‘Resilience is about anticipating market turbulence’: Alok Shende

ALMA MATER, IIM Calcutta (1997)

Alok Shende, Managing Director, Ascentius Analytics LLP

AS A NEWLY minted MBA, my head buzzing with models and theories and ready to conquer the corporate world, I landed a fantastic role at HCL Technologies as an assistant product manager for a new US tech product. I was thrilled; this was the real-world application I had been preparing for. We hit the ground running and with every meeting, our launch strategy became sharper. After a successful review with the vice president, we faced our final hurdle: pricing.

Our US partners had given a price bracket, but I was determined to validate. “To get the best deal, we need to know what everyone else is charging,” I thought. So, I asked other international partners their best prices for this product. Unbeknownst to me, my “smart move” was falling apart spectacularly. All the partners immediately went to our US principal, asking why the Indian partner was shopping around.

My ham-handed manoeuvre was, of course, not seen positively. That was a brutally honest lesson in partnership dynamics—one not taught in the classroom.

That lesson ultimately steered me toward my next chapter: business consulting with a US-based firm. I travelled the world solving complex business problems—a fantastic experience. But, after about seven years, I felt a new pull. The world was becoming increasingly data-driven and I knew I needed to evolve.

I decided to explore data science, but without breaking my career for a new degree. Fortunately, IIM Bangalore was offering one of the first courses on business statistics and machine learning. After passing, I deepened my skills with a follow-on course at IIMB. This pivot wasn’t a departure from my core interests, but an evolution.

I realised a crucial limitation: predictive ML is powerful for answering ‘what’, but it often falls short on ‘why’. This led me to focus on causal inference. Here, everything clicked. Causal inference was the practical embodiment of my economic background, allowing me to move beyond correlation to uncover mechanisms that drive outcomes. For instance, I applied causal models to measure the impact of interest rate changes on mid-market firms, enabling more nuanced credit pricing. We re-evaluated declined loan applications, identified systemic biases, improved risk models and opened a new stream of responsible revenue.

This work evolved into a focus on building forward-looking resilience. I learned that resilience isn’t about surviving market turbulence, but rather anticipating it. We began simulating alternate risk environments to see how a portfolio behaved. This gave us a dynamic map, showing which segments remained stable and where strategies needed to be adapted before the market shifted.

Looking back, my career is not a series of disjointed jumps. It is a coherent journey. A relentless pursuit of fundamental truth in complex systems. Whether via game theory or causal AI, my goal remains to go beyond surface-level patterns and build solutions that are logically sound, equitable and lasting.

—As told to Abhinav Singh