Vasuki Subbarao

Experience

1. VP of Data Sciences and Analytics

   Arkestro

   Mar 2023 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US

   Arkestro is creating and owning a new space in predictive procurement orchestration, leveraging behavioral science, game theory and machine learning to predict and win faster value across every category of addressable spend in buying organizations. The last 20 years has seen phenomenal process transformation in the B2B buy-side procurement space with automation of sourcing, P2P, supplier management, contract management and spend analytics processes. The next 10 years opens up opportunities for predictive analytics and AI to layer on top of this process transformation to extract and create real-time savings on all procurable spend. Arkestro aims to be a market leader in this space. My role as VP of Data Sciences and Analytics helps bring together my experience in B2B buy-side procurement in MMG, Zeborg and Ariba; B2B sell-side in Vendavo and Amazon Business; and in building complex predictive analytic products. I am responsible for conceptualizing, architecting and building the data, ML and UI layers for the Procurement Insights and Analytics (PIA) application that is used by 15+ F500 companies. PIA uses various types of procurement related data from our customers (e.g. POs, invoices, contracts and sourcing); assesses data quality; identifies and removes outliers; does entity resolution using NLP and generative AI techniques; identifies savings opportunities of various types using predictive ML algorithms (including how customers fare with respect to market trends); generates reason codes for these opportunities; converts the insights to actionable recommendations and serves them to customers through interactive dashboards, ChatGPT-type interfaces and emails. PIA will become a lead generator for our sourcing application identifying events with suggested pricing and recommended suppliers. We also plan to leverage various 3rd party data sources and OpenAI to develop market insights for our customers to act on. In short, this is predictive procurement in action.

Education

• Bangalore University

  BE, Mechanical Engineering

• University of Washington

  Data Sciences Certification Program, Data Sciences and Machine Learning, A

  2018 — 2018

• Amazon Machine Learning University

  Certification, Machine Learning, A

  2018 — 2019

• Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

  Master of Business Administration - MBA, Strategy and Finance, A

  1996 — 1998