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About
Anirban Poddar is a Senior AI Product Manager at Meta, where he builds agentic AI — voice and business agents — for lead-generation advertisers across Facebook's monetization ecosystem. His work includes one of the industry's first real-time voice AI agents for Meta on ads and Meta Business Agents for lead nurturing. Before Meta, Anirban led product for new delivery and logistics initiatives at Amazon, and was a founding product leader on the team that launched Walmart+, where he owned flagship shopping-event experiences. He previously founded ShopHop, an artisanal food marketplace in India that brought dozens of small producers online for the first time, and began his career as a strategy consultant at Strategy&. He holds an MBA with Distinction from Harvard Business School, a master's in Computer Science from Cornell Tech, and a bachelor's from Columbia. He advises the next generation of builders as a Cornell Tech Studio Industry Advisor and an inaugural Harvard Rock Center Venture Builder.
Anirban Poddar
Published content
expert panel
Marketing has always operated around a simple proposition: Get in front of people. Capture attention, create preference and make it easy for the consumer to buy.AI agents complicate every part of that formula.Instead of opening a search engine, comparing products, reading reviews and navigating checkout, a consumer may increasingly tell an agent what they want and let software handle the rest. The agent can interpret preferences, compare options, check prices, evaluate constraints and eventually complete the transaction.And if humans are no longer evaluating every option, companies may have to stop asking, “How do we get noticed?” and start asking, “How do we become the option an agent can confidently recommend?”Members of the Senior Executive AI Think Tank—a curated group of experts specializing in machine learning, generative AI and enterprise AI applications—see that transition from different vantage points. Here, they explore what this shift could mean for companies, consumers and the future of commerce—and what businesses may need to rethink as AI agents take on a greater role in the buying process.