Bharatwaja Namatherdhala is a senior product manager at Adobe Inc. The company was founded 40 years ago to create innovative products that change the world; Adobe’s groundbreaking technology empowers everyone, everywhere, to imagine, complete, and bring any digital experience to life.
With a passion for Artificial Intelligence and Product Management, Bharatwaja has been helping businesses navigate the rapidly changing technological landscape, enabling them to harness the potential of cutting-edge AI solutions in Product Management and more. Bharatwaja has a strong background in artificial intelligence and machine learning. He has published several papers on the topic, and his research has been cited over 95 times. He is also a frequent speaker at industry events, sharing his insights on the latest trends in AI.
In addition to his technical expertise, Bharatwaja is also a strong leader and communicator. He is passionate about using AI to solve real-world problems. He is committed to helping others learn about this powerful technology.
He believes the industry’s future is already unfolding worldwide, and companies must adapt swiftly and efficiently to these changes using these new technologies in day-to-day work.
In this interview, Bharatwaja shares his insights on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on society and how business leaders can effectively manage these resources to improve the ease of use of products and the engagement and adoption of their products.
Q. Hello, Bharatwaja; thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions. Could you please tell us about yourself?
Bharatwaja Namatherdala: Thank you for this opportunity. I’m Bharatwaja Namatherdhala, senior product manager for Adobe Inc, and I am passionate about the potential of Artificial Intelligence. I aim to help businesses harness every resource available to succeed in this race of Artificial Intelligence. I love solving complex customer problems; the most significant exciting moment for me is this combination of data & algorithms with real practical user problems around how to ease product use, how we can give more information about the product to customers, how to improve revenue for the company, etc…, these are some of the problems that I am trying to solve. I am excited to be here with you.
Q: What are the bad or good recommendations you got in terms of managing these new technologies? How did you use Artificial intelligence to solve the problems?
Bharatwaja Namatherdala: There is some bad advice and some good advice which I followed. Where the first stage, you look at the customer problem and then see if this technology can solve that problem and then use the technology like, for example: can we use AI to solve this problem and how can we automate this task, etc.., and then use A/B test to see if this solution solved the problem or not and use the customer interviews to see if your answer helped in solving the customer’s problems. Like looking at both qualitative and quantitative data to see if the technologies helped in solving the customer’s problems.
Q: Is AI overhyped right now?
Bharatwaja Namatherdala: I always tell people to see if we should use AI to solve this or not. If yes, the next question is do we have enough data to use AI. See if the effort and business impact make sense for our problem. Make sure there is a pain point that needs to be solved smartly. Once you have identified what that problem is and, at a very high level, what the solution would be, then reach out and try to figure out how to implement using Artificial Intelligence to solve that customer problem
Q: How to get started using AI?
Bharatwaja Namatherdala: This is a good question, and I guess the message I want to share with everyone is we shouldn’t be overwhelmed by these new technologies. If you don’t have a technical background as a PM; you need not worry as there are many resources out there to teach you some basics of AI, and the good part is you’ll never need to train or code as PM. There are multiple online resources where they teach the basics of AI and they are easy to learn.
Q: How much data do you think you need for AI ML to have a chance to contribute?
Bharatwaja Namatherdala: But the exact amount is hard to be defined. Significantly, it depends on the problem you’re trying to solve and how much accuracy you’re trying to solve. Suppose you’re building a heart attack detection system. In that case, you will need very high accuracy as the cost of false negatives is a life lost spam email detection, where an incorrect positive impact is not that bad. So, it depends on the problems we are solving, and the amount of data varies for each case. Still, as a rule of thumb, large amounts of data can help us train the models for edge cases.
Q: Where to learn Artificial Intelligence coding, and how can we help students in the US to learn these technologies from a young age?
Bharatwaja Namatherdala: That’s a great question, we need to start including AI coursework in all schools across the US and start teaching the kids how to use Artificial Intelligence and chatGPT to help them with all the questions they are trying to understand, and we can also have some open source projects that students can take like Kaggle where we have researchers around the world share their code and the methodologies on solving some small and complex problems which students and kids can learn by just watching those. Also, social media like YouTube, course era, and khan academy are good places to start teaching kids these tools and technologies.
Q: Do you also share these skills you have with others or mentor others?
Bharatwaja Namatherdala: Yes, I do. I share Artificial Intelligence and machine learning skills with others at work. Also, I am a volunteer at some schools and nonprofit organizations across the US, where I am helping improve STEM adoption across the US. I am also giving guest lectures on artificial intelligence to k-12 students in schools.
Q. One last question before we close. Where can readers reach you?
Bharatwaja Namatherdala: The easiest way to connect with us is through social media through Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bharatwaja-namatherdhala-823a7189 Or, send an email to nama7bharat@gmail.com
