Eightfold AI And Tata Consultancy Services Announce Partnership To Transform Talent Management For Enterprises Across The Globe

 Eightfold AI today announced its partnership with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a global IT services, consulting and business solutions organization. Through this alliance, TCS will offer services for the Eightfold Talent Intelligence Platform, and develop innovative joint solutions enabling enterprises to transform talent outcomes, retain top performers, upskill and reskill the workforce, recruit top talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals.

“Tata Consultancy Services brings the experience, depth and organizational knowledge required to create the sustainable business outcomes that our joint clients expect from Eightfold AI,” said Kamal Ahluwalia, President of Eightfold AI. “Their expertise and culture of innovation make them an ideal partner. We are excited about the possibilities our clients will achieve with our Talent Intelligence Platform paired with the services of TCS.”

“We believe through our partnership with Eightfold, we can help organizations manage workforce skills at scale and unleash their potential via AI enabled skill curation. By leveraging TCS’s domain expertise, consulting depth and center of innovation along with Eightfold’s cutting edge platform solution, our customers will be able to use AI for skill discovery, promote internal mobility, enable data driven decisions, drive diversity agenda etc.," said Ram Subramanian, Global Head of Human Capital Practice at TCS.

About Tata Consultancy Services

Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses in their transformation journeys for the last 50 years. TCS offers a consulting-led, cognitive powered, integrated portfolio of business, technology and engineering services and solutions. This is delivered through its unique Location Independent Agile™ delivery model, recognized as a benchmark of excellence in software development. For more information, visit www.tcs.com

About Eightfold AI

Eightfold AI® delivers the Talent Intelligence Platform™, the most effective way for organizations to retain top performers, upskill and reskill the workforce, recruit top talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals. Eightfold AI's patented, deep learning artificial intelligence platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into a competitive advantage. For more information, visit www.eightfold.ai.

'Sarvendriyanam Nayanam Pradhanam’ 80% Of Knowledge That We Acquire Is Through Our Vision

* World Sight Day on Oct 14, 2021

* By Dr. Satya Prasad Balki, MS, FCAS, Cornea, Phaco & Refractive Surgeon, MaxiVision Group of Eye Hospitals

As the excerpt from ’Neeti satakam’ written by the great scholar Chanakya says - ‘sarvendriyanam nayanam pradhanam’, which literally means, of all the senses, the sense of vision is supreme!  Ever wondered why he made this observation?! Because-80% of knowledge that we acquire is through our vision. Without vision, the other senses of hearing, taste, smell, and touch cannot differentiate! If you are blindfolded and made to smell a rose and a bottle of rose perfume, Can you differentiate?!

This only goes to show how our ancient scholars understood the importance of vision and documented it, ‘father of surgery’ Sushruta had described in detail the anatomy of the eye and its diseases like cataract and its treatment which involved displacing the cataractous lens with a sharp instrument inside the eye known as couching.

In the year 2000 WHO started to celebrate the second Thursday of every October as ‘WORLD SIGHT DAY’. This initiative is to bring global awareness to the issues of eye care facilities and preventable blindness. As I write this article, there are over 1 billion people worldwide with no access to eye care or even a basic eye examination, most suffering from treatable conditions such as cataracts wherein the natural lens of the eye loses its transparency, a surgery to replace this with an artificial lens suffices in restoring vision, refractive errors like simple myopia, hyperopia, especially in young children-which, only need spectacle correction, diabetic retinopathy in adults wherein the retina of eyes is damaged due to uncontrolled diabetes, which warrants prompt treatment to avoid permanent loss of vision.

As an eye doctor, I know that these conditions are indeed treatable with timely intervention; all it takes is access to the patient. In our practice we regularly have outreach programmes wherein we travel to remote corners of the country and conduct eye camps, the response to these camps is simply overwhelming with patients turning up in thousands every single time, which highlights the gravity of the situation and the need to administer timely treatment and spread awareness.

