Home ›› 07 May 2023 ›› Business Connect
Countless entrepreneurs have emerged with their unique start-ups in Bangladesh in recent times, gradually making ground for investment.
With massive digitisation and online habituation, businesses are adopting newer technology to boost their operations and customer engagements, which has led to hundreds of firms dealing in software and ITES scrambling to grab the markets.
Mohammad Oli Ahad is one of the finest among these fearless new breeds of entrepreneurs who show no sign of fatigue to achieve their goals.
The far-sighted man with a clear vision has founded Intelligent Machines, a deep-tech start-up based in Bangladesh which is reimagining traditional ways of doing business with practical but differentiating artificial intelligence (AI) solutions across industries.
The AI-specialised company provides AI solutions for retail, Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), trade finance, banking and many more.
Starting with only six people in 2018, Intelligent Machines has developed nine AI products and 28 AI models for large client organisations so far in Bangladesh, Myanmar and Australia.
It also has 11 more in the pipeline covering manufacturing AI, language AI, trade marketing AI, fintech solutions, and enterprise analytics. It has three engineering divisions: AI, analytics and product engineering.
The company has received $3.9 million worth of work orders in the last four years. Big companies and corporations such as bKash, Unilever, British American Tobacco Bangladesh (BATB), Telenor Myanmar, Ooredoo Myanmar, Wave Money, IDLC Finance, Prime Bank, and BHP are among its clients.
Intelligent Machines, which has outperformed global giants like Google and Huawei in many indicators including Telenor Myanmar’s benchmark, is currently considered one of the leading AI-based companies in South Asia.
Birth of an idea
After passing the SSC exams from Motijheel Model School and College in Dhaka in 1993, Oli Ahad took a very tough decision. He quit education.
Motivated by fancy stories of great innovators leaving behind their academic careers, Oli wanted to dive into the unfathomable ocean of knowledge that lay outside the academic world.
“I studied at Bishwo Shahitto Kendro and [Sufia Kamal] National Public Library all day long to learn more. I did various courses to strengthen my knowledge areas,” reminisced the Intelligent Machines founder while talking to The Business Post.
Eventually, Oli returned to his academic career after four years and completed a diploma course in architecture from Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology. Later, he continued higher education at Dhaka University’s (DU) Institute of Business Administration (IBA).
“After graduating from IBA, I joined BATB as a tertiary officer for three years and later worked in its regional marketing team for seven years. During my time there, I closely saw the difference between textbook reality and ground reality,” Oli said.
Throughout those 10 years at BATB, he worked on numerous international high-value projects in different markets, like Hong Kong, Malaysia and Australia, in the Asia Pacific region.
While working on these projects, he discovered that many Bangladeshi engineers were excelling in prestigious organisations such as Google, Facebook, IBM, etc. after graduating from top institutions like DU and Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET).
These experiences showed him that Bangladesh had an abundance of talent but there is no proper platform for these talented youths to showcase their skills, which led many graduates to migrate abroad for better and more rewarding careers.
To tackle this brain drain, he envisioned creating a place that would allow these graduates to showcase their talents from Bangladesh while addressing the most complex local problems, ultimately preparing them for bigger opportunities here and abroad in the future.
Building Intelligent Machines
Oli said, “I had a list of 32 projects to complete while I was working at BATB. But most of them failed. Then I made a social connectivity page to find and gather people scattered all across the world.
“Intelligence Machine Limited finally started its journey with only six people in April 2018.”
Intelligent Machines, in Oli’s words, is a solid platform where talented and skilled youths can come together and work to create things however they want to. “It works as a knowledge hub and centre of excellence.
“Graduates from IBA and BUET are combining advance analytics and artificial intelligence and provide intelligent solutions to our customers as a professional service,” he added.
bKash, the country’s most popular mobile financial transaction service, became the first customer of Intelligent Machines and gave it a boost locally later. bKash is still working with Intelligent Machines.
Oli’s company has no official website and has not carried out any advertisement campaigns. Still, it is receiving enormous responses from local clients. Apart from bKash, Intelligent Machines has also worked with big names like Unilever, Arla Foods and Akij Group.
Now, Oli’s team has a total of 40 members, including 17 deep learning engineers, 11 data scientists and nine product engineers, and other capable resources.
“We want to be a humble part of the next chapter of the Bangladesh story. Now, we aim to introduce deep technologies like AI, big data analysis and blockchain to a wider section,” he said.
Products in service
Intelligent Machines builds enterprise AI products for client organisations to help them reach their goals and objectives. It also provides data science as a service.
“Our clients use AI products to save costs, convert more consumers, accelerate speed-to-market, increase customer service quality, and achieve other important goals and objectives,” Oli said.
Biponon is a trade marketing AI that stores a digital trace of every activity by the field force and offers real-time operational intelligence. Some 10,000 team members of bKash are using Biponon to execute various trade marketing activities at over 600,000 active outlets.
Fordo uses hand-written text recognition to help businesses to transform Bangla handwritten datasets into digital data and prescribes consumer-specific product recommendations. Unilever used Fordo to engage with 500,000 consumers with individually tailored offers based on insights from 4.6 million Bangla handwritten shop receipts.
Shobdo is a speech recognition AI that provides brands with actionable insights by recognising keywords in any audio. Over 5,000 sales representatives of BATB have used Shobdo to run four brand campaigns at more than 700,000 outlets.
Dharapat empowers financial institutions to make more data-driven credit decision-making through extracting, categorising and analysing data from bank statements of 94 financial institutions and Credit Information Bureau (CIB) reports (issued by Bangladesh Bank).
