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.
Balaji Ingole
Employer
Amla Commerce in Milwaukee
Title
Project manager
Member grade
Senior member
Alma maters
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. 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…
Read full article: Balaji Ingole Develops AI Tools for E-Commerce Sites
The post “Balaji Ingole Develops AI Tools for E-Commerce Sites” by Julianne Pepitone was published on 08/21/2026 by spectrum.ieee.org