Where the Conversational AI Industry is Built

Laura Rosenbaun

Conversation Design Lead, General Motors

Laura Rosenbaun is currently the Conversation Design Lead at General Motors, leading a team of Conversation Designers covering GM’s current and upcoming conversational experiences. She has extensive research and design experience, for both in and out of vehicle interactions that are multimodal, voice-forward, and voice-only. Laura holds a PhD on Linguistics and Computer-Mediated Communication from the University of Haifa, Israel.

Jeff Blankenburg

Principal Technical Evangelist, Amazon

Today, he works on the Amazon Alexa team helping developers make Alexa even smarter. Jeff has also spoken at conferences all over the world, including London, Munich, India, Tokyo, Sydney, and New York, covering topics ranging from software development technologies to soft skill techniques. He also serves as an organizer for the Stir Trek conference.

Sara Taheri

VP Chief Product Owner, Prudential

Sara is the Chief Product Owner for Contact Center Transformation and Robotics in Prudential. In this role, Sara has overall vision, strategy, and execution responsibility for transforming the contact center capabilities to one with increased focused on customers through intelligent call routing, conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI), digital self-service options and chat to name a few.

Prior to joining Prudential, Sara held various leadership roles at MassMutual Financial Group for more than 14 years with a focus of digitizing and improving customer experiences. These initiatives included capabilities like, Conversational AI, Algorithmic Underwriting, Fluid-less underwriting, Electronic Health Data, eDelivery and Robotics.

Sara received her Bachelor of Commerce Degree in Computing & Information Systems from Saint Mary’s University, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Aniket Deosthali

Head of Product (Conversational Commerce), Walmat

Ryan Steelberg

President & Co-Founder, Veritone

Ryan Steelberg is a seasoned technology executive and pioneer of digital and data-driven businesses.  He is currently the co-founder and President of Veritone, Inc., a public company on NASDAQ. He also serves on its Board of Directors. Previously, he served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Brand Affinity Technologies, Inc.  Prior to that, Mr. Steelberg served as the Head of Broadcast at Google Inc.  From 2002 to 2007, he was the co-founder and President of dMarc Broadcasting, an advertising company that was acquired by Google Inc. in 2006.  From 1998 to 2000, he served as President and CEO of 2CAN Media, a company that was acquired by CMGi.   From 1995 to 1998 he served as President of AdForce, a company that was also acquired by CMGi in September of 1999, after its IPO earlier that year.

Gina Riley

Vice President, UX & Conversation Design Lead, JPMorgan Chase

Noelle Silver Russell

Global Partner, AI and Analytics, IBM

Noelle Silver Russell is a multi-award-winning technologist and entrepreneur who specializes in advising companies on emerging technology, cloud, AI and Web 3.0. She has led teams at NPR, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon Alexa, and is a consistent champion for public understanding of the ethical use of AI and tech based on her work building some of the largest AI Models in the world. She is the founder of AI Leadership Institute and serves as an executive at IBM. She was recently awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for Artificial Intelligence as well as VentureBeat’s Women in AI Responsibility and Ethics award.

Raj Tumuluri

CEO, Openstream

Raj is an inventor and one of the pioneers in the industry with 20+ years of experience in building context-aware, multimodal and mobile technologies; principal architect & evangelist of Openstream’s product vision & strategy; Co-Author of W3C standards on Multi-modal & Speech standards & W3C Automotive Web.

Yin-Juei Chang

Sr. Manager, User Research & Health Equity, Teladoc Health

Yin-Juei (pronounced “Ing Ray”) is a research scientist, a leader, a strategic thinker, and an advocate of ethical research. Starting as a neuroscientist and developmental psychologist, her interests in understanding human behaviors have taken her from academia through nonprofit to tech. Her work with adolescents and young adults impacted by cancer has ignited her passion for research around health and wellbeing. She has worked across diverse-age populations - from babies, adolescents, and adults to seniors. Her work at Best Buy as a Lead Researcher has been focusing on health tech for seniors and consumer health. She holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and a MSc in Neuroscience.