Hence the WHO has set a goal that by the year 2030 there should be an increase of 40% in effective coverage of refractive errors and a 30% increase in cataract procedures around the world.

Today is world sight day ( 14th Oct 2021)! And the theme this year is ‘’love your eyes’’, which is more relevant now than ever. With people locked up in their homes, work from home option has only worsened the burden we put on our eyes, mind you, eyes are as resilient as they are sensitive, they best try to accommodate the stress we put them under. Online classes for kids are increasing the rate of refractive errors. So we need to take care of our eyes, try and reduce screen time, get frequent and thorough eye checkups with your eye doctor and follow their advice, which is one of the objectives of this year’s sight day-

Let us pledge to Get an eye checkup and encourage our friends and family to follow the same.

Pledge to protect our eyes

Pledge to create awareness about preventable blindness and the need for eye donation

I urge my readers to use social media on this day to spread the message of eye care with the hashtag #loveyoureyes and make this unique initiative a success.

Also, with the festival season coming up, kindly exercise caution while playing with fireworks as they can cause serious and sometimes irreversible damage to your eyes, which is substantiated by the fact that the few days around Diwali are the busiest for eye doctors. Maintain a safe distance while playing with fireworks and use of protective eyewear is imperative. 

I Would like to end with another fascinating trivia, did you know that the basic design and function of a camera is based on well the way the eye functions-technology mimics biology!  We spend a fortune on a high-end smartphone or an SLR camera when our eyes have a staggering resolution of 576 pixels!! Now that’s a crystal clear picture!! and you have got two at no expense !!

I hope with these few words I have done my bit to spread the message -love, cherish and nourish your eyes because they are precious! 

Stay healthy! Live better!!

Westlife Development Led McDonald’s Introduces Chef’s Special Gourmet Burger Collection To Mark Its 25th Year In India

* The new range of indulgent burgers will strengthen McDonald’s leadership in the burger category

McDonald’s India turns 25 this year and the brand is giving its consumers, one more reason to celebrate this milestone! After 25 years of serving favourites like McAloo Tikki, Maharaja Mac, McSpicy, Mc Veggie & McChicken, Westlife Development Ltd led McDonald’s (West & South India), has unveiled a new range of indulgent Gourmet Burgers. This Chef’s special range consists of unique and generously sized, scrumptious burgers with signature McDonald’s touches to add some more favourites to your list.

Menu innovation has been a key pillar of success for brand McDonald’s in India. The brand has successfully managed to knit local flavours in its product range. With the launch of the Gourmet range, McDonald’s aims to strengthen its leadership in the burger category.  What makes this new selection of burgers a gourmet affair is the exotic patties, ingredients and sauces that they contain. The range is a mix of delectable cheesy indulgences and spicy delights to cater to all palates and taste buds. The burgers are also bigger in size and are curated to offer consumers, more filling meal options at McDonald’s.

Speaking on the launch of this new Gourmet Burger Collection, Smita Jatia, Director, Westlife Development Ltd said,” Menu innovation has been in our DNA. We have always strived to weave in local flavours and preferences into our menu. At the same time, our endeavour has been to bring global flavours to India in a truly McDonald’s way. This new range of premium burgers has been carefully crafted with exotic ingredients and is aimed at providing filling meal options to the customers thereby strengthening the meal proposition at our restaurants”. 

Here is a sneak peek into some burgers from this new Gourmet Burger Collection:

Cheese Lava American Burger: Cheese Lava American Burger is one of the star products of McDonald’s New Gourmet Burger Collection. The relishing salad in this one is propped up against jalapenos and shredded onions, with the roasted chipotle sauce and cheesy goodness oozes out of the patty. All this slides inside freshly toasted buns!

Piri Piri Spiced Chicken Burger: A Piri Piri spiced, grilled chicken patty topped with a roasted chipotle sauce, shredded onions, jalapenos, and a refreshing salad, placed between freshly toasted Piri Piri buns!

