Anand Rao is a Partner in PwC’s Advisory practice, with over 25 years of experience in industry, he is the Innovation Lead for PwC’s Analytics group, he leads the insurance analytics group, and is the co-lead for the Global Project Blue, Future of Insurance research. In these roles, Anand is responsible for a team of practitioners who work with C-level executives at some of the world’s largest organizations, advising them on a range of topics including global growth strategies, marketing, sales, distribution and digital strategies, behavioral economics and customer experience, and statistical and computational analytics. As the innovation lead for the analytics group he is responsible for research and commercial relationships with academic institutions and start-ups focused on new and innovative big data and analytic techniques. With his PhD and research career in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and his subsequent experience in management consulting he brings business domain knowledge, statistical, and computational analytics to generate unique insights into the theory and practice of ‘data science’.

Before joining PwC, Rao was with Mitchell Madison Group in London. Prior to that, Rao was Chief Research Scientist at the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, a boutique research and software house developing real-time knowledge-based systems for aerospace, defense, and telecommunications clients. He was also instrumental is setting up Agent Oriented Software, a software house specializing in advanced decision support systems. He has held Board positions at start-ups and currently serves as a Board member for not-for-profit industry associations.

Dr. Anand Rao has co-edited four books and published over fifty papers in refereed journals and conferences. Anand was awarded the Most Influential Paper Award for the Decade in 2007 from the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) organization for his work on intelligent agents. He is a frequent speaker on behavioral economics, analytics, and technology topics in academic and trade forums.