Ajith Vallath Prabhakar

The Analytical Foundation

I never planned to end up in AI. Nobody's career follows a straight line, and mine took an early turn that surprised everyone, including me. It started with a roommate's PC in law school. Games, at first. Total absorption. Then the question that wouldn't let go: how did they make this? I was studying law. Learning to read systems for failure modes, trace accountability, find where things break. Useful discipline. But my mind kept drifting toward building, not just analyzing.

So right out of law school, I made a choice that confused everyone around me. Walked away from the legal path before it really started. No tech pedigree. No obvious route in. Just a curiosity that wouldn't quiet down and a belief that the rigor I'd developed would translate. It did. I spent the next two decades in enterprise architecture. Environments where a design flaw triggers audits, lawsuits, headlines. I learned to build for accountability. To design systems that could explain themselves.

Then, about a decade ago, machine learning caught my attention. I started exploring, experimenting, going deeper. That exploration pulled me into AI fully. A new frontier, but the same feeling I had staring at that roommate's screen years ago: how does this work? What can I build with it? The same curiosity that started with a game in a law school dorm still drives the work. It just keeps finding new edges.