Vatsa Pulak on Turning Curiosity Into AI Proficiency at Tredence
Where I Started
I’m a Manager in Data Engineering at Tredence, but if you watched me work, you’d notice I rarely build alone anymore. AI sits beside me in almost everything I deliver, and getting to that point wasn’t an accident. It was curiosity, a few hours a day, and a willingness to fail in public. Here’s how that happened.
Curiosity was the fuel. I started by exploring what Generative AI could actually do, then grew more curious about Agentic AI. I carved out a few hours every day to learn and adapt, and I’d try things with whatever I picked up, even when there was no guarantee it would work.
One of those experiments was building RFPs to integrate AI into our existing platform for clients. It didn’t succeed, but I learned an enormous amount from it, more, honestly, than I would have from a clean win. That experience shaped a belief I hold strongly now: AI shouldn’t be feared as a replacement. It should be treated as a skill that enhances your productivity. It’s like learning how to drive a car. Once you know how, you reach places faster.
The Moment That Mattered
My proudest win is what that curiosity compounded into: becoming genuinely AI-proficient, and weaving it through everything I deliver. It started small: generating VS Code scaffolding for PPTs, writing SQL, building Power BI DAX measures. Then it grew. Now I’m working with agents, letting them take on the heavier, multi-step work while I focus on the parts that need judgment.
AI has become the catalyst for all my deliveries. The work I get done in a day now, and the quality of it, would have looked impossible to me not long ago. That’s the win: not one project, but a fundamentally faster, sharper way of working that I carry into every engagement.
AI shouldn’t be feared as a replacement. It’s a skill that enhances your productivity, like learning to drive, it just gets you where you’re going faster.
Who Made It Possible
Lopamudra Panda. She was my manager, but more than that, she was a mentor who pushed and guided me to learn and adopt AI. Whatever new thing she learned, she always passed it down to me. And just as importantly, she gave me the room to try, fail, learn, repeat, and eventually succeed, all without fear.
That last part mattered most. It’s easy to say “experiment,” but far rarer to give someone genuine permission to get it wrong on the way to getting it right. That’s the space she created, and it’s the reason I kept pushing.
What I’m Building Now
Right now, I’m going deeper into agentic workflows, figuring out how much of my engineering work agents can reliably own, and where I add the most value on top. The goal is simple: deliver faster, deliver sharper, and keep proving that an engineer with AI in the toolkit is a different kind of engineer entirely.
Turn Curiosity Into AI-Powered Delivery.
Tredence works at the intersection of deep domain expertise and cutting-edge AI, and gives its people room to experiment, fail, and grow. If you want to turn curiosity into real, AI-powered delivery, we’re hiring.