Headline

Co-founder illusionart AI | Saaya.ai: real-time video & voice AI, multi-lingual | Co-founder Miles Education | Agentic harness engineering | Salesforce AI Visionary

About

At 20 I was porting macOS onto hardware Apple never meant it to run on, with strangers on the internet. That was Project OSx86. Fifteen years later I'm still doing the same thing: making the thing that shouldn't work yet work in production. Right now that thing is real-time AI. I founded Illusionart AI and built Saaya.ai myself, from research to production, with no team. WebRTC-native video, voice, and chat AI, under 300 ms of latency, 20+ Indian languages, running on AWS. The models were never the hard part. The harness around them was agentic orchestration loops, tool use and function calling, MCP, multi-agent coordination, session memory and context management, guardrails, and multi-model routing across OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and ElevenLabs. I engineered that from first principles, and it's the part I care most about. Before this: 14 years at Miles Education, co-founder, then CTO. I joined to edit videos. I left owning technology, products, and platforms for a business doing $500M+ in revenue across India, the US, and the Caribbean. • Grew engineering from 12 people to 110+ • Shipped 18+ products: learning OTT, LMS, CRM, CDP, ATS, and a proprietary ERP • Put agents into the stack: 70% of manual work automated, 55% lift in sales efficiency • Delivered the Government of Guyana's national digital school, curriculum generated by AI • Salesforce named me a Future First AI Visionary for it What I'm particularly adept at: ▸ Agent harness engineering: orchestration loops, tool use, MCP, multi-agent systems, RAG, structured outputs, evals ▸ Real-time multimodal: WebRTC, ASR/TTS speech pipelines, turn-taking, interruption handling ▸ Platform & cloud: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, microservices, high-transaction APIs, payment integrations ▸ Engineering orgs: 110+, DevSecOps, product developers, AI governance, board, government stakeholders I ship things. Then I make them survive production. Open to AI architecture consulting, fractional CTO engagements, and end-to-end product builds. illusionart.ai · shivamchopra.me · github.com/shivamchopra7

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

claude code

codex

cursor

elevenlabs

github copilot

hermes agent

Work experience

Co-Founder at illusionart.ai, Jul 2026 - Present · 4 mos, Bengaluru, • Lead the technology strategy for illusionart AI, focusing on AI solutions for businesses and institutions. • Own the architecture and engineering of products, including Saaya, Penwizard and illusionart Studios. • Spearhead engineering efforts for enterprise clients, integrating AI into their workflows. • Architected Saaya.ai, a real-time multilingual AI agent platform that talks to customers over voice, video and chat in 20+ Indian languages with sub-300 ms voice response times. It's built for regulated industries like banking, financial services and insurance, and it can be deployed inside a customer's own cloud. We're using it for video KYC, customer support, counselling and tutoring.

Co-Founder & Fractional Chief Technology Officer at Miles Education, Jun 2012 - Present · 14 yrs 5 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, I joined Miles to edit videos. I left running technology, product and platform for a business doing $500M+ in revenue. Co-founded Miles and grew with it end to end: started in education content and video production, progressed through individual contributor and team lead, and led the entire engineering organization as CTO with full authority over technology, product and platform strategy. • Defined the technology vision that turned Miles from a traditional coaching institute into a cloud-native, AI-driven EdTech platform contributing $500+ million in revenue across India, the United States and the Caribbean. • Built the engineering and product organization from 12 to 110+ engineers, designers and AI specialists. Instituted DevOps, DevSecOps and ITSM standards; owned cybersecurity governance, data protection and IT risk (MFA, access controls, secure SDLC). • Embedded AI across the stack before it was table stakes: agents for scheduling, payments and follow-ups lifted sales efficiency 55%; agentic workflows automated 70% of manual process across admissions, finance, HR and learner support. • Led enterprise architecture for high-transaction enrollment, billing and payment-gateway systems across LMS, CRM and OTT platforms, with high availability and secure data handling. • Shipped 18+ products: Miles Masterclass (learning OTT), MilesOne (50,000+ users), Milesforce CRM, Miles Engage CDP, CPA & CMA LMS, ATS, and a proprietary ERP. • Delivered an enterprise aviation-sector L&D platform, and the Government of Guyana's national digital school with an AI-generated video curriculum. • Recognized by Salesforce as a Future First AI Visionary for enterprise AI adoption.

Founding Team — Education Content & Video Production at Miles Education, Jun 2012 - Nov 2013 · 1 yr 6 mos, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, Before the engineering, the storytelling. Founding-team member on the content side: produced and edited educational video, animation, visual aids and interactive elements in Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. That craft came back twelve years later at national scale, as the AI-generated video curriculum behind the Government of Guyana's digital school.

Filmmaker at Autofocus Pictures, Oct 2011 - Feb 2014 · 2 yrs 5 mos, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, Editor and assistant director across TV series, feature films and educational content. Cutting film teaches you to hold attention for 90 minutes with no second chances. It turns out to be the same problem as building a product people keep opening, and the same craft I later applied to AI-generated media at Miles and Saaya.

Open Source Developer at osx86project, Nov 2010 - Feb 2011 · 4 mos, Remote, One of the earliest global open-source efforts to port macOS to standard x86 hardware, built by people who had never met in person. I was 20. My entry point into systems engineering, and the first time I saw a distributed group of strangers outsource a company.

Builder at Saaya.ai / illusionart AI, 2009 - 2012 · 3 yrs, • Built and launched Saaya.ai from research to production using Python/FastAPI, Node.js and PostgreSQL on AWS and Google Cloud. • Built a workflow where coordinated AI agents plan, write, test and review software, with quality checks and backup models. • Set up containerized services, automated releases, automatic scaling and monitoring to support daily operations.

Education

Bachelor of Science in Information Technology, Computer Engineering Technology/Technician, Mumbai University Mumbai

Bachelor of Science, Information Technology, Central University of Gujarat - India

Public links

github: https://github.com/shivamchopra7