Debu Chatterjee, CEO Konfer and Mihir Shukla, CEO Automation Anywhere discussing responsible AI and engaging the audience. ALL PHOTOS: ASEIThe American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEIUSA.org), a non-profit founded in 1983, convened an AI Summit February 17, 2025, in Santa Clara, California, attended by a number of academics, researchers, authors, speakers and industry innovators.
Held at the UCSC Silicon Valley campus, the event also marked the 10-year anniversary of ASEI’s Silicon Valley chapter.
The Conference covered a wide variety of subjects in Artificial Intelligence.
India’s Consul General in San Francisco Dr Srikar Reddy addressing the ASEI audience at AI meeting, Feb. 15, 2025. PHOTO: ASEIAfter a warm welcome by co-hosts UCSC Dean P.K. 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. Reddy alluded to Prime Minister Modi’s recent speeches at AI Action Summit in Paris and recent visit to the US.
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 Malik, who has been working in the Data & AI domain for over 3 decades.
Congressman Ro Khanna, D-California, delivered a video message 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.
R to L: Dr Raj Yavatkar, CTO Juniper and ASEI Board member moderating discussion between Rama Akkiraju, NVIDIA VP and Shikhar Kwatra of OpenAI, Feb. 15, 2025. PHOTO: ASEIIn a keynote by Chief Business Officer of TheAgentic 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 products giving way to each employee surrounded by autonomous digital agents working efficiently in unison.
Malik 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. The 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 current euphoria after ChatGPT release by OpenAI and the bullish future for AI adoption disrupting all industries and future of work. Jain reassured the gathering 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, he said.
Investor and serial entrepreneur, Dr Muddu Sudhakar gave a talk on “The AI Disruption & Opportunities” spanning Trump 2.0 policies, tariffs and impact on AI startups and investments.
In a lively discussion with attendees, Mihir Shukla, the CEO of Automation Anywhere and Debu Chaterjee, CEO of Konfer, in a fireside chat, deliberated upon AI with privacy and security.
A discussion on “Industry use cases and applications of AI and GenAI” was moderated by AtomicWork CBO Lenin Gali and featured a Stanford professor and a researcher at SETI Institute, Dr. Ashwin Rao, and Dr Uma Gayathri, a biotechnologist involved in drug discovery and related areas at the SETI Institute
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. They were 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, an IBM Fellow at IBM Almaden Research Center for over a decade before becoming a VP at NVIDIA a few years ago; and the youngest master inventor at IBM – Shikhar Kwatra, who has a portfolio of 500+ patents and has recently joined OpenAI after tenures at IBM and AWS.“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,” organizers said in the press release. Indian American engineers discuss advancements in hot technologies
