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Bio, Work & Ideas

Sharmila Chokalingam

Conference affiliation: Microsoft · 2024

Sharmila Chokalingam is an AI product marketer focused on multi-model enterprise adoption: helping organizations choose foundation models for specific business problems and deploy them securely. In 2024, she was a senior product marketing manager at Microsoft working on Azure AI.

At the AI Engineer World’s Fair, she illustrated the Azure AI Model Catalog through three distinct enterprise applications: EY’s use of generative AI for professional tasks such as documentation and summarization; CMA CGM’s application of Mistral models to customer-service workflows; and Bridgestone’s use of Nixtla’s TimeGen model for demand forecasting.

Her Azure AI conference session emphasized that companies may need multiple specialized models across different workflows, alongside continuous model evaluation, responsible AI practices, and enterprise data privacy. She highlighted practical concerns about whether customer prompts and proprietary information are shared with model providers or used for training, positioning governance and security as essential requirements for moving AI applications into production.

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1 conference talk

Key ideas

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Follow model discovery, deployment, grounded chat, function calling, and flow evaluation to see how a shared inference interface supports application-specific model choices.

  • Can AI solve the use case—and can it scale?
    1:29 ↗
  • Choose capabilities, not just model size
    3:14 ↗
  • Inspect a model, deploy it, and compare benchmarks
    4:25 ↗
  • Give the same question a better source
    7:12 ↗
  • Separate infrastructure choice from the inference interface
    9:36 ↗
  • Use a function for the shop’s actual bill
    11:08 ↗
  • Build retrieval as a flow, then vary the models
    13:42 ↗
  • Control data handling, model integrity, and access
    16:25 ↗
  • From internal assistance to customer-care automation
    18:34 ↗
  • Forecasting broadens the catalog beyond chat
    21:16 ↗

References