Sowmya Podila

Sowmya Podila is a Lead Applied AI Scientist on the Advanced AI team at Target, building AI factories and accelerating the AI product lifecycle at enterprise scale. With over a decade of experience in artificial intelligence and machine learning across retail, cloud, and enterprise technology, including roles at AWS and Gartner, her expertise spans identifying and scoping the right use cases for AI, building reliable agentic AI systems, and developing AI evaluation frameworks that balance the trade-offs of cost, quality, and performance.

A few of her notable contributions include evaluating an AI shopping assistant under active development, published as SERA: An AI Evaluation Framework for Retail Shopping Assistants at RecSys 2026; TrendBrain, a patent-pending multi-agent AI platform for trend sensing that strengthens style leadership across Target's owned brands and has been featured by CNBC and Retail Dive; and SimRetail, a persona-informed multi-agent system blueprint for retail assortment planning, published at AAMAS 2026.

Sowmya is also an AI advisor to nonprofit organizations, including Retail Women in Tech (RWIT), and an active voice in the AI community through initiatives like the Women2Watch Collective and the RWIT AI newsletter. She hosted the Generative AI Summit 2026 in Washington, D.C., and a LinkedIn mini podcast series exploring how AI is transforming industries beyond retail. She regularly shares her learnings and perspectives through speaking engagements and panels at leading conferences and enterprises.

Outside of work, Sowmya enjoys traveling, discovering new cultures, and embracing the adventures of life as a new mom.

https://linkedin.com/in/sowmyapodila

@indigirl.ai