Bharti Airtel announced the appointment of Santanu Bhattacharya as its chief data scientist — responsible for leveraging data science capabilities and deep analytics to understand unique customer needs.

Airtel, the number one telecom operator in India, aims to use information of its wireless customers and usage patterns as part of its strategy to use artificial intelligence (AI) to develop innovative products and services.

Santanu Bhattacharya, who has a Ph.D. from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, will report to Harmeen Mehta, global CIO and head of Digital at Bharti Airtel.

Airtel said Santanu Bhattacharya is an MIT Sloan and MIT Media Lab alum and BTech from IIT (Bombay).

Santanu has earlier worked with organizations such as NASA, Facebook and AOL.

Harmeen Mehta said: “We aim to transform Airtel into a truly digital organization and start using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to solve real business problems.”