Manjari Agochiya

I started my career nearly 18 years ago as a full-stack developer, doing everything from front-end to back-end to database management, building databases, integrations, and APIs. But I realized that coding was a little bit of a lonely profession, and I'm generally a person who likes to be interacting with people. I wanted to move into a space where I could drive a larger impact - conflict resolution and driving large-scale impact is one of my strengths, and I realized I was thriving in that space. So I moved into program management and project management. In parallel, I've always been an entrepreneur. I was the first person in the Bay Area to start my own salon, and I also had a catering business which was fairly successful, though scaling was an issue since I was brand new to the U.S. and didn't have that many resources. I'm also a designer - I've done several interior design projects in the Bay Area, and I'm a jewelry designer who has designed for a lot of celebrities all across the world. My work was in nearly 700 different boutiques all over the world, all pre-COVID. I took a break from tech to raise my two kids while building my own businesses. Then in 2020, I went back to corporate and joined a huge customer engagement program at Wells Fargo where we built propensity models over trillions of data records to develop the next best conversation for customers across all banking channels. It was cutting edge, on the bleeding edge of technology, and operated like a little startup within Wells Fargo. That was my first segue into AI. From there, I moved to Five9 where I led a massive implementation changing how they charge customers and handle government-mandated taxes. It was a project that had been started 4 or 5 times and never saw the light at the end of the tunnel because it was so hard - we were redefining industry standards. I successfully delivered it in one year, and it got them $148 million that year. Then I came to Uber because what really got me about the company was that it created revenue flows for the average person - it was giving opportunity to an everyday person to create money for themselves. I started in HR tech implementing performance cycles, then moved to lead the most important program for Uber at that time - implementing Salesforce Media Cloud for Uber Ads, which was going to drive 1 billion ARR. The challenge was that Salesforce Media Cloud was brand new, so there was no industry expert who could help us. We became the experts, and in 7 months we rolled out the entire system. Today it's the key engine for Uber Ads. Then I led one of the largest cloud migrations at Uber - we migrated 2,000 assets across 29 organizational domains, 100+ stakeholders, and 4 data centers to the cloud. We studied 73 different tech stacks that had no owners, and even if one broke, that could have meant catastrophe for Uber's production systems. The overall impact I drove was $50 million in savings. After that success, I was given the Charter for AI. Nobody at Uber was really doing AI at that time. I was brought in to make the case for why we needed AI at Uber, and I set up 3 key programs - the AI Center of Excellence, AI strategy and operations, and executive insights and dashboards. My first mission was to understand where we were and take us to the next step. I brought the first tool to Uber, which was ChatGPT - a large implementation with 52,000 employees. I had to understand what it meant on the security risk side, budget risks, and align the vision of the team, the board, and data. Every day there are changes in the space of AI, and keeping a company the size of Uber up to speed with those changes, with the security risks and budget risks, is a task where I can barely sleep. In the space of AI strategy and operations, we have already evaluated 153 AI tools at Uber and experimented with them, and we've onboarded more than 45 or 46 tools ranging from agentic implementations to AI SaaS implementations to AI feature upgrades.