Kevin Fredrick

Managing Partner, OneReach

Kevin Fredrick is a Managing Partner at OneReach, where he works with companies to offer effective customer support over SMS. His passion for technology and the study of human interactions has led him to a career in customer experience management. With over 10 years experience in sales and product management, Kevin is a skilled leader and manager whose expertise spans several industries. Kevin has an MBA from the University of Denver.

Evan Macmillan

CEO, Gridspace

Evan has been an entrepreneur most of his life. Previously, he co-founded Zappedy, a payments technology company that was backed by Eric Schmidt's venture fund and acquired by Groupon. His other technology projects have been covered by the WSJ and PBS. Evan's patents include an HCI invention and a bank infrastructure capability. He has an engineering bachelor's from Stanford in Product Design.

Shyamala Prayaga

Senior Software Product Manager, NVIDIA

Shyamala is a seasoned conversational AI expert. Having led initiatives across connected homes, automotive, and wearables - just to name a few, she's put her work on research into usability, accessibility, speech recognition, and multimodal voice user interfaces, and has even been published internationally across publications like Forbes. Outside of her research, she's spent the last 18 years designing mobile, web, desktop, and smart TV interfaces and has most recently joined NVIDIA to own their roadmap for Speech AI tools.

Rupal Patel

VP Voice & Accessibility, Veritone

Dr. Rupal Patel is an internationally renowned speech scientist turned entrepreneur, bringing decades of clinical, academic, scientific and social entrepreneurship experience to Veritone. As Vice President of Voice & Accessibility, Dr. Patel is responsible for setting strategy and leading innovation efforts in the voice AI space, in addition to expanding the reach and impact of Veritone’s voice solutions for those living with disabilities or inequities. A preeminent thought leader in voice AI, Dr. Patel advocates for ethical transparent and fair use policies that can broaden the monetization capabilities for voice-over artists by leveraging AI. 

Prior to Veritone, Dr. Patel was the Founder and CEO of VocaliD, a voice AI company acquired by Veritone in 2022, that creates synthetic voices with personality for discerning brands that understand the power of customized voice and for individuals living with speechlessness who want to be heard in a voice that is uniquely theirs. VocaliD was a spinout from Dr. Rupal’s research lab at Northeastern University, where she is a tenured Full Professor with interdisciplinary appointments in the Bouve College of Health Science and Khoury College of Computer Science. Named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business, Rupal has been featured on TED, NPR, WIRED, and in major international news and technology publications.

Davar Ardalan

Executive Producer of Audio, National Geographic

Davar Ardalan is National Geographic's executive producer of audio, where she oversees the award winning podcast series, "Overheard”, the narrative limited series "Into the Depths" as well as new forays into spatial audio via Nat Geo's Soundbank. Prior to this, Ardalan was deputy director of the Presidential Innovation Fellowship Program in Washington D.C. and before that a veteran journalist at NPR News for two decades. In May 2014, Davar was the recipient of an Ellis Island Medal of Honor, for individual achievement and for promoting cultural unity. In Fall 2021, through her work at IVOW, (Intelligent Voices of Wisdom) Ardalan launched a conversational AI scholar on Google Assistant to preserve the wisdom and work of her late mother, Islamic scholar, Dr. Laleh Bakhtiar into 21-century voice technology. In March 2022, Ardalan's team at National Geographic’s Overheard were honored at the Ambies for Best Knowledge, Science and Tech Podcast. The team also won three Anthem Awards in February 2022 and in May 2022, Overheard received a Webby, in the category of Diversity and Inclusion in Podcast.

Roger Kibbe

Senior Developer Evanglist, Samsung

Roger is a senior developer evangelist for Samsung's conversational AI products. He is also a co-founder of Niftorian which is enabling artists to thrive in the world of Metaverse and NFTs.

Greg Bennett

Director of Conversation Design, Salesforce

Greg Bennett is Director of Conversation Design at Salesforce, where he founded and leads the company’s first dedicated Conversation Design practice since its inception. As a sociolinguist, he shepherds a product and design vision at Salesforce that helps teams across the entire product portfolio create inclusive experiences that feel natural, helpful, and meaningful, and manages an international team of Conversation Designers who work with Salesforce’s Product leaders to define the future of conversational AI.