Making Work and Life Smarter with AI

At Nishchay Shah's Mumbai home, everything is controlled by Alexa. Lights, air conditioners, curtains, fans, TV, CCTV cameras, doors and locks - all operate via voice commands and sensors. His house is equipped with multiple screens, making it the perfect smart home. "I obviously love automation and am over-invested in technology," said Nishchay, who moved to India's financial capital when he joined Cactus Communications about a decade ago. Today, he is the Group Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Products & AI at Cactus Communications. He owns at least four Echo devices and an Amazon Echo Studio, effectively creating a smart home hub where he can build immersive audio experiences.

Nishchay's interest in technology dates back to his early days. In school, he was involved in data forensics, ethical hacking, and pattern recognition. This early interest ensured that "AI, machine learning, and automation were always embedded in me," he shared. He grew up in New York and graduated in Computer Science from the University of Bridgeport. While pursuing his Master's degree, he started as a software developer, using technology to monitor CCTV cameras. "We worked on video compression techniques and used basic pattern matching to identify obstructions in the camera," Nishchay recalled.

Over the course of his career, he has worked with several companies, including Intertech Media, as a Stamford-based web designer, and Stova, a cloud event management software company based in New York.

In 2014, he joined Cactus Communications in Mumbai, where he currently serves as Group Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Products & AI. CACTUS is a science communication and technology company that helps improve how research gets funded, published, communicated, and discovered. The company collaborates with various stakeholders, including educational institutions, researchers, labs, publishers, and corporations. As Group CTO, Nishchay manages core technology, and in his role as EVP, he oversees Profit & Loss (P&L) for the products business.

When Nishchay joined the 22-year old CACTUS, his major focus was on engineering. How, he wondered, could tech solutions help upgrade internal and external processes - for employees and users alike?

Although CACTUS was not started as a technology focused-company it began to evolve into one, when it began to automate some basic tasks. Now, “we are actually running products which help check for technical capability, compliance, language, ethical compliance and several other things that need to be done before a research paper is submitted” said Nishchay.

An AI-led upgrade

As CACTUS grew, the company recognised the power of AI to help improve user experience. Therefore, in 2017, it began to look at AI capabilities that would disrupt CACTUS, do the necessary value-add and consequently improve business for all stakeholders. All of this, Nishchay acknowledges, could not have been possible without Amazon.

“The kind of traffic, requests, and scale that Amazon handles is extremely inspiring. It makes us also believe that we can manage scale easily,” Nishchay pointed out. At CACTUS, the workloads are run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the company uses both the infrastructure platform and the AWS services.

Interestingly, Nishchay was an early user of AWS, back in 2008. He was particularly impressed by the innovations AWS brought about, the company's response to market needs and its ability to make the platform sticky and relevant over the years. For AI specifically, CACTUS is using Bedrock and SageMaker. Bedrock offers a choice of high-performing foundation models for AI. While AWS SageMaker is a cloud-based machine-learning platform that allows creation, training and deployment of Machine Learning (ML) models on the cloud. It can be used to deploy ML models on embedded systems and edge-devices.

When it comes to hardware, Nishchay prefers Trainium, a custom chip from AWS that delivers cost effective machine learning model training in the cloud. For workloads EFA (Elastic Fabric Adapter) is ideal. “Anyone who wants to build an application, needs to focus on building the software layer, because infrastructure is available as a service,” said Nishchay. It's just a set of code that you run and things just work out. If hardware fails, you can make a swap and move on, explained Nishchay. This reduces the issue of RTO (Recovery Time Objective) or RPO (Recovery Point Objective). Besides AWS, RDS (Relational Database Service) has been a big lifesaver when it comes to parallelization, especially when the company needs to be DR (Disaster Recovery) ready. “Now, if you want to do it yourself, it will take you millions and millions of dollars to make all this work. But with AWS, it's very easy. They have done the hard work to create user-friendly solutions,” added Nishchay.

When he isn’t exploring the tech landscape, Nishchay likes to spend his free time cooking or travelling with family. Out of the 14 meals in a week, he makes sure to cook 5-6. Nishchay also loves making cocktails.

AI’s wider impact

While AI use is increasing across enterprises, Nishchay sees a wider impact it will have on society. Particularly in two areas—medicine and agriculture. Nishchay believes doctor-patient interactions will change as AI assists in disease detection and diagnosis. This could lead to hyper-personalized medicine, based on all family history, physical history, physiological history and more. In agriculture and food production, Nishchay sees an AI-led revolution in precision farming that will optimise resources, improve output and boost production.

As AI rapidly evolves, many experts predict we will achieve singularity by the 2040s. Nishchay optimistically envisions a future where AI handles all survival needs, prompting humans to redefine their purpose. "It paints a euphoric future where everything we need for survival can be done by AI," Nishchay said. He added, "Humans will have to think about the very definition of the purpose of life. Because everything is done by AI, what will humans do? A few things like creative abilities and artistic expression will be much better and humans will learn to explore more."

However, this AI-driven future may take longer to materialize due to immense demands on hardware, power, and other resources. In the foreseeable future, Nishchay expects advancements in both hardware and software to enhance AI experiences for all users and use cases.

To stay updated in the rapidly evolving AI space, Nishchay attends various AWS conferences, where he interacts with diverse industry experts. Additionally, there are many tech enthusiasts at Cactus Communications who continue to share the most cutting-edge AI developments with him. There is also an AI task force, that Nishchay likes to call the AI Transformation Task Force, which understands use cases across various departments and offers AI-driven solutions to help upgrade their work. In the meantime, his Alexa-driven smart home ensures everything runs smoothly, and that he stays connected, no matter where he is.