Panel: Making AI Work in Real-World Engineering
About Topic
AI is rapidly entering the engineering workflow but making it work in real-world teams is far from straightforward.
This panel brings together engineering leaders who are moving beyond experimentation to practical adoption. The conversation will focus on where AI is delivering real value, where it falls short, and what it takes to integrate it into day-to-day engineering without compromising quality or control.
This panel will focus on the following areas:
- Where AI Truly Adds Value: Identifying use cases that translate into meaningful productivity and outcomes.
- Balancing Speed with Quality: Putting the right guardrails in place as AI becomes part of the delivery pipeline.
- Making Adoption Stick: Enabling teams to use AI effectively while maintaining engineering rigor and accountability.
Join us for a practical, no-hype discussion on what it really takes to make AI work in engineering.
Key Takeaways
1. Innovation creates noise, making obvious truths harder to see.
2. Question if a problem really needs GenAI or if existing tools suffice.
3. Understand GenAI’s true value beyond the hype.
4. Old and new solutions should complement, not replace, each other.
5. A real-world case study shows how GenAI can be used effectively.
6. Clarity comes from cutting through illusions and embracing simplicity.
About Panelists
Karthik Giritharan is a seasoned technology leader with over 22 years of experience building highly scalable systems that serve millions of users globally. He currently serves as Director of Engineering at Twilio, where he drives product roadmap definition and strategic technology investments for large-scale, high-impact business initiatives.
With deep technical expertise across AI/ML systems, mobile and web applications, and enterprise platforms, Karthik brings a strong foundation in architecture, design, and distributed systems. His work spans cloud computing, big data platforms, search technology, and information retrieval, with a focus on delivering robust, scalable solutions.
He has led cross-organizational initiatives such as building scalable systems for millions of users, and leadership across organizations like Google & Microsoft. He also has extensive experience managing and mentoring large global teams. Passionate about people development, Karthik has coached and guided emerging leaders across organizations and actively mentors early-stage startups.
Ankit Soni is the Head of QA at Emergent, where he leads quality engineering with a strong focus on AI-driven testing, automation strategy, and reliability engineering. With 11+ years of experience in SDET and quality leadership, he works on integrating AI into testing workflows to accelerate test creation, improve coverage, and enable faster software delivery.
Before joining Emergent, Ankit held engineering leadership roles at Amagi Corporation, Dunzo, Cars24, and Hike Messenger, where he built scalable automation frameworks and led high-performing SDET teams. He is passionate about the future of AI in testing, autonomous quality engineering, and developer-owned quality in modern engineering organizations.
Javed is a seasoned engineering leader with 20+ years of experience driving platform engineering and quality transformation across large-scale fintech systems. He currently leads Platform Engineering as a Service (PEaaS) at Comviva, scaling standardized CI/CD, DevSecOps, performance engineering, and environment reliability across multiple business verticals.
He has spearheaded key initiatives like the DFS Command Center, enabling real-time observability, release orchestration, and incident response across complex ecosystems. Known for his “velocity without compromise” mindset, Javeed blends platform thinking with hands-on execution—building AI-powered tools for test generation, regression analysis, and performance orchestration.
Previously, at Zeta, he led quality engineering for PayZapp and Pixel Credit Card, reducing test cycles by 60%, cutting production issues by 50%, and supporting scale to 14M+ users with $1B+ monthly transactions—all while maintaining a 4.5★ app rating.
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