Neel Sundaresan

Neel Sundaresan is General Manager of AI Products and Productivity Tools at IBM. Before joining IBM, he served as Vice President of Data & AI at Microsoft, where he led several data and cloud productivity initiatives and played a key role in integrating AI into these tools. He is the creator of Bob, IBM’s AI software development partner. He pioneered the concepts of “Code as Data” and “Teaching Machines to Code,” land created Microsoft’s first AI code assistant, Intellicode which evolved into GitHub Copilot.He was instrumental in bringing key AI techniques and innovations into the product. Earlier in his career, Neel headed eBay Research and Data Labs, driving advancements in search, recommender systems, computer vision, economics, human-computer interaction, and distributed computing. He began his career at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, where he developed IBM’s first search engine and contributed to foundational work in web mining and XML systems. A frequent speaker at international conferences, Neel holds over 320 patents and has published more than 150 research papers. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University Bloomington and is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.