About
Vivek Kumkar is a Senior AI Engineering Leader at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he directs organizational vision, technical architecture, and multi-team execution across Amazon Bedrock Data Automation, Amazon Rekognition, and Amazon Textract. Leading multi-disciplinary engineering, applied science, and product organizations, Vivek oversees the core AI and multimodal infrastructure powering mission-critical, high-availability workloads for Fortune 500 enterprises across media, financial services, healthcare, and the public sector. With 18+ years of cloud and AI leadership across AWS, SAP, and Intel, he has built and scaled global portfolios spanning both artificial intelligence and core cloud infrastructure. Throughout his tenure, Vivek has conceptualized, designed, built, and led multiple teams to launch and scale Tier-1 services including Amazon Bedrock Data Automation (BDA), Rekognition, and Textract, as well as foundational cloud infrastructure such as EBS Snapshots (Archive Tiering and Copy) and EBS Volumes. Beyond his technical leadership, Vivek holds U.S. Patent 11,262,918 B1 in distributed storage systems and actively contributes to the broader AI ecosystem. An IEEE Senior Member, AWS Bar Raiser, and member of the Senior Executive AI Think Tank, he serves as a peer reviewer for premier conferences including COLM (DAIH Workshop), ISPOR, and MedBioAI, while judging global hackathons such as MIT Sloan Hack-Nation, UnitedHacks and MLH Build with AI.
Vivek Kumkar
Published content
expert panel
Aug 20, 2026
Early-career employees have always learned by doing the work that more experienced colleagues have moved beyond: building the first draft, reconciling data, troubleshooting code, preparing analyses and sitting in on important decisions. Much of it is repetitive, but it also gives new professionals something essential—exposure to how problems unfold, how mistakes get fixed and how judgment develops.As AI takes over more of that work, companies face a problem hiding inside a productivity opportunity: If the first rung of the career ladder disappears, what replaces it?Members of the Senior Executive AI Think Tank—experts in machine learning, generative AI and enterprise AI applications—are seeing this challenge across industries. They point to a new approach: Let AI handle more of the execution while giving early-career employees more responsibility for evaluating work, making decisions, solving problems and learning from experienced leaders.That means rethinking more than training programs. In the sections that follow, members of the Think Tank explain how leaders can redesign junior roles around judgment and verification, use simulations and AI-generated work as training tools, preserve mentorship and hands-on experience and give emerging talent meaningful accountability earlier in their careers—ensuring that as AI makes work faster, it doesn't make the path to becoming a capable leader disappear.