From Insight to Impact: Building AI-First Products with Privacy, Research, and Scale with Saswati Saha Mitra

In this episode of MLOps London On Air, host Alex Housley is joined by Saswati Saha Mitra, former Director of Insights at WhatsApp, to dive into what it really takes to build impactful AI-first products. Drawing from her leadership experience at WhatsApp, Uber, and Google, Saswati shares how research, data science, and engineering teams can meaningfully collaborate, even in highly constrained environments like end-to-end encrypted platforms.

They unpack lessons from scaling insights during the COVID misinformation crisis on WhatsApp, how to build with privacy-by-design while supporting business needs, and why collaboration models are evolving in leaner, more async organizations. The conversation also explores emerging trends like vibe coding, agentic systems, LLM interpretability, and how AI is transforming user research, dev tooling, and p ...