Hrishikesh Vedantam

Digital transformation strategist · Guelph, ON

Hrishikesh Vedantam

I find where AI and digital tools will actually change the work, then build it and see it through to adoption.

Five years across strategy and engineering: AI roadmaps for industrial clients, a SaaS market entry from zero to US$100k ARR, and air-gapped AI running at the Indian Navy and DRDO. Now completing Waterloo’s MBET with a specialization in AI & Digital Transformation.

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Hrishikesh Vedantam, smiling, arms crossed, in a white shirt
AI use cases mapped and ranked for one utility
15
ARR pipeline in a new market, from zero
US$100k
team built during that market entry
2→15
concurrent users on air-gapped AI
~100
defence organizations served
5
faster rollouts once deployment was automated
10×

Organizations I’ve worked with

Clients, employers and universities across India, the Netherlands, Singapore, the UAE and Canada.

  • Indian Navy
  • University of Waterloo
  • DRDO
  • Meridian Data Labs
  • National University of Singapore
  • Vassar Labs
  • Indian Army
  • IIT Hyderabad
  • IIITDM Kancheepuram
  • Coding Dojo

About

I work in the gap between the roadmap and the people expected to use it.

What I do

From the first discovery workshop to the tenth deployment.

Four stages, run as one engagement, so nothing gets lost between the strategy and the people who use it.

  1. 01

    Find the value

    Current-state assessments, process audits and workflow mapping. Then use cases ranked by value and ease, with ROI and pricing models behind them.

    15 AI use cases mapped for a utility; one anchor win chosen

  2. 02

    Shape the roadmap

    Roadmaps, business cases and scenario models. Go-to-market, pricing, and vendor and model selection under real compliance constraints.

    Pricing and business cases behind defence bids for five clients

  3. 03

    Build what it calls for

    Agentic AI, RAG and automations in n8n, Zapier and Retool, wired into business systems through APIs, webhooks and ERP integrations.

    Buzz AI, live and air-gapped at the Indian Navy and DRDO

  4. 04

    Make it stick

    Rollout, training, runbooks and prompt playbooks. Bringing teams onto AI tools across engineering, commercial and operations work.

    The tenth deployment ran 10× faster than the first

Selected work

Work that delivered results.

A few engagements, from the brief to the number that moved.

Utilities · AI strategy

An AI roadmap from an open brief

A utility asked where AI could help, with no scope or priorities. I mapped their operations, ranked use cases by value and ease, and scoped a plant-wide sensor rollout where each point’s flammability zone set its hardware, cost and installation.

Client
A utility (confidential)
Focus
AI strategySensor networks

Outcome

15

AI use cases, mapped and ranked

A roadmap anchored on one high-value win instead of fifteen pilots, plus a 1,554-sensor plan across 14 plant sections.

Defence · AI adoption

AI that never touches the internet

Navy and DRDO teams needed answers from sensitive documents, with no data leaving the site. I chose and vetted open-source models, built Buzz AI with retrieval, citations, evaluation and guardrails, secured MoD clearance and stress-tested it on-site with users.

Client
Indian NavyDRDO
Focus
AI adoptionOn-prem LLMs

Outcome

~100

concurrent users, fully air-gapped

Live in production, with every answer cited to its source document.

B2B SaaS · Market entry

Taking a Dutch SaaS into India

Optiply, an inventory and purchasing platform, had no team, customers or playbook in India. I built the go-to-market, segmentation, positioning and pricing, ran discovery with procurement teams, and shipped the Zoho and Odoo integrations myself.

Client
Optiply
Focus
Go-to-marketPricingERP integration

Outcome

US$100k

ARR pipeline in two years

A team grown from 2 to 15, with strategy reported to leadership in Amsterdam.

Industrial IoT · Operations

Making rollout repeatable

Every install of the six-service Honeycomb platform was manual, at sites with no connectivity and no remote support. I replaced it with one-command deploy and rollback across dev, test and production, plus runbooks client teams could run without us.

Runs at
DRDOHALGRSEIndian Navy
Focus
DeploymentOperations

Outcome

10×

faster by the tenth deployment

Rollouts that no longer need anyone from our team on-site.

Software · Modernization

Finding the real bottleneck at Vassar Labs

A media-sync process took 83 seconds, and the cause wasn’t obvious from the code. I traced it in New Relic to N+1 database queries and uncached downstream API calls, fixed both, validated the change in staging and shipped it.

Client
Vassar Labs
Focus
PerformanceModernization

Outcome

200×

faster: 83,750 ms down to 408 ms

Plus a written diagnosis the team could reuse on the next slowdown.

Open source · Product

Lineage: version control for people who never want to see git

People version documents by hand: a master resume with a copy per role, a deck per investor. Lineage is a free add-in for Word, PowerPoint and Excel that keeps tailored versions in step with the master, records every copy you send, and shows only the other side’s changes when a file comes back.

