Vijay Vijayasankar
General Manager of AI,Analytics,IOT and Watson Health for North America in IBM GBS . Proud Alum of University of Kerala . Geek, Engineer , Blogger and dog lover . Previously senior executive at SAP and MongoDB.
Some thoughts on evaluating job opportunities
I woke up at 4AM PST today to watch the first innings of Eng vs Pak in the cricket World cup. And at 5AM , I saw an email pop up from someone I mentor – who wanted some help in thinking through whether he should stay in his current job, or move to a […]
Salesforce buying Tableau – Quick thoughts
I am on vacation and woke up late and the first thing I saw on my phone is this news that Salesforce is buying Tableau . I – and many others – have predicted for a long time that Tableau would get acquired but several years passed by without that happening . And now that […]
Reality check on promotions
Promotions are hard for the employee and the employer. Unless its the first couple of levels in the organizational ladder, there is always a lot of subjectivity that goes into the process from both sides. Even when a company says it is all data driven – it is often the case that subjective decisions ( […]
Do we need a better North Star for AI than the Turing Test ?
Almost 7 decades have passed since Alan Turing asked “Can Machines Think?” . It’s hard to define what thinking means – and it continues to be hard today as it was in 1950. So Turing took a pragmatic approach and redefined the problem as “Can a computer behave like a human being?”. It was absolutely […]
Why can’t I have a 360 degree view of my own data ?
It’s tax season now and I owe a bunch of documents to my CPA to file my taxes . It’s a pain in the neck to compile all of them . I do all my banking with one single company – and have multiple accounts with them . I can get a view of how […]
What I learned from my social media detox
On Jan 1, 2019 I decided to get out of Facebook, WhatsApp groups and Twitter for a month. I stayed on LinkedIn and this blog though. I came back on Feb 1. Photo by Dima Visozki on Pexels.com Why did I leave ? The reason to leave was three fold – one, there were a […]
AI Adoption Challenges – 12 Lessons From The Trenches
In 2015, when I was given the chance to lead a services portfolio that included AI, I was quite excited for two reasons. One – it perfectly suited my geeky interests (especially my passion for math) and two – it seemed to me that I was back in 2000 with ERP, with every company wanting […]
Balancing The Need For Validation
To some degree, we all need some validation to feel good and perform better . As we grow as leaders, it becomes a big part of our lives to balance the need for validation of folks in our team. Too little and they may never realize full potential and too much and you will never […]
Story telling for techies
The first time I saw bottled water being sold at the TRIVANDRUM Central railway station, I remember it being a big joke in my family . We continued taking water from home when we travelled for a couple more years, constantly making fun of those “Bisleri” vendors, and the idiot travelers who could have just […]
Making your point !
One of the most embarrassing professional development moments for me was a class on communication that I took as a trainee in TCS in 1999. The instructor video taped me – and went through the replay, pointing out everything that went wrong with my short presentation, in excruciating detail. He concluded with “If you don’t […]
