01
AI delivery
Led 20+ AI initiatives from use-case prioritisation to production rollout, managing estimates, staffing and budgets.
Karthick Raju
AI Delivery & Transformation Leader
AI delivery and enablement leader with 18+ years in software engineering and enterprise delivery. Led 20+ AI initiatives spanning agentic applications, small language model (SLM) fine-tuning and in-house alternatives to paid enterprise software. Enabled AI adoption across the software development lifecycle, personally training 500+ developers, primarily in AI-assisted engineering. Established a 20+ member AI Centre of Excellence. Combines executive stakeholder management, programme and budget management, and architecture oversight to guide teams from use-case prioritisation to production rollout.
Open to AI leadership roles in the UAE and across the GCC
At a glance
- Experience
- 18+ years in software and enterprise delivery
- AI focus
- Leading AI initiatives since 2023; full-time AI delivery since 2025
- Teams led
- Units of up to 80+ people; delivery across India, Denmark and Lithuania
- Industries
- Banking, manufacturing, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, water treatment
- Education
- B.Tech in Information Technology, plus three one-year postgraduate programmes
- Languages
- English
- Open to
- AI leadership roles in the UAE and the GCC; full-time, fractional or consulting
- Contact
- karthiaraju@gmail.com
What I lead
02
AI Centre of Excellence
Established a 20+ member AI Centre of Excellence for a client, working with the CEO and senior stakeholders.
03
AI-enabled engineering
Personally trained 500+ developers in AI-assisted coding, debugging, testing and documentation.
04
Enterprise and industrial delivery
Banking delivery at Danske Bank and Infosys; industrial projects in oil and gas, pharmaceuticals and water treatment with OEMs and their end customers.
Core capabilities
- AI delivery
- use-case discovery and prioritisation; delivery planning; PoC-to-production delivery; Agile Scrum; risk and dependency management.
- programme leadership
- scope and estimation; budgets and resource planning; executive and cross-functional stakeholder management; delivery governance.
- generative AI and agentic solutions
- large language model (LLM) integration; retrieval-augmented generation (RAG); embeddings and vector databases; API-based agent workflows; machine learning delivery.
- technical leadership
- solution design; model selection; SLM fine-tuning with LoRA/QLoRA; architecture reviews; AWS SageMaker and Azure-hosted LLM services.
- AI governance and operations
- response evaluation; data-access controls; human approvals; release readiness; monitoring of failures, latency, model usage and costs.
AI work, delivered
A few highlights, not a full list. I led these deliveries end to end and set the technical direction; the teams did the build. Two of them run fully offline or air-gapped to keep data confidential. Client and product names are withheld.
01
Small language models
Small language model for a manufacturer
Baselined a small language model (SLM) for a manufacturing-industry client, then trained it on the company's domain knowledge.
Engineering knowledge assistant on a fine-tuned small language model
Led delivery of a small language model fine-tuned on AWS SageMaker using LoRA and QLoRA, incorporating hardware-domain and proprietary product knowledge. In use by 50 users for technical queries and problem-solving, reducing reliance on senior specialists.
02
Multi-agent systems
Air-gapped multi-agent systems across 100+ manufacturing plants
Delivered multiple multi-agent systems for a manufacturing organisation with 100+ plants, managing the lifecycle of all equipment across all plants. The agents run completely inside an air-gapped system.
Hiring OS: 18 AI agents for hiring and talent management
An AI hiring operating system in which 18 specialised AI agents support hiring and talent management end to end: resume sourcing and ranking, round-the-clock AI voice interviews with standardised scoring, pipeline and applicant tracking, offer management, skill mapping, bench and workforce intelligence, and the employee lifecycle from onboarding to offboarding, with audit trails for AI decisions.
03
Enterprise chatbots
Offline enterprise chatbot for 1000+ users
Delivered multiple chatbot solutions. One, for a company with strict data-confidentiality needs, was built entirely offline: embedding was done completely offline, GPUs were purchased, and the LLM was self-hosted and optimised for 1000+ users. It works as an enterprise chatbot with AI governance.
