Nikhil Pentapalli - Crafting a Successful AI Career & Transitioning Research into Scalable AI Produc

In this talk, Nikhil Pentapalli, a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Adobe, will share practical strategies for building a high-impact career in AI/Machine Learning. Drawing from his journey across academia, applied research, and industry product teams, Nikhil will explore how to navigate key decisions, grow technical depth, and shift from research prototypes to scalable real world AI systems including the agentic world. Whether you’re a student, researcher, or early-career ML engineer, this session will give you actionable insights on aligning your work with business outcomes, creating leverage through systems thinking, and building a long-term career in the fast-evolving AI landscape. Nikhil Pentapalli is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Adobe, where he specializes in document intelligence, generative AI, and large-scale NLP systems. With a background in both academic research and product engineering, Nikhil has led end-to-end development of AI-powered features from proof-of-concept to production. He is passionate about mentoring aspiring ML professionals and building systems that bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and real-world product impact. Nikhil has spoken at multiple conferences, podcasts, and internal technical forums, including O’Reilly events, where he shares insights on applied machine learning, generative AI workflows, and research-to-product transitions. Nikhil holds a Master’s in Computer Science from the University at Buffalo. This session is brought to you by the Cohere Labs Open Science Community - a space where ML researchers, engineers, linguists, social scientists, and lifelong learners connect and collaborate with each other. We'd like to extend a special thank you to Vaibhavi Singh, Arya Suneesh and Prahitha Movva Leads of our ML Industry group for their dedication in organizing this event. If you’re interested in sharing your work, we welcome you to join us! Simply fill out the form at https://forms.gle/ALND9i6KouEEp