Built with
Rust & WebAssemblyOffice.jsOneDrive
View on GitHub

Where it stands

0

git words a user ever sees

In development and open source under Apache-2.0. Just masters, versions and checkpoints.

Under the hood

Platforms I’ve built.

Hands-on builds, from on-premise AI to the networks and pipelines that keep it running at defence and industrial sites.

  1. 01

    Buzz AI

    On-premise agentic AI · live at the Indian Navy and DRDO, ~100 concurrent users

    Answers from sensitive documents with no internet connection. Retrieval, tool calling, citations, evaluation and guardrails, all running on the client’s own hardware.

    • Llama 3
    • Mistral
    • RAG on pgvector
    • Tool calling
    • Evals & guardrails

  2. 02

    Honeycomb

    Multi-tenant industrial IoT · 1,554+ sensors a month, at five defence organizations

    Collects, routes and visualizes plant sensor data for many tenants at once, built for sites with strict MoD compliance and no internet.

    • Magistrala
    • ChirpStack
    • LoRaWAN
    • Superset

  3. 03

    Honeycomb Edge

    Edge runtime in Go · HTTPS and MQTTS

    An offline-first runtime for resource-constrained hardware. It keeps collecting when the link drops and syncs securely when it comes back, so nothing is lost in the gap.

    • Go
    • MQTTS
    • HTTPS
    • Offline-first

  4. 04

    Zero-trust access layer

    Network security · Tailscale and WireGuard

    Private network overlays that give each person and device only the access it needs, with a Go auth module built on Chaum-Pedersen zero-knowledge proofs.

    • WireGuard
    • Tailscale
    • Zero-knowledge proofs
    • Go

  5. 05

    pyInfra deployment system

    Deployment · 10× faster rollouts

    One command to deploy or roll back six services across dev, test and production, so the tenth install is as boring as it should be.

    • pyInfra
    • systemd
    • nginx
    • Linux

  6. 06

    ERP integrations

    Business systems · delivered at Optiply

    Zoho and Odoo connected over REST and webhooks, with retry logic and sandbox validation, taken all the way through go-live.

    • Zoho
    • Odoo
    • REST
    • Webhooks

How I work

Habits I picked up deploying where nobody could help.

  1. 01

    Sit with the work first

    I watch before I build. At Optiply and at MDL, the real workflow was different from the documented one almost every time.

  2. 02

    One win before fifteen pilots

    Rank every idea by value and ease, then put the effort behind the strongest one. Momentum sells the rest of the roadmap.

  3. 03

    Own the adoption

    A pilot nobody uses is a cost. I stay close to users through testing and rollout, because getting a system trusted is harder than building it.

  4. 04

    Make the tenth deploy boring

    Automate it, runbook it, and make rollback one command. If every rollout needs a hero, the system isn’t done.

  5. 05

    Write it down

    Integration guides, runbooks, prompt playbooks. Each one is written so the next person can use it without getting me on a call.

Experience

Where I’ve worked.

  1. – Present

    Co-Founder & Product Lead Meridian Data Labs

    Hyderabad, India / Guelph, ON (remote)

    • Lead product strategy for Honeycomb, the company’s industrial IoT platform: market analysis, pricing and the V2 roadmap, reviewed weekly with leadership.
    • Mapped a utility’s operations into 15 AI use cases ranked by value and ease, and anchored the roadmap on one high-value win.
    • Ran engagements from discovery workshops to commercial terms, including RFI, RFP and GeM responses and a full defence bid with a compliance matrix and dependency plan. Built the pricing, business cases and scenario models behind bids across five clients.
    • Took Buzz AI from prototype to production at the Indian Navy and DRDO, embedded on-site at defence facilities, and secured MoD clearance for every deployment.
    • Hired and coached engineers, designers and commercial staff, and led the team’s adoption of AI tools across engineering, commercial and operations work.
  2. – Present

    Teaching Assistant University of Waterloo

    BET 405, Digital Leadership & Transformation

  3. – Mar 2024

    Techno-Commercial Manager, Asia Optiply

    Hyderabad, India

    • Led India market entry for a Dutch inventory and purchasing SaaS from zero: go-to-market, segmentation, positioning and pricing. Grew the team from 2 to 15 and built a US$100k ARR pipeline.
    • Built the business cases for expansion, including competitive analysis and pricing for new verticals, and reported recommendations to leadership in Amsterdam.
    • Ran discovery with client procurement and inventory teams, delivered Zoho and Odoo ERP integrations through go-live, built ops tooling in Retool, and managed pipeline in HubSpot.
  4. – Jan 2022

    Software Engineer Vassar Labs

    Hyderabad, India

    • Cut media-sync latency from 83,750 ms to 408 ms, a 200× improvement, by tracing N+1 queries and uncached API calls in New Relic, and documented the diagnosis for the team.
  5. – Dec 2021

    Teaching Assistant, Cloud Computing Coding Dojo

    Remote, part-time

    • Co-developed the GCP curriculum, led a live session on APIs and cloud integration, and wrote guides learners used after the course.
  6. – Jan 2021

