Anand Rao is a Principal with PwC’s US Advisory practice, with over 24 years of industry and consulting experience, helping senior executives structure, solve and manage critical issues facing their organizations. He has worked extensively on business, technology, and analytics issues across a wide range of industry sectors including Financial Services, Healthcare, Telecommunications, Aerospace & Defense, across US, Europe, Asia and Australia. His work has included behavioral economics, simulation modeling, global growth strategies, marketing, sales, and distribution strategies, online, mobile, social media strategies, customer experience, multi-channel integration, risk management and compliance, large scale program mobilization and management. Before his consulting careers, Anand was the Chief Research Scientist at the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, a boutique research and software house. Anand has also co-edited four books on Intelligent Agents and has published over fifty papers in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in major journals, conferences, and workshops. Anand was awarded the Most Influential Paper Award for the Decade in 2007 from the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) organization. He is a frequent speaker at a number of industry and academic forums. Anand holds a MSc(Tech) in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology and Science in India and PhD in computer Science from University of Sydney, where he was awarded the University Postgraduate Research Award. He was also awarded an MBA from Melbourne Business School with Distinction.