Sowmya Aitha

Senior Data Scientist with 4+ years of experience building machine learning and Generative AI solutions across pharmaceutical, healthcare, supply chain and retail clients. Hands-on Technical Lead for an LLM-powered customer intelligence platform, where inference optimization cut LLM processing costs by ~90%. Also delivered forecasting, optimization and recommendation systems with measurable business impact.

Senior Data Scientist at ZS Associates (2025-01 – 2026-09)

LLM-Powered Customer Intelligence Platform

• Reduced LLM processing costs by ~90% (from $10–12K to $1–1.2K per million reviews) and improved processing speed by ~60% by migrating production NLP pipelines from text-davinci-002 to GPT-4o-mini, and by optimizing prompts and inference workflows.
• Re-architected four independent modules (Phrase Extraction, Post Processing, Parsing, Concept Collapsing) into one unified workflow, eliminating redundant processing and streamlining data exchange and execution dependencies for concept extraction, sentiment classification and evidence tagging; cut processing time and operational effort by ~70%.
• Led migration of the platform from a legacy sandbox to an AWS environment, covering architecture alignment, dependency mapping, environment planning, risk assessment and end-to-end integration testing; coordinated onboarding and knowledge transfer for ~60 team members.
• Directed technical delivery for 5–6 concurrent client pipelines processing millions of customer reviews, owning pipeline execution, debugging, root-cause analysis, output validation, production issue resolution and client-specific ad hoc requirements.

Data Scientist at ZS Associates (2022-06 – 2024-12)

• Intelligent Gap Analysis: Led the comprehensive development and deployment of a Gap Analysis module for a leading global pharmaceutical company.
• Employed a combination of NLP techniques and Generative AI to identify gaps, such as missing or extra information, between Standard Operating Procedure documents, including those in different languages.
• This module significantly enhanced efficiency of the process, saving the client considerable time, energy, and resources.
• Drug Price Forecasting: Developed an eight-quarter drug price forecasting framework for a leading U.S. pharmaceutical distributor, integrating ARIMA and XGBoost to capture temporal trends and nonlinear pricing patterns.
• Achieved 96% average forecast accuracy across 118 out of 169 products, covering 92% of gross revenue.
• Predictive Faulty Batch Detection: Performed comprehensive Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) and developed a classification model to detect faulty batches during the manufacturing process before final product testing.
• Analyzed real-time sensor data from equipment and active ingredients in batch manufacturing to identify features contributing to batch failures.
• The module has been integrated into the manufacturing process, enabling early detection of faulty batches and resulting in significant time and cost savings.
• Supply Chain Optimization: Developed and deployed an optimization module to maximize company profits by efficiently allocating products during supply shortages for specific drugs.
• This internal SCM solution was later commercialized and sold to multiple clients in the industry, significantly enhancing their supply-demand management capabilities.
• Personalized Customer Recommendations: Played a crucial role in delivering personalized offers to customers of a U.S. Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) retail client.
• Leveraged QSR and customer data to generate weekly recommendations aligned with client strategies, incorporating offer recommendation, item recommendation, and customer segmentation.
• Achieved a significant improvement in conversion rates, resulting in an annual revenue increase of approximately $4 million.

M.S. by Research – International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (2018-07 – 2021-12)

B.Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering – Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies, Basar (2013-09 – 2017-05)