[00:00:00 – 00:00:07] Nitin Bajaj

Welcome to the Industry Show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj.

And joining me today is Dr. A. K. Pradeep. Welcome on the show.

[00:00:07 – 00:00:09] A. K. Pradeep

Thank you, Nitin. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:00:10 – 00:00:13] Nitin Bajaj

And let’s start with a big question. Who is Pradeep?

[00:00:13 – 00:01:16] A. K. Pradeep

That’s an existential question, right? Who am I? I think our ancestors wondered about that for a very long time. I would say that I’m one lucky human being. And that’s all there is. If I do something in life, I have a PhD from Berkeley.

I was at G’s R&D. I’ve got a boatload of patents at lower 90. I’ve written four books. I’ve built two companies that were acquired. I’m building my third gen AI company. But if you ask after all of this, who is Pradeep? I would say, I don’t know.

I still feel like the 17 year old who walked into engineering college in southern India with eyes full of wonder. Hoping to find myself and figure who I am someday. That someday has arrived and I think I’m as ignorant or as filled with wonder as I was when I was 17. I don’t know who Pradeep is and if you do find out, please let me know.

[00:01:18 – 00:01:37] Nitin Bajaj

I love the humility. I love the sense of humor and you’re amazing and I’m looking forward to unpacking a little bit of that mystery here in the next few minutes. Let’s talk about sensory AI. Tell us why, after having done all these wonderful things that you mentioned, why do this?

[00:01:38 – 00:01:50] A. K. Pradeep

It’s a great question, right? It’s the same question any surfer who has gone surfing on a big wave. If you ask him, you just surfed a whole bunch of waves. Why would you want to surf the next one?

[00:01:50 – 00:01:50] Nitin Bajaj

Right?

[00:01:51 – 00:04:15] A. K. Pradeep

The answer is, I have to. I have to. So when I was 17, I started the Society for systems, cybernetics and artificial intelligence in or where I was an undergraduate student.

And that was in 1981-82. And it is 2025, almost close to 40 years since then. And that little thing that I dreamed about and was passionate about has become an extraordinary powerful wave. Now, I had built surfboards using neuroscience. So my previous companies were all neuroscience companies. The one that was acquired by Nielsen was Neurofocus, where I analyzed brains of people as they reacted to advertising, marketing and messaging using dense array EEG. And this seemed to be almost the perfect surfboard to surf the wave of GenAI.

And that’s what Sensori is. The only company in the planet that basically uses neuroscience coupled with GenAI. The only company in the planet that uses non-conscious data. We are the world’s largest collection of non-conscious data. There is data consumed by the non-conscious mind.

Why is it important? 95% of human decision-making isn’t the non-conscious. So you’ve been talking to me or hearing me talk for a couple of minutes. You’ve already decided whether you love me or not. It’s game over, over, right? So because our decisions and desires sit 95% in the non-conscious, and there is no company in the planet that understands that and uses that. So it seemed to be so perfect to take something extraordinarily beautiful, which is an understanding of neuroscience and the non-conscious mind, and scale it and couple it with generative AI.

So Sensori was meant to be. It had to be. I just happen to be an instrument that brings it to life, but it’s the natural evolution of what generative AI is.

[00:04:17 – 00:04:40] Nitin Bajaj

Love that. Give us a sense of the impact it has already created, and I know this is the very early stages, both for Sensori but also the wave of AI in its most recent form. So give us a sense for what kind of impact Sensori has already created and what do you vision in the next even few months?

[00:04:40 – 00:10:43] A. K. Pradeep

It is. It’s one great democratization, right? In the sense that big companies were the only ones that used to be able to create innovations. To create great marketing, to create great messaging, to create pricing. They had economists sit around and think about pricing. And they had amazing marketeers think about promotions. And so all of those things that only big companies can do and small companies would always feel amateurish, would feel, my God, if only we had the resources that these big boys and girls have, what could we do?