04
Predictive ML
Predictive maintenance models for manufacturing
Delivered several predictive maintenance models for the manufacturing industry.
Manufacturing hazard management
Delivered a production solution using machine and sensor data to predict hazards, recommend actions and track alerts through corrective action. Used reinforcement learning to inform risk-reduction actions and adjust alert thresholds or priorities.
05
Vision
Vision OS: intelligence for factory cameras
Vision OS, a solution that adds intelligence to the cameras already in a factory. It works with compatible RTSP/ONVIF camera streams, processes video locally, and flags configured events for people to review: PPE exceptions, restricted-area crossings, occupancy thresholds, after-hours activity, loading and unloading counts, and vehicle-plate checks.
06
Build versus buy
Build versus buy: SaaS tools replaced by agentic systems
Drove build-versus-buy decisions for an organisation, replacing its small and medium SaaS tools with agentic systems so the company saves cost and time, and converting manual processes inside the company into applications with agents.
In-house HRMS replacing a paid tool
Delivered an in-house HRMS platform with AI assistance for 500+ employees and retired the previous paid tool. The full build cost, including development team time, was approximately six months of the former subscription fees.
AI-assisted bill of materials assessment
Led an AI-assisted application that reduced full-project bill of materials (BOM) review from 3-4 weeks to one day, identifying obsolete components and comparing alternatives by specification, configuration and price.
07
AI SDLC and enablement
Custom AI SDLC framework with 50+ agents
Introduced a custom AI SDLC framework and trained people working on different projects to use it. Developed 50+ custom agents in this framework.
AI SDLC enablement: 500+ developers trained
Personally trained 500+ developers, primarily in AI-assisted coding, debugging, testing and documentation, with additional batches covering AI applications, agents and delivery practices.
08
AI leadership
Establishing an AI Centre of Excellence
Leading AI delivery and transformation for a client, partnered with the CEO and senior stakeholders to establish an AI Centre of Excellence and build a 20+ member team.
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Education
An engineering degree, followed by three one-year postgraduate programmes.
B.Tech (Information Technology), Anna University
Jan 2004 - Jan 2008
Executive Program, IIM Bangalore
Jan 2019 - Jan 2020
PG Diploma in Product Management
Jan 2022 - Jan 2023
Business Fellowship
Jan 2023 - Jan 2024
Career
Jul 2025 - Present
AI Delivery and Transformation Leader
- Led a portfolio of 20+ AI initiatives across multiple client engagements, translating business needs into solution proposals and delivery plans. Guided engineering teams through implementation and managed estimates, staffing and budget tracking, with delivery responsibility for 40+ people on one engagement. The initiatives span agentic applications, small language model fine-tuning, enterprise automation and in-house alternatives to paid enterprise software.
- Leading AI delivery and transformation for a client, partnered with the CEO and senior stakeholders to establish an AI Centre of Excellence and build a 20+ member team.
- Personally trained 500+ developers, primarily in AI-assisted coding, debugging, testing and documentation, with additional batches covering AI applications, agents and delivery practices.
- Applied AI expertise to projects in oil and gas, pharmaceuticals and water treatment, working with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and OEM end customers and translating project requirements into AI use cases and delivery plans.
Sep 2023 - Jun 2025
Site Lead, Infosys
- Owned delivery and site/people leadership for a banking client unit spanning 5-7 Scrum teams. Delivered AI-powered business applications alongside conventional software.
- Co-led team expansion from 58 to 80+ people with account leadership and recruitment, owning delivery staffing needs and team readiness.
- Led AI initiatives for the business unit, forming an AI squad to evaluate, prioritise and implement proofs of concept (PoCs). Collaborated with the central AI team on implementation across the business unit.
Jan 2021 - Aug 2023
Delivery Manager, Danske Bank
- Led digital customer-facing channels across multiple Scrum teams comprising 40+ people. Wider India delivery responsibilities covered around 50 cross-functional team members.
