Jai Ranganathan (KeepTruckin)
Jai is currently SVP Product at KeepTruckin, and was formerly VP of various AI and Data matters at Uber.
End-To-End Use Case of Uber's COTA system
- A tool that uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques to help agents deliver better customer support.
- Enables quick and efficient issue resolution for more than 90 percent of Uber's inbound support tickets.
As Uber grows, so does the volume of support tickets
- Millions of tickets from riders, drivers, and eaters per week
- Global-scale of serving 600+ cities
- Thousands of different types of issues users may encounter
- Multilingual support

https://eng.uber.com/cota/
- Steps in the workflow
- User → Select Flow Node → Write Message → Contact Ticket → Customer Support Representative → Select Contact Type → Lookup Info and Policies → Select Action → Write Response Using a Reply Template → Response → User
- Problems to solve
- Issue prediction
- Issue categorization
- Ticket routing
- Ticket volume
- Policy optimization
- Auto-response
- Identify the right problems to solve
- Use analytics to understand the value before all else
- Know what metrics to optimize for
- Understand whether Machine Learning is a good fit
- Build with an eye on the probabilistic nature of Machine Learning solutions
- Many possible solutions including basic Machine Learning techniques
- Understand the cost-benefit of compute time vs accuracy
- Deep learning is a fast-evolving space - keep up with the literature to understand the latest advances
- Validate your results with visualization
- Architecture complexity with feature engineering and training have special needs
- Deep learning is still slow! Distributed deep learning can help a lot and is getting better
- Good experiment design required to validate the models
- Dynamic business problems require retraining strategies with well thought out safe deployment
- Continuous improvement of labeling will make your models better
- Look for edges where your models fail to find room for model improvements