This IEEE Senior Member Develops AI Tools for E-Commerce Sites
IEEE Spectrum Julianne Pepitone
An IEEE senior member in Milwaukee is building AI tools for e-commerce and health care. He says his bots can cut catalog setup from months to two weeks, and even write status reports.
Based on reporting by IEEE Spectrum, Julianne Pepitone — read the original for the full story.
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Balaji Ingole grew up in Udgir, India, in a place where computers and phones were absent from everyday life. There was one television in the village, and neighbors would gather around it. He didn’t see a computer until middle school, when a lab visit changed the direction of his life.
He took to programming fast. What started with C code in that lab turned into a self-taught run through databases, hardware, software, and error logs. That habit of learning by building still defines him now. Ingole works weekdays in Milwaukee as a project manager at Amla Commerce, where he leads AI-driven digital transformation work for B2B e-commerce clients. On weekends, he keeps going as an independent researcher.
At Amla, his focus is painfully practical. He’s building AI chatbots that help manufacturers manage huge product catalogs inside e-commerce platforms. The usual process can drag on for two to three months as teams upload products, rename items, set prices, and update images by hand. Ingole says the goal is to turn that into a two-week process with an AI agent that walks users through the setup step by step.
He’s also using AI to eat some of his own project-management chores. Instead of spending 10 to 12 hours a week on status reports, he built an agent that checks his emails every Monday morning, pulls out highlights, risks, timelines, and upcoming releases, and drafts the report. It takes a dozen-plus steps behind the scenes. The point, he says, is to clear away the rote work so people can spend more time on deeper thinking.
His research life runs in parallel. For nearly a decade, Ingole has worked on data analytics and AI-enabled health care applications, published more than 40 peer-reviewed papers, and earned six patents in the United Kingdom and India. Those include an AI-powered wearable for health monitoring and an AI-based breast cancer detection tool. He also works with a team on technologies for patients who are paralyzed and nonverbal, including a brain-computer interface aimed at simple tasks like turning on a fan or switching off a television.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the useful version of AI: boring, specific, and aimed at workflows people actually hate. The industry spends too much time selling magic and not enough time shaving weeks off catalog setup or helping nurses, patients, and project managers do real work. The buzzword crowd can keep their demos; the rest of the world needs fewer clicks and fewer excuses.
Read more about this at: IEEE Spectrum