- Owned delivery of legacy-system retirement and business-critical forms migration, realising approximately US$1 million in annual maintenance and support savings. Led planning, teams, dependencies, stakeholder coordination and migration.
- Digitised estate-document submission using e-ID and e-signatures, reducing the time customers needed to complete and submit documents from approximately two weeks to two days. Enabled largely remote completion or a single branch visit.
May 2018 - Dec 2020
Engineering Manager, Danske Bank
- Established an India development team of 20+ developers and expanded responsibility to global delivery for 35+ developers across India, Denmark and Lithuania.
- Led A/B testing and UX improvements that increased qualified home-loan leads passed to sales or advisory teams in Denmark by 30%.
- Led a natural-language form-building pilot that enabled the team to create 40% more forms in the same amount of time, with testing by selected business users.
- Strengthened release-readiness checks, automated testing, code/design reviews and quality dashboards across Scrum teams, improving production quality and release stability.
Aug 2015 - Apr 2018
Project Manager, Danske Bank
- Modernised existing banking applications while retaining legacy systems, owning end-to-end delivery and introducing automated task ordering and prioritisation for business analysts. Led implementation of a test framework across the organisation. Led the conversion of a customer-facing website to a content management system (CMS), coordinating requests from multiple stakeholders.
Dec 2013 - Jul 2015
Lead Consultant (Danske Bank account), ITC Infotech
Jun 2011 - Dec 2013
Senior Web Developer, Replicon
Sep 2008 - May 2011
Software Engineer, TEKsystems
Tools and techniques
- Agents and orchestration
- LangGraph
- LangChain
- LlamaIndex
- Hermes Agent
- RAG and vector search
- Pinecone
- pgvector
- Chroma
- Redis Vector Search
- Self-hosted models
- vLLM
- Ollama
- Fine-tuning and ML
- LoRA
- QLoRA
- Reinforcement learning
- Evals and observability
- LangSmith
- Langfuse
- Ragas
- Guardrails and governance
- Guardrails AI
- Cloud
- AWS SageMaker
- Azure-hosted LLM services
Common questions
- Who is Karthick Raju?
- AI delivery and enablement leader with 18+ years in software engineering and enterprise delivery. Led 20+ AI initiatives spanning agentic applications, small language model (SLM) fine-tuning and in-house alternatives to paid enterprise software. Enabled AI adoption across the software development lifecycle, personally training 500+ developers, primarily in AI-assisted engineering. Established a 20+ member AI Centre of Excellence. Combines executive stakeholder management, programme and budget management, and architecture oversight to guide teams from use-case prioritisation to production rollout.
- What kind of AI work has Karthick Raju led?
- Highlights include small language models, multi-agent systems, enterprise chatbots, predictive ml, vision, build versus buy, ai sdlc and enablement. For example: Delivered multiple multi-agent systems for a manufacturing organisation with 100+ plants, managing the lifecycle of all equipment across all plants. The agents run completely inside an air-gapped system.
- Which industries has he worked in?
- His delivery experience spans banking (Danske Bank and an Infosys banking client), oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, water treatment and manufacturing.
- How can I check whether he fits my role or project?
- Paste your job description or project brief into the fit check on this page. It returns an evidence-based alignment estimate, with the evidence behind every requirement and the gaps stated plainly. You can also ask the AI guide questions without a job description.
- Is he open to roles in the UAE and the Gulf?
- Yes. Open to AI leadership roles in the UAE and across the GCC: the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. For relocation and timing, ask the AI guide on this page or contact him directly.
- Is he open to consulting or fractional work?
- Yes. He is open to AI leadership roles and to fractional or consulting engagements.
- How do I contact Karthick Raju?
- By email at karthiaraju@gmail.com or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthick-raju. His resume can be downloaded from this page.
Contact
Open to AI leadership roles in the UAE and across the GCC, and to fractional or consulting engagements.