The great equalizer is here. Because through sensory. ai and our blend of unique neuroscience and generative AI, we’ve been able to equip anybody, whether you’re a big brand, a little brand, whether you want to create an innovation that mesmerizes the human mind, that just completely blows you away, without asking the consumer 10 million times, oh, will you please articulate your unarticulated desires and needs? What kind of a dumb question is that? Steve Jobs used to say, Don’t ask your consumer what they want. They don’t know what they want. Yet the same consumer who could not articulate what they wanted looked at an iPod and they said, oh my God, how did you know I needed that?

How is it that you couldn’t articulate what you wanted, yet you could recognize what you craved? How funny is that? So Sensori creates an impact by, again, we work with big brands and little brands and anybody that wants to make a difference in the world and make all the tool sets that would enable you to have a big impact Whether you are a big person or a small person, it democratizes the power of imagination. So we do that for product innovation, for branding, for packaging, for pricing and promotion. But most recently, something new has happened in the last three months. What has happened? It used to be that in the old days of search engine optimization, you would create a little product, then you would jam every possible keyword you could think about, including your unborn child’s middle name, and put it in there and hope somebody or an engine would take notice of it.

These days, in the last three months in particular, anytime you go to a, I don’t know, Google or a Perplexity or a ChatGPT and search for, hey, you know, what will be good milk that I can drink where I’m not even if I am lactose intolerant, it really won’t kill me. It’ll just on the borderline, it’ll be relatively safe for me. Now, if you pose a question like that, the first thing that responds is Google AI overview. The large language models rally in immediately and they understand the context of why I am asking the question, what my fears may be. Understand that. And respond intelligently. And a product or two shows up out there.

I tell my clients, if today your product does not show up in the LLMs overview, you’re as good as dead on arrival. It’s not search engine optimization. It is LLM love. The large language model love you. So this was our own NVIDIA moment. Jensen Huang one day, he was making chips to make to enable everybody play video games better. One day he woke up and he said, you know what the hell?

These same chips that I’m using to help make this Call of Duty play better, I could use to get the LLMs to train themselves. And overnight, a trillion dollar company was born. Kudos to him and a whole bunch of my buddies that used to work there. They are awesome. Now we had our own little Nvidia moment.

What is it? It’s very simple. All of my tools in neuroscience were generally used to persuade and seduce the human mind into buying products and services. That was the field of neuromarketing we co-created. Now the LLM today resembles a human brain. When you talk to a chat GPT or a Google, it feels like you’re talking to a real smart person. And we realized, oh my God, all the tricks of Neuroscience we learned to persuade and seduce the human mind work with the llm.

So instead of jamming every known search term into your product, if you could intelligently write your product description in a manner that the LLM can understand, appreciate and love you. Then in the AI overview of a Perplexity or a ChatGPT or a Google, your product may show up.

If not, it won’t. So the same danger that the old world of SEO everybody went through, has come back a full circle. It is about LLM love. It’s not taking 10,000 SEO terms and jamming it in the metadata pertaining to your product. It must be structured differently. We know how. And so that’s part of Sensori’s magic in unleashing neuroscience with GenAI that has captured the attention of many of my clients.

[00:10:45 – 00:11:00] Nitin Bajaj

Super exciting and congratulations. Now, as you’re doing this, this is happening at a massive scale. I would love for you to highlight amongst the many challenges, the one that stands out to you the most.

[00:11:03 – 00:11:08] A. K. Pradeep

In the world of AI, I’m assuming you’re asking in the world of Gen AI in particular, right?

[00:11:08 – 00:11:17] Nitin Bajaj

That or even as you look at this as an opportunity or a business or the landscape, What is the one thing that stands out for you?

[00:11:17 – 00:15:41] A. K. Pradeep

It’s very simple. I don’t know where we are going with this, to be honest. I’ve written books on AI. The latest came out last September, not this September 2024, Neuro AI. We speak about this all around the world. I run a cutting-edge company, but I’m clueless. I’m clueless and I will tell you why.

