Interview with Dr Gopi Katragadda

Dr Gopichand Katragadda was born in Bangalore in 1968. He says of growing up in Bangalore: “I had a fun time as a kid, going to school, coming back, playing on the streets, learning what the school was teaching, but also learning beyond, making stuff, breaking stuff, learning through friends. I was always a curious, creative, aspirant, I painted and I liked to build stuff. It was a great time.”

Gopi is the oldest boy of the family and has twin brothers who are also engineers. Gopi’s extended family, includes  40 first and second cousins on his father’s side all of whom are engineers, while his cousins on his mother’s side are writers and artists. He says: “My dad was an engineer, his dad was an engineer. My last name, Katragadda means ‘black soil’ and the story is that we were cotton farmers and  military engineers going back hundreds of years and on my mum’s side of the family we were, going back hundreds of years, bookkeepers and writers.  My mother’s side, the last name is Tripuraneni, which means that they were tax collectors for three towns.  There is a large statue of my great-grandfather in one of the primary locations in Hyderabad, the capital city of the state, and my grandfather was an award-winning writer.”

Gopi attended a private equivalent to a convent school in India called Stella Maris, and then St Joseph’s, after completing his early education, Gopi went on to study for a Bachelors of Engineering in Electronics and Communication at RV College of Engineering (the national College of Engineering).

Gopi says of his interest in engineering: “In India in those days for those in the middle classes there were only two professions which were encouraged, not just in schools, but in society, your parents, your uncles, aunts, and they were either engineering or medicine. … Everybody would want their kids to go into either engineering or medicine and so there’s no issue like the STEM issue in the UK, even now, everybody wants to be science engineering graduate.”

Gopi says that while this focus on engineering gives India a competitive advantage, it there is also room for improvement, adding: “There are 1.5 million graduates in engineering every year and most of them will not find engineering jobs, most of them are also not really qualified with an ability to take on engineering jobs.  So we need to do better at producing a more thorough percentage of good engineers.”

He says of his own experience: “Engineering is a field where you want to learn and grow, you want to break things, you want to set things on fire and learn, I’ve done all of those. At an early age you’re not thinking engineering, you’re thinking about making stuff, creating stuff, and then you have the curiosity, so that combination is what I had.” He says that if he hadn’t been an engineer he would have been an artist following his love of painting and creativity.

Gopi’s school education saw him learn a board range of subjects including physics, chemistry, maths, biology, alongside English, and history etc. After this point he was then able to select his field between the sciences or arts and then at the age of eighteen select between engineering and medicine.

 He says that this broader approach to education than that followed in UK schools is beneficial, adding: “What we find is that those who are broad-based, those who can talk on multiple topics, and those who can think that way, are more effective in the current workforce.  For example, if you want to bring in an individual who can do artificial intelligence, that person is also going to understand biology of the neurons, but also if that person can understand, let’s say, health and wellness from a broad level, you don’t have to be at the engineering level of detail, but know that there’s organ and tissue health, there is cellular health, and there is health at the molecular level, then those folks can think about the future of health and wellness.  Whereas if you’re only able to produce one piece of equipment, in the best possible way, then you can be an engineer obviously, and do very well in that domain, but I think more and more it’s about creating new ways of providing value.”

Gopi highlights the role of mentors in his career from school onwards, saying: “I always learn from people. In school, for example, there was a Hindi biology teacher who was very good at their subjects, so my performance would naturally go up when you had good teachers. I drew a lot of inspiration from them in terms of knowing a subject in depth, and that helps me now, it helped me in my Masters and PhD, and it helps me in any form of research which I do beyond my work as well. In my grad school, my professor, Dr William Lord, who is from the UK, was a major source of inspiration from a standpoint of how to interact with people.  He would inspire us to get work done, and he didn’t have to say much, it’s because we wanted to do it for him. His approach of doing good for his team so that they in turn returned that favour is what I use even today. I learnt operations excellence from my first boss in my first role. I learnt global thinking from my boss in GE at that point of time, and from the Tata Group I learnt how to be humble.”

Gopi followed his degree up with a Masters in electrical engineering at Iowa State University in the US. He adds: “I did my Masters funded by NASA and I worked on the space shuttle main engine heat exchanger tubing and built electro-magnetic sensors for inspection of those tubing, and used AI to classify the signals coming out of those sensors. My PhD was funded by Gas Research Institute which was interested in looking at automating the inspection of the hundreds and thousands of gas pipelines by putting what are known as Pipeline Inspection Gauges (PIGs) into the pipelines, and collecting data which will tell them where there are cracks and so on.”

 He says of the experience of studying in the US: “It was such an enjoyable experience, there were 25,000 students in a small town with a total population of 50,000.  I was part of the Student Union board, I led the Indian Student Association, I met my wife, future wife, at Iowa State University, and a lot happened in those five and a half years.”

Of his involvement with NASA, he adds: “One of the happiest moments in my life was when Dr William Lord said that he would give me that assistantship.  I’d gone to the US without a source of funding other than my parents, and from day zero I was able to get NASA funding, and in those days NASA was really prestigious. Being part of NASA with a research scholarship, was really awesome.”

