I am an AI Product leader with 7 years shipping agentic AI, conversational AI and NLP systems at consumer scale. Right now I lead Product and AI at The Good Bug, a Series B consumer health company, where I took the AI and Product org from 0 to 1.

My career started as a founder. I co-founded Apli.ai, which grew to 1,200+ institutions and 6.5L+ candidates before being acquired by Edulab. From there I went to Lenskart, where I shipped a GPT-4 powered eyewear recommendation engine and the Face Shape AI that lifted conversion 2.5x. That work taught me that the hardest part of AI shipping is rarely the model. It is deciding where the model should stop and a human should start.

How I think about AI products

The demo is easy now. The production version is a different sport, and the gap between the two is where most agent projects die.

  • Evals are infrastructure, not a chore. Faithfulness and relevancy harnesses gate every model swap. If you have not been running them before the change, you are guessing.
  • Model choice is a margin decision. Cost per resolution sits in the same spreadsheet as latency and headcount saved. Quality parity at lower cost is a product win.
  • Design the autonomy boundary first. Decide where the AI stops and a human starts before launch, not after the first angry customer.
  • Domain experts own quality. The team closest to the problem makes the best eval authors. Give them ownership, not a threat.

What I do day to day

Full stack AI ownership: model selection, retrieval and memory architecture, eval pipelines, inference cost, and the P&L behind all of it. I have run migrations across GPT-4o, Llama 3.2 and Mistral, and I build the teams and roadmaps that ship them.

Beyond the day job

  • Lead Instructor at Google for Startups, teaching AI product and prototyping to early-stage founders across India.
  • Visiting Faculty and speaker at IIT Bombay, Mesa School of Business, Masters’ Union and 20+ events on Gen AI and Product.
  • Open source contributor with merged PRs in repos like Ollama, LangChain, SWE-Agent, Deno and Jaeger.
  • Writing about agentic AI, evals and AI product strategy for ~24K LinkedIn followers, mostly D2C founders and PMs.

Currently

Based in Abu Dhabi. Building AI products, consulting through Nexhumans, and tinkering on side projects like an AI voice companion for elderly parents and a macOS workflow agent.

The fastest way to reach me is LinkedIn, or email at iitb.shivam@gmail.com.