Claude Ecosystem: Code, MCP, Skills, and the Whole New Stack

Aki Wijesundara is an AI leader with a PhD in Machine Learning and extensive experience mentoring startups at Google's AI Accelerator. With a career spanning both research and applied AI, Aki has taught 5,000+ students worldwide how to design and deploy production-ready AI systems.

He has worked across cutting-edge areas of applied AI, from LangChain and RAG pipelines to observability and large-scale deployment. As a researcher and educator, Aki bridges the gap between theory and practice, making complex systems approachable and actionable for engineers, founders, and product leaders.

Aki is also a frequent speaker and advisor to organizations adopting AI, helping them transition from experimentation to production at scale.

Karun Thankachan is a Senior Data Scientist at Walmart E-Commerce, where he specializes in Recommender Systems, NLP, and Information Retrieval to improve item selection and availability at scale. He holds an MCDS degree from Carnegie Mellon University and has worked across E-Commerce, FinTech, PXT, and EdTech accumulating several published papers and 2 patents in Machine Learning.

Sai Kumar Bysani is a Lead Data Analyst at BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina, where he applies machine learning and GenAI to healthcare data at scale. He holds an MS in Data Science from the University of Connecticut and holds 4 cloud certifications across AWS, Azure, and GCP with deep hands-on expertise in Python, TensorFlow, PyTorch, LangChain, and AWS SageMaker.