Triple Cheese American Veg Burger: A crunchy corn patty filled with cheese, topped with jalapenos, shredded lettuce and more cheese, layered between Piri-Piri Buns.

Piri Piri Spiced Veg Burger: An exotic, spicy veg patty, topped with roasted chipotle sauce, shredded Onions, Jalapenos and a delish salad all layered between freshly toasted Piri Piri Buns.

McSpicy Premium Chicken Burger: McSpicy Premium Chicken Burger assures a lavish burger experience. A spicy chicken patty, shredded lettuce topped with Jalapenos and Cheese slice, spicy Habanero sauce & cheese sauce layered between toasted whole wheat buns.

Chunky Chipotle American Chicken Burger: A combo of grilled chicken patty and Piri Piri chicken patty, smeared with a Roasted Chipotle sauce, cheese, shredded onions, jalapenos and a delish salad layered between freshly toasted quarter pound buns.

McDonalds is committed to staying ahead of customer expectations and giving them global products with the perfect local twist to take the concept of comfort food a notch higher. This is just the start of the silver jubilee celebrations from the brand and there is much more coming soon!

The McDonald's Gourmet Burger Collection is available across all outlets in South and West India. You can order it on the McDelivery app or go to the nearest McDonald’s restaurant.

Are you ready to indulge in this glorious gourmet experience by McDonald’s?

As part of its Golden Guarantee promise, McDonald's has implemented stringent safety and hygiene protocols to ensure the complete safety of its customers and employees.

About Westlife Development:

Westlife Development Limited (BSE: 505533) (WDL) focuses on setting up and operating Quick Service Restaurants (QSR) in India through its subsidiary Hardcastle Restaurants Pvt. Ltd. (HRPL). The Company operates a chain of McDonald’s restaurants in West and South India, having a master franchisee relationship with McDonald’s Corporation USA, through the latter’s Indian subsidiary.

About Hardcastle Restaurants:

HRPL is a McDonald’s franchisee with rights to own and operate McDonald’s restaurants in India’s West and South markets. HRPL has been a franchisee in the region since its inception in 1996.

HRPL serves over 200 million customers, annually, at its 305 (as of June 30th, 2021) McDonald’s restaurants across 42 cities in the states of Telangana, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Goa and parts of Madhya Pradesh and Union Territory of Puducherry and provides direct employment to close to 10,000 employees. McDonald’s operates through various formats and brand extensions including standalone restaurants, drive- thrus, 24/7, McDelivery, McBreakfast and dessert kiosks. The menu features Burgers, Finger Foods, Wraps, Rice, Salads and Hot and Cold Beverages besides a wide range of desserts. Several of the McDonald’s restaurants feature an in-house McCafé.

The pillars of the McDonald's system – Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value – are evident at each of the restaurants that HRPL operates.

PhonePe And NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd. Partner To Launch ClickPay For Easy Bill Payments

* PhonePe is one of the first payments platforms to enable the  Bharat BillPay ClickPay  

* Customers can now make recurring bill payments easily for categories like electricity, water, gas, loan repayments, etc.

PhonePe, India’s leading digital payments platform, announced the launch of ClickPay for its customers in association with NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd.(NBBL). ClickPay is a unique payment link that enables customers to make recurring online bill payments (electricity, water, gas, loan, etc) and removes the need to remember tedious account details associated with each biller/service. This link sent by the biller will lead the customer directly to the payment page fetching the bill amount instantly.

PhonePe is one of the first payment platforms to enable support for ClickPay, and it benefits the customers by removing the hassle of remembering the unique identifiers/details associated with making bill payments - they can simply pay by clicking on the ClickPay link sent by their biller, making it only a two-step process. This launch will help in increasing the share of digital transactions in the ecosystem by reducing the errors induced by manual inputs required for bill payments.

Speaking on the launch, Ankit Gaur, Director, Online Merchants at PhonePe, said “We are very excited to partner with NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd. on the launch of ClickPay. This will bring a large number of potential customers from the offline realm to pay their bills online. We believe that this will further the adoption of digital payments by making the discovery of billers and bill payments convenient for consumers.”

