From a Village With One TV to Building AI Tools in Milwaukee

Key points

• Balaji Ingole, an IEEE senior member (a professional grade awarded by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), works as a project manager at Milwaukee-based Amla Commerce and holds six patents in the UK and India.
• An AI agent he built reads his emails every Monday and produces a full project status report, replacing a task that used to eat 10 to 12 hours a week.
• Ingole is developing a brain-computer interface to let paralysed, non-verbal patients control everyday devices such as fans and televisions.
• He has published more than 40 peer-reviewed research papers, held in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.
• His AI-assisted product-setup tool aims to shrink a two-to-three month e-commerce onboarding process to two weeks.

Balaji Ingole saw his first computer in a middle-school lab in the small Indian town of Udgir, Maharashtra. No one in his village owned one. His neighbours had to share a single television set. That lab changed everything.

"I was fascinated that you could create something with just a few lines of code," he told IEEE Spectrum. He taught himself database design, hardware wiring, and software debugging entirely outside his formal classes.

Today Ingole lives in Milwaukee, where he is a project manager at Amla Commerce, a company that helps manufacturers run their online sales operations. On weekends he works as an independent researcher, building AI tools aimed at health care.

What does he actually build at work?

His biggest current project is an AI agent, software that can carry out a series of tasks on its own without a human clicking through each step, that guides manufacturers through setting up their product catalogues online. Uploading thousands of products, adjusting names, entering prices, swapping out images: it is slow, fiddly work that can drag on for two to three months.

Ingole's agent is designed to walk customers through the whole process in two weeks.

He has also pointed the same technology at his own inbox. Project managers typically spend 10 to 12 hours a week writing status reports for colleagues and clients. Ingole built an agent that fires up every Monday, reads through his emails, pulls out key risks and deadlines, and drafts the report for him. The workflow involves at least a dozen steps under the hood, but the result is simple: he gets the document, and his morning is free for deeper thinking.

What is he working on outside the day job?

Ingole has co-invented an AI-powered wearable health monitor and an AI-based breast cancer detection tool, both registered as patents in the United Kingdom. His view is direct: when engineers use data correctly, they can help doctors diagnose patients faster and more accurately, and that comes with real responsibility.

He is also part of a team developing a brain-computer interface for patients who are paralysed and cannot speak. The goal is to let those patients turn a fan on or switch a television off using only brain signals.

"Health care data is not like other data," he says. "The stakes are high, compliance requirements are different, and the margin for error is effectively zero."

Common questions

What is a brain-computer interface?

It is a system that reads electrical signals from the brain and translates them into commands for external devices, so a person who cannot move or speak can still control things in their environment.

How does an AI agent differ from a regular chatbot?

A chatbot answers questions. An AI agent takes action: it reads files, connects to other software, makes decisions across multiple steps, and completes a task from start to finish with minimal human input.