Consulting allows Aditi Ghosh to combine her passion for data science with her interest in creative communication and her commitment to outcome-driven strategies.

Can you share the most interesting part of your career journey as an AI expert?

I’ve spent more time as a full-time Deloitte employee during the COVID-19 pandemic than before it! I’ve found amazing project teams and built fulfilling mentoring relationships both before and during the pandemic. That, to me, is proof that you build your own career here. 

Consulting lets me combine my passion for data science with my talents and interest in communicating creatively and effectively.

So far, the most interesting part of my journey has been my undergraduate years. After spending so much time in research labs, I was convinced I would be working as an AI/ML researcher and eventually getting my PhD, until I got to my Master’s program and discovered consulting as a career path. 

Consulting lets me combine my passion for data science with my talents and interest in communicating creatively and effectively with executive audiences, translating analyses into business outcomes, driving toward strategic priorities, and building strong interpersonal relationships—which I love!

What excites you most about working with data and AI?

People often say “you can’t argue with data” as though there are universal truths that data self-reveals, but I think data science is as much of an “art” as it is a science. The data itself is just as important as the modeler handling the data, how creative they get with it, and how ethically they manage the process of building arguments based on it.

I love the thrill of exploring a new data set for the first time and discovering innovative ways to solve real business problems for our clients! I approach data science and AI with the attitude of an explorer, designing experiments based on hypotheses about what we might find, and allowing the data to guide us toward reportable or actionable outcomes.

I love the thrill of exploring a new data set for the first time and discovering innovative ways to solve real business problems for our clients!

I’m fascinated by the idea that lines of code on a screen can produce “living, breathing” machines that perform functions and aid us in our lives. This fascination began in high school and sustained me through all of my projects, and I’ve been grateful to have the opportunity to try my hand at several things.

Another thing I love about data science is the flexibility my ever-evolving data science toolkit provides wherever life takes me. So far, it’s taken me on a journey through computational genetics at the Institute for Research in Cancer and Immunology in Montreal; investigating sentence unit detection in automatic speech recognition transcripts in NTU Singapore; predicting avoidable days in hospital stays at a large health care provider; guiding one of the country’s leading hospitals through its people, processes, and technologies for a scalable AI and cloud-enabled organization; and driving membership growth, acquisition, and retention at a large consumer retail player in the US.
 

Describe an interesting project that you have worked on.

While there have been several projects I would call interesting, the project I found both interesting and fulfilling is my first project at Deloitte.

I loved every step of the journey and eventual impact of this project—on not only the client but also my own career growth, network, and friendships at Deloitte.

We were working with a leading health care provider in the US that was ramping up its AI journey and looking to prove out the benefits of AI for end users. A priority use case was predicting whether a patient was likely to stay in the hospital longer than would be medically necessary. This problem is expensive and has negative impacts on the patients as well as the health care provider. This could happen due to a variety of factors like their unique mobility issues, transportation reasons, or lack of a support system for after-hospital care.

We were able to build an ensemble of models that predicted with high precisions and accuracies the likelihood of an avoidable day for a patient. I loved every step of the journey and eventual impact of this project—on not only the client but also my own career growth, network, and friendships at Deloitte.

I’m so excited to see what else I can help uncover and discover in the future.

Another project I’d like to mention here is one that allowed me to get an inside view into the other side of the US health care equation. We worked with claims data at a large health plan client to increase operational efficiencies using AI and reduce manual interventions needed in the adjudication of claims—getting claims outcomes back to members quickly and reliably! This was just one of 50 use cases for AI-based innovation that we designed for this client, and I’m so excited to see what else I can help uncover and discover in the future.