Steven Kawasumi

Steven Kawasumi is an accomplished product management executive, consultant, and artificial intelligence thought leader whose technical, business, and leadership abilities have been critical to his success. Steven’s innate ability to empower and push executives and employees to achieve greatness and his propensity to transform organizations into AI-forward companies has given Steven the opportunity to develop and implement numerous moonshots and skunkworks projects and take the lead on core corporate initiatives and strategy. Steven currently serves as a Product Management Leader at Intuit, a global technology platform specializing in financial software for small businesses and consumers. As part of Intuit’s commitment to powering prosperity, they’ve developed a number of prominent products, including TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp. Part of this commitment has also been leveraging artificial intelligence to predict, automate, and personalize the customer experience, revolutionizing the way people access and use these platforms for their financial needs. This is where Steven Kawasumi’s contributions come in. Steven has pioneered the development of fintech generative AI experiences and built them into Intuit’s products, accelerating the adoption of a durable, scalable, and reusable platform that has transformed Intuit Customer Success into an AI/ML-forward organization. As a result, Intuit was able to recently introduce advanced processes and technologies into their Virtual Expert Platform to further streamline their tax filing and small business services. Steven Kawasumi has also developed and deployed a number of other AI platforms, like the omni-channel customer intent classifiers, proactive self-help capabilities, natural language understanding, and expert augmentation models. Steven’s technical skill set isn’t the only contribution he’s made to Intuit. He’s also elevated the organization through mentorship, regular coaching sessions, and his strength-based, positive management style. Under Steven’s leadership, his team members have increased their impact at Intuit and accelerated their career trajectories, and have been promoted and tasked to take on more product management and leadership roles across the company. Prior to his role at Intuit, Steven Kawasumi consulted for Motorola and served as the Acting Director for the Data Science and Machine Learning (AI) Group for the company’s Mobile Services Division. Over the course of two years, Steven built out their entire AI/ML infrastructure and strategy by streamlining and standardizing data instrumentation, training, validation, feature engineering, A/B testing, ML model building, and continuous improvement flow. Steven applied AI to existing customer data and created a framework that could identify imminent failures and quality breakdowns, like dissatisfied customers, legal escalations, and device issues, for immediate rectification. Steven Kawasumi’s additional career experience includes working as the Executive Director of Product Management & Business Development at Westmere Capital LLC, where he leveraged novel AI/ML technologies for small business evaluation and created data models for new business development, partnerships, and strategic investments. He also served as Senior Program Manager for New Product Introductions at Nvidia Corporation, where he led cross-functional global teams and brought new GPU designs for graphics, supercomputing, and deep learning to market. Steven served as Senior Manager of Transmeta’s IP Licensing Group, where he pioneered ML-based adaptive-voltage power-saving technologies and performance and yield optimizations for semiconductor chips. Steven’s academic background set the stage for his expertise in technology, AI, and leadership. Steven earned an engineering degree at Stanford University during the height of the dot com boom in Silicon Valley and developed his engineering, data science, and leadership skills across a broad spectrum of organizations. Steven later went on to attend the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business, also known as Michigan Ross, to further accelerate his career with a focus on entrepreneurship and leveraging his AI acumen in a broader range of business contexts. Here, he became an investment lead in a student-led VC seed fund and led seed and Series A investments. In that capacity, he also served in a consulting and executive board role at a number of portfolio startups. Steven and his team won the 2011 McGinnis Venture Competition and earned 2nd place in the 2011 Venture Labs Investment Competition. He graduated with a master’s degree in Business Administration with High Distinction. After graduation, Steven leveraged his VC fund experience to found a private equity fund focused on helping small to medium-sized businesses adopt AI technologies to accelerate their growth. During this time, he also consulted for the company’s portfolio companies, as well as outside companies, and cemented a reputation as an AI/ML and data science expert.