Abbas Merchant, founder and CEO of Matics Analytics, shares his unconventional career journey from dropping out of high school to join his family business, returning to education, discovering statistics and ML through StatQuest, landing an AI/ML internship, and eventually founding a startup focused on bringing AI and analytics to SMEs. He details a real-world ML-powered marketing project for a US financial company, covering propensity modeling, expected spend regression, channel preference classification, feature engineering, SHAP values for explainability, and lift/gain charts for evaluating campaign targeting effectiveness. The conversation also covers the iterative nature of data science work, where 70% of effort goes into data preprocessing and feature engineering rather than modeling itself.