A Q&A Feature with Ankita Mohapatra, Advisor at Credo AI
TLDR;
- Why Credoer Ankita joined Credo AI: After ~4+ years in Big Four Responsible AI consulting
- What makes Credo AI’s culture different
- Credo AI’s Velocity, customer impact, and trusted AI scalable offerings
- Advice on becoming a Credoer
Ankita Mohapatra didn't just want to talk about AI governance—she wanted to build it. After spending over four years in traditional service-based consulting, she made a pivotal move to Credo AI. We sat down with Ankita to discuss professional empowerment, product-centric culture, and what it’s like to drive the next wave of AI governance.
Ann Marie Cullen: You spent a significant part of your career at a Big Four firm's Responsible AI practice. What was the driving force behind your decision to move to Credo AI?
Ankita Mohapatra: I did—and it’s one of the most important career decisions I’ve made.
There were two main reasons I made the jump. First, I wanted to actually own the recommendations I was giving clients. Second, I wanted to stick around long enough to see if they worked! And learn from the outcomes.
Consulting was the right place to learn this work. I had great mentors and exposure to AI challenges across industries. But at the end of the day, it’s a service business. The deliverables stop at slide decks, draft policies, or workflow diagrams.
At Credo AI Advisory, that’s where the work begins. As advisors, we’re empowered to implement governance workflows directly in the product, iterate through pilots in weeks, and refine configurations until they actually work for the client. That appealed to me.
Because we’re also the AI governance vendor—and a sub-100-person company—we have long-term visibility into client outcomes. That level of ownership and follow-through is what I was missing before.
Ann Marie Cullen: What were your first impressions of the culture, and did it meet your expectations?
Ankita Mohapatra: My first impression was: flat, smart, hard-working, and deeply trusting.
During my interview, our Head of Advisory, Jeff Sizemore, told me, “I’m not going to manage you.” I understood what he meant in my first Advisory weekly—each advisor casually shared their client updates, clearly owning planning, decisions, and delivery end to end. That level of autonomy was new to me, coming from a more hierarchical consulting environment. Here, if I hear a client articulate a need, I can independently reshape a deliverable the next day without navigating approvals. That only works because there’s real mutual trust in the culture.
As a startup, we also work closely across teams—product, research, customer success, sales—which I didn’t expect but have really enjoyed. Advisors are treated as the source of industry expertise, and there’s a constant two-way exchange of ideas. That collaboration is a defining part of Credo AI’s culture.
Ann Marie Cullen: Can you share an example of how that nimbleness translates into real-world results for customers?
Ankita Mohapatra: Nimble is a great word! Earlier this year, a client asked us to make a major pivot mid-project due to internal stakeholder dynamics. Instead of implementing a planned technical configuration, they needed a full AI governance maturity assessment, meaning the scope, deliverables, and success metrics all changed at once.
We realigned in two days. Because we’re small and empowered, we quickly aligned leadership, reset the plan, and moved forward. At my previous firm, a pivot of that scale would have taken two to three weeks.
The client later told us that our speed and flexibility were the most valuable parts of the engagement. That’s nimbleness translating directly into outcomes.
Ann Marie Cullen: You’ve been instrumental in piloting several new customer engagement models. Can you highlight a few of the most innovative new offerings you've been working on?
Ankita Mohapatra: I’ve been lucky to help pilot a few new engagement models:
- Program Readiness: This was the maturity assessment I mentioned earlier. We evaluated enterprise-wide AI governance capabilities beyond just application-level workflows.
- QuickStart: A streamlined onboarding model for organizations with simpler workflows, where we identify the minimum viable processes and risk logic to configure the platform, cutting time to value by about 50%.
- Partner Co-Delivery: A collaborative model where we onboard customers alongside their existing consultants who are Credo AI partners, working together to configure the platform for the client. We’re going to see more of these in 2026 as Credo AI expands its partnership ecosystem!
- Staff Augmentation: In this model, I act as a full-time platform administrator for the client. It’s been invaluable for understanding the product through the customer’s lens and identifying opportunities to prevent downstream hurdles.
What’s exciting is that these models start as one-off solutions—but they consistently evolve into scalable offerings that attract entirely new sets of customers.
Ann Marie Cullen: For someone considering a career move to join the Advisory team at Credo AI, what are the three essential traits they should bring?
Ankita Mohapatra: We are looking for unicorns! Three qualities that matter:
- Customer-Centricity: You genuinely care about the customer and have client-facing experience. Advisors are the face of Credo AI in a customer’s early days, so representing the company well is critical.
- Domain Expertise: You bring a clear area of depth—whether that’s data science, security, privacy, or a specific industry or geography—and can speak to it with confidence. We want to be a balanced portfolio across the Advisory team.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: This role is an orchestrator. You connect technical and strategic teams—on the client side and internally within Credo AI—working closely with our Product, Engineering, and Customer Success teams to deliver client outcomes. The product is at the center of the company, and we are all incentivized to bring what we’re learning back into the product to make it the best it can be.
If this sounds like you, and you share our vision for leading trust in AI, we’d love to chat and get you started on your AI governance journey
DISCLAIMER. The information we provide here is for informational purposes only and is not intended in any way to represent legal advice or a legal opinion that you can rely on. It is your sole responsibility to consult an attorney to resolve any legal issues related to this information.
