Pocket FM chairs former Netflix executive Pannagadatta K Shivaswamy as Director of AI

To lead the Artificial Intelligence (AI) initiatives, Pocket FM has appointed former Netflix executive Pannagadatta K Shivaswamy. As a Director of Artificial Intelligence, Shivaswamy will head the startup's AI strategy and oversee the integration of voice assistants and content analytics, the company said.

"His extensive AI experience and deep understanding of the audio entertainment industry resemble our stature of work as we continue to innovate and enhance our platform," said Pocket FM co-founder Prateek Dixit.

The company also said that Shivaswamy will play a key role in advancing Pocket FM's generative AI capabilities and work closely with the engineering and content teams to develop and deploy advanced AI models that will change the way users discover and engage with audio content.  

Prior to Pocket FM, Shivaswamy was associated with Netflix for almost seven years as a Machine Learning (ML) research scientist. He worked on multiple projects related to recommender systems and personalisation for various product applications of the video streaming service.

Shivaswamy has over 14 years of experience with stints at LinkedIn and AT&T research. He holds six US patents and specialises in large-scale machine learning and deep learning, focusing on personalisation, recommender systems, ranking, and search, the company said.

"His extensive AI experience and deep understanding of the audio entertainment industry resemble our stature of work as we continue to innovate and enhance our platform," said Pocket FM co-founder Prateek Dixit.

Pocket FM was founded in 2018 and claims to provide more than 100,000 hours of long-format audio content across various genres such as romance, horror, thriller, sci-fi, fiction, and mythology in English and several Indian languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, and Marathi. 

The company claims to have over 80 million listeners globally who are spending an average of over 150 minutes on a daily basis.