Editor’s note: This story is part of Meet a UChicagoan, a regular series focusing on the people who make UChicago a distinct intellectual community.
In 2006, Satyajeet Salgar, MBA’07, was sitting in an advanced marketing class at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business when he pitched his group on a case study: a new video platform called YouTube.
Smartphones were growing in popularity, and the internet was nearly ubiquitous.
“This platform is going to be big,” Salgar thought. But his group balked.
“The sentiment in the class was, ‘We don’t think this thing will make it to next year,’” Salgar said.
After he graduated, he got a job with Google—working on partnerships at YouTube, one of its newest acquisitions.
“I always found that hilarious,” Salgar said.
Nearly two decades later, Salgar serves as director of product management and user experience (UX) at Google AI. In this role, Salgar leads the company’s efforts to use AI to build the next generation of products for Android, Chrome, Google Cloud, Search and more. It was a path that emerged from his graduate studies at Booth, where he learned to break a problem into its basic principles before looking for a solution.
“I might be a better software engineer for it,” Salgar said. “Even without writing code for two years, I felt like I developed the habit of rethinking everything from the start, then building it back up.”
The path toward innovation
Growing up in Tanzania, Nigeria and India, Salgar saw how innovative technology was changing the way people lived their lives and spent their time.
By high school, he knew computing would be central to his path in life. This led him to pursue a bachelor’s in computer engineering at India’s Pune Institute of Computer Technology, then a master’s in computer science at Stanford University.
As a graduate student, Salgar worked part-time at a medical startup; after graduating, he joined a data storage security startup. These experiences taught him how technology needs to work with sales, marketing and finance to find success.
This understanding deepened when Salgar earned his MBA at Booth, which he calls a truly “transformational experience.” Salgar enjoyed being part of a student body with diverse skillsets and experiences. His classmates all had unique goals, ambitions and talents, and he loved being in their orbit and learning from them.
Salgar worked as editor-in-chief of the Booth student newspaper, Chicago Business, and kept a pulse on what was happening around campus. He was fascinated by classes with professors Austan D. Goolsbee, Sanjay K. Dhar and Raghuram G. Rajan, all world-class experts in their fields.
“I feel very lucky for my time in Chicago because there was this grounding in data and facts,” Salgar said. “The school was also very intentional about helping students be better at both strategy and marketing, so it was a good time for me to be there.”
That groundwork has become essential for Salgar’s career at Google. His broad skillset has allowed him to move from partnerships at YouTube to a wide range of roles across Google. He’s worked on ads, payments, games and Google Search, among other parts of the company.
Search, especially, was important to Salgar.
“It’s an incredible product because of the impact you have on the world,” he said. “You get to deeply understand people, because you can see what they’re looking for and understand their needs.”
New access to intelligence
In his current role at Google AI, Salgar draws on his nearly two decades of experience across the company to guide AI innovation.
AI, he believes, will affect how everyone works and interacts with the world. He said it could extend intelligence much as YouTube lowered hurdles to broadcasting and Search flattened access to information.
Salgar is part of the AI Innovation and Research team, managing designers, researchers and product managers, among other employees. His goal is to improve Google’s core AI models to help make people’s lives better.
He believes there’s still a gap between the potential of AI and how it’s used today. To close it means letting users find new ways to interact with the product, while his team innovates to push technology further.
“Right now, I’m very focused on improving our platforms and ecosystem,” he said. “How will Chrome evolve? How will the Android operating system evolve? We have glasses that we’ve announced—how do those get better with AI? How do people live better lives as a result?”
Marketing plays a role too, Salgar said. To effectively communicate its value, Google must deeply understand its customers and how they use its products. Marketing is an art and a science, he said. His team can be simultaneously creative and data-informed when promoting and improving a product.
Salgar gives back to Booth by engaging with students through the James M. Kilts Center for Marketing, where he sits on the steering committee, and more recently with the Center for Applied AI (CAAI), where he’s on the advisory council.
When he meets with students, he sees that expansions to the school’s programming have helped prepare them well for the intertwined world of business and technology.
This includes events at CAAI and others such as the Kilts Center’s Marketing and Management Forum, which allows students to connect with high-profile alumni in small-group discussions. Salgar has participated in this and other events through both centers.
“The impact of the school, and the Kilts Center in particular, is remarkable,” Salgar said. “I feel very connected to the center and the folks over there and energized by meeting with students.”
One thing that hasn’t changed since Salgar was at Booth is the emphasis on students first understanding themselves and their own interests. Students must not only develop their skills but also learn what makes them feel curious and expand their understanding of how the world works.
Even with all the coming innovation, Salgar said students shouldn’t forget soft skills. There will always be new technology, but learning how to manage and work with people can set a technologically proficient professional apart.
“I often tell students that the class I used the most in my first six months of working at Google was Organizational Behavior,” Salgar said. “What incentives do people have? How do I bring people around to my ideas? Those skills were as important as anything else.”
Austan D. Goolsbee is the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics. Sanjay K. Dhar is the James M. Kilts, Jr. Professor of Marketing. Raghuram G. Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance.
—This story was originally published on the Chicago Booth website.
