Interview with Anuj Gupta, Head of Machine Learning at Vahan Inc.
Vahan Inc. is an AI-driven virtual assistant that helps field sales teams and frontliners do better work at scale. Vahan’s AI-based chatbot called ‘Mitra’ allows employers to hire workers in large volumes in a number of industries across India. This virtual assistant is completely customisable to align with employers’ support, training, communication, and reporting needs. Vahan is a technology company headquartered in Bengaluru that helps companies such as Zomato, Swiggy, Flipkart, Uber, Shadowfax, etc., hire blue-collar workers and are on track to become India’s largest recruitment platform. Analytics India Magazine caught up with Anuj Gupta, who gave insights about the use of AI in industries and how Vahan is using AI. Anuj Gupta is formally trained at the intersection of maths and CS and has worked across both academia and industry. He has led machine learning efforts at Airwoot, Freshworks, Huawei Technologies, and Intuit. Currently, he is heading machine learning at Vahan Inc. He also has authored a major book in Machine Learning – “Practical Natural Language Processing Book [O’Reilly]” which has been endorsed by professors and researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, UCSD, DeepMind, Google Brain, Microsoft Research and AI practitioners from Airbnb, Facebook (Meta), Spotify etc. The book is being used by 30+ universities across the globe to help students gain a pragmatic view of building AI systems AIM – How is India shaping in analytics, AI and ML? What would you say are our strengths and weaknesses in this context? Anuj Gupta – India is shaping very well to take advantage of the AI wave. First, we need to understand that AI is a broad term encompassing the entire spectrum, from analytics to artificial general intelligence. India has always been very strong in data, analytics, predictive analytics, and we were very quick to jump on the DS/ML bandwagon and leverage it. Today in India, everyone, including educational institutes, startups, MNC, IT services, Govt of India, even traditional businesses, is trying to make the most of AI. Our biggest strength is 1.3 billion people who are super aspirational and willing to cut their teeth on deep and complex technologies like AI. Having said this, we need to guard against trivialising it. We have seen this with engineering, IT services, and cloud technology in recent times. AIM – What is the business model of Vahan Inc.? Anuj Gupta – Vahan helps organisations hire Blue Collar Workers (BCW) at scale and velocity. This is a great win-win for both – the job seekers and the employers. Our product is emerging as the employment exchange for over 300 million blue-collar workers in India. We are placing 10K+ people a month now, and 97 per cent of those who find jobs through us do so in 7 days. The blue-collar gig economy is powered by massive growth in the demand for flexible staffing from India’s e-commerce and logistics sectors. Organisations have been struggling to recruit blue-collar gig workers at scale. These organisations wanted to adopt innovative methods to hire workers, recruit them faster, and even retain them. Today we have a total demand of 300K jobs to be filled each month! AIM – How is Vahan leveraging AI? Anuj Gupta – We are using AI and tech to reimagine the complete experience and hiring lifecycle of blue-collar workers—right from screening and vetting job seekers for key skills under 10 minutes, matching users to the most suitable jobs, all the way to optimise operations. All this is powered by AI technology. Thus, we provide vetted leads to the employers. Another key area where we use AI is reducing workforce attrition and increasing overall worker productivity. This is a problem that plagues most employers that hire blue-collar workers. Using our systems, we can predict attrition before it happens and reduce churn by up to 40 per cent. AIM – What is the demand for blue-collar jobs pre- and post-pandemic in India? Anuj Gupta – Gig work saw a huge boost during the COVID19 pandemic; it has transformed the way employers and job seekers think about the low-skilled segment. There has been a strong shift towards gigs compared to full-time employment. India has over 250 million blue-collar workers, and the pandemic acted as a key catalyst in blue-collar jobs. COVID19 brought big (and, maybe permanent) changes in user behaviour, not just millennials but also other user cohorts such as senior citizens and homemakers. Most of them now want their daily supplies to be delivered to homes. Due to the strong tailwinds from the pandemic, the highest demand for blue-collar workers is expected from the logistics and e-commerce sectors, as building efficient delivery channels is important for internet businesses. AIM – Please elaborate on the tech stacks used by Vahan. Anuj Gupta – We use a hybrid tech stack to serve our diverse needs. In databases, it is mostly PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch and Redis. On the programming languages front, we mostly use Node JS, Python, Java, Android (Java & Kotlin), HTML, and CSS. In terms of frameworks, it is Spring Boot (Microservice), ReactJS, Angular, and Flask. On the machine learning side, we heavily use PyTorch, scikit-learn, NumPy, Pandas, FastAPI, and Airflow. For hosting, it is AWS and Docker. AIM – How has Vahan made a difference in people’s lives? Anuj Gupta – Vahan is helping millions of Indians find their next gig work. Last year, we placed 65,000 people. We are on track to become India’s largest recruitment platform next year. On the job seeker side, our technology leverages existing user behaviour. We are not trying to change the way people find jobs, mostly through networks and friends. Instead, we have productised this human-driven approach and made it super-efficient using AI; and that’s been our success story. We also focus very highly on reducing turnaround time, so about 97 per cent of the people who get placed through us get a job within seven days. AIM – Who are your target audience and competitors? Anuj Gupta – Today, on the B2C side, it is an Indian looking for a blue-collar job; on the B2B side, any organisation looking to hire a blue-collar/gig workforce. We will be living in the APAC market in the next three-five years. Today, we are currently focused on jobs, but in the future, we are looking to build a financial wellness platform that can also support people getting loans to start a business and assist with upskilling opportunities so people can grow in their lives and careers. There are many other players in this space – Apna, GoodWorker, Kromo, Naukri, OLX, etc. Most of these platforms are focused on generating leads at the top of the hiring funnel. There are three key issues in this space: (a) Over 50% of job applicants don’t meet basic blue-collar job-specific requirements (b) Attrition is very high; most workforce churns in 3 months. (c) Clients have to work with a long tail of mom-pop HR agencies for their supply. We solve these issues by a human-centred, AI-powered value chain between job seekers, recruiters and employers. AIM – What lies ahead for Vahan? Anuj Gupta – Like I said before, our product is on its way to becoming the employment exchange for blue-collar jobs. It leverages existing blue-collar worker behaviour of finding jobs via their network. Today we are placing more than 10,000 people every month, growing at 25-30 per cent per month. While we are currently focused on placement, in the medium to long term, we see ourselves becoming the central platform for blue-collar workers serving their needs from job search, upskilling & vocational courses to their financial needs. The opportunity is massive.
We are placing 10K+ people a month now, and 97 per cent of those who find jobs through us do so in 7 days.
We are placing 10K+ people a month now, and 97 per cent of those who find jobs through us do so in 7 days.
["Interviews and Discussions"]
["scikit-learn", "NumPy", "machine learning", "AI", "PyTorch", "ML", "Aim", "FastAPI", "analytics", "Pandas", "Interviews and Discussions"]
["AI", "machine learning", "ML", "analytics", "Aim", "PyTorch", "scikit-learn", "FastAPI", "Pandas", "NumPy"]
Poornima Nataraj has worked in the mainstream media as a journalist for 12 years, she is always eager to learn anything new and evolving. Witnessing a revolution in the world of Analytics, she thinks she is in the right place at the right time.