I have patterns, as I said, over 90, I cannot innovate as fast or as brilliantly as my algorithms. I’ve taught them how to innovate. They come up with mind-blowing innovations. Anytime I try to be creative in my marketing, messaging, or anything, I can’t even remotely compete with my algorithms, right? I’ve always thought that my contribution and purpose in the world was that I was a creative problem solver, that I would think about things differently, and anything that comes from my mind would be creative, would solve a problem, and be relatively unique. Now, I can tell you, I am nothing compared to all my algorithms. So I really don’t know what the hell am I supposed to do?

What is my purpose? What am I offering the universe? Every day when I wake up, is it just so that I could go close a few deals and run my company and do a few things here and there that are I would say more directly creative because I really don’t know what my purpose is anymore. And I must say that this is just the beginning of the wave of AI. Just the beginning. I feel rudderless and purposeless even in these early stages. And I’m supposed to be somebody who is at the forefront of this revolution.

Pushing the wheel of progress forward with a whole bunch of other people. And as I push that wheel forward, I don’t know what I’m pushing it towards.

I really don’t. I must say that the biggest challenge for me is not so much about creating products and services and everything. It’s about a complete confusion an extraordinary mystery of what the hell I’m supposed to do. I honestly do not know. It doesn’t scare me, it doesn’t concern me, but it intrigues me. It intrigues me in the following sense. When I wrote my PhD dissertation in ’92 at Berkeley in nonlinear control systems, I came up with a conjecture among the numerous theorems and proofs that I had in my thesis.

There was one thing that was vexing that I knew to be true, but I couldn’t prove it. I could not for the life of me prove it. So I asked my PhD advisor, Professor Shankar Sastri, whether I should include it in my dissertation. He said, you don’t have to. You don’t have to prove it. It’s okay. There’s the rest of this stuff there.

But I felt, you know what? I wanted to include it so that somebody later may pick it up and solve it. Some graduate student may pick it up and do something with it. So what I did, this was in ’92, May. So out of curiosity, when ChatGPT 5 came about, I picked up my old dissertation that was lying around. I picked up the conjecture that I could not prove, entered it into ChatGPT, GPT 5, and I said, I would love for you to verify it and to give me a theoretical and a mathematical proof of it and provide a simulation as well. In one and a half minutes it was done.

One and a half minutes. There was a theoretical proof that was correct. Simulation was done and a conjecture was proven. It is no longer a conjecture. It’s done in one and a half minutes. Right.

[00:15:42 – 00:15:42] Nitin Bajaj

So.

[00:15:44 – 00:18:08] A. K. Pradeep

I now look at this and I say, listen, I may have found my perfect colleague, my adventurer, into realms of mathematics and physics that I always felt that I had some wisdom or understanding, some imagination, but maybe lacked the theoretical knowledge to bravely venture forth. I have found a buddy. Microsoft calls it a co-pilot. I’m not entirely sure that I’m capable of flying that plane.

But I have an awesome body. And you think of Big Bang Theory and Sheldon Cooper is so knowledgeable that having Sheldon around makes you boldly venture into theoretical things that you wouldn’t dream about. I think I found my Sheldon Cooper, right? So I found a body with whom I could think in domains that I have, whether it’s physics or mathematics or anything, art or literature, I could think creatively and partner with this wonderful entity and explore. So one of the ways in which I’m slowly finding purpose is that I’ve become an intellectual adventurer again. I boldly am ready to venture into things that I knew nothing about but was always curious and passionate about. I have somebody who can explain to me things in manners I will understand, who keeps a record of every single puzzle that I puzzled about and knows how to frame it in ways that I can understand.

So, I feel emboldened that while on the one hand, I have lost my sense of purpose of what I contribute to the universe, my own sense of being an adventurer, an explorer into domains I know nothing about, I feel like the Viking on a long boat, all right? And I have my body with me, and I think we’re gonna go and to strange places we have never gone before.

And that excites me. So I’ve lost purpose on the one hand. I’ve gained a sense of adventure on the other hand. And that is where I find myself.

[00:18:09 – 00:18:39] Nitin Bajaj

Love that. And as we venture into the future, I want to pause and have you reflect in to the history and ask you to share two moments from your life and career. One where things did not work out as you had expected. There was disappointment, failure, lessons, and another moment where things exceeded your own expectations. And there was success beyond your imagination.

