

Radha: Yes. Primarily in India, but also we have centers in New Orleans. We have in other parts of the world, in Bangladesh, in Africa, and it's actually, and there spawned out of it, a prosthetics 3D printed prosthetic, low-cost prosthetics called Vispala that helps with low-cost prosthetics for people, lots happened. I took a small subset of them, only 70, especially young women who couldn't leave and go get jobs, very bright, and I just leapfrog trained them in AI. And I shouldn't say I, Microsoft Health, eBay, and Piero Media, founder of media network, founder of eBay, co-founder was my, with the seed investor along with me and that's how iMerit was formed, iMerit Technologies.

Pamela: Wow, I love the fact that you're talking about this too because I believe AI can really help us do things we've never been able to do alone and training so many people in the future of what this could mean will really help us move forward in terms of what our understanding is of what AI can do and how they might even think about innovating themselves. They don't have to be afraid of the technology. People who are worried about it, I don't think have to be worried about it at all, do you?

Radha: I think it's, to me, it's more than not being worried about it. They will be the people. See, the thing is, when you have an error, a bug in your labeling of models, it is really the bug of your future in AI. So think about this, we work in autonomous vehicles, some of the leading applications of AI, right? You want the best 3D LiDAR labeling people. You will find them in the women who work for us. Multi-sensor fusion, medical AI, cancer cell categorization, et cetera. Think about if there is a bug, an inaccuracy, how that affects the future of that product. You're investing in it. What we do is AI needs the human, the human view, the human application. It's the fusion of robotic fusion and the human intelligence.

Pamela: The human intelligence.

Radha: Right, robotic intelligence and human intelligence fuse together.

Pamela: People plus machine.

Radha: That is exactly. That is the future of AI. When we participate in it, we not only are not afraid of it, much beyond that, we see the application of AI in societal applications. You clean the internet, any number of things. The safety of cars on the road of any kind of transport. Geospatial for risk insurance. Flood. All kinds of things. Natural language processing of museum and library documents. We did some great work for Metropolitan Museum of Art in cataloging all of their, in AI cataloging all their work. Imagine that being available to kids all over the world.

Pamela: All over the world. And you believe this type of human involvement is necessary through the entire lifecycle, not just at the end state.

Radha: Absolutely, you start with it. Now you take AI into deployment. Let me give you an example. Your autonomous vehicles are on the road or the ADAS, as they call it, advanced driver assist systems. And it's finding a construction zone or some issue there, or it's finding in doing cancer cell categorization, a new form, a set of people who may have it in a different way. You have to be involved. In fact, the data in the ML ops is a ton more to work with than even in the model building because you're deploying it in the real world and the anomalies, edge cases, drift monitoring, these are all technological words, but that's where humans come in and that's where we excel. So it's technology, the talent and the technique that I talked about, and that's what brings it together.

Pamela: I could talk to you about this all day. I really do enjoy it. This has been amazing. I think the level of insight and impact you have brought is inspiration for all of us. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Radha: Thank you so much, Pamela, and thank you for your insightful questions and I think what it does is it kind of naturally brings out the passion of what we're doing.

Pamela: Oh, it does, it does.

Radha: Just the way you've asked the question, so thank you so much for having me.

Pamela: You're welcome, you're very welcome.