This comprehensive guide provides ten essential tips to help business leaders effectively integrate AI into their operations and overall business strategy.
Sonali Sambhus
Fractional CTO/CPO and Advisor
Helping founders, CEOs, CTOs, and other leaders level up their engineering & product functions and ultimately drive business growth. I am a seasoned leader, Ex SVP at Square, ex-CTO, current Fractional CTO, Startup Advisor, and Board member.
I coach, diagnose, bridge gaps, and drive positive change using my 20+ years' of experience across a broad and deep range of industries (including B2B SaaS, B2C) company stages/sizes, and challenges.
As the former Head of ML Platforms at Square and a curre…
Work
Fintech Credit Score & Risk Management Solution | Worth AI
https://worthai.com/Advisor to the CTO, CEO and Data Science teams for building an AI-based risk management B2B SaaS application.
Key Accomplishments:
- Deeply embedded with the data science teams, enabling them wherever needed, including calibrating model performance, and identifying opportunities for improving ML.
- Created an AI Explainability strategy balancing the delicate needs of fintech regulations, explaining the scores to gain customer's trust, highlighting the value of the product and not protecting the IP
- Creating a product strategy for the AI-based product with a holistic approach incorporating the voice of the customer, competitive differentiation and technology constraints.
- Advise the CEO and COO on team capabilities and limitations, helping them build the right team, the right org structure as well as process enhancements for accelerating product-market-fit
- Help with capital raise leveraging my deep network of VCs in Silicon Valley.
- Making key business introductions which led to 2 very large enterprise customers, significantly accelerating the company's revenue.
Block Inc
https://block.xyz/As Head of Block's Developer Platforms, my team's work resulted in a $400M+ impact through fraud prevention, risk assessment, and lending applications.
While leading the ML Platforms, in the lending space, we increased TAM by $150M by adding new data sources, with the right feature engineering, and model tuning. I spearheaded many projects for MLOps/AIOps, ensuring that accelerated the ML development for the company.
While leading Square's API Product (the equivalent of Stripe), I led the product strategy for improving developer experience (DX). On the engineering side key projects for API security, stability and scalability as well as organizational influence resulted in meaningful growth
In the developer productivity realm, we focused heavily on build speed improvement, improving IDE speed and code optimizations.
Experience
Worth AI
Fractional CTO/Advisor
May 2024 - Present
Series A, AI-Based B2B SaaS Fintech Product for Risk Assessment and Credit Scoring.
- Advisor to the data science team for model performance improvements and data infrastructure
- Advisor to the CTO for talent development, hiring, coaching
- Advisor to the CEO for fundraising, business expansion and product strategy for achieving product market fit
Avidxchange, Inc.
Member Board of Directors
Nov 2022 - Present
Accounts Payable Automation and payments leader for mid-market businesses with $400M in revenue.
- Beyond governance and strategic insights, I am deeply involved in the digital transformation, automation, AI strategy and delivery efforts
- Strategic M&A advising and deal due diligence
- Cybersecurity assessment, mitigation and cyber defense
Multiple Startups
Startup Advisor
Jan 2021 - Present
Cartup: AI-enabled shopping assistant, Market Engine: Gen AI-based digital marketing, Affable: business process management platform.
- Coaching, Deep tech advise for team building, operations, improving engineering and product
- Introductions to meaningful network connections through my board network resulting in customer and revenue growth
- Helping with fundraising through coaching and VC intros
CommonBond.co
Advisor
May 2021 - Jul 2022
CommonBond was one of the fastest-growing lending companies in the U.S with $50M+ in revenue (Series D).
- Product Strategy for the pivot from a single product company to a multi product portfolio
- Advisor to CTO for the student lending product for improving the customer experience for the B2C offering
- Steered the M&A and eventual exit
Square
SVP Developer and Machine Learning Platform
Mar 2019 - Dec 2022
Block Inc (formerly Square) is the leading Fintech company in the US. My role spanned the broad portfolio of Point of Sale Products and Square Bank.
- Head of ML Platforms resulting in a $400M+ impact to Square through fraud prevention, risk assessment, lending applications
- Head the DevOps and Internal Platforms driving 30%+ in developer productivity
- Head the API Platform product, improving product delivery and ultimately CSAT
Vuclip
Vice President of Engineering
Jul 2015 - Jun 2016
International Media company operating in 30+ emerging countries, offering short-form entertainment with apps.
- Cloud Migration, QA Automation for the B2B2C product,
- improving availability of services from 96% to 99.99%
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