FOUNDING TEAM · PRODUCT + EXPERIENCE
Co-founder & Chief Product & Experience Officer
Product design executive and former Google UX Director with more than 20 years of experience transforming complex enterprise technologies into clear, trusted, and useful product experiences.
At ContextFormers, Bala leads product strategy, experience vision, and customer-centered innovation across the company's AI platforms — including Media Intelligence and the spatial solutions.
"AI creates value only when people can understand it, trust it, and put it to work."— Bala Kalyanasundaram
CAREER JOURNEY
Leads translation of technical capabilities into coherent products, customer journeys, and business solutions. Work spans intelligent media discovery through Media Intelligence and connecting fragmented information across media, places, infrastructure, and enterprise workflows.
Led product design and research for major enterprise AI and business application platforms. Recently led 35-person organization supporting agent creation, Gemini Enterprise, AppSheet, Application Integration, Apigee, and enterprise connectors. Scaled AppSheet from 300,000 to 3 million monthly active users. Extended Apigee’s security and governance from APIs to AI agents. Earlier built design organization for Ads Sales Platform, launching 40+ products contributing to $10B+ incremental revenue.
Led 35-person global experience design organization across three countries, developing customer-centered transformation approaches across CRM, services, reporting, renewals, and connected customer experiences.
Built and led four multidisciplinary UX teams supporting large-scale consumer, advisor, and institutional financial platforms. Work included ETF trading platform handling ~$10 billion daily trades and broader adoption of design thinking and Lean UX across organization.
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Turning advanced AI capabilities into understandable, governable, and useful enterprise products.
Designing how people create, supervise, trust, and collaborate with intelligent agents.
Connecting customer needs, business opportunity, technology capability, and long-term product direction.
Simplifying high-stakes platforms, technical workflows, and interconnected product ecosystems.
Building multidisciplinary teams, operating models, and cultures of sustained product excellence.
Creating visibility, control, security, and human oversight that AI-powered experiences require.
AT CONTEXTFORMERS
Bala ensures the company begins with the problem — not the technology. His role shapes end-to-end products helping customers understand fragmented information, uncover useful context, and act with confidence.
"The goal is not to add AI to every product. It is to redesign the product around what AI now makes possible."
A PARTNERSHIP BUILT OVER DECADES
Bala and Raja Srinivasan have known each other since 1991 as 11th-grade classmates. Professional paths crossed at Google after years of family friendship. Their long relationship evolved into a product partnership through ContextFormers — combining Raja's technology architecture and AI expertise with Bala's product strategy, experience design, and organizational leadership.
1991 FRIENDSHIP → CONTEXTFORMERS
EDUCATION & DEVELOPMENT
B.E., Electrical and Electronics Engineering
Design Thinking Bootcamp
Executive leadership development at Google
BEYOND THE WORK