Meet Madhura Dudhgaonkar, the Head of Engineering — Search, Data Science, and Machine Learning at Workday. Madhura’s experience ranges from being a hands-on engineer to leading large engineering organizations, and her teams have created machine learning-powered tools that are used by Fortune 500 companies. We interviewed Madhura as part of AI4ALL’s Role Models in AI series, where we feature the perspectives of people working in AI.
NH: As the Head of Engineering — Search, Data Science, Machine Learning at Workday, what does your work look like? What about it excites you?
MD: I’m passionate about Workday because we’re creating software that makes millions of professionals’ lives easier at work — software for things like people processes, finance processes, and software you use to make decisions about your business. If you think about it, we all work to create value in the world, to reach our own life goals. So, to be working on something that makes your workday more productive and more meaningful, that’s exciting for me.
Right now, we’re focused on defining our strategy around using machine learning, which means that I don’t have a “typical day,” so to speak. My days often involve a lot of conversations with people, where I’m helping to develop people, facilitating a conversation, or driving discussions about strategy. Or I might just be thinking about the future and what might get in our team’s way as we work towards that future.
You’ve mentioned that you pride yourself in having high emotional and curiosity quotients. Do you feel this is an asset for your technical work? If so, in what way?
Absolutely. For leaders on both the technical track and the people management track, both the emotional and the curiosity quotient are important for them to succeed in their leadership roles. Much of leadership involves having conversations with people. When you’re having conversations, you need your emotional antenna to be high up in order to read between the lines and go beyond the words that are coming out of people’s mouths. Once you use your high emotional quotient to detect that something is going on either in the entire room or in an individual you’re talking to, then need to ask the right questions. That’s where the curiosity quotient plays a role, by encouraging you to ask the right questions to understand the more holistic picture of what is going on so you can take the group or the person in the right direction.
How did you get interested in this work? And how did you get interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning?
I’ve always been interested in the latest technology, inventions, and innovation. It’s just part of who I am — I like being on the cutting edge and figuring out how to transform a cool invention into practical products for business. For example, when a lot of software was moving into the cloud, I knew I wanted to be one of the people who was making that happen, so I joined Workday where we build cloud software for the enterprise space. Then within Workday, when we started to understand that we needed to integrate machine learning and AI into our products, I was one of the people internally who stepped up to figure it out for us.
You have degrees in math and computer science. Did you always know that you wanted to focus on those subjects?
For anybody who was born and raised in Asia when I was, if you got good grades, there were two choices that your family pushed you towards: you could either become an engineer or a doctor. When I was faced with that pressure as a younger person, I gravitated more towards science subjects at school, so I went into engineering. I almost had to fight with my family to say, “No, I’m not going to be a doctor. I enjoy engineering more, so I am going to go into engineering.” And then I went into engineering.
What has been the proudest or most exciting moment in your work so far?
I am proud every time my team comes together and works really hard to ship something that our users love. Anytime my team finishes working on something challenging that took a lot from all of us, it makes me feel proud. It also makes me want to take on more and harder things.
Where do you see AI making the biggest impact in the next 5 years? What are some of the important things humans should be doing to create an ethical and equitable future for AI?
AI is everywhere and it’s going to continue to have an impact on everything we do. From my perspective, the AI and the tools we create are only as ethical as the people who create them. This means that the focus needs to be on human beings, our values, and figuring out what we consider ethical.
This is challenging because right now a lot of public conversations are happening within echo chambers, where there are boundaries between people with different opinions. If we don’t share perspectives across these echo chambers, then our broader value system is going to be incomplete or incompletely thought out.
To that end, we have to continue to focus on developing a common purpose and a common value system across all the different groups that makes space for our diversity. At the end of the day, we want to be able to boil it down to a few purposeful values that will help us in making sure we build the best products with AI and other technologies. I am actually very optimistic about AI helping human beings be better human beings if we create the right products with it.
What advice do you have for young people who are interested in AI?
This is general advice, not just for pursuing AI — I would say stay thirsty, stay curious, and never stop learning. Go where you draw energy from and listen to both your heart and your brain. It’s also important to be very purposeful and think about your values and what you care about in life. The earlier you start, the clearer it becomes faster.
About Madhura
Madhura Dudhgaonkar is responsible for leading Workday’s search, data science and machine learning teams based in San Francisco. Her teams have spent ~4 years building machine learning products used by Fortune 500 companies. Her experience ranges from being a hands-on engineer to leading large engineering organizations. Madhura’s career spans across SUN Microsystems, Adobe and now Workday. She has built products for software developers, consumers, and enterprise SaaS users.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics and telecommunications and a master’s degree in math and computer science. She is a frequent speaker at conferences and panels. She also leads the San Francisco Women@Workday Chapter.
Madhura is originally from a small town in India and came to the United States to pursue her passion in technology. She currently calls San Francisco home, and can’t get enough of its hilly charm, the diversity of people, culture, and experiences.
Follow along with AI4ALL’s Role Models in AI series on Twitter and Facebook at #rolemodelsinAI. We’ll be publishing a new interview with an AI expert on Wednesdays this winter. The experts we feature are working in AI in a variety of roles and have taken a variety of paths to get there. They bring to life the importance of including a diversity of voices in the development and use of AI.