SGA Consulting

A hands-on skill building program for CXOs and Leadership Team

The Machine Learning Retreat

SGA Consulting, South Africa was founded in 2018 with a vision of supporting businesses in Digital Transformation Journey.

At SGA, we understand how the advent of sophisticated digital technologies has turned the traditional way that people communicate, collaborate and do business on its head. With the utilization of modern day intelligence a must, organizations need to embrace the new world of digital by journeying on a digital transformation path.

We believe, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence will become integral part of the companies to revolutionize business models. Understanding human intelligence alone is no longer enough. To instill the data-driven culture in the organization, Transformation Journey starts with The Leadership Team.

SGA Consulting in collaboration with Career Launcher (CL Data School), India brings “The Machine Learning Retreat” program to South Africa.

Career Launcher(CL) focuses on diverse segments of education across the learners of multiple age-groups. Led by a team of highly qualified professionals, including IIT-IIM alumni, with a passion for excellence in education.

Core ideology of CL is to ‘enable individuals to realize their potential and achieve their dreams’. This is firmly grounded on their focus on academic excellence, technological innovation, and domain expertise built over years. CL is in business for 22 years, do over a 100,000 annual student intake and have 1000 employees at 200 locations in India.

Why Leadership Team MUST be ML skilled?

Tomorrow’s New Literacy

Unlike other innovations in the past, being on top of the machine learning revolution is not as straightforward as having machine learning specialists in every company.

Everyone will need to be well versed in the application of machine learning. Just as one cannot in this day and age function without being able to read and write, in tomorrow’s world machine learning will become the new literacy.

According to the World Economic Forum1, over half of the jobs in the world will be impacted by artificial intelligence in the next five years and many of those people will need to be reskilled. This includes the CXOs and Leadership Team as well.

Impacts on your Business Model

Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence will become integral part of the companies to revolutionize business models. Understanding human intelligence alone is no longer enough.

ML will have impact on all five aspects which are: Strategy, Operations, Customer Engagement, Compliance, People & Talent.

Need of CXOs and Leadership Team for building future business

The job of Leadership Team in the age of Artificial Intelligence is to design new combinations of technologies, assets as well as human and machine skills to revolutionize business models. Understanding human intelligence alone is no longer enough.

Humans and algorithms will collaborate together in the enterprise. Instilling a data-driven culture whereby the first reflex to solve a problem is looking at data.
AI/ML Implementation in an organization starts with asking relevant questions at the top and define objectives for the problem that needs to be tackled.

This requires the CXOs and Leadership Team to understand at least the very basics of the technologies that make it possible to learn from data.

The Learning Experience

Program Highlights

The program is for top executives (CXOs, VPs, Directors, Leaders, Business Owners, etc.) from a diverse set of companies to get a practical introduction to machine learning.

It is a 2 day, 16 hour intensive hands-on learning session when you will go back to school and solve introductory problems using the cutting edge data science methodologies.

The course is taught in a way that leaders from non-programming backgrounds can enjoy the thrill of using solving ML problems. The program is designed for fun & learn and will be conducted in a free-wheeling back to school environment.

What to expect

Learn new age skills in ML and AI with no prior programming or IT knowledge
Learn in a easy going, fun environment, with college like deadlines
Gain familiarity with machine language vocabulary, hands-on usage of various algorithms
Experience of being a ML engineer!
You will be able to generate ideas on the way ML can be used in interesting ways

What not to expect

Strategy or management gyan from armchair experts
5 star customer service in the classroom
Everything to work perfectly

Program Content

Basics of Python and Pandas for Data Handling and Visualization
Unsupervised Algorithms – Build a movie recommendation system based on IMDb like data
Solving prediction problems (Classification & regression) – We will solve prediction problems from Banking, Insurance, Retail, Manufacturing, Telecom, Mining, Real Estate and Healthcare industries
ML based Image Recognition – Take a close look how algorithms can read human handwriting or recognize text and images
Deep Learning – Do a hands on Artificial Neural network implementation and see the amazing power of these algorithms and how they help the Banking and Telecom industry predict potential loss of a customer
Natural Language Processing – We will solve a problem of predicting sentiment of customers based on their social media messages or website reviews
Building your Own Voice Bots (Alexa) – How to enable voice tech for your customers and get Alexa to talk about your products
Market basket analysis using Association Rule Mining – see how a retail outlet increases sales using ML
Customer Segmentation – Use clustering algorithms to automagically bring out similarities among customers along and align marketing campaigns to each segment

The Faculty

Sujit Bhattacharyya is a founder of CL Educate and has been the heading the technology and innovation efforts in CL for the past 18 years. Prior to CL he worked in the bay area of California, Wipro and Tata Motors. Sujit is a hands on technologist who loves to code. He leads the Data Science initiatives in CL, and had developed many data driven models for business, including one which was patented. His recent work in developing personalized voice bots in education resulted in an invitation to the Alexa Advisory Council meeting in Seattle, USA. Sujit is a passionate trainer and has taken hundreds of workshops for students, parents and executives in topics ranging from empathic parenting,leadership and technology. Sujit will be assisted by his young team of data scientists who work on machine learning technologies and have held high rankings on various world wide competitions held on global data science platforms like Kaggle.

Notes from Faculty

My personal journey of learning about AI and ML started a couple of years back. That was the time when, almost with unfailing regularity, I would be be called into our conference room to meet a hot new ed-tech who had a AI driven product to offer. Phrases like AI, ML, Deep Learning etc would be thrown at us and I would nod sagely with little understanding. Suffering from a uncomfortable fear of being left behind, I enrolled into Andrew Ng’s iconic Machine Learning program on Coursera. The experience was thrilling but frustrating too. Andrew would keep things simple, at his level, but I came dangerously close to revisiting the nightmares of very tortuous math taught during engineering.

ML today has become far more accessible and easier to learn. I am convinced that data science is not the preserve of the Phds from Stanford alone. There are many aspects of this technology which are hugely useful to managers and leaders on a daily basis. I also believe that there is great value for CXOs to get their hands dirty and solve problems with these new age tools. An experiment conducted in our organization where we put a diverse set of people (from a history honours fresher to mathwiz-engr-mba CXOs) revealed to me how one event could change people’s self belief and perspective so beautifully. It is perhaps like that first experience of a bungee jump, the first half-marathon or swim, or it may be your first date, but untill it’s done, one doesn’t believe it’s possible.

In this program, you will be treated like a programmer on the first day of your job. While you will simultaneously feel the frustration of learning, you will also savour the thrill of solving some problems, all on your own. You will write code to detect images, analyze natural language, build a voice bot, solve machine learning problems to predict results in real world examples. It doesn’t matter if you have never written a line of code before, we will ensure that you get past all the hurdes. Our aim will be to demystify ML at an elemental level, and start imagining solutions for your business with a completely new perspective.