Anish Agrawal is the CEO and Cofounder of Traversal, where he and his team are revolutionizing observability and site reliability with AI Agents. He is also a Professor of Computer Science and Operations Research at Columbia University, and earned his PhD in Computer Science from MIT, specializing in causal machine learning — teaching AI to understand cause and effect from data. Despite achieving his goal of becoming a professor, Anish pivoted from academia, recognizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to apply his AI research to tackle the industry’s toughest challenge — autonomous troubleshooting of the most complex production incidents. His career also includes roles as a management consultant at BCG and research scientist at Amazon and Microsoft.