Nayan Kanaparthi

AI Solutions and Enablement Intern

Embedded with Global Procurement on a CEO-sponsored AI transformation initiative at Avis Budget Group (NASDAQ: CAR, ~25,000 employees), owning AI use cases end to end, from discovery and scoping through build and adoption, on the AI Solutions and Enablement team reporting to the Office of the CEO. - Designed an end-to-end AWS serverless pipeline to audit ~100,000 annual roadside-tow invoices, targeting recovery of $1M+ in identified supplier over-mileage (Lambda, Step Functions, RDS PostgreSQL, Amazon Location, Bedrock, CDK), now being containerized for deployment on AWS EKS (Kubernetes) - Built a commodities market-intelligence agent on AWS Bedrock that gives procurement early warning on supply and price shocks, delivering grounded, source-verified alerts with a layered anti-hallucination system: span-level citations, deterministic citation checks, and a separate-model entailment verifier - Designed and led live AI enablement workshops for the US and UK Procurement teams, covering practical LLM application, prompt engineering, and responsible-use guardrails, with live demos on core procurement workflows - Scoped a document-AI and anomaly-detection system to audit vendor repair invoices, expanding audit coverage from 50% toward 100%

AI Graduate Assistant

Building and deploying AI tools for the Goldman Sachs Black in Business program, delivered in partnership with NYU Stern, embedding structured AI systems into the learning and operational workflows of an entrepreneurship cohort of 265 Scholars. - Designed and operationalized an AI-assisted learning framework with module-specific prompt libraries; Module 1 measured 97.7% adoption (259 of 265 Scholars) and 96.5% rated the prompts helpful, with zero "not at all helpful" ratings - Built and shipped the SMART Goal Builder, a production web app (React, Vercel Edge Functions, LLM-guided conversational flow) that walks non-technical business owners from a vague aspiration to a polished SMART goal - Built and shipped the BiB Financial Benchmark Tool: Scholars compare their P&L margins against industry benchmarks across 37 industries, built from data aggregating ~4.5M privately held U.S. businesses, with AI-powered industry matching and plain-English interpretation - Designed data-minimization and governance guardrails aligned with institutional and sponsor risk expectations

AI and Innovation Grad Assistant

Scoped and built end to end an AI-powered RAG knowledge assistant for NYU's Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship, serving 1,100+ startup teams per year with grounded, citation-backed answers, then hardened it to production grade. - Designed the full pipeline: web scraping, semantic chunking, FAISS vector search, query expansion, and streamed citation-backed responses (FastAPI + React) - Built a Postgres + pgvector semantic cache: 55% hit rate, 41x faster cached responses, 98% lower cost per cache hit - Hardened for production: grew the test suite from 33 to 207 backend tests, re-architected natively async end to end, and added Redis-backed rate limiting, OWASP-informed guardrails, and self-healing database pools - Leading original research to define the first structured methodology for building AI-native startups, and turning it into an AI advising tool for founders

Graduate Research Assistant

Research assistant to Professor Michelle Greenwald, supporting cross-sector innovation research and AI-driven product strategy. - Co-researched and contributed to Forbes CMO Network articles on GenAI adoption, retail marketing, and founder-led brand strategy - Contributed to a forthcoming book on cross-sector innovation strategy - Led competitive evaluation of a GenAI innovation product: designed A/B testing, ran a 52-respondent blind user survey, and built the go-to-market strategy: customer profiles, segmentation of 3,000+ connections, and tiered outreach campaigns

Co-Founder and CEO

Co-founded and led a peer-learning startup impacting 1,000+ engineering students across India, with pilot cohorts in Laos and Germany. - Led product vision and hands-on development of Quest Labs, an AI-enabled learning platform built around narrative-driven tasks, intrinsic motivation, and real-world problem solving - Piloted with 160+ users over three months: ~33% improvement in engagement and intrinsic-motivation indicators and a 93% learner recommendation score - Built the three-pillar model (QuestLabs, Collaborative Spaces, Community Spaces) combining narrative gamification, structured challenges, and peer learning cycles - Authored and published a white paper on the learning methodology

Business Development and Strategy Intern

Business development and strategy for a software-engineering upskilling company. - Conducted market research and competitor analysis that steered a revised go-to-market plan - Led A/B-tested content campaigns to increase brand reach and partner inquiries - Served as Community Manager of the Core Coders Network, a community of 3,000+ aspiring software engineers, launching initiatives that lifted weekly engagement around coding and DSA skill-building

Business Development Lead Intern

Identified new business opportunities, nurtured client relationships, and supported revenue generation. Conducted market and trend analyses, developed proposals and presentations, and collaborated with sales and marketing teams to execute targeted growth initiatives.

New York University

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CIIE IIM-Ahmedabad

Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Hyderabad (JNTUH)

Organizer

Led a 55-member organizing team across five domains to deliver FrostHacks, a national MLH hackathon with 300+ participants, managing logistics, sponsorships, and participant experience end to end.

Beta MLSA, Founder & Lead

Founded and led one of the region's largest student-led tech communities: 15+ workshops and conferences engaging 1,500+ students over two years, with ownership of partnerships, outreach, operations, and content strategy.

Community Manager & Blockchain Lead Mentor

Scaled a tech-learning community from one college to seven campuses, reaching 5,000+ students. Led mentorship programs and workshops, and designed a blockchain-learning roadmap that enabled 100+ students to complete hands-on projects.

CR/PR Executive

Secured sponsorships and strategic partnerships that scaled TEDx IARE'23 to 800+ attendees. Managed outreach, partner communication, and speaker coordination under tight deadlines.

Organising Committee Member- Undergrad summit 2k22

Supported event planning, speaker coordination, and on-ground operations for UnderGrad Summit 2K22, a student conclave hosted with the JNTUH Technology Business Incubator.