[00:18:40 – 00:22:59] A. K. Pradeep

It’s a great question. Yeah, I would say that on the success front, meaning I grew up in a as many Indians do in humble backgrounds with dreams of accomplishment and basically letting our imaginations take flight and hopefully to have a small modicum of success in life. And as I began this conversation, it’s about luck. There are enough people in the Silicon Valley who are so smart, who work so hard, who are brilliant ideas. Some of us who have had a small modicum of success have just been lucky. I have no advice to offer anybody. I can’t pontificate nor can I offer expert wisdom because I can comfortably say I have none to offer.

It’s just luck. And for every one of us here in the Silicon Valley who has had a small modicum of luck, there are a thousand times more of us in India who are smarter than we ever will be, who work harder than we ever do, who are burning with more ambition that may ever have. So any of us that have done anything is because of luck. So I would say to you that what has gone in my life beyond my wildest imaginations has been a small modicum of success in my professional career as an engineer, as an entrepreneur, and as somebody who built dreams of technologies that were in my life, I’ve always created fields that never existed. It’s not that I became very good in an existing field. I’ve always opened up new fields that did not exist. With Bode Vantage, I created corporate governance portals, and nobody thought that’ll work.

With Neurofocus, I brought neuroscience to marketing. Nobody thought it would work. With Sensori. Ai, I’m bringing neuroscience and gen AI together to revolutionize the innovations, fragrances and flavors, and nobody thought it will work, right? So in that sense, those have been my, what I call, success beyond my wild imaginations. Attributable all to luck in my professional career. If you ask me what my greatest challenges and perhaps disappointments have been in my personal life, meaning I’m still single, I’ve had amazing kids, adult kids who are doing PhDs in neuroscience and building companies, et cetera.

And so in that sense, it has been an extraordinary joy to see everybody go. And do beautiful things. But if I was to be candid, I would say, my God, the place where if I was at the pearly gates or I was in front of the God of Time, Yama with his danda, standing there asking, okay, what could you have done better? I would very comfortably say, I think maybe in my romantic life, I could have done a heck of a lot better. I think that if I was to take an unbiased, hard look at life, I would say college prepared me, my teachers prepared me to be a good engineer, maybe a good entrepreneur, and a guy that can build intellect and build companies and write books and patents. I think I was prepared. I’m not sure I was really prepared other than The Indian epics, having a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in one hand and the Kamasutra in the other, does not prepare any of us for what follows.

So I would say I was woefully unprepared to be a stunning success in my personal life. The rest of my life is an instruction. I think I am an experiment in progress and hopefully a good one.

[00:23:01 – 00:23:26] Nitin Bajaj

Well, I have always enjoyed your honesty, your brutal honesty and pretty good sense of self assessment. And Pradeep, stay the way you are. You’re awesome and you’re amazing. And there’s still a lot of time for you to make up on what you think you haven’t been your best at. So sending positive vibes your way on that front as well.

[00:23:27 – 00:23:28] A. K. Pradeep

Appreciate that, Ajit.

[00:23:30 – 00:23:48] Nitin Bajaj

Now, you are a very well-read person. If I have to ask you to share one book or one podcast that you would want to recommend and feel free to cheat and include your own books in that list or a podcast, which is the one you would recommend?

[00:23:49 – 00:27:24] A. K. Pradeep

It’s very straightforward in my mind, meaning there are only Two things I recommend. One, of course, is the Prophet by A. K. Pradeep. The Prophet in my mind is, I would love a day when generative AI can write something as profound and as meaningful as Khalil Gibran, all right? Or Yeats when he says, For I being poor have only my dreams. I spread my dreams underneath your feet.

Tread softly, because you tread upon my dreams. Those are lines that are evocative. Maybe generative AI will come close to it. But in my mind, Khalil Gibran’s the Prophet is a distillation of everything beautiful to think about, to reflect and to live life by. And so I find it very important, an extraordinary book. And it’s not that any of our great Indian epics are any less. They are profound and beautiful and meaningful, but they’re also very big.