Rahul Tandon, Head Product & Market Development, NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd., said “ClickPay is a step to empower the customer, wherein with ease, payment can be effected sans the tedium of manual inputs and errors.  We are happy to launch the ClickPay facility with PhonePe and extend robust facilitation to a huge customer base. ClickPay will assure faster payments and help with furthering of digital transactions in the payments service space.”

GoodWorker Scales-Up Tech Workforce; Kickstarts Month-Long National Coding Challenge

Backed by the Lemmatree Group, noted actor Sonu Sood and Schoolnet; GoodWorker launched a nation-wide coding challengeto identify the best talent for multiple positions for software engineersin the company.  The unique challenge will provide an opportunity to the coders to solve real-world problems. 

The coding challenge will include two rounds. In the preliminary round, the candidate’s basic coding skills will be assessed. The candidates who qualify will then be required to solve a complex problem using their creativity within a stipulated timeframe, thereby examining how their performance under pressure. The participants can enrol themselves via the link https://www.techgig.com/challenge/goodworker-hiring-challenge 

GoodWorker is a digital platform that provides the country’s youth access to blue/grey collar jobs and quality of life services. The company, which partnered with Singapore tech giant Affinidi, has an ambitious vision of impacting the lives of 300 million blue-collar workers by bridging the gap between job seekers and employers. On the launch of the challenge Amit Jain, CEO, GoodWorker said, “GoodWorker continues to rapidly execute its vision of transforming lives of blue-collar workers in India, by providing access to career-enhancing opportunities and other quality of life services. We aim to use cutting-edge technologies leveraging real-time communication, NLP for Indian languages & entirely new paradigms of UI/UX to better connect with our target users. Hence, we are looking to rapidly expand our technology team to support this scale-up.” 

About GoodWorker 

GoodWorker is a digital platform, which aims to transform the lives of blue-collar workers in India by providing access to career enhancement opportunities and other quality of life services for e.g in the financial sector. It harnesses Affinidi’s digital verifiable credential technology to enable the youth to access such services. Our vision is to create value for youth and employers, impacting 300 million lives by 2030. 

GoodWorker is headquartered in Bengaluru, India, and the Affinidi Group in Singapore with a hub in India, Berlin, and Germany. 

Paytm Brings “Digilocker To Its Mini App Store” - Now Access All Your Documents Digitally

* DigiLocker is a secure cloud-based platform provided by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India under its Digital India initiative 

* Paytm becomes one of the first consumer app to bring the entire Digilocker functionality to consumers via its own app  

* DigiLocker Mini App on Paytm offers users one-click access to access all government records from Digilocker even when users are offline or in a low connectivity zone 

* Users data stays on their device locally and can be accessed offline or even in low connectivity zones  

* Paytm users can now add and retrieve documents such as Aadhar, driving license, vehicle RC, Insurance, COVID-19 Vaccine Certificates, and others  

* To ensure data privacy of its users, Paytm does not store or send any document related information at its back end  

India’s leading digital ecosystem for consumers and merchants(1) Paytm has announced that it has onboarded “Digilocker to its Mini App Store”. With this,  Paytm users will be able to save and access their digital documents in a safe and secure manner. 

DigiLocker is a secure cloud-based platform for storage, sharing and digital verification of documents & certificates, provided by MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information technology) under Digital India Corporation (DIC). Some of the most popular use cases for DigiLocker are accessing Driving License and Vehicle Registration Certificate, Aadhar Card, Mark Sheets among others. Users can also utilise Digilocker documents for self KYC and video KYC with telecom operators, online share trading platforms and other fintech platforms as required. DigiLocker documents are legally recognized on par with original documents, as per the Information Technology Act, 2000. 

