Bharath Shankar leads the design and engineering of Gnani.ai’s AI systems, focusing on building enterprise-grade Agentic AI platforms that combine speech-to-speech Large Language Models (LLMs), industry-specific Small Language Models (SLMs), and agentic workflows. His primary responsibility is to develop systems that enable AI agents to understand, reason, and autonomously handle tasks across customer service, sales, and internal enterprise processes.
At Gnani.ai, Bharath has played a key role in the evolution of the platform — from its origins as a conversational AI system to a full-fledged Agentic AI stack. He leads the architecture of AI agents that are capable of speech understanding, task automation, agent assistance, and autonomous decision-making. His team focuses on making these systems efficient, scalable, and suitable for production deployment in sectors like banking, insurance, telecom, and healthcare.
Currently, Bharath and his team are working on advancing voice-to-voice AI models, enabling AI agents to handle complete conversations with customers — from understanding queries to generating voice responses — without relying on intermediate text. These capabilities are central to Gnani.ai’s goal of delivering natural and autonomous customer-agent interactions in voice-based channels.
Prior to Gnani.ai, Bharath spent over a decade at IBM India Systems Development Labs, where he held senior roles in the Cognitive Systems Group. His work spanned AI-powered enterprise systems, distributed computing, and system optimization. He holds two patents in computer networking and distributed systems.
Bharath graduated as a Computer Science Engineer from Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU). Outside of his work, he is passionate about following emerging technologies, enjoys playing chess, and likes traveling.