He built dams before he built AI. Now he runs the swarm that feeds you.
Shail Khiyara trained as a civil engineer, ran marketing at all three giants of robotic process automation, and wrote the books on agentic AI. As CEO of SWARM Engineering, he is pointing that machine at food, farming and logistics.
Most technology careers start in software. Shail Khiyara's started underground and out at sea - on the oil, gas, water and mining projects that engineering firm Bechtel builds around the world. He was a civil engineer, trained to ask a single stubborn question about anything complex: where does it break? Decades later, that question is still the one he asks, except now he asks it of supply chains, and the answer comes back from an AI.
Khiyara is the chief executive of SWARM Engineering, an agentic AI platform that helps industrial operators - the people who move grain, poultry, meat and freight - make faster, better decisions. He took the top job in February 2025. It is the first time in a long, unusual career that his title reads "CEO" rather than "chief marketing officer" or "chief customer officer." Getting there meant becoming, by most accounts, the only person to hold senior roles at all three of the companies that defined the robotic process automation era.
Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, UiPath
The originEngineering rewired how he sees the world
Khiyara earned a master's degree in civil engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 1988. He has been blunt about how much that shaped him. "Engineering at NJIT rewired how I see the world," he told the school's alumni magazine. "It taught me to deconstruct complexity." From there he went to Yale for an MBA and to Harvard Business School for executive education - a jump from the physical to the commercial that he tends to describe as a continuation rather than a break.
The Bechtel years came first, though, and they mattered. Working across oil and gas, water, mining, transportation and energy taught him to respect systems that fail expensively and in public. When he later moved into software, he carried a builder's instinct for where the load sits and where the cracks form. That instinct is easy to miss on a resume that reads like a marketing career.
"For years, we've built AI that waits for a prompt. But real intelligence adapts. It collaborates. It has intent."Shail Khiyara
The unicorn yearsMarketing at every giant in the room
In the 2010s, robotic process automation went from a niche idea to a stampede. Software robots that could click through legacy systems became the fastest-growing enterprise category of the decade, and a handful of companies fought to own it. Khiyara ended up shaping the story at three of them - as chief marketing officer at Automation Anywhere, chief marketing and experience officer at Blue Prism, and chief customer experience officer at UiPath. Insiders called him a "unicorn" for it, because almost nobody moves cleanly between direct rivals in the same category, let alone all of them.
Before automation, he had already done tours at Autodesk, Seagate, Verisign and Taleo, the recruiting-software company Oracle acquired. Two of the businesses he helped market were bought outright. He was, in other words, the person companies hired when they needed the market to understand a complicated product quickly. That is a specific and rare skill, and it is the reason his eventual pivot to running a company felt earned rather than sudden.
The turnWhen someone stole his playbook
One story explains why Khiyara stopped chasing individual wins and started writing books. He built a strategic framework, and a Fortune 500 company adopted it - without ever calling him. Most people would file that under theft. He read it differently. If his thinking could travel that far on its own, the leverage was in the thinking, not in his personal involvement. So he shifted toward influence: mentoring, speaking, and putting ideas on paper where they could spread without him in the room.
In 2023 he co-authored Intelligent Automation - Bridging the Gap between Business & Academia, written with a Fortune 500 CFO. He followed it with work on agentic AI, including a contribution to the Amazon best seller Agentic Artificial Intelligence alongside a roster of the field's better-known writers, and his own Agentic AI in the Enterprise. LinkedIn named him a Top Voice in AI two years running. The framework thief, it turned out, did him a favor.
"Some of you will build products, others will build companies, others will build communities. They're all needed."Advice to young engineers
VOCALGetting 90 rivals to compare notes
Around the same time, Khiyara founded VOCAL - short for the Voice of the Customer in the automation and AI landscape. The premise is simple and slightly subversive: get more than 90 Fortune 500 brands into one room to talk honestly about what AI is and isn't doing for them. Executives kept telling him the same thing privately, which he sums up as the real bottleneck: "The ability to think about what AI can actually do for me is still a challenge." VOCAL exists to answer that question with evidence instead of vendor pitches.
It also cemented his role as a connector. He sits on the board of automation firm Turbotic and advises a cluster of AI companies including Skan.ai, Robocorp and Workato. Taken together, those seats give him an unusually wide view of where enterprise AI is actually landing - which turns out to be useful ammunition for his day job.
SWARMDecision intelligence for people who feed the world
SWARM Engineering, backed by S2G Investments, builds what it calls Challenge Engineering - a no-code way for an operator to define a business problem precisely before any AI tries to solve it. The company aims its agentic AI at food, agriculture and logistics: growers, poultry and meat producers, warehouses and freight networks drowning in siloed data and split-second tradeoffs. Khiyara's pitch for all of it fits in a single line he repeats often.
His argument for why this matters now is a numbers argument. Industrial enterprises, he says, "are drowning in complexity - siloed data, inefficiencies, and decisions made with incomplete information cost them millions every year." Agentic AI, in his telling, is not a chatbot that waits to be asked. It notices, adapts and acts within guardrails - closer to a colleague than a tool. Whether the market agrees is the bet he is now personally on the hook for.
The personSix words he keeps coming back to
Ask Khiyara for advice and you tend to get the same compact answer: "Stay curious. Stay useful. Stay generous. Purpose fuels passion." It is the kind of line that could sound like a poster, except that his career actually tracks it - the curiosity that carried him from concrete to code, the usefulness he sold on behalf of other companies for years, the generosity of building a think tank and mentoring engineers rather than guarding his own edge.
He still describes himself, at bottom, as an engineer. The titles changed - marketer, author, board member, founder, CEO - but the reflex to take a complicated thing apart and find the failure point never did. In a field crowded with people promising that AI will do everything, there is something grounding about a leader whose first instinct is to ask, plainly, where it breaks.