Aalap Ghosh | AI Transformation Leader | Dubai | PMP® | PMI-CPMAI™
I've spent 20 years translating what businesses need into technology that works. This includes a recommendation engine adopted across Unilever's markets worldwide, a full technology stack for a helicopter airline and an AI platform for construction commercial risk. Along the way I've built and led engineering teams of up to 27.
Book a 30-minute callIn my first job as a software engineer, I had no say in the requirements I was working on, even when I could see a better way. Getting that say would have taken 5+ years. A 2-year MBA at IIM Bangalore was the shortcut.
On day 1 at NIT Warangal, our programming professor said we would only ever be taught logic. Over 4 years we used 13 languages, and nobody taught us the syntax of any of them. Figuring out the 'how' was on us. I still work that way, which keeps my focus on the 'what': what the business needs the technology to do, and what it needs to change to get the value.
That's been the thread through Unilever, IBM and my startups. AI makes it more urgent, because building the wrong thing is now quick and cheap.
I'm looking for an AI Transformation leadership role in the GCC, or one leading software engineering.
Selected work
2025
Co-founder & CTO, Lexacon
Mid-sized construction firms manage commercial risk across large volumes of unstructured project documents. The goal was to turn those documents into structured intelligence that project and commercial teams could act on.
Shaped the risk management methodology and architected single-tenant AI infrastructure with modular agents, hierarchical tagging and orchestration, handling ingestion and retrieval across 100K+ documents. Integrated AWS Bedrock and OpenRouter for LLM routing and RAG, balancing cost, latency and data residency. 5 projects across 2 clients ran live until the platform was sunset when funding didn't close.
2023 to present
Volunteer Advisor, Strategic Technologies Insights Group, PMI
A global group of PMI volunteers, each bringing examples of how their organisations, PMI included, are adopting AI in software development. Every organisation is doing it differently.
Brought in examples from Lexacon, including a full session on n8n. One of the group's main questioners on controls when members present what they're trying, from the tools used to measure impact to how token usage is managed. The group's input shapes PMI's own SDLC practices and its wider industry guidance.
2022 to 2023
VP, Customer Engineering, Vieu
Vieu was a data-focused sales augmentation platform in early growth. How it ingested and configured client data capped the size of client the customer engineering team could take on.
Rewrote the customer engineering processes and redesigned data ingestion and configuration for graphs at tens of millions of nodes. Data processing throughput went up 5x, and the existing team went on to onboard clients 20x larger than any before.
2019 to 2022
CTO, Vetifly
Custom helicopter charters were priced by phone or email, with a turnaround of hours to two days. Pricing depended on rules that had never been written down: aircraft, helipads, routes, and constraints like night-time certification.
Spent weeks with our COO, who was also a helicopter pilot and safety officer, defining the master data before writing any logic. The result was the world's first algorithm for custom aircraft charter with upfront cost, shown instantly in the app.
2019 to 2022
CTO, Vetifly
Vetifly needed booking and flight execution systems across mobile, web and operations, and a team to build and run them, starting from nothing.
Designed and launched the booking and execution platforms, scaling to 12 daily trips on shared helicopter routes. Put remote working mechanics in place before COVID, then grew a fully remote team of 17 across 5 time zones, with CI/CD and a middle-management layer that grew engineers into IT business partners. Kept APIs on a separate domain so the apps and ops portal stayed up if the main site went down, and governed Microsoft 365 with SSO and IAM across entities and countries.
2011 to 2013
IT Business Partner & Innovation Manager, Unilever
Unilever's Single Source of People Truth initiative needed one identity and access model for its global workforce, with joiner, mover and leaver processes that worked across functions and geographies.
Led the €12M global IAM programme, with about 150 people at programme level, giving secure access to 200K+ users. Sole IT member of the 3-person global team that defined every joiner, mover and leaver process with senior business stakeholders, and owned the data side of each step, including which employee data to collect at each stage.
2010 to 2011
Systems Manager, Hindustan Unilever
HUL wanted to give its general trade salespeople personalised guidance on which SKUs and what quantities to sell into each outlet, on the mobile devices they used in the field.
Part of the Sales CoE team that delivered Project iQ: an SAP BI-driven outlet-SKU recommendation engine sending personalised guidance to 18K+ salespeople via mobile. I owned all data flows between SAP and the field. It won global CIO recognition and was adopted across all of Unilever's general trade markets worldwide.
Thinking
Short pieces on what actually happens when organisations take AI and software into production.
October 2026
'Black October' cost me half a day on a few small apps. Very little of that time went on running commands.
October 2026
PHP2Shell has every vendor shipping urgent fixes this week. The ones I’d watch are the AI systems that keep working after the patch goes in.
October 2026
Nobody else could price a custom charter flight upfront, in an app. At Vetifly, we could do it because I spent weeks on the data before writing any logic.
Community
I speak regularly at PMI and founder events on managing startups, entrepreneurship challenges and project management.
2023 to present
Volunteer Advisor
Comparing how organisations worldwide roll out AI in software development, with a focus on controls.
2024 to present
Deputy Director
Leading financial governance and event strategy for IIM Bangalore alumni across the Middle East and Africa.
2017 to 2019
Director, Marketing
Led all marketing, grew membership by 25% in 2 years, and scaled the volunteer team from 2 to 17.
If you're hiring for AI transformation or engineering leadership in the GCC, book a 30-minute call or message me on LinkedIn.