AI Advisor  ·  Founder, 256 Technologies

Hitesh
Sarda

I help leadership teams cut through AI hype and make evidence-based decisions: what is feasible, what the ROI really is, and the smallest pilot that proves it. 25+ years building production systems, including work at Citi, Virtusa, Yash, and ValueLabs. Today I run 256 Technologies, an applied AI lab in Hyderabad, and I have been writing here since 2009.

155 posts
7 topics
2009 since

@fullstackcto  · LinkedIn

AI Advisory

Acting as your fractional Head of AI: strategy, feasibility, ROI modeling, vendor assessment, and roadmaps grounded in real engineering constraints. No hype, no vendor lock-in.

AI Executive Training

A six-week program that builds an AI-native leadership team: hands-on executive workflows, governance and risk, and a 90-day adoption roadmap that moves leaders from watching to leading.

MVP Development

Tangible code beats theoretical roadmaps. I build the smallest prototype that answers the key technical and business questions, across agents, computer vision, and ML, before you commit to a full build.

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When your TAM is bigger than US GDP

SpaceX just paid $60 billion for a coding tool. The price is interesting. The justification -- a $26 trillion addressable market -- reveals more about how we price AI right now than about what it's actually worth.

The real cost of running AI locally for coding

Serious developers are dropping paid AI subscriptions for local models and reporting it actually works. The 'it's free' pitch is real - but it obscures a different set of costs.

AI Writes the Code. Who Governs It?

Almost every team now codes with AI; only a third governs it. The teams pulling ahead review AI's output as seriously as they once reviewed their own code.

I Don't Want My AI to Lie to Me. I Want It to Say No.

Anthropic's Fable 5 shipped with two guardrails: one that refused honestly, and one that quietly degraded the answer without telling you. The second is the dangerous kind, and Anthropic's own reversal shows why.