Rakesh Ranjan is currently an IBM executive leading a worldwide engineering team for IBM's Automation Software division. He grew up in a working-class family in the small town of Khagaria, 160 km from Patna in the Northern Indian State of Bihar. Both his parents were teachers — his father was a professor of Physics at Bhagalpur University and his mother taught Home Science at Girls High School. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering at the Institution of Engineers Chennai, then completed an apprenticeship in New Delhi at the prestigious CMC Limited, now part of TCS. Here, he learned the craft of systems and software programming while gaining practical experience working with some of India’s most significant institutions, including the National Institute of Immunology, Indian Railways, the India Meteorological Department, and the Reserve Bank of India.

This hands-on work deepened his interest in solving complex business and technical problems for large enterprises. In 1997, Rakesh returned to Chennai to take an application programming role at Pentafour. Around this time, the love of teaching Rakesh had absorbed growing up in a family of teachers prompted him to share his passion for entrepreneurship and technology. He taught technology to the working professionals seeking to leverage India’s mid-90s IT boom. He also established a software development and training center for Pentafour Software in Calcutta in 1997 before leaving for the United States in early 1998. Rakesh joined IBM — his dream company — in 2000, and immediately began a steady rise through the ranks of management. While working full-time in technical leadership positions, Rakesh earned a Master of Science degree in Software Engineering from San Jose State University in California. Shortly after graduating, Rakesh’s strongly-held belief in the value of teaching led him to accept an Adjunct Professorship of Computer Science at SJSU, a position he’s held for the past 10 years while also working at IBM. In 2004 Rakesh led IBM’s initiative to build data and analytics services in IBM Cloud, an important strategic move for IBM and for their most significant enterprise clients. While the IT industry was still puzzling over the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Rakesh was leading important initiatives at IBM to infuse AI and ML into enterprise-grade products that make users more efficient, give clients substantial cost savings, and position them to lead in their markets. To further understand the implementation of AI and ML and the attendant ethical and bias-related challenges, he studied AI and business strategy at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Rakesh credits his parallel careers in industry and academia with placing him at the forefront of AI and ML innovation

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