Adil Islam

Principal Product Manager, watsonx.data; Data and AI Strategy

2025 – Present

• Focal for major client engagements ($150M+), IBM as client zero ($20M+ value), and SMB strategy
• Solution Accelerators: Building assets for rapid deploy with CI/CD of RAG and lakehouse solutions

Group Product Manager, Data and AI in Cloud and Cognitive Software

2020 – 2021

• Led PMs / data scientists in portfolio strategy for Data and AI org (~$6B revenue) and special projects for roadmap, pricing, strategy, M&A, and GTM overhaul

Applied Research and Product Lead

2024 – 2025

• B2B: Managed ops and research on finetuning, workflow dev and hosting for studio clients (<$1M ARR)
• B2C: Built SaaS app for anime creation in 3D environment; cultivated global community on X and Discord

Product Lead (previously Chief of Staff)

2022 – 2024

• Led 0-1 build of B2B API platform for Image and Video services (~$1M MRR)
• B2C apps built: Dreamstudio.ai, StableVideo.com, and Stable Artisan (Discord bot), (~$1M MRR in total)
• Project manager (GTM, release mgmt.) for foundation models: Image (SD3, SDXL), Video (SVD), 3D (TripoSR, SV3D), Audio (Stable Audio), and Language (Stable LM series)
• Migrated MLOps from Sagemaker/Coreweave to Stability cluster to increase reliability (from <80% to 99.5%)
• Partnered with sales on enterprise license deals with major clients in US, UK, and Australia ($3M+ ACV)
• Technical lead for distributor partnerships, including AWS Bedrock, Fireworks, and IBM ($21M+ ACV)
• As Chief of Staff: Executed global fundraise tour; created investor pitch decks; created and owned deal room; set OKRs for Policy, Legal, Product, MarComms, and Business Development; supported legal strategy

Head of Product, Operations, and Business Development

2021 – 2022

• Managed 0-1 product development with 4 engineering squads (GUIs, Platform, Security, AI APIs)
• Hired, tooled, and operationalized Product, Business Development, and Marketing team (9 total headcount)
• Supported spin-off of oPro.ai for energy vertical; secured lighthouse customer for new Kubernetes product
• Established 2-week deployment process for LLMs / Image models on V-100 K8s clusters with custom UIs

Management Consultant, Corporate Strategy Consulting

2018 – 2020

• Projects: Data and AI M&A, zero-based budgeting ($40M+, RSA sales), hardware strategy (VMware & Dell)

Founder

2016 – Present

• ULI (Proptech for Real Estate Developers); Prompt Engines (AI Consulting); and Flow (AI for ESL students)

Developer and Analyst, Econometric Data Science at Development Economics Prospects Group

2012 – 2015

• Developed and managed iSimulate, the World Bank's primary macroeconomic forecasting platform
• Led the Data Science and Modeling team for World Bank's flagship publication Global Economic Prospects
• Created data pipelines, developed models, and deployed a multiplayer web app for predictive models