Dr. Prasad Akella, founder and chairman of the Drishti board, is creating his third massive market category that uses technology to extend human capabilities. In the 1990s, Prasad led the General Motors team that built the world’s first collaborative robots (“cobots,” projected to be a $12B market by 2025). In the early 2000s, as cofounder of the social networking pioneer Spoke, he envisioned and helped build the first massive social graph — a category now worth trillions. Today, at Drishti, he is working to combine the cognition of AI with the flexibility of humans in factories in the form of AI-powered production. Prasad is based in Mountain View, California.
Alessya Visnjic is the CEO of WhyLabs, the AI Observability company building the interface between AI & human operators. Prior to WhyLabs, Alessya was a CTO-in-residence at the Allen Institute for AI, where she evaluated commercial potential for the latest AI research. Earlier, Alessya spent 9 years at Amazon leading ML adoption & tooling efforts. Alessya is also the founder of Rsqrd AI, a global community of 1,000+ AI practitioners who are making AI technology Robust & Responsible.