Winners' Circle

In this episode of the Winners’ Circle Podcast, we sit down with Paolo Sellari, Director of Product Management at Tangoe, to explore how his team is helping global enterprises find control, clarity, and confidence in the age of cloud and AI.

With over two decades in technology and product management, Paolo has built a career around transforming complexity into simplicity. At Tangoe, he leads efforts to help organizations manage and optimize IT, cloud, and AI costs across more than $34 billion in managed spend and 200+ countries. His work helps companies uncover hidden costs, streamline financial operations, and align technology investments with real business value.

Throughout the conversation, Paolo explains that cost optimization isn’t about cutting — it’s about clarity.

“The hype is overrated. The cost is underestimated,” he says. “Our job is to give organizations control, so they can make smarter, faster decisions.”

We discuss the evolution of enterprise FinOps, the future of AI-driven cost management, and the lessons he’s learned from helping large organizations balance innovation with financial accountability.

We also dive into:

• The cloud cost paradox: why the biggest challenge for most companies isn’t spending, but understanding where the spend goes.
• FinOps maturity: how Tangoe helps enterprises evolve from reactive cost cutting to proactive financial intelligence.
• AI and automation: why visibility and governance matter more than ever in an era of accelerated innovation.
• Shadow IT and compliance: how automated reporting and rule-based workflows are helping enterprises stay ahead of risk.
• Sustainability in IT: why the future of efficiency isn’t just financial, but environmental.
• Customer success stories: how a global enterprise reduced analysis time from weeks to minutes with Tangoe’s automation engine.
• Leadership and purpose: Paolo’s philosophy for mentoring teams and creating tools that empower — not overwhelm — decision-makers.

Paolo’s perspective comes from the intersection of engineering precision and business empathy. He believes financial intelligence is the foundation of operational excellence — and that the companies who embrace it will define the next era of cloud innovation.

“It’s not just about savings,” Paolo notes. “It’s about building systems that make organizations smarter, more agile, and more resilient.”

From tackling global-scale cost control to anticipating the hidden expenses of AI adoption, Paolo offers an inside look at how Tangoe is helping organizations turn chaos into clarity.

🎙 Learn more about Paolo Sellari and Tangoe here: https://www.tangoe.com

In this episode of the Winners’ Circle Podcast, we sit down with Aryyama Kumar Jana, Software Development Engineer and Tech Lead at Amazon Devices, who has built his career at the intersection of research and impact.

Aryyama holds a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence and has spent more than a decade working across industries including energy, manufacturing, and technology. He has authored papers, mentored startups, and even collaborated on research with Nobel Prize-winning professors. Today, his work at Amazon focuses on the Peregrine Initiative, which forecasts reverse logistics — predicting not only what will sell but also what will be returned. At Amazon’s scale, understanding the reverse supply chain is as critical as forecasting sales.

Throughout the conversation, Aryyama emphasizes that research is only valuable when it creates practical outcomes. “My whole career has been research come development, something for impact,” he said. “Because I always believe that if we just research something and keep it in papers, that’s kind of not enough. We have to bring it into practical impact.”

We also dive into:

• Bridging academia and industry: how early-stage research can inspire enterprise innovation, and why scaling up always reveals new corner cases.
• Generative AI and AGI: why today’s shift in AI feels like a new software revolution, moving from coding in assembly languages to high-level prompts.
• Responsible AI and ethics: why humans must remain accountable, no matter how advanced AI becomes, and why responsibility cannot be delegated to machines.
• Judging innovation: his philosophy for evaluating award nominations, which looks past flashy marketing to focus on measurable impact, scalability, and true innovation.
• Mentoring startups: advice for innovators to reverse engineer from real problems, prototype quickly, and prioritize user experience above all else.
• Unconventional inspiration: how dreams, hiking in nature, and cooking experiments often spark his best ideas.

Aryyama believes the next decade of AI will be defined by human-AI collaboration, with AI acting as a powerful assistant while humans remain in the loop to guide, supervise, and take responsibility.

“It’s kind of like Tesla’s autonomous car,” he explained. “It’s the responsibility of the driver who needs to be awake and see that things are going right or not.”

For Aryyama, the future of AI is not about replacement but about augmentation — building systems that assist humans, scale responsibly, and create real-world value.

🎙 Learn more about Aryyama Kumar Jana here: https://www.bintelligence.com/judge/aryyama-kumar-jana

In this episode of the Winners’ Circle Podcast, we sit down with Sasibhushan Rao Chanthati, AVP and Senior IEEE at T. Rowe Price and a longtime judge with the Winners’ Circle awards programs.

Sasi has built his career on the front lines of FinTech, AI, and large-scale systems engineering. He has authored papers, received U.S. copyrights, and mentored technologists around the world. Now, he is focused on building secure, scalable systems that keep up with the nonstop pace of financial technology.

In our conversation, Sasi shares:

• Why continuous improvement is essential in financial systems
• How small language models are reshaping fraud detection and compliance
• The security layers and trust frameworks that protect financial AI systems
• Why companies must balance innovation with responsibility and caution
• How he evaluates true innovation when judging nominations
• His passion for mentoring veterans, peer reviewing research, and training future technologists

Sasi also talks about what keeps him inspired, from attending conferences to mentoring PhD students, and offers advice for anyone pushing the boundaries of AI in high-stakes industries.

This conversation is packed with insights for anyone exploring the future of AI in finance and the critical role of responsibility and trust.

🎙 Learn more about Sasi here: https://www.bintelligence.com/judge/sasibhushan-rao-chanthati

What does it take to design the next generation of AI systems responsibly? In this episode of the Winners’ Circle Podcast, we sit down with ⁠Maneet Bansal⁠, a senior leader at Meta and longtime judge in our awards programs, to explore how observability, transparency, and trust are becoming essential in building AI at scale.

Maneet explains how AI workloads fundamentally differ from traditional cloud computing. In cloud environments, you can route requests across a pool of servers behind a load balancer. With AI, however, every request has unique demands on GPU memory, system resources, and downstream protections. It is not harder or easier. It is different. And that difference is reshaping the playbook for infrastructure and operations.

We discuss:

• Why observability is not just a tool but a philosophy for engineers and organizations that want to scale AI responsibly.
• The cybersecurity blind spots companies face when rushing to deploy large language models without guardrails.
• The importance of industry guidelines and collective responsibility to keep AI safe and trusted.
• How the speed of change in AI requires agility over long-term planning, with problems evolving faster than solutions.
• The role of mentorship, philosophy, and even poker in shaping Maneet’s approach to leadership and decision-making.

Maneet also shares two books that have shaped his thinking:

• ⁠The Courage to Be Disliked⁠ by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
• ⁠The Coming Wave⁠ by Mustafa Suleyman

Two standout quotes from the conversation:

• "It is not harder or easier. It is different." On the shift from cloud workloads to AI workloads.
• "The solution is not just smarter machines. It is clearer industry guidelines and collective responsibility." On AI and cybersecurity.

This episode is a reminder that the future of AI is not only about what is possible, but also about what is safe, transparent, and responsible.

Learn more about Maneet and his work as part of our judging community: ⁠Maneet Bansal Judge Profile⁠.