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 Advisor in Hyderabad · Founder, 256 Technologies
Dr. Hitesh
Sarda
I help leadership teams decide what AI to build, buy or skip, and prove it with the smallest pilot that works. 25+ years building production systems at Citi, Virtusa, Yash and ValueLabs; today I run 256 Technologies, an applied AI lab in Hyderabad.
245
posts
7
topics
2009
since
What I do
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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.
Start here: guides
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The real cost of AI: tokens, models and who pays the bill
Why AI bills keep rising as token prices fall, how caching and model choice move the cost curve, and when a smaller or local model is the better call.
Deploying AI agents safely: autonomy, permissions and blast radius
How much autonomy to give an AI agent, how to scope its permissions by blast radius, and how to keep a record of what it actually did in production.
Leading engineering teams that code with AI
What changes when AI writes most of the code: review becomes the bottleneck, technical debt costs more, and someone has to decide what the agent prefers.
AI strategy for leadership teams: pilots, build versus buy and moats
How to run an AI pilot that tells you the truth, when to build versus buy, where AI pays off first, and why the model you pick is rarely your advantage.
AI in retail and loyalty: when your next customer is an agent
What changes for retailers and loyalty programs when AI agents start shopping for people, and which parts of the customer relationship stay worth owning.
Recent Writing
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Goldman limited coding agents by job title. Limit them by blast radius.
Goldman Sachs pulled coding agents from most traders and bankers. The control that works is narrower permissions per agent, and it lets you keep the demand.
The real price of an agent sandbox is the team that patches it
Replit went through 6,211 Linux kernel advisories in five months to keep agent code contained. Ask who does that work before you pick a sandbox vendor or decide to build.
AI just raised the interest rate on your technical debt
A crash bug sat unfixed for two years until AI turned it into remote code execution. Your list of accepted risks was priced for attackers who no longer exist.
Your coding agent now takes instructions from your software vendors
A desktop app updated itself and wrote startup instructions into its users' Codex and Claude Code. Agent configuration is now a procurement and governance question.
Your release date assumed bugs were hard to find
Postgres 19 slipped after AI found old bugs faster than maintainers could review the fixes. Plan your roadmap around verification capacity, not discovery.
Assume your platform vendor will lose your secrets
Railway, OpenCode and Northflank each told customers to rotate their secrets within two weeks. The useful question is what a stolen key costs you before you notice.
Run your next incident drill with the AI turned off
AI is absorbing the routine incidents that used to train on-call engineers. A timed drill with the AI off shows whether your team can still handle the one that matters.
DoorDash is paying $17 billion for the part of Instacart an AI agent can't skip
Instacart's app is the layer shoppers will hand to software. The deal prices what stays scarce, and gives any business that sells through an interface a test to run.
New book · Free PDF
Implementing AI Agents in Your Company
A Blueprint for Innovation
A practical, hype-free playbook for the managers and operators who have to turn AI agents into real business outcomes. Read it free, no signup.