Jontro detects factory equipment’s temperature, vibration and noise to predict breakdowns. Using this, manufacturing teams can utilise machines to their full extent and implement predictive maintenance. It saves substantial production costs and also helps reduce CO2 emissions.
Jolchhap makes it impossible for counterfeiters to replicate products by encoding fully hidden, AI-encrypted messages in the packaging.
Borno uses computer vision to detect and read both printed and handwritten identity documents. Telenor, Ooredoo and Wave Money have used Borno more than 40 million times since May 2021.
Chotur uses deep learning and computer vision to authenticate identity documents by detecting the smallest deviations in the norm and performs this authentication significantly faster than human counterparts.
“Companies in Bangladesh are earning Tk 32 for every Tk 1 spent on AI,” according to Oli.
Creating culture
Intelligent Machines specialises in understanding their clients’ businesses and their context, and finding solutions while employing their machine learning expertise to create value for them.
Concepts like these bring to mind images of a start-up in a relatively more developed environment, except, these are all facts about a start-up here in Bangladesh.
“The culture is here, no one will leave a single chance to help others, which ultimately widens their ways to learn or examine the knowledge if it works. People working at Intelligent Machines are exclusively called ‘Team Members’. They are never referred to as employees,” said Oli.
Intelligent Machines is a tech company with almost no rules, he added. “Here, it does not matter where the work is being done or how, as long as it is getting done.
“Team members are accountable only for fulfilling their responsibilities and not causing bottlenecks; how they achieve that is up to them.”
Salaries are based solely on employee performance, not tenure or certifications. Undergraduates are routinely hired into leadership positions with full-time salaries (by industry standards), and they are allowed to work around their academic needs.
About AI market potential
“AI mainly works on intelligence for any individual or company. The companies or individuals who are taking AI-based solutions from us are getting unbelievable benefits in terms of cost, time effectiveness, accuracy and efficiency,” Oli said.
AI has been making significant strides in recent years, transforming industries and revolutionising how businesses operate, he added.
He said that AI is still in its infancy in Bangladesh, but the country has made steady progress in the field in recent years, thanks to a growing number of talented engineers and innovative start-ups. However, there are still several challenges the country needs to address before AI can truly take off.
For instance, he continued, there is a lack of funding and resources for AI research and development. Additionally, there is a shortage of skilled AI professionals, and retaining AI talents can be challenging.
Still, the potential for growth and innovation in the field is immense. With the right support and resources, Bangladesh can build a robust and thriving AI ecosystem, making significant contributions to the global landscape, Oli said.
“We currently have 10 organisations — five local and five global — as our clients. Local expansion of any AI-based service provider depends on how ready the consumers are for the technology. I think AI adoption will increase in three-four years,” he added.
He also stressed, “We are not behind India when it comes to using AI. But in future, they may get ahead of us if local customers’ interest in AI does not increase significantly.
“The Indian government is very progressive and taking on a huge number of AI-based projects, which will probably take them ahead.”
Oli said he is seeing a new form of inequality in AI use that is going to form a new type of colonisation around the world. For example, Unilever has undertaken AI technology hugely and giving the best possible services with less human involvement and more effectively.
This will make the global brand unparalleled to others and no one will be able to compete with them, he added.
There are many retail shops in Bangladesh. But, the lack of a proper transportation and maintenance system causes product prices to go high by the time they reach the outlets, even though the production costs of the goods are not high.
Oli believes that the ‘market has to be made and trend has to be set,’ and hopes that Intelligent Machines will become the trendsetter.
It’s always a matter of pride when/if talented students/graduates from Bangladesh get recruited by Google or similar foreign companies. But local companies fall in trouble when these talents go to work abroad. However, not all Bangladeshi students even know whether there is scope to work in such an environment here, he said.
Local companies now can employ such efficient people. So, they should choose to work in these companies and take them forward so that such local entities can become brands, he added.
Many talented Bangladeshis are working at global tech giants and creating solutions with fundamental ideas. “Talent has never been an issue here. What we need is to let the talents work with freedom,” said Oli.
Recognitions
Since its inception, Oli’s Intelligent Machines has received many awards and recognitions from different types of organisations.
They include the AWS Activate grant of $130,000, Google for Startups grant of $120,000, Microsoft for Startups with $150,000 cloud credits, co-selling with Microsoft, and Microsoft Gold Partner for Data Analytics and Data Engineering Competencies. Intelligent Machines was also selected for Founder Friendly Labs, a highly selective accelerator in San Francisco.
The company was also a global semi-finalist in Global Innovation through Science and Technology Catalyst Competition in 2019.
It also participated in NVIDIA Inception Program and worked on AI for Bangla by the ICT Division of the Bangladesh government.
Dreams
Oli Ahad holds a vivid vision in his heart about the people involved with Intelligent Machines.
He said, “Intelligent Machines wants to be a global player in the field of data science. But our core vision isn’t totally confined to data science.”
Although the company is currently focused on software and AI only, its name suggests rather something else, he added.
“Intelligent Machines will make intelligent robots one day. Micro, nano, large, mobile, e-mobile — all kinds of robots will be produced here in Bangladesh when we reach a strong base,” Oli shared his dream.
He said, “I want Intelligent Machines to be a school where people will learn great values and hone their skills.”
He stressed, “We aim to reach every section of small and big entrepreneurship or businesses and provide them with the tech support that is till now only accessed by the bigger players of the market.”
