Urjit Patel
Urjit Patel
Head of Commercial Data Science · AI Researcher · Builder

My work spans the full AI stack at S&P Ratings' commercial division, from model research and architecture to deployment and adoption across teams and geographies. The hardest problems tend to show up when AI capabilities run into the reality of messy financial data.

Before S&P, I spent two years at Praedicat (now part of Moody's) building NLP and deep learning pipelines on scientific literature to surface emerging insurance risks. I did my M.Sc. in Data Science at NYU (2017), where I TA'd for Prof. Yann LeCun and did research with Prof. Kyunghyun Cho on multi-document summarization.

Right now I'm most interested in AI agents and agentic systems, knowledge graphs as structured memory for LLMs, pricing optimization, and multimodal document understanding. Most of what I build at work comes down to making these systems actually hold up when the data is noisy and the decisions matter.

// background
Executive Education — AI & Analytics Leadership Wharton School, UPenn Joining Wharton's executive cohort focused on AI strategy, leadership, and organizational decision-making.
2026-06
Head of Commercial Data Science S&P Global, Ratings Commercial Leading AI strategy across S&P Ratings, driving LLM adoption, agentic workflows, and data product innovation. Hall of Fame Award 2025.
2024 – present
Sr. Lead / Lead Data Scientist S&P Global Built AI systems for multimodal financial QA, cybersecurity threat detection, pricing optimization, and revenue forecasting. Three US Patents filed. $20M+ revenue impact.
2019 – 2024
Data Scientist Praedicat (acq. Moody's) Applied NLP to detect emerging liability risks from scientific literature. Early work building AI on unstructured financial text.
2017 – 2019
M.Sc. Data Science NYU Center for Data Science · GPA 3.81 Studied under Yann LeCun and Kyunghyun Cho. Published work on attentional LSTMs and multi-document summarization at TREC-CAR 2017.
2015 – 2017
Software Engineer Wipro Technologies Enterprise software development on distributed systems. Where I got my grounding in production engineering and building things that couldn't go down.
2013 – 2015
B.Sc. Computer Science Nirma University, India Undergraduate foundation in algorithms, data structures, and software engineering.
2009 – 2013
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Hall of Fame Award S&P Global 2025
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Ratings Impact Award — Innovation S&P Global 2025
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S&P Global Inventor Award AI & GenAI Patents 2021
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Conference Speaker — Deep Learning & NLP AI conferences 2018–
// connect

Happy to talk research, AI agents, speaking, or anything in between. If you have a half-formed idea or a concrete project, send me a note.