Gopi’s first job was with a company called Carter Technologies in San Antonio, Texas. It was a start-up spun off from Southwest Research Institute, that used electro-magnetic sensors for inspecting critical equipment.   Gopi says: “We were a start-up and I was the employee number 40 when I joined.  I joined as a senior research engineer.  But like would happen throughout my career, I always focussed on the job at hand, but the opportunities showed up very quickly for something larger.  So within a year the vice president of the organisation left to start his own company, so they asked me to do the role, not with the title, but still did the role, with the title first of manager, then director, and then VP of R&D in three years. We grew in the meantime from 40 to 400.”

Gopi returned to Bangalore, India in 2000 when the John F Welch Technology Centre opened. He remained with GE for twenty years. He says: “It was the largest centre for GE outside of the US at that point of time, now it is the largest centre across the globe. When I went back to India for a wedding I saw an advertisement in a local paper in US which had Indian flavour, advertising for jobs at John F. Welch Technology Centre, so I went and talked to them.

“The way I made my career moves was the intersection of technology, people and in some manner, India.  So that intersection is the sweet spot for me.  But what I realise now I’ve spent my career in India, it is much broader, it’s the intersection of technology, people and culture. Wherever I am, I look forward to learning the culture.”

In 2014 Gopi joined the Tata Group as Chief Technology Officer across the group having been approached initially by a recruitment firm. He says: “I wasn’t in interested, but the request was to meet Cyrus Mistry, who was the chairman of the Tata Group at that point of time and the opportunity to meet with Cyrus was something that needed to be attended to because he was leading a 110-billion-dollar organisation in India. I met him and he ended the conversation asking if I would join him.  I took six months before accepting.”

Gopi says of the role which he stayed in until 2019: “It was a new global role created by the new chairman, who was interested in ensuring that the group had a more significant technical outlook and flavour. We were looking at creating something at the group level, which was never done before, to give a technology heft to the group.”

The six months Gopi spent negotiating prior to accepting the role revolved around an agreement and understanding that to achieve this kind of technology, the holding group, Tata Sons, would need to invest in technology research, which is not typical for a holding company.

Gopi says of his achievements in the role: “So that six months was to say that this is what it’ll take, this is the kind of investment which will be needed, this is the kind of team which we’ll need to set up.  So that was one part of what we delivered at the group level, across different companies.  The second part was what do we do to facilitate university collaborations, again at a group level. How do we help our group companies think five years, seven years down the road and what were the global best universities. Thirdly, was to address the fact that when large companies like Airbus was looking for collaboration, they were finding it difficult to talk to so many Tata Group companies, so we needed to provide a unified technical face to the organisation.”

Under these three target areas, Gopi lead teams that developed new materials such as graphene, created an India specific fuel cell using hydrogen fuel, which also played a role in helping Tata Motors in their efforts to produce a fuel cell public transportation vehicle.  In the agricultural space Gopi’s team looked at aerial delivery of fertiliser and pesticide using drones.  Gopi explains: “In agricultural sector in India we were able to show significant improvement in efficiency by looking at where we need to spray, how much we need to spray using AI, and using aerial delivery of the spray and pesticide.”

He also looked at industrial IOT including the improvement of safety on the factory floor through the introduction of safety wearables. He adds: “From a university standpoint, from Harvard and Yale to Imperial and Tel Aviv University and in India, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Kanpur, we set up were multi-million dollar, multi-year collaborations, which provide many opportunities for the group to collaborate with large companies and create partnerships with a single face.”

Having spent four years with Tata, and with a change of Chairman, Gopi decided it was time to move on. He says: “I felt that it would be a good opportunity to do a start-up and play a role in the start-up we called System of India.  Today, I am running a start-up and I’m also the chair of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) start-up council in the southern region. I’m also a part of the overall national start-up council.”

 Referring to the Myelin Foundry which Gopi set up in 2019, he says: “In the start-up world, we said we’ll work on global first products which come out of the region we’re in, and since we had the luxury we decided we would be an AI company.  But we also took an even earlier call on being a company which delivers AI on devices, such as on mobile phones, TVs, and executing the AI on the device and not having to go to the cloud.  There are many advantages to this: latency, privacy and the ability to do safety in a timely fashion.  So there are many advantages to the Edge, which is the device.  But also we excel on the cloud.  We differentiate on Edge, but we excel on the cloud.”

Asked about the current debate around the speed at which AI is developing and the potential issues that it may create, Gopi says:

“So this is where the excitement is. And so where I see this going is that it’ll impact knowledge workers, it’ll – by that I mean it’ll aid them – so if you’re a doctor you’ll have information at your fingertips of new, very new research, if you’re a lawyer you will have information on case laws which are, you know, much more than you can digest on a regular basis. But, what AI will not be able to do is give a professional judgement on whether you should have a surgery or whether you should take medicine. These are calls based on seeing so many patients in the last, let’s say, couple of years, based on medicines which have been working in the last couple of years. So, where there is a lot of data AI can help the individuals, where there is less data and judgement calls have to be taken, and where there is sometimes emotion involved, humans are the only folks who are – right now – who can do that, because you cannot program emotion by definition. If you can program it, it’s no longer emotion.”

