This Crazy Wave We’re Riding: Walmart’s Prakhar Mehrotra and the Ups and Downs of AI

Prakhar Mehrotra, vice president of machine learning at Walmart, shares his experience and how it prepared him to lead an AI team at a $500B retailer. Tasked with using AI to help with decision-making and enhance the business, Prakhar focuses on the technology that improves store merchandising (pricing, inventory management, financial planning). Before joining Walmart, Prakhar led data scientists and developed stochastic models at Uber and Twitter, where he learned how to move quickly and scale AI. (Fun fact: he even drove for Uber to better understand the driver experience — a perfect example of the role empathy plays in AI.) Hear Prakhar share stories on rallying and educating teams on AI, the relationship of AI and business intelligence, and what it means to make big bets in an enterprise setting. Read the episode transcript here. Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast betweenMIT Sloan Management Reviewand Boston Consulting Group, hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.   Guest bio: As vice president of machine learning, Prakhar Mehrotra is one of the top executives for AI and machine learning at Walmart and an internationally recognized leader and innovator in the field. He was recently awarded The Franz Edelman Medal by INFORMS for significant contributions in data science and advanced analytics. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and serves as a peer reviewer for top conferences and journals in AI, including the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference, the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials. We want to know how you feel about Me, Myself, and AI. Please take a short, two-question survey.