Nikhil Malhotra is the Global Head of Makers Lab, Tech Mahindra, a unique creator space within the company. With 23+ years of experience, Nikhil is also a World Economic Forum AI Fellow working on responsible AI and Quantum ethics.
Nikhil has been a researcher all his life and is now leading the growth of AI and Quantum Computing research within Tech Mahindra. His area of business research is how quantum Computing, AI, and neuroscience would inspire the growth of AI and the next change in society, business, and for humanity. He has won numerous awards including the 2020, 2021, and 2023 Innovation Congress awards for the most innovative leader in India.

Nikhil is also a TEDx speaker and the author of a best-seller book – Courage, the Journey of an Innovator. Nikhil and team have produced a number of firsts, including finding a therapeutic molecule against COVID using both computational and non-computational means, creating the first meta bank for India, and creating an app for farmers to make them self-reliant. One of his long-standing visions has been to enable machines to talk in the local Indian dialect. Project Indus is the seminal effort to build Indic LLM (large language model), which Nikhil is leading. Nikhil holds a Master’s degree in computing with a specialization in distributed computing from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, and is an avid physicist.