Nirmala Pudota is committed to her goal of developing clearly differentiated AI expertise  by continuously evolving her capabilities and applying them to solve complex business problems in a socially responsible way.  

Can you share the most interesting part of your career journey?

My Deloitte journey began almost nine years ago joining the risk sensing team from my postdoctoral position. The shift from academia to corporate was stressful at the beginning, but the process taught me valuable lessons and helped me grow personally and professionally. I am proud of the decision, and it helped me frame my vision: Develop clearly differentiated expertise in AI fields by continuously evolving my capabilities and apply them for complex business problems; and be socially responsible and a role model to my kids.

I truly believe in "knowledge not shared is wasted".

Over nine years, I have had the chance to observe and learn how to bring innovative solutions and apply cutting-edge techniques from my domain to our client requirements. Bringing the best from industry and academia and helping to develop innovative solutions have been the key focus and most interesting part in my career journey.

Another integral part in my professional development is the mentoring and counseling that I have received from my leaders and coaches and have shared with my colleagues) I truly believe in “knowledge not shared is wasted,” so constantly, I share the best practices I learn from my experiences and the guidance I receive from my leaders and mentors. I feel immensely happy and proud when our professionals succeed and when they tell me that I, too, have played a tiny role in their journey! AI, ML, NLP, mentoring, coaching, and team development are some of the buzzwords in my career journey!

What excites you most about working with data and AI?

Innovation has become essential with the acceleration of change and scale of data, AI, and digital technologies. I am fascinated with AI and its possibilities—and the benefits it could provide to society and business. Staying in the field, creating an impact, and having the opportunity to innovate and evolve is what excites me! It keeps me as a lifelong learner and an applied researcher.

Describe an interesting project that you have worked on.

There are plenty. I find every project is interesting and something to learn! But my first project is special; it taught me what “value to a client” means. That is delivering what’s important to the client, showing the art of possibility wherever possible, even before they ask us!

I am fascinated with AI and its possibilities—and the benefits it could provide to society and business

While working on creating a repeatable process to identify disruptive trends in innovation—particularly in the hospitality and technology space, I observed the importance of a new feature based on NLP models that could help the client locate supporting documentation while analyzing the latest trends. Given that the objective of the process was to highlight and provide trends in disruptive innovation, we were debating on inclusing this new feature into the process as it was not initially discussed with the client. We reasoned on how we could make the deliverable more valuable to the client with a little more effort. The client was very appreciative of the addition of the new feature and how it helped them with a clear understanding of trends extracted from multiple, disconnected sources. Further, we extended the feature with a feedback loop mechanism to train the underlying NLP models. Later, the feature was added to the periodic process and considered a must-have in the final deliverables.