The Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry organized an Interactive Session on "Using Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain to Monetize the Mobile Economy" with Dr. Anindya Ghose on Friday, 1st November 2019, at IIHM Global Campus. Dr. Ghose is the Heinz Riehl Chair Professor of Business; Professor Technology, Operations, and Statistics, NYU Stern School; Professor of Marketing, NYU Stern School Director, NYU. The programme commenced with the Welcome Address by Mr. Deb A Mukherjee, President Designate, The Bengal Chamber. Shri Debashis Sen, IAS, Additional Chief Secretary, Information Technology and Electronics, Government of West Bengal was the Chief Guest. Mr. Arnab Basu, Chairperson, IT Committee, The Bengal Chamber and Managing Partner, East; Technology Consulting Leader, PricewaterhouseCoopers Private Limited had a Conversation with Dr. Ghose before concluding the session.

Additional Chief Secretary shared his thoughts on how digitalization is playing a vital role in Rural India. He also took example of few startups from Kolkata who are disrupting the O2O (Online to offline) space.

Dr. Ghose started his talk by comparing Retail strategies of the past and future where retailers today are trying to predict the unknown needs of their unknown customers. He has consulted several MNCs and Fortune 500 companies where he used to collect data from these organizations and differentiated fake data from genuine data using Blockchain methodologies. He stated that the mobile economy is huge and it contributes to around 4.2% of the global GDP. In 2018, Giants like Amazon, Walmart and Alibaba went for some major Acquisitions in an effort to integrate Offline customer data with online customer data which is rather very complex. He took various other examples on mobile economy before stating that although it seems so ethical, 1 out of 5 ads that we see is an outcome of a fraud which is caused by algorithms trained to behave in such manner. He summed up the session by putting forward three takeaways which are as follows:

I) A shift in common mindset about privacy and data exchange 'Butler not Stalker',
II) 9 forces + Artificial Intelligence to monetize the mobile economy, and
III) Blockchain for data veracity and addressing fraud in digital advertising.

Post Dr. Ghose's talk, Mr. Arnab Basu had a conversation with him discussing on various aspects like data theft, ethical side of AI and data collection of teenagers. The discussion was concluded after few Q&As during the open house.