Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Beerud Sheth is the Co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, a Conversational AI unicorn headquartered in San Franciso. He is a successful two-time entrepreneur, investor and futurist. An IIT-B and MIT alumnus, he started his career working on Wall Street.

Beerud was the founder of Elance (now Upwork), a listed company on Nasdaq focused on the gig economy. Sheth, who comes with a track record of thinking far ahead, witnessed scepticism when he started Elance (now Upwork), a freelancer marketplace, in the early 90s. Elance was the quintessential poster boy of the gig economy (even before the phrase ‘gig economy’ became popular), leveraging the internet to create a global services market, powered by skilled freelancers. Beerud played a critical role at Elance as its founder, CEO and top executive till 2007 and later as a board member until the merger in 2014. The company was listed on NASDAQ in 2018.

Started in 2004 as a social network, Beerud has transformed Gupshup into a global leader in conversational engagement, with a strong AI-powered enterprise messaging platform. Gupshup’s brand philosophy stems from Beerud’s vision of a future where it's as easy for a customer to chat with a business as it is with a friend. Primarily focused on mobile-first markets, Gupshup is helping businesses unlock the power of conversational messaging, The tech platform powers over 6 billion messages per month. Across verticals, thousands of large and small businesses use Gupshup to build conversational experiences across marketing, sales and support. He now believes a few years from now, we’ll wonder how anyone did business without conversational messaging.

A profitable entity for the last few years, the company posted a revenue upwards of USD 100 mn in FY21. Gupshup already has a significant presence across India, Middle East and Africa, South East Asia, USA and Latin America. 80 of India’s 100+ unicorns have scaled their business better and faster with Gupshup. The company has raised upwards of $340 million at a $1.4 billion valuation from an industry-leading group of investors.

Sriram Thiagarajan has served as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Ancestry, since November 2020 and is responsible for ensuring Ancestry’s customers have the best product experience powered by its software products, advanced technologies and cloud platform. Sriram leads the overall vision, strategy and execution for all aspects of Ancestry’s product engineering and technology development including architecture, data science and product analytics, platform engineering, cloud operations, cyber security, corporate infrastructure and business systems. Sriram joined Ancestry in 2017 as Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer, and in December 2019 added the position of SVP Platforms. Sriram is a seasoned, growth minded technology executive with 20+ years of experience in scaling businesses and delivering growth by leveraging advanced technologies and software solutions at Fortune 500, Venture and Private Equity backed companies. Prior to Ancestry, Sriram served as SVP & Chief Information Officer at Infoblox, where he was responsible for Information Technology and Cybersecurity. Before Infoblox, Sriram was the Global Head of IT & Corporate Engineering at Twitter, where he helped architect and scale corporate infrastructure, enterprise applications and integrations to revenue and billing platforms, to help prepare the company for its IPO. Prior to Twitter, Sriram served as VP of Payments Infrastructure & Corporate Systems at Yahoo, and its premium services monetization platform and enterprise systems organizations. Earlier in his career, Sriram held leadership roles at Verisign and Ernst & Young. Sriram holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Florida Atlantic University, FL. and a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics & Communications Engineering from Anna University, India.

Sriram Subramanian is a Research Director within IDC AI and Automation Software Research group covering AI/ ML Lifecycle Management Software. His coverage on AI// ML Lifecycle management includes the tools, technologies, and end-user needs for building, training, tuning, running, and scaling the end-to-end life cycle for AI/ML solutions from experimentation to production. He advises vendors on product strategy, market positioning, and messaging; and buyers on implementing end to end scalable ML pipelines and AI-enabled digital transformation best practices to meet their business needs. Prior to joining IDC, Sriram was the founder and principal analyst at CloudDon, an independent market research and advisory services firm. He is a certified Yoga instructor passionate about teaching Yoga/ Healthier lifestyle to kids. He spends his free time playing cricket or outdoors with his kids.