With a grateful goodbye to Zoho, I joined Moative, a newly started startup, during the days of my new job search. I began developing, deploying, and maintaining AI applications. What started as a new chapter soon became a journey of building. Today, after the success of our initial developments, we have built our own AI-powered RPA system. At Moative, I work on a wide range of AI initiatives across multiple teams, constantly learning, adapting, and creating. And now, it feels deeply fulfilling to be an AI Engineer here.

After a second internal interview, I was selected as a Full Stack Developer in the Zoho Desk team at Zoho, Tenkasi. This new facet of my career was where I honed my product development skills. I worked primarily on user interface features and maintained a close connection with Zia, the AI team of Zoho Desk, where I proposed ideas for AI-driven software. The people I worked with were absolute gems. I learned not just how to build products, but also how to build them with ownership and purpose. And then, the time came for something big, risky, and undoubtedly outside my comfort zone.

In the Zoho office in Trichy, the new year began with new technologies. This was where I learned the nuances of speech processing, acoustic modeling, and much more. I was entrusted with tasks involving issues related to sampling rates, and I even designed a neural network architecture for audio classification. It was another exciting chapter of learning and exploration. But somewhere along the way, the direction began to change. I started searching for the missing synergy.

As a full-time, dedicated, research-focused Deep Learning Engineer, I started working on few-shot classification of documents with high intra-class variance. With everything I learned, I began building deep neural networks. Starting with small networks, then moving to moderately sized vision models, and eventually to pretrained transformers, it was a fascinating phase of my life, one that awakened the researcher in me. I discovered new phenomena in the systems I worked with. From small models that offered only a wisp of accuracy, I built a model that achieved 96%. The Life of Ari had a meaning.

The evening of Jan 22, 2023 felt so void. The sounds I was used to were absent. The colors of my village seemed dimmed. I was leaving Tirunelveli for Coimbatore. With my heart filled with my grandmother's face and a few droplets in my eyes, I was leaving. The next day was surreal. At the Zoho office in Chinniampalayam, I was introduced to the Deep Learning team, Zlabs. I met the man who had interviewed me, who had cherry-picked me, and quite literally, who gave another dimension to my life. For the next six months, I loved those rigorous evenings of learning deep learning and delivering my understanding back to him through challenging tasks and discussions. I learned profound concepts in deep learning and found myself falling for it. A new life had begun.