Through The Corporate Glass

Welcome to a brand new episode of Through the Corporate Glass. I am your host, Apurva Divakaran. Hands-on design, engineering innovation, and entrepreneurship are fundamentally redefining how we solve the world’s most complex challenges. Today, preparing the next generation of innovators requires bridging the gap between rigorous academic theory and real-world, human-centric application.In this conversation, we’ll explore what this means for the future of STEM — how we can revolutionize engineering education, the opportunities and challenges of launching educational startups, and what it takes to inspire and empower the next wave of global changemakers.Exploring this vision with us today is Dr. Nikita Hari, the Head of the Teaching and Research Design Support Group at the University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science. Nikita is a multi-award-winning engineer with over a decade of global industry and academic experience. She holds a PhD from Cambridge and an Oxford Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Named one of the Top 50 Women in Engineering in the UK and a Clinton Global Changemaker, she has co-founded two EdTech startups, delivered 100+ keynotes, and is a TedX speaker. Having served in roles like CTO and COO, she currently serves as an Honorary Associate Professor at UCL and is a member of the UK Young Academy.2:30 Career Beginnings13:00 Understanding Engineering Education Innovation21:25 AI, Technology & Interdisciplinary Impact37:00 Balancing Multiple Roles45:22 Challenges, Motivation & Lessons53:05 Professional Communities & Entrepreneurship01:01:00 Startup Journey01:06:10 Future Projects01:12:05 Emerging Skills & Advice for Women in STEM

What does a career in Sales in the era of AI look like? Most technology products are built for or augmented by AI in some shape or form. What are the unique challenges and opportunities while selling AI products?  How can folks at different stages in their career be more successful by leveraging AI . To answer this we chat with Jason Langone, Head of Global AI Business Development, Nutanix. He has over two decades of experience spanning large companies and startups in a variety of roles.  Before his current role at Nutanix, he was an early-stage growth executive, leading a GenAI startup from seed through Series A, owning PMF, pricing, fundraising, and founder-led selling.

Generative AI is reshaping the world of UX design. And one of the most exciting innovations at its forefront is Generative UI. Today, we’ll explore what this means for the craft of design, the opportunities it opens up, the challenges it raises, and how it could shape design careers in the years ahead. To talk about this and much more, we're joined by Parikshit Deshmukh, the co-founder of Thesys, a company pioneering the future of user experience through Generative UI. Parikshit has over a decade of experience shaping design at fast-growing technology companies. He was Head of Design and a founding member at DevRev.ai. Before that, he led design at Recko.io, a fintech startup acquired by Stripe, which was one of the biggest SaaS requisitions, and was an early member of the design team at Nutanix.

Shownotes

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/parikshitd/

• Website: https://www.thesys.dev/

• Generative UI : https://youtu.be/-SlZp2H1jZ4?si=R0l7HVWKbkIdYdy9

• Thesys in news : https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidprosser/2024/11/07/how-thesys-plans-to-change-the-look-and-feel-of-ai-forever/

How is AI being applied to traditional industries? We will take a deeper look at the manufacturing industry, the concept of Industry 4.0 and the role of AI and Subject Matter Experts. We will discuss the need for new skills and also how experts can become powerful consultants driving the new AI tools landscape.To discuss this and a lot more we chat with Liana Kbilashvili. Liana is a global supply chain executive with over 15 years of leadership experience in the manufacturing sector. She was previously Director of strategic procurement at Summit Materials. In her current work, Liana advises organizations on AI readiness and digital adoption within supply chains. She serves as a strategic liaison between the established manufacturers and the  technology innovators.

Shownotes

Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lianakbilashvili/

Switching roles as part of your career journey involves being open to new challenges and embracing change. There could however be overlap of skills required across multiple roles. In this episode we will chat with Samina Diamond, Principal Product Manager at Nutanix to examine the role of Product Management under a microscope and identify some overlap areas with consulting. Samina has over 25 years of industry experience and brings a unique perspective to this conversation given her experience with software and management consulting as well as product management. She is also on the board of Tandem, a non-profit in the space of early learning.

What does the field of Operations Research entail? How does it relate to AI, machine learning and analytics? How is it applied in industry? What are the current areas of research  focus & how does the new wave of Generative AI fit in?

To answer this and much more we will talk to Dr Radhika Kulkarni, an Advanced Analytics professional, active in the areas of Operations Research, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. She retired after 35 years of leading various areas of analytics R&D at SAS Institute, Inc. For the last 10 years of her professional career, Dr. Kulkarni was the Vice President of Advanced Analytics R&D, overseeing software development in many analytical areas including Statistics, Operations Research, Econometrics, Forecasting, Data Mining, and Machine Learning. Dr. Kulkarni served as the 2022 President of INFORMS.

https://www.informs.org/Explore/History-of-O.R.-Excellence/Miser-Harris-Presidential-Portrait-Gallery/Radhika-Kulkarni

https://www.orie.cornell.edu/radhika-kulkarni-ms-80-phd-81

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhika_Kulkarni

What is unique about technical marketing for a GenAI product? What are skills necessary to be successful? What challenges and opportunities does AI add to the mix? We address these as we delve into the career journey of Laura Jordana, Director Technical Marketing, Nutanix. Laura graduated with a Bachelors in Computer Science from San Jose State University and has close to two decades of experience spanning site reliability engineering, support, sales enablement and technical marketing. She now focussed on an AI Inference platform called Nutanix Enterprise AI.

Show Notes

Laura's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurajordana/

Posts and Content Created by Laura

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynspIURn4To&list=PLAHgaS9IrJef7bWOvz7SKubDCphVcdi7u

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/experimenting-vision-models-nutanix-enterprise-ai-laura-jordana-mreec/?trackingId=hvHVY65RRwGx9PDYffjG8g%3D%3D

We dive into the world of AI infrastructure and explore the exciting career opportunities it offers. What goes into building an AI infrastructure product? How does open source play a transformative role in the industry? What key skills are essential for a successful career, and how has GenAI changed the landscape?

To help us answer these questions and more, we’re joined by Johnu George, Technical Director at Nutanix developing an AI Inference Platform called Nutanix Enterprise AI. He is also the Co-Chair of both the Kubeflow & AutoML Working Group and the MLCommons Working Group

Shownotes

Johnu's Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnu-george-83036610/

Kubeflow: https://www.kubeflow.org/

KServe: https://www.kubeflow.org/docs/external-add-ons/kserve/introduction/

ollama: https://ollama.com/

AnythingLLM: https://anythingllm.com/

Nutanix Enterprise AI: https://www.nutanix.com/products/nutanix-enterprise-ai

In this episode, we explore the role of a decision scientist and how it's related to data science with Anand Ramanathan, Decision Scientist at Meta. We will contrast data science research with roles in the industry to point out both strengths of each as well as differences between them. We'll unravel the skills required to be successful, the opportunities, and then also the challenges.

Anand has a fascinating background with a PhD in physics from the University of Maryland and more than a decade of experience as a physicist at both NIST and NASA before embarking on a career as a data scientist.

Show Notes

Anand's Linkedin Profile

Kaggle

Book Recommendations

Thinking Fast and Slow

Noise

It is always a balancing act between making pragmatic choices and those driven by the heart and passion. Raluca Mihu, the founder of Synchromind, a security consulting startup with a unique approach strikes this balance and shares her choices.

She has over two decades of experience in the IT industry and has founded an initiative to help abused women become part of the IT industry by providing them with training and counseling.

Raluca Mihu's Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralucamihu/

Synchromind: https://www.linkedin.com/company/synchromind-eu/