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. Almost immediately, he says, the machine felt like a window into a different scale of possibility for him.

“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. I was fascinated that you could create something with just a few lines of code.”

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. “I really like to test my knowledge and prototype ideas to find out if they truly work.”

A college project becomes an inspiration

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. The experience helped him gain confidence, he says, giving him the push he needed to pursue interviews for the publication with two Indian entrepreneurs he admired: N.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.

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. The fact that they took the time to do this really motivated me.”

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. At Gainwell, he managed projects for the core IT systems multiple U.S. state health departments use to administer Medicaid benefits, manage provider enrollment, and verify member eligibility. 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. “The stakes are high, compliance requirements are different, and the margin for error is effectively zero.”

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.

Agentic AI in e-commerce

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. Such product setup traditionally has been a manual, tedious, error-prone process: Companies upload thousands of products, adjust item names, enter prices, update images, and more.

“Product setup has been one of the most painful processes in e-commerce, and it can take [our] customers two to three months to complete,” Ingole says. “We’re creating an AI agent that will guide them, step-by-step, to get everything set up in two weeks.”

Ingole relies on AI agents for some of his own tasks at Amla. Project managers historically have spent 10 to 12 hours each week assembling and sending status reports to stakeholders. Ingole built an AI agent to handle much of the work.

“It runs every Monday morning and reads through my emails to extract highlights, risks, timelines, and upcoming releases, then sends me a written status report,” Ingole says. The process might sound simple, but the agent’s workflow involves at least a dozen steps including defining parameters, managing temporary files, and integrating with existing tools.

With the information-gathering work handled, it frees up Ingole and his colleagues to spend more time on deeper-thinking work, he says.

Publishing as idea refinery

For nearly a decade, Ingole has spent some of his free time conducting independent research projects in data analytics and AI-enabled applications in health care. He has written more than 40 peer-reviewed papers, which are in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. He has been granted six patents in the United Kingdom and India. In the U.K., he is a registered coinventor of an AI-powered, cloud-connected wearable device for health monitoring and an AI-based breast cancer detection tool.

Ingole’s patent for the breast cancer detector, he says, reflects his belief that when engineers apply data and AI correctly, they can help doctors diagnose patients more quickly and accurately.

That, he says, is both a power and a responsibility.

He is part of a team helping patients who are paralyzed and nonverbal control items in their environment. His goal, he says, is to develop a brain-computer interface to let patients turn on a fan, switch off a television, and complete similar tasks.

Publishing research requires both academic rigor and peer scrutiny, and Ingole says the function has been critical to improving as both a project manager and a researcher-inventor.

“Lots of research ideas never make it to paper,” he notes. “But when you write for journals or conferences, you’re bombarded with questions from Ph.D.s and experienced researchers. This forces me to refine my methodology, and to combine use cases and technical architecture in a way that stands up to expert review.”

Finding a professional hub

Ingole joined IEEE in 2022, and he says the affiliation has become central to both his research and his professional identity.

“I use the Member Directory often and contact engineers through my IEEE email address, which gives me credibility because they know it’s a genuine research connection,” he says.

The organization has given him a platform to contribute to the research space beyond his own papers, he says. He has served as a conference session chair, keynote speaker, technical program committee member, and peer research reviewer for various conferences and events. His IEEE membership, he says, has opened doors to other communities, helping support his entry into the British Computer Society, which has stringent acceptance criteria.

Those opportunities have helped him build a global network of collaborators with whom to discuss upcoming research, seek advice, and share data, he says.

“IEEE is important for me to continue as an independent researcher,” he says. “It lets me contribute to the community, and I get a lot in return.”