Going against the popular perception that artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) are taking away jobs, on-demand, digital data services firm iMerit is all set to create 1,200 new jobs in these areas in FY2019, starting next month, fuelled by growing demand for its services in its key market, the US.

The company’s 1,300-plus employees, who are in the 18-24 age group, work out of five delivery centres in Kolkata, Bhubaneswar and Ranchi.

With 80 per cent of the existing workforce being from underprivileged sections of society, 80 per cent of the new recruits in FY2019 will also continued to be hired from underprivileged families. iMerit partners with Anudip Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to identifying and skilling marginalised young people in data and tech skills for 3-6 months, including project-based skilling, Radha Basu, founder and CEO of iMerit, told BusinessLine .

Freshers start as interns and earn ₹7,000-8,000 a month.

“We do the work that is done in Silicon Valley right here in India, and with a team of youngsters, which comprises 52 per cent women who have a great eye for detail when it comes to the Computer Vision services that we offer clients. Sequencing of images is a very complex task which requires juggling multiple images. Young women, with their natural innate skill can be trained to do this” Basu said.

She pointed out that it takes just as long to re-skill experienced people that iMerit hires from industry, as it takes to skill new young recruits from underprivileged backgrounds, to deliver on customer requirements.

One of iMerits’s customers, a global automobile manufacturer, a contender in the autonomous vehicles segment, needed huge volumes of data to be segmented and tagged with precision — pixel by pixel — into meaningful classes of objects — such as trees, buildings, street lights, dustbins, etc. These image data sets are then used to help train the machine learning algorithm of the company’s driverless cars, to not just ‘see’ but also understand and interpret its environment for a smooth and safe ride.

iMerit employed a team of trained visual data experts to do the job, which is parallelly reviewed by quality experts to ensure over 95 per cent accuracy.

Besides Computer Vision, iMerit offers services in Natural Language Processing, Content Services (data categorisation, extraction, enrichment), Sentiment Analysis, Transcription and Customer Support including training data for bots.

Ninety four per cent of iMerit’s customers are in the US, and the rest are in the UK and Germany. The company enjoys an employee attrition rate of less than 5 per cent and offers a cost arbitrage of over 30 per cent that goes up to 70 per cent in some cases.

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