Media veteran Anil Goel jumps ship to join AI transformation start-up Brained

MUMBAI: Anil Goel has swapped three decades of media-industry battle scars for a shot at the AI frontier, joining Brained.app as chief AI transformation officer. The role hands him the client portfolio and service business outright, while the product roadmap is shared with co-founder Akshit Sharma. Brained bills itself as an end-to-end digital transformation platform where AI agents do the grunt work and humans supply the creativity, imagination and governance.

Goel is no stranger to being early. He cut his teeth at Rediff.com in the late nineties, writing HTML in Notepad because founder Ajit Balakrishnan would not spare an extra byte, back when webservers ran on a 64k footprint and content was distributed off farms nobody would recognise as infrastructure today. He went on to help launch Hotstar under Uday Shankar at Star India, a project so ambitious it had Italian engineers at Accenture Video Solutions stitching four-second MP4 chunks together to make video playable on a Rs 900 feature phone.

His CV since reads like a greatest-hits reel of Indian media and telecom: Vodafone-Idea, StarSports.com, SonyLIV, and a stint directing the Sony-Zee pre-merger technology workstream, a job that meant herding BCG, KPMG, Deloitte, Accenture and TCS in the same direction at once. Along the way he built data, analytics and AI centres of excellence, ran JIRA-based compliance processes to keep 40-plus applications SOX-clean, and set up innovation labs with AWS and Google to prototype AI use cases in content and metadata. He even helped Shah Rukh Khan launch srkworld.com back in 1999, a website roughly two decades ahead of its market.

At Brained, Goel says the appeal is watching AI agents align stakeholders across meetings, emails, chats and codebases while building data models and back-end logic on the fly, the same sense of bewilderment, he says, that he felt understanding the internet at Rediff and streaming at Star. He is betting AI will not just be another technology wave but the operating system for human civilisation itself, one that makes the internet and mobile eras look like warm-up acts.

Whether Brained turns out to be a genuine inflection point or simply Goel’s latest adventure in being early to a party others haven’t noticed yet, the man himself sounds in no mood to sit still and find out slowly. Coffee in Andheri, he says, is a good place to start.