Behind the Growth
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Behind the Growth
Praveen Kumar on Taking AI From Demo to Production
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Praveen Kumar, Sr. Director, Data & AI at mobileLIVE, joins host Imran Mian on Behind the Growth for a candid conversation about why so many enterprise AI initiatives stall before they ever generate business value, and what it actually takes to move models from pilot to production.
Drawing on two decades of leading data and AI transformations across Fortune 500 banks, telcos, and retailers, Praveen opens with a story from a previous role: a team running pilots for over a year with nothing in production. His unlock wasn't pitching AI but asking a business partner which problem they'd want solved by tomorrow. From there, he reframes the AI conversation entirely, arguing that the model is roughly ten percent of the equation, with infrastructure and engineering carrying the other ninety.
The discussion moves into the seven skills required to operationalize AI, with observability called out as the most underestimated (because AI fails silently, not loudly). Praveen unpacks how resiliency, circuit breakers, and bounded tool-calling protect production systems in regulated industries like banking, and why weak data becomes more dangerous, not less, in the hands of AI. He makes the case for production-grade data products, product-owner thinking over a purely technical mindset, and treating AI not as a tool rollout but as an operating model change.
He closes with a sharp piece of advice for first-time AI leaders: start with business friction, not AI excitement, and build the trust bridge between demo and dependable system. That's what separates the eleven percent who scale from everyone still admiring their pilots.
Praveen weighs in on:
- Why pilots stall in purgatory
- The most underestimated AI skill
- Data as production-grade product
- Product thinking over technical mindset
- AI as an operating model shift
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