The American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) convened an AI Summit on Feb. 15 highlighting digital workers, advancements in hot technologies in AI, GenAI, Agentic AI and pathways to responsible AI.
The summit celebrating the 10th anniversary of ASEI’s Silicon Valley chapter at University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) Silicon Valley campus saw a number of academics, researchers, and industry innovators covering a wide variety of topics in the field of Artificial Intelligence, according to a media release.
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 and ASEI members and gave a glimpse of the richness of its collaborations with national and international professional bodies and government agencies, it stated.
READ: Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas stuck in green card backlog (January 31, 2025)
After a warm welcome by co-hosts UCSC Dean PK Agarwal andASEI Silicon Valley President Piyush Malik, 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.
US Congressman from California Rep. Ro Khanna in a video message said 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, Hans Sandhu, Chief Business Officer of TheAgentic, a GenAI company that is disrupting and challenging leading large language model companies, spoke about how “digital workers are going to eat SaaS” — a reference to rise of AI agents and traditional software as service products giving way to each employee surrounded by autonomous digital agents working efficiently in unison.
Malik, founder of TheDigitalAgenda, conducted a fireside chat about the “State of AI” with fellow IIT Delhi and Google alum Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean, an AI-powered work assistant that works like “Google Search for business,” and ensures confidentiality of company data while making the employees more productive.
Their conversation brought out interesting facets of the whirlwind current euphoria after ChatGPT release by OpenAI and the bullish future for AI adoption, disrupting all industries and future of work. Jain 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.
Investor & serial entrepreneur, Dr Muddu Sudhakar, founding CEO of Aisera gave a high energy talk on “The AI Disruption & Opportunities” spanning Trump 2.0 policies, tariffs and impact on AI startups and investments.
Responsible AI with privacy and security was the hot topic that Mihir Shukla, CEO of Automation Anywhere and Debu Chaterjee, CEO of Konfer deliberated upon in a fireside chat.
Industry use cases and applications of AI and GenAI was the next discussion moderated by AtomicWork CBO Lenin Gali and featured Stanford professor Dr. Ashwin Rao and Dr Uma Gayathri, a biotechnologist involved in drug discovery and related areas at the SETI Institute which interestingly also uses AI to search for aliens using AI.
READ: Apple CEO comes out in support and praise for DeepSeek (January 31, 2025)
The final session of the day featured three 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.
Dr. Raj Yavatkar, CTO at Juniper Networks, Rama Akkiraju, VP at NVIDIA and Shikhar Kwatra with a portfolio of 500+ patents, shared practical tips to survive and thrive in the upcoming Agentic AI disruption in the “Career Readiness with AI & Agents” segment.
Co-organizers Niharika Srivastav and Rakesh Guliani proposed a vote of thanks.