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Balaji Ingole builds AI agents for e-commerce and health care

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Balaji Ingole builds AI agents for e-commerce and health care

Balaji Ingole is a project manager at B2B e-commerce company Amla Commerce in Milwaukee, where he leads AI-driven digital transformation work for the company's manufacturer and B2B clients, and on weekends he is an independent researcher working on AI-enabled health care diagnostics and assistive technology. He grew up in the small Maharashtra village of Udgir, India, where no household he knew had a computer and only one had a television; he first encountered a computer in a middle-school lab, an experience he says changed his life and led him to teach himself the C programming language and, later, to build database-backed applications on his own. As a mechanical engineering undergraduate at what is now COEP Technological University in Pune, Ingole wrote for the college magazine and, after repeated fax requests, secured a phone interview with philanthropist Sudha Murty, cofounder of the Infosys Foundation. He asked to meet her in person instead, then traveled the 940 kilometers from Pune to Bengaluru overnight by bus and train with a classmate, borrowing money to make the trip. Murty met him at the Infosys campus and, impressed by his persistence, also arranged a brief meeting with her husband, Infosys cofounder N.R. Narayana Murthy, who handwrote a message to Ingole's fellow students that the magazine later published. Ingole earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in 2008 after an internship at the Tata Research Design and Development Center, then worked as a graduate engineering trainee at Honeywell Automation before spending 13 years in software engineering and project management roles at various Indian IT companies starting in 2009. He earned an MBA from the Welingkar Institute of Management, Mumbai, in 2017. In 2022 he moved to the United States to take a project-manager role at Mars IT Solutions in Madison, Wisconsin, then joined Gainwell Technologies in Madison the following year as senior project manager, managing IT systems that U.S. state health departments use to administer Medicaid benefits, enroll providers and verify member eligibility. That work, he says, gave him a particular appreciation for health care data, where he says the margin for error is effectively zero. Ingole joined Amla in July 2025. For Amla's manufacturer and B2B customers, he is building an AI chatbot agent meant to guide them step by step through setting up large product catalogs on e-commerce platforms, a process he says traditionally takes customers two to three months and that the agent aims to compress to two weeks. Internally, he built an AI agent that runs every Monday morning, reads through his emails and produces a written status report covering highlights, risks, timelines and upcoming releases, a task he says historically took project managers 10 to 12 hours a week; the agent's own workflow involves at least a dozen steps, including defining parameters, managing temporary files and integrating with existing tools. Outside his day job, Ingole has spent close to a decade on independent research in data analytics and AI-enabled health care applications, publishing more than 40 peer-reviewed papers held in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library and receiving six patents in the United Kingdom and India, including a UK patent on an AI-powered, cloud-connected wearable device for health monitoring and one on an AI-based breast cancer detection tool. He is also part of a team developing a brain-computer interface intended to let paralyzed, nonverbal patients control items such as fans and televisions. Ingole joined IEEE in 2022 and says the Member Directory and his IEEE email address have given his outreach to other engineers added credibility; through IEEE he has served as a conference session chair, keynote speaker, technical program committee member and peer reviewer, and the affiliation helped him gain entry to the British Computer Society, which he describes as having stringent acceptance criteria.

Key facts

  • Balaji Ingole, an IEEE senior member and project manager at B2B e-commerce company Amla Commerce in Milwaukee, is building an AI agent meant to cut manufacturers' product-catalog setup time from two to three months to two weeks.
  • He separately built an internal AI agent that reads his emails every Monday and drafts a status report, replacing work that historically took project managers 10 to 12 hours a week; the agent's own workflow runs at least a dozen steps.
  • Outside his day job, Ingole has published more than 40 peer-reviewed papers in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library and holds six patents in the UK and India, including an AI-based breast cancer detection tool and an AI-powered wearable health monitor.
  • He is part of a team developing a brain-computer interface to let paralyzed, nonverbal patients control devices such as fans and televisions.
  • Before Amla, Ingole managed IT systems at Gainwell Technologies that U.S. state health departments use to administer Medicaid benefits, provider enrollment and member eligibility.

Why it matters

The story is less about a single product than about where practical AI-agent building is actually happening: not only inside frontier labs, but in the day-to-day work of a B2B e-commerce project manager automating a specific, painful workflow (product-catalog setup) and his own status reporting. It also traces an unusually direct path from operational AI work in e-commerce to independent research on AI-enabled health care diagnostics and assistive technology, showing how the same person applies similar tools across very different stakes.

Who it affects

Most directly, Amla Commerce's manufacturer and B2B customers, who Ingole says currently spend two to three months on product-catalog setup, and Amla's own project managers, who he says have historically spent 10 to 12 hours a week compiling status reports. More broadly, the assistive-technology and diagnostic work he does on weekends is aimed at paralyzed, nonverbal patients and at clinicians who might eventually use AI-assisted breast cancer detection tools he has patented.

How to use it

Both AI agents described are tools Ingole is building for Amla rather than products with public pricing or availability: the catalog-setup agent is being developed for Amla's manufacturer customers, and the status-report agent is an internal tool for his own team. No licensing terms, pricing or public release plan for either tool is given. His patented wearable health-monitoring device and breast cancer detection tool are UK- and India-registered patents rather than shipping products.

How solid is it

The account rests entirely on Ingole's own description of his work in an interview for IEEE Spectrum's member-profile series, written by freelance journalist Julianne Pepitone; there is no independent verification of the time savings, the two-week target, or the agents' actual performance. The publication record (40-plus peer-reviewed papers in IEEE Xplore) and the six UK and India patents are independently checkable facts about his output, but the article gives no accuracy or error-rate figures for either AI agent.

Risks and caveats

The two-to-three-months-to-two-weeks improvement and the 10-to-12-hours-a-week savings are Ingole's own estimates, not measured outcomes, and the article gives no completion date for the brain-computer interface project or detail on how many of his six patents are granted versus pending. As a profile piece, the story is built to showcase a career and a body of work rather than to evaluate any one tool, so it should be read as biography, not as a technical assessment of the AI systems it describes.

“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”

— Balaji Ingole, project manager at Amla Commerce