Anirban Chatterjee

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

“Seven years learning how to build AI; now learning the harder question: what to build.”

Hometown: Tezpur, Assam

Fun Fact About Yourself: If you have tapped a card anywhere between Mumbai and Melbourne in the past couple of years, there is a fair chance your transaction later passed through a data pipeline I looked after. My team’s systems moved close to two terabytes of payments data across Asia-Pacific every single day. I cannot see your coffee order, but I have almost certainly moved it.

Undergraduate School and Major: B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Silchar. I later completed a Post Graduate Certification in AI for Leaders at the McCombs School of Business, UT Austin.

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Senior Engineer, Data & AI/ML at Visa Inc.

Aside from your classmates, what was the key part of IIM Bangalore’s MBA programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you? The live industry consulting projects. Most programmes teach strategy through cases where the ending has already been written. IIMB places a real company’s unsolved problem on your desk and lets you feel what live constraints are like, with faculty and industry mentors watching how you handle shifting stakeholder positions, incomplete data, and a client who pushes back. The EPGP office quietly curates this access and lines up the right mentors, allowing us to pour ourselves entirely into the problem. I was moving from building AI to deciding where it should go, and I did not want the first test of that shift to happen on an employer’s payroll. I wanted it to happen here, where there is room to be wrong and people whose job it is to catch me. Six months in, that bet has already paid for itself.

What has been your favorite course or extracurricular activity at IIM Bangalore? What has been the most important lesson that you have learned from it? Competition and Strategy. As an engineer, I had spent seven years optimising within a system, making pipelines faster, data cleaner and models better. This course turned my gaze outward. Where you sit in an industry’s structure decides as much as what you build, and the best engineered product can still lose to a rival’s positioning, a supplier’s leverage or simply an ill-timed entry. For someone moving into AI product strategy, that was the missing half of my education. I used to ask how we could build something right. I now begin by asking whether it should be built at all, by us, and why now. That one question has changed every product decision I have weighed since.

What makes Bengaluru a great place to earn your MBA? The distance between the classroom and the market here is a short drive. The companies I hope to build for – whether AI startups, global capability centres or product labs – sit minutes from campus, and you feel it in everyday life. The founder guest-lecturing your elective is wrestling with the very problem you modeled that morning, and the alumnus you meet for coffee works two streets from where you will one day interview. For anyone switching into technology from another function, Bengaluru compresses years of network building into a few months. No other Indian city lets an MBA and the industry it feeds sit this close together.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: It was getting more than 400 colleagues across Visa Asia-Pacific to actually use generative AI in their daily work. As part of Visa’s Core GenAI team, I ran hackathons, workshops, and hands-on enablement across the region, and was awarded Visa’s GenAI Multiplier Badge for it. What made the effort credible, though, was not the workshops. It was the unglamorous work running underneath them. People do not adopt AI because someone demos it well. They adopt it when a person they trust has already done the plumbing and can show them exactly where it breaks. Building the thing, and then earning people’s trust in it, is the accomplishment I care about most.

Describe your biggest accomplishment as an MBA student so far: It was the live consulting project with a major global technology subsidiary, where I am helping shape its move from an engineering services business towards a Palantir-style AI intelligence platform, guiding them through strategy and organisational design. It is precisely the shift from building to deciding that I came here to make, playing out on real stakes.

Alongside it came a role I never planned for. Classmates kept stopping by with AI tools that refused to cooperate, whether for case preparation, research, or project work, and those corridor conversations slowly grew into informal coaching sessions on prompting and workflow. In a cohort of accomplished people reinventing their careers, helping others get real work out of AI has been the most rewarding thing I did not see coming.

What is your class’ favorite hangout away from school? Why do you gather there? Mykos Brewery, which by now is practically the EPGP annexe. This is a one-year programme filled with people carrying eight-to-ten years of work behind them, so a table at Mykos after a submissions week sounds nothing like a typical B-school hangout. Someone is dissecting a case answer, someone else is comparing it to a client they once served, and a third person is insisting that everyone stop talking shop, and failing. The compressed intensity of a one-year MBA needs a pressure valve, and ours happens to serve good beer.

What do you hope to do after graduation? I intend to move into AI product management, owning the roadmap and go-to-market for AI products, with general management and strategy as a parallel path. I have spent seven years on the engineering side of AI, and the MBA is my bridge to the decision-making side, where the question changes from how to build to what gets built and why. In the long run I want to be the person who turns frontier AI into products that real businesses adopt and trust, because I have seen from the inside how rarely capability alone earns adoption.

What advice would you give to help potential applicants gain admission into IIM Bangalore? Do not sand down the thing that makes you unusual. The admissions team reads hundreds of polished and interchangeable narratives from technology professionals and consultants. What stands out is specificity: the precise thing you did, the number that proves it, and an honest line connecting it to why you need this MBA now. In my case it was not seven years in AI that carried the application. It was one concrete story about persuading hundreds of skeptical colleagues to trust a technology they feared. Know that story cold, quantify it, and resist the urge to sound like the person you imagine they want. Specificity will beat polish every single time.

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