Atul Chhabra

Atul Chhabra brings his rich experience in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data, and Cloud to bear upon entrepreneurial ventures and industry services. As Managing Director at Alto Strategies, he offers strategy consulting and business development services across a wide array of industry verticals. He has over 40 peer-reviewed publications and one patent in computer vision, machine learning, and AI.

Over the last year, Atul has been working on early-stage stealth-mode startups in HealthTech and Autonomous Navigation for eVTOL/passenger drones; both initiatives leverage AI at their core.

Earlier, over five years at CenturyLink IT Solutions, Atul was responsible for practice development, solution architecture, and sales support for cloud hosting and IT services such as cloud readiness assessment, cloud migration, and related services. He worked across diverse industries including financial services, healthcare, transportation, retail, energy, government, defense, and education. He spent a year advising Wall Street firms on technology trends. He has an entrepreneurial focus with deep expertise in emerging technologies. Earlier, Atul co-founded a technology startup to accelerate storage I/O for virtual infrastructure in cloud-scale and enterprise data centers.

Atul spent several years with Verizon as Director of IT Strategy. There, he managed private cloud strategy and execution, data center consolidation, open source software, and sustainability. His experience at large enterprises and tech. startups gives him a unique perspective on the technology and market landscape in AI/ML, cloud, big data, blockchain, and other emerging technologies.

While at Verizon, Atul advised the enterprise business unit on Verizon’s cloud offerings, acquisition strategy, and go-to-market strategy. He managed the virtualization and cloud-automation of 10,000 physical servers. His partnership with the enterprise business unit led to the $1.4 billion acquisition of Terremark and helped establish Verizon as a credible player in the enterprise cloud market. This business was sold last year to IBM.

Earlier, as Chief Architect for Verizon Shared Services, Atul managed data architecture and application architecture for a portfolio of enterprise applications. He fostered enterprise-wide thinking and informed decision making on IT infrastructure, applications, information, and business processes. Helped achieve economies of scale by reuse of common infrastructure, application, and information assets. Built and managed global teams.

Early in his career, at NYNEX Science & Technology, Atul led a collaborative industry-university R&D team to develop algorithms and software for machine learning, pattern recognition, and image processing/computer vision. During this period, Atul held a leadership position in the International Association for Pattern Recognition.

Atul holds a Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Cincinnati and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. His PhD research on computer vision and industry research on machine learning, pattern recognition, and document image understanding has been widely cited. He is a senior member of the IEEE.