A Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and Corporate Secretary (CS), a management consultant who has the ear of the boardroom, and a Data, Analytics, and AI thought leader supporting Fortune 500 organizations to realize outsized value with their data. If you are thinking about what these three have in common, they are all one person – Ruchi Agarwal.
Born in a Mumbai suburb, Ruchi was raised in a conservative, grounded, and hardworking family of doctors and entrepreneurs. Despite her humble beginnings and limited means, through sheer determination and tenacity, she cracked the highly competitive and demanding Indian equivalent of the CPA exam ( only to push further on and add the Company Secretary feather to her hat. While a large number of similar certified students go on to work in family practices, Ruchi earned a coveted spot in EY’s International Tax practice for Technology clients. A couple of years in, she knew she was destined for more.
In the pursuit of growth and continual learning, she moved to the US and earned a full-time MBA degree at the prestigious Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business (with two merit-based scholarships ). One would think that with a commerce/ accounting background, she would take the safe bet of working in corporate finance. Instead, Ruchi pursued a STEM certification to earn chops in business analytics and decision science. Intrigued in understanding how organizations make decisions and how these organizations run the world, she joined the highly sought-after global management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In her time at BCG, she worked with Fortune 50 clients to help them with their use of digital technologies (cloud scale analytics and AI) to change business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing market and business needs.
Due to her unique perspective on management decision-making – financial and strategic, she was sought out by Microsoft to help them engage senior executives at their large customers to drive adoption of Microsoft cloud capabilities in Data, Analytics, and AI. Over the past 5 years, Ruchi has specialized in Databases, Data Warehousing, ETL, and AI/ML technologies. As a member of the highly regarded Global Black Belt team, she plays the role of both a technical thought leader as well as a thought partner to help Microsoft’s customers turn the gold that is their data into business outcomes that drive both top and bottom lines.
Ruchi’s professional journey boasts several noteworthy achievements and significant milestones. She worked with the technology team of a large US grocer while steering a large Microsoft team of experts and business strategists to develop a smart technology system, powered by Microsoft Azure and connected by IoT sensors, to transform a few pilot stores. The pilot stores leveraged RaaS, establishing a way to quickly add innovations to create new customer experiences, enable higher levels of personalization through insights, and enhance store associate productivity. By using Microsoft Azure to store and process the data generated in stores, near the smart shelves, and on the company’s app, the digital stores introduced never-before-seen shopping experiences.
As her most memorable experience, Ruchi recounts her experience driving a data estate modernization at a retail pharmacy where the team brought data (structured, unstructured, and semi-structured) into the Lakehouse to enable lightning-speed data insights, with horizontally scalable data engineering pipelines across petabytes of data. This project helped pharmacists avoid expensive out-of-stock situations with accurate inventory numbers and provided the ability to plan and forecast based on store needs across thousands of store locations.
Looking ahead, Ruchi is most excited about the possibilities of generative AI; most specifically in her home bastion of Analytics. She portends that with ever-growing troves of data companies are going to struggle to make profitable decisions. Podium finishes will be only reserved for those who combine data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and automation. She believes that the use of AI/ML-based methods can lead to quick insight discovery and smart decision-making by allowing users to monitor and analyze huge sets of data conveniently and efficiently. In addition to her already overflowing plate, she has been incubating internal projects that bring together AI/ML and analytics to offer innovative solutions to customers.
What makes Ruchi stand out is the ethos she brings to her work and her teams. Mentor, guide, and coach are phrases that one can tease out of her, with effort. Peers prefer to use the phrase Role model.
Featured image credit: Dimitri Karastelev / Unsplash
