Mohammad Oli Ahad was graduate from IBA of University of Dhaka. He joined BAT as Territory Officer and worked there for 10 years. Apart from the experience of managing the territory, he got exposure in advanced automation project team and served 25 countries including Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong and so on. Now his mission is to disrupt the micro scale business with innovative products of Intelligent Machine Limited.

Beginning of the Startup

Founder of Intelligent Machine Limited, Mohammad Oli Ahad was working in British American Tobacco for a long time. There he was involved in various interesting high budget million pound projects in several countries. But sometimes it created disappointment as there were no demand of these advanced projects in South Asian region. Again he found some Bangladeshi engineers working in Australia and Singapore. They were from renowned institutions of our country like BUET, Dhaka University. Later, he observed that many of his batch mates and juniors are working for some of the best organization in the world such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. All these indicate that the issue is not the talent in our country. People of Bangladesh has enough talent but they do not get any scope of showcasing their works. Moreover, most of the graduates migrate to abroad for better education and lifestyle. Basically there is no worthy platform for them in this country. That is why he wanted to create an intelligence studio in Bangladesh to facilitate those graduates. They can learn more and get more experience by solving local intelligence problems and they can also prepare them to go for bigger opportunities in future. 

Intelligence Machine Limited started its journey in April, 2018. It works as a knowledge hub and center of excellence. They combine advance analytics and artificial intelligence and provide these as a professional service. Whether you are a financial company or manufacturing company or from any department you can take services from them. Students graduate from IBA, BUET will provide intelligence solution to our customers. There are total 25 members, 23 are in technical team and only 2 are in management team. They have the strong senior technical team. They have another volunteer team divided into two section – AI engineers and advanced analytics.

Product Portfolio

Currently Intelligent Machine Limited is serving 11 projects including BRAC for 3.5 million women garment workers. They serve them by identifying the amount of savings and amount of loans needed for individual. They are also working for another operational service company who worked for large telecom corporations like GP and Robi. These companies have many cells tower that is very hard to maintain as the towers do not have any power backup. As a result in the time of load shedding, it is very time consuming to provide generator for the towers and the transportation system is also very expensive. Intelligence machine limited saves thousands of taka of these telecom company by letting them know the time and location of load shedding so that they
can take proper arrangement before this. The response of the customer base is great.

Right now they do not follow any marketing strategy as they believe there product will be their strength. They want to fully focus on engineering sector instead of spending lot in marketing. Now a days customers are more concern about services so they will find out the best. That is why, in the near future they are not thinking about to go for marketing rather than their plan is to make services more strong.

Retail AI, Inventory management solution for small business

At this moment Intelligent Machine Limited is serving bKash with its Flagship product, Retail AI. In developing economies like us, the channel through product of manufacturer transfer to customer is very fragmented. In developed countries, outlets/retail stores are very organized, centralized and synchronized. But in Bangladesh there are many centralized managed retail shops but the small retail shops beside our residence do not think about what the customer want. They bring products that they can afford and managed by themselves. These shops do not have enough products to serve the local customers. Our current retail ecosystem is very complex and expensive for manufacturer, retailer and customers. The way super shop managing their system, small shops cannot understand or follow them. So Retail AI push them and finance them to adapt the system.

With Retail AI, shops will provide necessary data to them and open an account with retail AI. If the shoppers do not pay back the distributer, the issue will be solved by paying money from the account maintained in Retail AI. bKash is taking their merchandise AI service. Through the information getting from Retail AI you can easily assesse the credit worthiness of the retailer. In this model, retailer capture their own photo and input their information by themselves. General people can download the informations through registration with the app and they can also rate the retailer and his products and
verify.

After installing the app, retailer input their current stock updates. There will be different baskets of different companies such as Unilever, Coca-Cola. They have arrangements with their distributors. Retailer will order in this digital platform and distributor will accept it. Thus retail AI can keep track on those retailer order request data of every days. They reward those retailer who provide them with the pictures of their shop, shelf, customers and other inventories data. Later, the system will give suggestion to the retailer of what to order by getting retailers’ daily records and other shops responds in that area. After getting all these records, retail-AI analysis the data and give this to different manufacturer and business house.

Stumbling blocks for Machine Limited

Major two challenges that is worth highlighting:

Funding: In our country, people are still learning about startups. Many investors do not supports new companies because of trust issues or they might face losses in past while supporting startups. Moreover, their approach toward risk is more suitable for traditional business model. Investors need to understand that startup funding need is different than traditional companies.

Resource: It is hard to get adequate capable human resource. In our culture, everyone wants safer job. Moreover, most people want to work for MNCs. So it will take time to solve the problems.

Plans down the line

Three plans are in its prime focus-

1. Its main focus is now to complete the product design of Retail AI and launch the app in the near future. It will be a huge opportunity for them.

2. Intelligent Machine Limited is invited in Global Entrepreneur Summit and the Govt. of Netherland invite them to expand their operation in the country. So they want to utilize the opportunity to showcase the talent of our country. Besides, they are planning to provide data analytic services in France.

3. Also a key focus is to build the right team. They want to make their resource base stronger by grooming employees. They had to go through struggle to build the team because they did not had right resource for the team.