Rising Star: Ashwini Asokan and the world of artificial intelligence

The tech entrepreneur is deeply passionate about changing the way we consume AI in our everyday lives

The Established shines a light on younger talent in India that is slowly but steadily making a mark in the world of business. Every month in our ‘Rising Star series’, The Established will highlight entrepreneurial journeys that are just beginning to bloom. We will feature entrepreneurs who have taken risks, are full of passion and drive and want to change the world.

By the time, The Established finally meets Ashwini Asokan—we’ve exchanged several calls, rescheduled once and I am worried if she will have the time to deal with my barrage of questions. This is a woman who heads one of the world’s fastest developing artificial intelligence (AI) companies and has a roster of clients from all over the world. Once we start chatting, she is focused, articulate and passionate about the work her company, Mad Street Den (MSD), is doing. CEO and founder of MSD, Asokan is committed to the idea of making AI reimagine the future of work and everyday life.

A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, Asokan's work is at the intersection of technology, people and complex organisational systems. Before she founded MSD with her husband Anand Chandrasekaran, she had led the mobile innovation portfolio as part of Intel Labs at Silicon Valley, and was responsible for driving research and development of cutting-edge mobile products. Calling herself a product designer and cultural researcher, Asokan returned to India in 2013 to set up MSD. Edited excerpts from an interview with Asokan about her entrepreneurial journey:

Where did this lovely name Mad Street Den come from?

It came from a very particular kind of evening spent at a microbrewery in southern California. If you look at one of our first offices, it was at the end of a cul de sac kind of space, and it was in a basement. So the name kind of stuck [chuckles].

When we started this company, we've been discussing what it means for companies and people to become alienated. That is, we use desktops at some point, become mobile-native at some point, cloud-native at some point. [At MSD] we believe that the next kind of decade of transformation is around AI and people becoming AI-native. We think it's going to be almost a form of citizenship, whether you are someone who just passively uses AI or whether you're going to be actively participating in the creation and the consumption [of products] in some form. We were very driven by the idea of building a general purpose AI platform, and had a lot of very specific technical ambitions. The idea was to be able to deploy AI across problems, across industries, and build a truly horizontal platform.

Are you based in Chennai and California?

We moved to Chennai to get MSD up and running. But it is a US-incorporated company and we have a co-founder there in the US and teams there as well. So right from the get-go, we've been global. Today, we have offices in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

After eight years at Intel, what was the impetus to turn entrepreneur?

I don't think I had an ‘aha’ moment. My co-founders and I had been talking about [AI] years prior to starting a company.

It was less about, you know, we're going to have an entrepreneurial journey. It was a problem we were really interested in solving. It was a combination of a very technical problem of building a generalisable AI engine in a platform. How do you build a very people-centered solution? How do you get people to participate in the creation of AI? It was more about the fact that we knew this journey was coming. We've been speaking about it for a decade, or more, prior to this to begin with. My co-founders come from academic backgrounds and I from a corporate one, and it was a very natural transition.

What was the decisive moment?

My career hasn’t been very linear. In fact, if anything, my career was all about jumping across very different types of disciplines. It was very intentional because I wanted to get a holistic view of what it means to run a business, or to look at it through the lens of tech.

While I spent a significant chunk of my time at Intel, I also worked with a lot of other folks, trying to understand what it means for a really large company to produce technology work with its partners across the ecosystem, and then produce it and push it out in the market. Intel certainly provided me that opportunity to do that right, that is, to look at it in a very 360 degree kind of way.

That really helped me, and it was around 2012-2013, that it became very evident to me that the time was right. I remember holidaying on the East Coast [in the US] while on Christmas break, and we [my husband and I] literally woke up one day and said, ‘Okay, now we're ready. Let's just go.’

You just moved lock, stock and barrel to India?

When we moved back to Chennai, we were moving back to a country where we hadn’t really been adults. We were also moving back as parents while simultaneously starting a company. It was a very important decision for us, just uprooting our lives. But we did it, and within weeks of making that decision, we just put the house on rent and moved!

In hindsight, do you think it was a brave decision?

I think it depends on the day [the decision was taken], really [laughs]. I did have a three-year-old child and she took a long time to cope with that move. In retrospect, it feels like it was the only way we could have done it. And then there are days when I'm like, ‘Oh, my God, that was so foolish!’ My answer largely depends on the kind of day. So I don't necessarily think of it as brave, but as a series of steps I had to take in order to achieve a few goals.

Tell us about what your flagship brand Vue.ai does?

The platform can clean data, structure data, work with customer data, personalise customer experiences and automate workflows. It's meant to be an end-to-end platform because we want to be able to give customers the power to do a lot with AI.

Our first foray was into retail, and today we work with retail across the globe. We do everything from personalisation to managing inventory to automating workflows, whether it's styling, or photo shoots or merchandising. And this is a single AI platform that can do it all. It's less of a volume play; we're not going after every small brand in the world, we are very much top-down, in the sense that we work with large enterprises across the world. Over the last two years, we've expanded into healthcare, education, finance and insurance.

What are the benefits for a business that uses AI?

It's always twofold. People want to use AI to grow their revenue, or they want to use AI to save costs, that's it. It's as simple as that. So think of customer data this way–AI is able to personalise journeys for people in a way that most other entrants cannot, because we're looking at images, at videos, we're actually extracting information not just from tech or text but from actual images. We're also trying to interpret what this really mean for the person who's interacting with it. So personalisation, for example, is all about growing revenue.

On the other hand, workflow automation is all about reducing costs. You're using SAS software, where people have to actually enter the data. Product managers and marketing managers spend hours just entering data when they have other stuff to do.

Take the example of fashion stylists. How are you going to manually curate collections for a million users on your website or personally style a million users? But you still have a job to do. Since you're not going to be able to get to a million users, you're probably going to focus on the one per cent or two percent that's going to make the most amount of money. But you want your style, ability and your job to basically be able to replicate and grow in size and make it available to a million users. So businesses are investing in [in Vue.ai] and saying, ‘Okay, I'll keep my stylists who will handle, say, 1000 to 10,000 of the premium users. But then the stylist may not meet the demands of the other million people that they're not going to cater to because margins are not nearly high. Hence you've got AI that allows you to save costs and helps companies and businesses scale very rapidly.

Is data the new currency?

Data will not tell you what to do but will point you directionally to a handful of things that won't exactly tell you what to do. So you still have to be the one making the decision. Data will help you make your decisions and it's important to have data from which to make your decisions.

What advice would you offer entrepreneurs looking for funding?

I’d say don't try and play the system; be very clear about what you're doing. You're going to have to go out there and tell people your story over and over again. And [investors] are just going to be looking for conviction.

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