What we talked about
Harshit Kohli is a Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS, where he serves as a trusted advisor to enterprise customers on cloud strategy, architecture, and AI adoption. He started his IT career in 2010 at Infosys in India, built his way through Tech Mahindra, HPE, and Cloudera, moved to the US in 2016, and joined AWS in 2022. He is currently completing a PhD in AI, has published over a dozen research papers on mental health prediction, churn forecasting, and healthcare AI, and presented at the MCP Dev Summit on real-time streaming to agents.
Show notes
Harshit Kohli is completing a PhD in AI while simultaneously serving enterprise customers at AWS as a senior technical account manager, a combination that gives him an unusually clear view of the gap between what companies expect AI to do for them and what it actually requires. His answer to that gap is consistent across both roles: the data has to be ready before the model matters.
What we covered
- A Technical Account Manager at AWS functions as the extended team of an enterprise customer, not a salesperson, not a pure architect, but a blend of both. Kohli describes the role as someone who “thinks about the customer’s business as their own business,” engaging at every stage from initial cloud adoption through workload optimization, cost stabilization, and long-term architecture decisions.
- The biggest misconception Kohli encounters about AI is that it has a magic wand. He identifies three distinct misunderstandings: that AI can solve everything, that everything is AI-fit, and that AI can fix bad data. He illustrates the last point with an example of 100 flower images where 70 are blurred, no matter how sophisticated the model, unclear input produces unreliable analysis, not accurate results.
- He published research at an international conference on predicting mental health issues from wearable device data, using Kaggle datasets to compare model accuracy and precision across different algorithms to identify which model performed best on that specific data type. He has also published on predicting diabetes and on customer churn using sentiment analysis.
- At the MCP Dev Summit, Kohli presented work on streaming real-time context to AI agents, solving a specific limitation of the request-response model that MCP typically operates on. The result allows an agent to receive continuous live data and respond to interactive queries like “how many anomalies occurred in the last hour” in real time.
- When judging hackathons, he described seeing ideas emerge around AI-assisted crop prediction for farmers, models that analyze weather patterns to help farmers choose which crops to plant given a forecasted climate. He said that five or six years ago, these proposals would have been considered assumptions rather than buildable solutions.
- His advice to engineers in India considering a career in cloud or AI: go deep on fundamentals, not just surface-level familiarity. He argued that understanding the mechanics of services, even without reaching expert depth on all of them, is what allows someone to connect the dots for a customer and earn trust. Certifications and courses are the mechanism, but “if your fundamentals are not good, it is not going to help you in the longer run.”
About Harshit
Harshit Kohli is a Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS, where he advises enterprise customers on cloud strategy and AI adoption. He has worked across Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Hewlett Packard, and Cloudera over a 15-year career spanning two continents, and is currently completing a PhD in artificial intelligence.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harshit-kohli-99801543
- Website: https://amazon.com
Episode 152 of the PreVetted Podcast.