This IEEE Senior Member Develops AI Tools for

What happened

Balaji Ingole rarely saw televisions while growing up in Udgir, India. No one in the small Maharashtra village had computers or phones. Only one household owned a television, and neighbors often gathered there to watch shows together. Ingole never even saw a computer growing up. It wasn’t until he reached middle school that he encountered a computer lab, an experience he says changed his life.

Impressed by their persistence, she surprised them by also arranging a brief chat with Narayana Murthy. “Narayana Murthy handwrote a personal message to the engineering students of [my college]—which we proudly published in our college magazine,” Ingole says. “In his note, Murthy shared that we are at an extraordinary moment in India’s history and that the future looks even brighter.

His words encouraged us to work hard and make the most of this time. “I still have that note,” Ingole says. “They are billionaires, and I was just a regular student. ” During the final semester of his engineering studies, Ingole joined the Tata Research Design and Development Center in Pune for a six-month internship.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 2008, he became a graduate engineering trainee at Honeywell Automation in Pune. He left the company in 2009, and during the next 13 years, he held different software engineering and project management positions at IT companies across India. He earned a master’s degree in business administration from the Welingkar Institute of Management, Mumbai, in 2017.

In 2022 he accepted a project-manager role at Mars IT Solutions in Madison, Wisc. The following year, he left to join Gainwell Technologies, also in Madison, as a senior project manager. S. state health departments use to administer Medicaid benefits, manage provider enrollment, and verify member eligibility.

Why it matters

Almost immediately, he says, the machine felt like a window into a different scale of possibility for him. COEP Technological University and Welingkar Institute of Management, both in India “I was very studious and not very social, always reading or solving problems in a math textbook,” he says. “At the computer lab, I began learning the C programming language—which was like discovering a whole new world.

” His early interest grew into a self-directed education. Outside of Ingole’s formal classwork, he taught himself to build database-backed applications, wire up hardware, write software, and trace error logs. Today the IEEE senior member similarly splits his time. During the week, he’s a project manager in Milwaukee at B2B e-commerce company Amla, leading AI-driven digital transformation initiatives to help the company’s clients boost their sales.

On weekends, he leads a similarly demanding life as an independent researcher. His current projects include developing AI-enabled health care diagnostic tools and assistive technologies to support people with physical disabilities. “I believe in ‘learn by doing,’” he says. ” Ingole’s tendency to go beyond his coursework continued after he graduated high school in 2004.

As a mechanical engineering undergraduate at The College of Engineering, Pune (now COEP Technological University), in India, he participated in several extracurricular activities. One was interviewing entrepreneurs and writing about them for The COEP College Magazine. R. Narayana Murthy, cofounder of IT giant Infosys; and his wife, philanthropist Sudha Murty.

The Murtys cofounded the Infosys Foundation, a nonprofit that runs educational, health care, women’s empowerment, and sustainability programs in underserved areas of India. “Every week I would fax them: ‘Please give me an interview time,’” Ingole says. Eventually, Sudha Murty’s office offered him a phone interview, but he requested to meet her in person at Infosys’s Bengaluru offices.

She agreed, but the offices were 940 kilometers from Pune, and he didn’t have the money to travel or stay overnight in a hotel. Ingole and a classmate borrowed money from friends and traveled through the night on multiple buses and trains to get to Bengaluru. They freshened up in a public bathroom before heading to the Infosys campus to meet Murty.

What to watch

The experience managing projects that directly enabled patients’ access to health care gave Ingole a special appreciation for and interest in this area, he says. “Health care data is not like other data,” he says. ” Ingole says he enjoyed the rigor of data governance combined with the potential to positively impact lives, and that also applies to his current work at Amla. Ingole joined Amla in July 2025.

He helps manufacturers and B2B customers modernize their e-commerce operations. He also builds AI tools for them and for his internal team. For Amla’s customers, he’s developing AI-enabled chatbots that help manufacturers set up and manage large product catalogs in e‑commerce platforms.