So I find that the Prophet to be a relatively slim volume and given my challenges in sitting and reading anything unless it’s and bullet points, I find the Prophet to be as close to beauty, knowledge, wisdom, samarized so gorgeously. So it’s a book I would strongly, I wouldn’t recommend my book to anybody. You can always welcome to read it. But no, that is one thing. The second one I would recommend, it’s my hero, Professor Richard Feynman, right? Richard Feynman. He is a human being after whom I have tried to model everything in my life.

A human of boundless curiosity, endless wisdom, especially with an utter desire to simplify things, to translate things and put them in a manner that everyone can receive it, can connect to the wisdom, be enriched by it. At the same time, he doesn’t come out and is boastful of what he knows. In fact, for all you know, he’s the kind of guy you would sit and have a beer with and chit chat about life. And he would share with you more of what he doesn’t know and what he finds so joyfully interesting in, and therefore in the process make you curious, make you interested, make you passionate about wanting to decipher the puzzles of life and the puzzles of the universe. And so Feynman’s lectures in physics, be they the book or be they those extraordinary videos that are on YouTube of him talking about in Cornell or whatever, it’s just a brilliant mind laying bare and laying open the secrets of the universe, but in a manner that everyone can understand, appreciate, and want to know more. So in my mind, if I was to host a dinner party and I would invite two guests, one would definitely be Khalil Gibran and the other one would be Professor Richard Feynman.

[00:27:25 – 00:27:36] Nitin Bajaj

Love that. Thank you for sharing those recommendations and I agree with you. Now, on to my favorite part of the show, Pradeep, I would love for you to share your one-line life lessons with us.

[00:27:39 – 00:31:03] A. K. Pradeep

Only ChatGPT can give you really pithy one-line life lessons, right? I would say that long ago when I started my career, I invented things. I was a scientist at GE, Scopet RD. I invented some things that caught the attention of the old CEO of GE. He’s dead and gone, but he lives fresh in my his name was Jack Welch. And we ended up, some of us ended up having to interact with Jack, et cetera, et cetera. And a lot of my own life lessons came from how Jack ran GE.

And he summarized them in very beautiful ways. Beautiful ways, right? So I’ll share some of them with you. One of them is, control your destiny or someone else will. I thought that was quite darn profound and I have lived by it. The next one is face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it might be. I thought that is pretty interesting. And it is something I’ve always kind of thought about and look forward in life.

It’s another statement, words change before you have to. Because when you change when you have to, it’s the most painful experience in your life. So always change before you have to. And the second, the fourth one, that I thought was very important was don’t manage, lead. And so many people confuse management and leadership. And so I think that leadership is a little different, right? And it’s something very important.

And the last one is something that I saw as a poster in my friend Greg Johnson. He used to be the CEO of Franklin Templeton. He’s now the owner of the Giants. And in his office, there was a poster and it said, and I believe in it and I’ve lived my life by it. It said, listen to everyone, follow no one. And I thought that was brilliant. So these are One-liners, very pity, but they have represented to me great copious amounts of professional wisdom and life wisdom encapsulated in simple manners that are pity, easy to understand. And I can very comfortably say that I don’t claim any ownership or authorship of any of them other than to say, they have been guiding posts of my life as I’ve tried to live it.

So that wisdom that I articulated to you is not original, but it comes from people I truly admire. And it also represents my collective view on what it takes to lead a reasonably successful life.

[00:31:05 – 00:31:40] Nitin Bajaj

The view essentially summed up very beautifully the reason, the essence of what these one-line life lessons are. Pradeep, thank you so much for making time to share your journey, your story, and these life lessons and doing it in a very honest, transparent, and eloquent way. That’s why I love you. That’s why I’m rooting for your continued success. And we’ll bring you back here in some time and talk about more of these success stories and I really appreciate you.

[00:31:41 – 00:31:43] A. K. Pradeep

My pleasure, Nitin. Thank you so much.