Surabhi Sankhla is at the forefront of national artificial intelligence innovation. As AVP, she is instrumental in shifting the paradigm of how businesses and consumers interact with technology. Her career includes academic research, global consulting, hypergrowth startups, and Big Tech. Her commitment and vision to apply cutting-edge AI technology at scale to create powerful, life-changing digital products that millions can benefit from is unmatched. Sankhla’s passion and leadership capabilities have been the force behind major achievements in multiple industries, most notably banking, customer growth and engagement, cybersecurity and digital media.
Most recently, she organized a consortium of seven global IT vendors to collectively articulate a compelling product vision. Further, she led the introduction of Amp, an innovative new audio platform that allows anyone to host a live radio show right from their phone. These initiatives are a small window into how Sankhla is challenging the status quo of tech’s male-dominated heritage.
Pioneering Innovations in Audio and Banking
Sankhla’s impact is evident in her recent artistic work with Amp. This innovative audio platform is changing the ways people engage with their local live and free radio. She’s empowered users by allowing them to produce entire shows from their phones. This innovation has created thrilling new opportunities for creativity and expression in broadcasting. With this unique platform, radio becomes democratized, and those voices who might never have been heard before can speak to audiences around the world.
Beyond her work on audio, Sankhla has been at the forefront of revolutionizing the banking sector. Her digital transformation at the State Bank of India (SBI) – India’s largest bank – was unprecedented. This new Workday initiative placed a strong emphasis on talent management. She’s launched a new performance management platform to help with this called Saksham. This enabled them to track employee performance to monthly goals in real-time for all 170,000+ employees. This new approach did more than just make operations more efficient; it helped create a culture of accountability and progress within the organization.
By launching Saksham, Sankhla has done a great deal to blow up the old-school, banking-as-usual approach to performance management. Her forward thinking methods have raised the bar for every other institution to follow. Most importantly, it illuminates the ever-increasing need for data-driven decision making when it comes to managing employees.
Driving AI Adoption Across Enterprises
Sankhla’s impact hasn’t been limited to audio and banking. She’s played a key role in fueling AI adoption in many enterprises. During her tenure at YaloChat, an award-winning conversational AI startup, she spearheaded their award-winning customer engagement solutions. These solutions flourished on widely used consumer platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Her labor has resulted in a 30% increase in adoption of our tools. As a result, agent productivity has increased by 20%, even doubling customer satisfaction scores.
Sankhla’s entrepreneurial mindset helped him realize the importance of strategic thinking, which resulted in the idea for an AI-enabled lending platform that runs completely online. This first-of-its-kind digital platform significantly reduces transaction costs and risks across the lending chain while improving transparency and accessibility for borrowers. She has implemented more than 70 connectors to power the search experience. In tandem, she opened a pre-built agent marketplace for other innovators, helping her industry pivot far quicker toward secure, compliant and scalable AI use.
Her AI social impact initiatives at Uber further underscore her commitment to using AI for good. So she built a geographic and demographic AI-powered predictive system. Its intent is to protect financial institutions from default risk on car loan borrowers. This initiative is just another testament to her ability to use technology to tackle important challenges especially for populations that are often not served.
A Holistic Approach to AI Development
Sankhla’s career reflects a holistic approach to AI development through her exploration of three distinct domains: distributed sensor networks, computer vision, and security. Together, each of these domains arm us with the understandings necessary to build high adaptive, and ultimately intelligent architectures that can wrap around sophisticated business requirements.
Her unique experience empowers her to drive technological innovation as well as a significant business impact. Under her leadership, customer bases have grown 40% in the last two years. Simultaneously, she holds accountability for the efficacy of the deployed systems by demanding tangible outcomes. She’s passionate about building AI systems that are more than just cool technology but actually drive meaningful impact in users’ everyday lives.
