Sustainable AI with Darshna Shah

About Show #1028

How does artificial intelligence become more sustainable? Richard chats with Darshna Shah about her experiences as Chief AI Officer at Elastic. Darshna discusses the resources required to run large language model experiments, the pressure this has put on the electrical grid, and more. The conversation turns to efficiency - and the idea that there is little incentive in the current land grab around LLMs to be more efficient - that the focus is on growing quickly. But as technologies mature, efficiency becomes a key competitive advantage!

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Recorded January 29, 2026

Darshna Shah is the Chief AI Officer at Elastacloud, where she leads strategic development of AI accelerators across Finance, Legal, Energy, Sustainability and Security. Darshna also has a broad-ranging consultancy experience, in which she has developed and deployed a wide range of machine learning models on Azure across a myriad of industries.Darshna has a PhD in Neuroscience, specialising in neuronal network dynamics in drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy from which her passion for Data and AI stemmed. She is an established speaker and mentor, having given talks at Tech(K)now, Microsoft conferences (Future Decoded, Build, Ignite), DPS Days, Cloud Brew, UK Azure meetup, SQL Bits as well as co-organising and leading the monthly Data Science London meetup group to bring together a community of over 10,000 members together to discuss and learn about the latest AI developments. She has a huge passion for sustainability and loves speaking with diverse audiences, learning and sharing knowledge through blog posts.

About Show #1028

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