Doing the right AI - and doing AI right.
Shobhit Varshney is Global Head of AI at Citi, where he leads the firm's global AI strategy across one of the world's largest financial institutions. He is responsible for firmwide AI strategy, the AI operating model, the agentic transformation of the bank's most complex processes, and Responsible AI governance - all under his guiding philosophy: doing the right AI, and doing AI right.
Shobhit brings a rare combination of technical depth, commercial breadth, and operating experience inside a regulated enterprise. Before Citi, he spent 13 years at IBM, most recently as VP and Senior Partner leading Data & AI Consulting across the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. He personally led multi-year AI transformations for PepsiCo, Elevance Health, CVS Health, and Merck, and championed IBM's own enterprise agentic AI deployment as Client Zero. Earlier, he led technical analytics product development at Bloomberg for quantitative trading and market research.
Shobhit's recognitions include LinkedIn Top AI Voice, Tech Leader of the Year, AI Top 50, and Most Inspirational Tech Leader, among other industry honors. He has delivered 100+ keynotes at conferences including CES, NVIDIA GTC, Google Next, AWS re:Invent, IBM Think, and Gartner Summit, and his perspectives have appeared in CNN, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg. He holds four AI patents and is the author of the popular AI with Whiskey newsletter.
Shobhit holds an MBA with distinction and an MS in Computer Science from Cornell University, and a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Arkansas, summa cum laude. He lives in Dallas with his wife and two children, enjoys robotics and photography, and is working toward his whiskey sommelier certification.
More at shobhitvarshney.com.
