NVIDIA’s Rama Akkiraju on Building the Right AI Infrastructure for Enterprise Success - Ep. 255

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. As AI continues to evolve, organizations need to think carefully about how best to develop and integrate scalable AI systems within their existing infrastructure. This is where the AI platform architect becomes so important. It's a role that's part technical expert, part strategic thinker, and critical to driving AI innovation and transformation within a company. With us to explore the importance of the AI platform architect and AI infrastructure in the enterprise more broadly is Rama Akiraju. Rama is VP of IT for AI and ML at NVIDIA, where she leads AI and ML initiatives for enterprise use cases. She's a former IBM fellow who worked on the Watson artificial project as part of her two plus decades at IBM. Rama has also been honored as a top 20 woman in AI by Forbes and a team for AI by Fortune magazine among numerous other accolades. Rama, it's a pleasure to have you here. Welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. Thank you so much, Noah. Thanks for having me here. Thank you for taking the time. So maybe you could set the stage for the audience by talking a little bit about what your role is. What do you oversee? What are your teams working on? And what are some of these enterprise use cases that you're leading the delivery of? Sure. I lead the enterprise AI and automation team at NVIDIA, where I drive AI adoption across, the company, enhancing developer productivity, IT operations, and enterprise workflows. So as part of this effort, my team and I build chatbots, co pilots, AI agents for improving our own employee productivity and developer productivity. We We also build, AI platforms that are enterprise grade for everyone in the company to use. So let me give you a couple of examples of the kind of things that we develop. There is one that sits on our intranet, what is called as NVInfo, a chatbot that answers employees' questions. I think many things related to the company, internal documentation, company policies, and financial information, and and so on. And, then we build, chatbots and copilots that sit within our developer productivity tools like our bug management tools. And we also work with our sales supply chain, marketing, finance, and other teams to help them build their own transformation AI projects and such using the platforms that our team builds. We built a generative AI platform in the company, and everybody can use it both with APIs and low code, no code type of interfaces to build their own generative AI solutions and deploy them And various other use cases. And you've been with NVIDIA just about three years now? Not yet. Two and a half. Two and a half. And so prior to that, you were at IBM for quite a while and worked on, some amazing things. Can we take just a second and maybe speak to your background …