Manishanker Talusani

I'm the founder of TryNewAI, an AI-native engineering firm helping AI-native startups and pharma R&D teams ship production AI through embedded senior engineers.

Before TryNewAI, I spent six years as a senior software engineer at IPsoft, Justdial, and InMobi, building production systems across enterprise AI, search, and ad-tech. Those years taught me what most AI projects miss: getting something to work in a notebook is a different problem from making it work reliably in production, at scale, on dirty real-world data.

I founded TryNewAI in 2020 to focus on exactly that gap. Not staff augmentation. Not throw-it-over-the-wall projects. Instead, embedded engineering: senior engineers placed inside client teams, picking the highest-value AI workflows alongside leadership, and shipping them to production end-to-end.

Five years in, the model has held up:
→ ForwardEdgeAI - what began as a 3-month contract is now a 5-year continuous engagement
→ Pharma & life sciences - production AI and data engineering with Johnson & Johnson, Charles River Labs, and Haleon
→ Enterprise - engineering work with Cisco and AusNet
→ AI-native startups — including Ox.work (San Francisco)

Where I personally go deep:

• Taking AI systems from prototype to production - eval harnesses, observability, reliability engineering
• Data engineering for AI - pipelines, foundations, AI-ready data architectures
• Regulated environments - pharma R&D, GxP contexts where "usually works" isn't acceptable
• Embedded leadership - working as a fractional senior engineer or tech lead inside client teams

Who I'm best for:

-> A CTO at an AI-native startup whose AI features are stuck between prototype and production. A pharma R&D leader trying to operationalize AI inside regulated workflows
->A founder who'd rather have one senior engineer in the trenches than a five-person dev shop behind a project wall.

Hyderabad-based, working globally. DMs open — happy to talk shop even if it doesn't lead to an engagement.