 “Those who have asked for putting AI development on hold, like Elon Musk, for example, have continued their own development and they have released AI work along the way. I think that everybody understands that this train has left the station and the question is, if you want regulations, if you want good actors to play a more significant role, they have to be on this train and they have to be looking at what is happening, which are the stations which are just ahead and how do we make sure that we are using the technology for the better human health and comfort, but also with the planet in mind.

“Will there be bad actors and the equivalent of the dark web?  Of course there will be. The dark web exists today and there are bad actors who use the dark web to carry out transactions which you and I can’t even imagine.  But, there are laws in place, they’re criminals and we can use the laws to bring them to book.

“The question is, is there sufficiently more positivity which has come out. I think the answer will be yes.  The economy has grown, it has provided more access to remote parts of the world, more jobs to remote parts of the world, given more people access to healthcare, to knowledge.  Similarly with AI, we will be able to deliver value for the benefit of society and for the benefit of the planet, and it will happen, there is no question about it. What will also happen is that there will be deep fakes, there will be people who can use the technology to maybe hack into environments which were previously not hackable, and so on, so forth, but we can deal with it.

“I don’t think we have that ability to say we’ll put a pause on something.  It has never been done before, you can only pause what the good people are doing.  Who is going to pause people who don’t care about regulations. Hence, I think that it is important for us to leverage it.  Also, no technology is bad, it is the human behaviour that we need to look at and no amount of technology neither can compensate for bad human behaviour, nor any new technology be dangerous in itself.  So anything can be dangerous, so we just need to ensure that we are thinking about this correctly.”

In October 2023, Gopi was named President of the IET. He encourages everyone to volunteer, saying: “There is an opportunity to do your career and alongside it to volunteer.  In a way I’ve been a volunteer with the IET since 2012, but I’ve also been a volunteer in student bodies from my undergraduate days. If you volunteer or give back to society, it doesn’t happen after your retirement. The skills that you develop along the way, and you will be repeating that development based on your roles, include expertise which you build in your grad school and later, it will include imagination and creativity, but also it will include clear thinking, it’ll include being able to work inclusively, and it’ll include having an external focus as you grow into managerial roles of different levels of magnitude.”

He says of his time as President: “The role of the president is part of a continuum, it is 150-year-old organisation so presidents come every year.  I believe a president should look to provide a leadership and a focus for that year, and at the same time provide continuity from the past year, and provide a continuity into the next year. For example, Bob Cryan was focussed on mentoring and looking at engineering careers of youngsters.  I think that is something that should continue.  My focus is on AI and creating AI jobs in the right places, and being able to think about AI ethics and data ethics.

“It will be a long journey in terms of being able to find the best way to optimise the good impact AI has, while not letting go of certain fundamentals on how we do it.”

Asked what he most proud of in his career, Gopi says: “It’s been the individuals that have gone on from working with me to be great leaders globally in multiple places.  My career is based on the conjunction of technology, people and culture and the biggest aspect of that is people. I feel rewarded whenever I meet my colleagues doing really great jobs, heading large companies, starting small companies, and when I meet them and the warmth that we share with each other shows that we had a great time and I had a piecemeal role of influencing their direction.”

Looking to the future, Gopi highlights a foundational paper called ‘Attention is All that you Need’ and says that it was written in 2017 by people in Google with authros from around the world, he adds: “So I don’t think any particular country should take complete ownership of the now opportunities which AI will have.  I think the opportunities are everywhere, starting with healthcare, the ability to go from diagnose and cure to predict and prevent, in energy to identify the right mix to minimise the impact to the planet, in transportation to ensure that we are leveraging public transportation in the most effective way, and thinking about the networks and what is the best design, using AI, and in agriculture, to be able to look at how to get the optimal outcome using the least bit of interventions like fertilisers and pesticides, because those are damaging the soil below.  So there is significant amount of opportunity.  For us, for my company, for me, I think the opportunity is to excel on the devices.”

Offering advice to young people considering a career, Gopi says: “I think youngsters should be the best version of themselves. For those who are creative, I would strongly recommend engineering, for those who have curiosity I would strongly recommend engineering, those who want to work with their hands or are interested in creating a future, I would strongly recommend engineering.”

Gopi highlights that we need engineers in order to rebuild everything for the future, a future which will be impacted by climate change. He adds: “Today we are heading down a path where climate change is not going to allow the future to be as pleasant as it is today or as pleasant as it was yesterday, and so we need to rethink everything which is out there with a new lens. Engineers are the most capable people to do that.  There is significant opportunity for engineers.  The new engineer is an engineer who is not happy with just what they’ve learnt, but are constantly learning into the future, they are creative, they are hands-on, they have the planet in their hearts and minds and are willing to make a large impact.”

Interviewed by: Jane Bird

Transcribed by: Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by: Lynda Feeley