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Santa Clara, CA
On Feb 15th, the American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) convened an AI Summit with a number of academics, researchers, authors, speakers and industry innovators covering a wide variety of topics in the field of Artificial Intelligence at UCSC Silicon Valley campus while celebrating 10-year anniversary of its Silicon Valley chapter.
After a warm welcome by co-hosts UCSC Dean PK Agarwal and ASEI Silicon Valley President Piyush Malik, setting the stage for the event, the Consul General (CG) of India in San Francisco Dr Srikar Reddy shared his perspectives on India’s digital economy, the strength of Silicon Valley Indian community and how the Indian government is investing in and leveraging AI for improving lives and livelihoods of citizens including farmers through India AI mission. Drawing examples from Prime Minister Modi’s recent speeches at AI Action Summit in Paris and visit to the US last week where “Make India Great with AI” was cited, he quipped “Let’s hope MAGA + MIGA make MEGA partnership in the Indo-US relationship”.
Previously, opening the program with a classical Indian music performance by a young high school STEM student Sohum Gupta, the emcee for the day – AI Strategist & Author Tonya Long introduced the conference chair Piyush Malik who has been working in the Data & AI domain for over 3 decades with leadership roles at PwC, IBM, Google etc., serving Fortune 500 clients worldwide and is now entrenched in the startup ecosystem currently as founder of TheDigitalAgenda in addition to being the founding president of ASEI Silicon Valley for the past decade.
US Congressman from California Rep. Ro Khanna gave a crisp message via video emphasizing how as a result of this conference he’s looking forward to recommendations from the ASEI & Silicon Valley community on how AI can be used for governmental policies, curing diseases, solving energy problems, and all this with guardrails and safety.
In a keynote by TheAgentic, a GenAI company that is disrupting and challenging leading large language model companies, its Chief Business Officer Hans Sandhu spoke about how “Digital workers are going to eat SaaS” in a reference to rise of AI agents and traditional software as a service product giving way to each employee surrounded by autonomous digital agents working efficiently in unison.
Piyush then conducted a fireside chat with fellow IIT Delhi and Google alum Arvind Jain, Founder and CEO of Glean – a generative AI unicorn startup that has rapidly grown to $100M ARR and $4.6 Billion valuation. Glean is an AI-powered work assistant that works like “Google Search for business”. It safely and securely ensures confidentiality of company data while making the employees more productive. This conversation about the “State of AI” brought interesting facets of the whirlwind AI journey from its humble origins in research labs in the 1950s to the springs and winters of investments over decades, first commercialization efforts at IBM Watson, expansion via Google Transformers and current euphoria after ChatGPT release by OpenAI and the bullish future for AI adoption disrupting all industries and future of work. Arvind reassured that AI isn’t eliminating jobs—it’s amplifying productivity for those who embrace it. The biggest risk is not adapting to AI-powered workflows. This session provided nuggets of wisdom for students, professionals and entrepreneurs alike especially when Arvind closed with an open invite to join them as Glean is expanding.
Investor & serial entrepreneur, Dr Muddu Sudhakar then gave a high energy talk on “The AI Disruption & Opportunities” spanning Trump 2.0 policies, tariffs and impact on AI startups and investments. He was the founding CEO of Aisera and has sold several of his prior startups to bigger enterprise tech companies such as Splunk, VMWARE, McData/Brocade etc.
Responsible AI with privacy and security was the hot topic that Mihir Shukla, the CEO of Automation Anywhere and Debu Chaterjee, CEO of Konfer deliberated upon in a fireside chat. It was interesting to hear the perspectives from Robotic Process Automation industry creator Mihir and how entrenched they are in the productionization of agents while Debu Chatterjee is tackling the compliance angle all while rooting for responsible AI with privacy and security guardrails in place. Audience loved and engaged with the panelists freely and openly favoring inclusivity rather than deepening existing technical divides.
Industry use cases and applications of AI and GenAI was the next discussion moderated by AtomicWork CBO Lenin Gali and featured a Stanford professor and a researcher at SETI institute. Dr. Ashwin Rao, who has a financial services industry background and is also the chief AI officer at a startup, researches on Reinforcement Learning and teaches Mathematical Foundations of ML at Stanford University. Dr Uma Gayathri is a biotechnologist involved in drug discovery and related areas at the SETI Institute which interestingly also uses AI to search for aliens using AI. Thus, we had a good mix of industry use cases from service management to supply chain to drug discovery and medtech covered in an engaging discussion.
The final session of the day featured 3 inventors turned executives who also happen to have business acumen honed over their foundational careers initially at IBM – the original sponsor of ASEI Silicon Valley chapter. While Dr. Raj Yavatkar, an ASEI board member and sponsor is CTO at Juniper Networks, he was a longtime Technical Fellow at Intel and Google Cloud previously. Rama Akkiraju was an IBM Fellow at IBM Almaden Research Center for over a decade before becoming a VP at NVIDIA a few years ago. The youngest master inventor at IBM – Shikhar Kwatra has a portfolio of 500+ patents and has recently joined OpenAI after tenures at IBM and AWS. This power panel was the highlight of the “Career Readiness with AI & Agents” segment as they shared practical tips to survive and thrive in the upcoming Agentic AI disruption.
It was so inspiring to count almost 10 book authors and nearly 1000 patents collectively amongst all speakers assembled at this “AI Everywhere and all at Once” conference.
The interactive discussions continued to buzz throughout the nearly 4-hour conference, with an engaged audience networking, snapping selfies with speakers, and connecting with each other over high tea and snacks afterwards. Proposing the vote of thanks, board members and co-organizers Niharika Srivastav and Rakesh Guliani led the cake cutting celebrations marking ASEI’s 10th birthday in Silicon Valley to close out this exciting and impactful conference.
This Career Ready with AI & Agents conference showed the attendees the depth of AI/ML & Agentic AI experience and thought leadership among the Indian diaspora & ASEI members and gave a glimpse of the richness of its collaborations with national and international professional bodies and government agencies.
The American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) is a 501 c(3) not-for-profit organization that provides a platform for networking, career advancement, community service, mentoring, and technology exchange for professionals, students, and businesses in the United States and abroad. Members are guided by several objectives, including the creation of an open, inclusive, and transparent organization; providing positive role models, awarding scholarships, and remaining socially responsible. ASEI was founded in 1983 in Detroit, Michigan. Today, the organization has active professional chapters in Michigan, Southern California, Silicon Valley, Dallas and Washington, DC with more student chapters in various universities across the country.
For more information, or to join this professional body, visit its website.