    Software Architecture Intern Estatetial

    Markham, ON (remote)

    • Built the production backend for a real-estate platform: GraphQL and Node.js services, a JavaScript-to-TypeScript migration, Docker and Kubernetes. Ran two zero-downtime cloud migrations, planning cutover and stakeholder communication.
  7. – Aug 2020

    Cloud Deployment Intern Indian Institute of Technology

    Hyderabad, India

    • Deployed private cloud infrastructure on OpenStack with Ansible, and built software-defined networking for routing, segmentation and access control.
  8. – Jun 2019

    Academic Intern National University of Singapore

    Singapore

    • Built secure IoT applications on Raspberry Pi, Arduino, ESP32 and micro:bit boards talking to Microsoft Azure over CoAP, MQTT and HTTP.
  9. – Jul 2018

    Software Development Intern TrackIT Solutions

    Dubai, UAE

    • Trained in full-stack web development and the software development life cycle, from requirements through testing and deployment.

Speaking & recognition

On stage, on camera, and in print.

Keynote · 2025

“Secure, On-Prem Intelligence at Scale”

Startup Mahakumbh 2025, hosted by iDEX at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi. Live product demos for founders, policymakers and enterprise leaders, with 95% positive attendee feedback.

  • Research · 2026 Quoted as an industry expert in TDK Ventures × Theia Ventures research on India’s Industrial IoT and Digital Twins opportunity. Read the report (p. 51)
  • Award Young Achievers Award, Indian Achievers Forum.
  • Video Interviews with MyStartupTV (SwarAksha Mahotsav 2025) and the Indian Achievers Forum, plus product launch and demo videos.
  • Writing Articles on the Meridian Data Labs blog about on-premise AI, edge computing, IoT architecture and agentic systems.
  • Teaching TA for Digital Leadership & Transformation at Waterloo; co-developed the GCP curriculum at Coding Dojo.
  • Community Active in the EdgeX Foundry, OpenWebUI and Flutter open-source communities. Designed our exhibition stalls and ran live demos at industry events for two years.

Toolkit

Strategy first, with the technical depth to back it.

Strategy & discovery

Current-state assessment · process audits & workflow mapping · use-case prioritization · ROI, pricing & business cases · scenario modelling · roadmapping · go-to-market

Change & adoption

Discovery workshops · executive presentations · stakeholder alignment · team AI adoption · training, runbooks & playbooks · technical writing · Agile delivery (Jira, Confluence, Notion)

Delivery & governance

Proposals & SOWs · RFI / RFP / GeM responses · compliance matrices · program & milestone management · risk & dependency planning · vendor & model evaluation

AI & agents

Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini · Llama 3, Mistral · agentic workflows & tool calling · RAG & pgvector · MCP servers · evaluation & guardrails · Cursor, Copilot

Automation & integration

n8n · Zapier · Retool · REST, GraphQL & webhooks · OpenAPI & Postman · Zoho & Odoo ERP · HubSpot CRM

Sensor networks & IoT

LoRaWAN & ChirpStack · MQTT, MQTTS & CoAP · EdgeX Foundry & Magistrala · offline edge runtimes in Go · Raspberry Pi, Arduino, ESP32 · plant-wide sensor planning

Computer networks & security

TCP/IP, DNS & routing · segmentation & firewall rules · SDN · zero-trust overlays (Tailscale, WireGuard) · VPN · hybrid on-prem and cloud connectivity · SSO, SAML, OIDC · zero-knowledge proofs

Cloud, data & code

GCP · AWS · Azure · Docker · Kubernetes · OpenStack · Ansible & pyInfra · Linux · Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript · WebAssembly · Office add-ins & Microsoft Graph · PostgreSQL · Superset & Grafana · air-gapped deployment

Education

An engineer, now studying how organizations change.

  • Sep 2026 – Sep 2027 · In progress

    University of Waterloo

    Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology (MBET).

    SpecializationAI & Digital Transformation

    Coursework includes Essential Accounting for Entrepreneurs (BET 605) and the corporate finance side of digital transformation. Teaching Assistant for BET 405, Digital Leadership & Transformation.

  • 2017 – 2022 · Chennai, India

    IIITDM Kancheepuram

    Dual degree (B.Tech + M.Tech) in Computer Engineering.

    MinorProduct Design

    Coursework covered both sides of the stack, from VLSI and high-performance computing to computer vision, digital image processing and human-computer interaction. That mix is why I’m comfortable with both the hardware and the software side of a business.

    • VLSI
    • High-performance computing
    • Computer vision
    • Digital image processing
    • Human-computer interaction

  • Until 2017

    Delhi Private School

    Secondary education, Computer Science. Dubai, UAE.

Contact

Let’s talk.

If you’re working out where AI fits in your organization, or you need someone to take a roadmap all the way to adoption, I’d like to hear about it.

Hrishikesh Vedantam in front of a honeycomb pattern