Navigating AI with clarity, delivering value.

Independent advisory to C-suite, boards, and investors on AI strategy, transformation, and value creation in healthcare and life sciences — equally at home in technology, business, and operations, and grounded in deep credentials built over years running organizations at the cutting edge.

Expertise & Leadership

AI in Health & Life Sciences

Senior-level engagement across the full health ecosystem — biopharma, payers, providers, medtech, and technology — gives a whole-system view of where AI actually creates value, and where it doesn't. That view is built on having innovated, built, and delivered AI solutions across each of these segments: creating innovative technologies for AI in health at IBM Research, co-founding IBM Watson Health, and serving as Novartis's first Chief Data and AI Officer. The same grounding extends to advising senior leadership at Fortune 500 companies on AI more broadly.

Innovation

Leading innovation end to end — from concept, through the technology that gives it form, to the business case that justifies it, to adoption for value creation — takes a different kind of experience than sponsoring or advising on any one phase alone. It takes knowing what mix of talent and expertise a given stage actually needs, and how to bring it together. That range shows up across a number of products, services, and engagements over the years — from a world-class, comprehensive portfolio of technologies for AI in health, to services and products built on those technologies, to setting up an industry-first data exchange network for healthcare, to overseeing AI-related innovation at Watson Health and Novartis.

Data & Its Use

The responsible use of data — increasingly critical in the age of AI — has been a deep and abiding interest: who controls data, who benefits from its use, and what governance must look like for both to be trustworthy. These questions sit behind a series of businesses led and created around the permissioned exchange of health data — pioneering the Health Utility Network, a consortium of major health insurance companies and banks for B2B, permission-based data exchange, with underlying technology later leveraged by the FDA.

What We Do

A few things, done well, rather than everything:

AI Strategy & Transformation — roadmaps tied to business objectives, from readiness assessment to phased execution.

Board & C-Suite Advisory — building the judgment and fluency boards and executives need to govern AI well.

Investment & Diligence — assessing AI capability, technical moats, and data strategy for PE, VC, and portfolio companies.

Execution Oversight — a trusted advisor through delivery: monitoring execution, selecting vendors, and tracking ROI.

Executive Briefings — bringing leadership teams up to speed on AI and what it means for their business, in offsites and strategy sessions.

Who We Work With

Representative engagements:

Biopharma — enterprise AI value creation; established and chairs an AI advisory board.

AI Compute Infrastructure — use cases and applications for bleeding-edge compute infrastructure, across biopharma and financial services.

CROs — transforming the contract research organization business with AI.

Private Equity & Venture Capital — AI use by portfolio companies, and diligence on investable businesses.

Startups — advisory to early-stage companies on building moat and differentiation through AI and proprietary data.

(clients not named for confidentiality)

How We Engage

Nav.AI works directly with C-suite, senior leadership and boards. Every engagement begins with a first conversation with the senior sponsor and stakeholder, to understand the challenge the business is facing and assess, together, how Nav.AI can partner with the sponsor and the organization to provide assistance.

Shahram leads and remains accountable for every engagement, personally partnering with the sponsor throughout as their trusted advisor. Where a project calls for it, he draws on a network of world-class specialists — AI and domain experts, organizational change, communications, legal and privacy — selected to the project's needs and brought in only where they add real value.

He is not biased and acts as an independent and vendor agnostic trusted advisor.

info@nav-ai.ai A brief note is enough to start a conversation.

Notes

Some recent conversations and thoughts we've had on AI, data, and everything related to those topics for the enterprise. In a very noisy environment, with many people chiming in on AI, we try to select a few impactful publications and conversations that senior leadership and boards should be aware of.

(Updated periodically.)

Own

Podcast

The Cultural Shifts That Power AI Adoption — Data Science Leaders

On what it takes to lead AI in the enterprise — team structure, incentives, and moving from experimentation to business value.

Podcast

The 80/20 Rule of AI: Scaling Healthcare Innovation — Forces of Change, with Annie Graziani and Dr. Mikah Sellers

A conversation on disruption at the intersection of technology, policy, and purpose.

Selected Others

Coming soon — a short list of outside reading and conversations worth a leader's time.