What was your journey/career path to your current position?
In the early 90s computers and the internet were a route to a world of information. A bunch of us used to set up Bulletin board networks, and do demonstrations of animation and simulations during our school events. The internet, and computers, were unknown entities and many people were amazed at simple hacks. In my late teens and early 20s, I shifted to the humanities and did my MA and PHD at SOAS, with a focus on the anthropology of fear. My field sites were Mumbai - crime representation and technology in particular. Once I finished my academic degree, I found myself in the Market Research industry - and discovered that the information we sought through MR was mostly available on the Internet. These were the days when Orkut was still a dominant network. The opportunity was clear - why do research offline, when people are entering the internet in a way that we have never seen before? It's not just information but a platform for the expression of life. For me, anthropology was only possible online, as offline anthropology seemed like a sliver of a much larger reality.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
Quilt.AI does some exciting work for causes and social good. I've found some of our work in studying mental health as reflected on Instagram post colours, and search engine behaviour from refugee camps to be truly groundbreaking. We learned that the shift in the pixel distribution of colors appeared correlated with negative ideation, and that inside refugee camps an unexpected sense of hope was maintained through search for music and bridal dresses. Regardless of the interpretation, it's important, because it has shifted the 'unit of insight' from a social media conversation to a pixel that only a machine can detect. Much like Freud said about secrets : 'If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips'... insight is everywhere.
What does social intelligence mean to you?
Social intelligence is the ability to read the internet in an empathetic way. People are not the sum of their hashtags, and are a bundle of dreams and uncertainties. Social intelligence is anthropology online, a new world which needs to be studied in the way Malinowski did his first ethnography.
What's been the biggest challenge you've faced while trying to get brands to integrate social intelligence within their growth strategy?
It's around the epistemology of social intelligence - is this real or not? Is it representative or not? I often tell brands that those questions are vestigial methodological hygiene questions from the offline world. Instead of asking 'is it real?' we should ask 'is it useful?'
What do you think is the biggest missed opportunity for social intelligence?
I believe adoption has been slowed down because there are many players on the market who offer PR / brand monitoring services, but package them up as human insights. This has made the industry a bit suspicious of the value of social intelligence.
What's on the cards for you and your team/organisation in 2022?
We are continuing to explore language and image  based models a lot more in 2022 - and are refining how we run semiotics, trend spotting and segmentations. We are also in the final stages of exploring language models. Most importantly, our self serve product which has multiple beta clients is going to be launched to a broader audience.
How do you see social intelligence and its use evolving?
While the technology has always been exciting - there is some need for methodological clarity. There are multiple players in the market, and we all need to build a framework for how best to value the information that we are immersed in.
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