Ashwin Rao has more than two decades of experience as a leader in the Finance and Retail industries, with a consistent focus on creating outsized business value through technological innovations. Specifically, he has led science and engineering teams building products for Trading, Risk-Management, Pricing, Forecasting, Supply-Chain, Personalized Customer Experience. He brings unique skills in translating challenging business problems into technical specifications, and solving them by blending traditional mathematical/algorithmic methods with modern machine learning methods.Ashwin is currently the Chief AI Officer at QXO, a company focused on building materials distribution. Ashwin is also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University where he focuses his research and teaching on AI for Sequential Optimal Decisioning under Uncertainty, particularly Reinforcement Learning algorithms and particularly applied to financial trading and retail industry problems. He is the author of a book on Reinforcement Learning for Trading (https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Reinforcement-Learning-Applications-Finance/dp/1032124121), and has developed extensive open-source code for models and algorithms on this topic.