Building Reliable AI Agents for Product Managers

Aki Wijesundara is an AI leader with a PhD in Machine Learning and extensive experience mentoring startups at Google’s AI Accelerator. With a career spanning both research and applied AI, Aki has taught 5,000+ students worldwide how to design and deploy production-ready AI systems.

He has worked across cutting-edge areas of applied AI, from LangChain and RAG pipelines to observability and large-scale deployment. As a researcher and educator, Aki bridges the gap between theory and practice, making complex systems approachable and actionable for engineers, founders, and product leaders.

Aki is also a frequent speaker and advisor to organizations adopting AI, helping them transition from experimentation to production at scale.

I'm a data science and AI practitioner with 13+ years of experience leading teams and building systems that turn AI capability into real business impact - from ML models and experimentation to, more recently, agentic AI systems. In my current role at Google, I build

agentic AI systems that power insights for some of the company's largest advertisers. I'm passionate about democratising AI knowledge and helping others build the skills to keep pace as the field moves fast. I've taught 350+ professionals through my courses at Maven & PrepVector, and I'm committed to giving people the practical, hands-on skills needed to thrive as AI reshapes how products get built.