A Conversation with Umesh Sharma, VideoMining's First Chief AI Officer

VideoMining has appointed Umesh Sharma as its first Chief AI Officer, continuing a commitment to AI that goes back to the company's founding. As VideoMining Chief AI Officer, Sharma will help advance the company's AI-powered behavioral shopper intelligence, using modern machine learning and generative AI for retail analytics to help retailers and CPG manufacturers better understand shopper behavior. "AI has been in VideoMining's DNA from the beginning," said Dr. Rajeev Sharma, VideoMining's Founder and CEO, who started the company after leading an AI research lab at Penn State. For more than sixteen years, VideoMining has used patented computer vision, machine learning and behavioral science to make shopper behavior inside physical stores measurable at an unprecedented scale — more than 1.6 billion shopping trips analyzed every year. Umesh Sharma joins to build on that foundation, applying modern machine learning and generative AI to make an already-exceptional behavioral dataset even more accessible, predictive and actionable for the retailers and CPG manufacturers who rely on it.

This work will also expand the value of AI shopper insights and AI retail intelligence, helping clients turn complex behavioral data into more actionable business decisions.

Sharma brings more than 25 years of experience spanning artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, cybersecurity and enterprise-scale systems. He started out doing AI and computer vision work on early autonomous robotics programs, including DARPA-related self-driving research, and spent more than six years at Cisco Systems leading AI and large language model initiatives, AI security and AI governance. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science with an AI-focused research background from the University of Maryland and has authored five IEEE publications in artificial intelligence.

We asked Umesh to share more about his vision for the role.