Reshmi Neogy

UCLA, Anderson School of Management

“Indian in California, tech innovator, passionate about AI, storytelling, and empowering people to grow.”

Hometown: Kolkata, India

Fun Fact About Yourself: I’ve moved across continents twice and still pack books first.

Undergraduate School and Major: University of Calcutta, Statistics

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: ABB, Manager (Advanced Analytics & AI)

UCLA Anderson is founded on the Three Pillars: Share Success, Think Fearlessly, and Drive Change. Which pillar resonates most with you and why? My connection to “Think Fearlessly” really comes alive when I’m working on technical problems that require questioning fundamental assumptions – which reflects exactly what Anderson seems to value in its approach to business education.

A few months back at work, someone brought me a machine learning model that was performing terribly – accuracy was hovering around 60% on what should have been a straightforward classification task. The conventional approach would have been to try different algorithms, tune hyperparameters, and get more data. But I found myself fixated on something everyone else had dismissed: their training data came from three different sources with different collection methodologies.  Once we built a preprocessing pipeline that normalized across collection methods, accuracy jumped to 94%.

This connects directly to what I see in Anderson’s “Think Fearlessly” pillar. In both business and technology, the most impactful solutions often come from being willing to challenge accepted wisdom – whether that’s market research that seems conclusive, technical approaches that feel obvious, or organizational strategies that everyone assumes are correct. The fearless thinking isn’t just intellectual curiosity; it’s the practical courage to dig deeper when something doesn’t feel right, even when you’re going against consensus.  It’s what transforms routine problem-solving into genuine breakthrough thinking.

What makes Los Angeles such a great place to earn an MBA? What genuinely excites me about Los Angeles for an MBA is the immediacy of it all – the way your education spills directly into the real world happening around you.

I keep thinking about conversations I’ve had with Anderson students who describe this surreal experience of analyzing a marketing campaign in class, then be able to meet with the actual CMO who ran it in the same class! Another example is studying supply chain disruption in the morning, then attending a panel that evening with logistics executives from the Port of Long Beach who are living through exactly those challenges.

There’s something powerful about learning in a city where the business cases aren’t hypothetical. Your professors aren’t just academics – many are practitioners who split their time between the classroom and active industry projects. When they’re teaching you about venture capital structures, they might mention stopping by a pitch meeting after class. When you’re studying international trade, your classmate might work part-time at a freight forwarding company in San Pedro.

The city becomes your extended campus in a way that feels organic rather than forced. You’re not taking field trips to see how business works – you’re embedded in it. Your study group might include someone who works in post-production, another in aerospace manufacturing, and someone building a direct-to-consumer brand. The cross-pollination of ideas happens naturally because everyone’s dealing with different industry realities simultaneously.

What strikes me most is how this environment teaches you to synthesize information from wildly different contexts – a skill that feels increasingly valuable as industries continue to blur together. You’re not just learning business theory; you’re learning to navigate the beautiful complexity of how different sectors intersect in practice.

Aside from your classmates and location, what was the key part of UCLA Anderson’s MBA programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you? Six years in data science taught me to see patterns others miss, but it also revealed a frustrating gap: the distance between brilliant insights and actual implementation. Anderson’s Applied Management Research (AMR) program isn’t just experiential learning—you’re literally digging into companies’ real problems. You’re not studying businesses from the outside; you’re working inside their operations for months, understanding how they actually function before trying to change anything.

What draws me to AMR is how it flips traditional business education. Instead of analysing case studies about companies, you become part of their story. Instead of theoretical frameworks, you’re testing ideas against actual market conditions. My data science background becomes something I can actually use within real organizations, not just talk about in classroom discussions.

What course, club or activity excites you the most at UCLA Anderson? My industrial experience has taught me something unexpected: the most interesting conversations happen when technical people and business people try to understand each other and usually fail.

With the student run club, AnderTech, I see the chance to be the translator. Not in some condescending way, but as someone who’s lived in both worlds—building models that executives don’t understand, sitting in strategy meetings where people throw around “AI” like it’s magic.

The startup pitch competitions particularly interest me. I want to be the person who can listen to a pitch and say, “Your tech stack won’t scale past 10,000 users” or “You’re solving a problem that doesn’t actually need machine learning.” But also, the person who can spot when someone’s underestimating what’s technically possible. I’m drawn to their company case competitions too. Most business students approach tech companies like they’re just companies that happen to use technology. I see them as fundamentally different organisms—where product development cycles, data infrastructure, and user feedback loops create entirely different strategic constraints.  What excites me most is contributing to discussions that usually happen without technical context.

What is your unique quality that will enable you to make a big contribution to the Class of 2027?  I’m a bridge-builder—I earn trust quickly, listen hard, and turn that trust into momentum. I learned this the slow way. As a PM working with colleagues across India, Europe, and the U.S., I often walked into rooms where people didn’t agree on the problem, let alone the plan. My first move wasn’t slides—it was coffee. I asked dumb questions, mapped what each person cared about, and repeated it back until everyone felt seen. Only then did we pick a direction and share the credit. That habit—listen → translate → move—helped me mentor new teammates, win over skeptical stakeholders, and keep projects calm when the path was messy.

It’s also who I am outside work. I’m the friend who hosts potlucks for people who just moved, the one who organizes study circles before big exams, the person who will sit with you at 1 a.m. to rewrite a cold email. I love science fiction because it’s really about people—how we imagine better worlds, together.

I’ll be the teammate who turns a diverse group into a tight one—setting norms, clarifying goals, and making sure quiet voices shape the plan. I’ll run “work sprints” before deadlines, open my notes and templates to anyone who needs them, and start low-lift community things—chai (tea) & chat study hours, culture-share potlucks, storytelling nights— so the cohort feels like a community from the start.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: Leading ABB’s first data-driven account-management transformation for the Mining, Metals, Cement & Paper businesses. We had to replace relationship-only reporting with a single, insight-driven operating model—on top of legacy SAP/CRM, different regional processes, and a tiny core team. I ran user interviews across Australia, the U.S., and Zurich, mapped the “jobs to be done,” and shipped a lean prototype in weeks. We integrated messy data, built the KPI backbone, and trained frontline teams while debugging live in the field.

What I’m proudest of isn’t the tech—it’s the adoption. By launch, 55+ teammates were using the platform daily, with 200+ stakeholders relying on the insights. The program delivered ~$125K in monthly NPV. I learned more here than on any other product: how to challenge legacy assumptions without breaking trust, how to ship when the path is unclear, and how to stay hands-on—data modeling one hour, change management the next. Our “customers” were colleagues, which made the bar higher and the win more meaningful. It cemented how I work today: listen hard, prototype fast, measure what matters, and push for better—until the new way becomes the way.

What do you hope to do after graduation (at this point)? After graduation, I want to step into a technical product management role at a core tech company (cloud/AI/platform) or a scaled retail/CPG player where the problems are real-world and data heavy. I’m excited to build platform products—data pipelines, forecasting and optimization services, ML observability, experimentation frameworks, and API integrations—that improve planning, inventory, pricing, and personalization at scale. In the near term, my goal is adoption and measurable lift: tighter SLAs, higher forecast accuracy, lower waste, faster decision cycles. Longer term, I aim to lead a platform org (or build a venture) that modernizes retail and operations with responsible AI—turning messy, cross-functional problems into operating models that teams actually use.

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