At Vectice, we are passionate about data science, so we hosted an event with more than 25 data science leaders from various industries, including guest speakers from Microsoft, Kohl's, and Yelp.
The event "Voices of ML Leaders" took place at our headquarters in San Francisco on May 4th, 2022. The lineup consisted of discussions about topics related to talent retention, talent acquisition, aligning AI initiatives across business units, and building trust between data science teams.
Pushpraj Shukla, Partner Director AI & ML @ Microsoft
Pushpraj Shukla is leading one of the most prominent applied AI/ML groups in Azure.
He shared insights on what it takes to hire in the most significant growing AI team with so many people opting to work remotely:
"Data science talent is hard to find. Sometimes, to retain the best people, you have to let them work from wherever works best for them and their families." - Pushpraj Shukla
Dr. Ragnar Lesch, Head of Data Science @ Kohl’s
Dr. Ragnar Lesch is leading the team of data scientists focused on price and assortment optimization, the Covid impact on sales, and demand forecasting.
He shared his insights on how you build trust between data science teams and the line of business: "We involve the data scientists with the product folks from early on in the analysis stage, so they have direct contact with the stakeholders and end-users of an application." - Dr. Ragnar Lesch
Justin Norman, former VP of Data Science @ Yelp
Justin led the Data Science and Data Product at Yelp and was responsible for five functional Data Science teams and the Core Machine Learning Platform.
He shared his insights and experience from his time at Yelp, Cloudera, and Fitbit on the key to retaining data science talent:
"The key is to rebuild the job description together and spend more time telling the team's story. We created and modified different individual career paths and opportunities instead of just one data science career path for everyone."
The Vectice team would like to thank all who attended and the three speakers who provided an unparalleled level of knowledge and left the audience inspired. Our next event will be held in New York City later this year.