At a time when schools and institutions are attempting to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) in their curriculum, learning systems too are set to undergo changes. With an aim to transform India’s educational space by helping students identify their real talents and encouraging them and their parents to think outside the obvious careers of engineering, medicine and management, Arjun Hari founded Wudi. Wudi (meaning ‘invincible’ in Chinese) is an artificial intelligence-based software solutions enterprise that helps teachers and students understand the real potential in every individual. Additionally, it makes AI affordable to SMEs.
"Wudi is the result of an evolution of thoughts that took shape during my post-graduation days at IIM. It started when I came across a few articles about the number of unskilled and unemployable graduates in the country. I was curious to know the underlying reason and started researching. What I found was frightful — grave unemployment in the near future. On the one hand, we have a population of close to 800 million below the age of 35 in India and on the other hand, we have AI eating up jobs and disruption killing industries. To add to the misery, we have an army of unskilled and unemployable graduates. The problem seemed too complex and so, I got together with my sister and started working on this," said Arjun, the Founder and CEO of Wudi.
Arjun believes that the only sustainable solution is to ensure that an individual chooses a career based on inherent talents and skills. But how do we achieve this in a country like India was the next big question? "To begin with, we broke down the problem into three phases — basic education, professional education and employment. We commenced with basic education and were rendered perplexed by the state of our education system, with dozens of boards and curriculum structures and no grounds for standardisation and normalisation. The diversity and complexity further increased as we progressed up the career ladder. Soon we realised that we had a huge 'data' problem at hand and the only solution was to build a super-intelligent system to derive insights out of this vast, unstructured and non-standardised data. That gave birth to Wudi," he added.
Wudi has developed a free educational product, Edu-Wudi, to enable technology inclusion for every organisation, irrespective of their financial and technical backing. Through this, they wish to empower organisations with a fully customisable product with minimalistic design, and enriched user experience that can extract data and derive deep insights using artificial intelligence-driven modules. These insights are then used to provide personalised mentoring/career guidance. They have designed the UI from a layman's perspective and the backend from a data scientist's perspective. Wudi is now incubated at IIM-K and has a team of contributors spread across the globe.