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