Users can access their DigiLocker within the Paytm app to retrieve, add, save/store and even receive verified electronic copies of documents from registered organizations directly into individual lockers eliminating the need to carry physical documents. Users who have booked COVID-19 Vaccines through Paytm can add their Vaccine Certificates with one click to Digilocker.  

To view and access the documents users can go to the profile section under ‘Your Documents’ on the Paytm App. DigiLocker documents once added on Paytm can be accessed by users even when they are in low connectivity zones or offline.  

The Mini App store was launched on Paytm app to make it a space for developers and businesses to launch their apps and leverage Paytm’s user base. Today, it houses several businesses who use Paytm’s reach to grow their user base, reach out to consumers, enable their existing users to access services easily and more. Through the Mini App Store on the Paytm app, users can book a cab, order food, book doctor’s appointments or order medicines, health supplements, purchase travel & entertainment tickets, and book slots for COVID vaccinations. 

Paytm spokesperson said, “We are excited to bring the Digilocker functionality to the Paytm App. Millions of users who open the Paytm app for vaccine booking, travel, FASTag, insurance, KYC and many other use cases, will be elated to have the DigiLocker functionality which will enable convenience and easy access to important documents.”  

MeitY spokesperson said, “DigiLocker’s aim, aligned with the Digital India mission, is to provide to all Indian citizens a digital platform for paperless services. Our partnership with Paytm Mini App, will extend DigiLocker’s services to Paytm’s users, who can access important documents like Aadhar, Driving License and more at one place, and exclude the need to carry all paper documents with them.” 

Great Lakes Institute Of Management Announces An Exclusive “Alumni Rewards Program”

* Becomes the first B-school to launch a rewards program for alumni in the country

Great Lakes Institute of Management has announced the launch of an exclusive “Alumni Rewards Program” - Great Lakes Insider for their 9800+ strong alumni spread across 33 countries. The launch event was held virtually on at its mega alumni meet - Confluence 2021 recently. This unique rewards program comes as a first for an Indian B-school Institution. Great Lakes has set up a seamless rewards program to strengthen its alumni relations further and to build a well-connected, awesome active alumni (AAA) community across the globe. 

The focus of this program is to Connect, Communicate, and Create relations between Great Lakes Institute of Management and its alumni. The institute is offering its alumni a chance to choose rewards from over 300 renowned brands across Travel, Hospitality, Lifestyle, F&B, and more. The institute has partnered with renowned brands like Adidas, Amazon, Myntra, Lifestyle, Shoppers Stop, Zomato, Big Basket, Book My Show, ClearTrip, Croma, MakeMyTrip, Flipkart, Hidesign, Home Center, Lenovo, Nike, O2 Spa, Philips, Pizza Hut, Puma, Reliance Digital, Westside, Yatra, Samsung among other top brands. From Instant digital gift vouchers to merchandise and experiences, the program covers a huge array of rewards for its alumni network.  

The reward points issued to its alumni can be redeemed to buy vouchers/gift cards or products from a wide array of options. Great Lakes has also floated a hybrid system of payments for redeeming a voucher. In case of lack of points or sheer desire to refrain from using up all the reward points, the option of combining cash and points if also available while redeeming the rewards.  

Commenting at the launch of Great Lakes Insider, Dean Suresh Ramanathan said, “We are proud to present a distinctive Alumni Rewards program like ‘Great Lakes Insider’ for our vast alumni base spread across the globe. The rewards program has something for everyone and the perks of being a Great Lakes alumni are now endless. This offers tremendous potential for the students to network, get back in touch with their course-mates, seniors, and junior pass-outs while remaining an integral part of Great Lakes Institute of Management and stay connected forever. We will continue to develop new ways to make this program more innovative through different updates which will enable us to have a meaningful engagement with our current and future alumni.” 

Through this program, Great Lakes Institute of Management’s alumni will be connected to a global community across several geographic, demographic, and cultural backgrounds and would be able to foster a strong network with peers as well as directly, with the institute. The institute aims to extend support and promote all events and activities with its alumni and reward them for their engagement with current students, the institution, and other alumni.