Sumit Gulwani

À propos

Sumit Gulwani is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft, where he connects ideas, people, and research with real-world practice. His work spans agentic AI, AI-assisted programming, neuro-symbolic AI, and human-AI collaboration. He is the inventor of several intent-understanding and programming-by-example technologies, including the popular Flash Fill feature in Excel, used by hundreds of millions of people and now featured in middle-school computing textbooks. He built the PROSE research and engineering organization at Microsoft, whose technologies have shipped across various Microsoft products including Excel, Visual Studio, Power Query, Power Apps, Power Automate, SQL, and PowerShell. More recently, he has led scientific and architectural work on agentic AI across Excel Copilot and Visual Studio Copilot, with a focus on making AI systems more effective, efficient, usable, and continuously improving. His current interests include evaluation and production learning, fine-tuning and specialist models, neuro-symbolic AI, organizational knowledge systems, and insights from the human sciences.

A strong believer in the power of storytelling, Sumit has championed storytelling as a core skill for scientists and technical leaders.

Sumit is an ACM and AAIA Fellow. He has co-authored 190+ research publications across multiple areas of computer science, including 15 award-winning papers and three Most Influential Paper Awards from ICSE and POPL, and has delivered 80+ invited keynotes and talks. He received the Max Planck-Humboldt Medal in 2021 and the ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award in 2014 for his contributions to AI-assisted programming and program synthesis. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where his dissertation received the ACM SIGPLAN Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. He obtained his BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur, where he received the President’s Gold Medal (2000), and was later honored with the Distinguished Alumnus Award (2024).

Sumit has also focused on building research cultures and talent systems that translate foundational ideas into real-world impact. He articulated the Four Big Bets for Better AI Research around customer connection, blended research and engineering, cross-disciplinary thinking, and reusable research frameworks. He created the PROSE Research Fellowship Program in India, a research-apprenticeship model for nurturing exceptional early-career talent.