Bio
Ishan Anand is Chief AI Officer (CAIO) at InsightSciences.ai, where he builds LLM-powered synthetic persona systems for market research, using generative AI to model audiences, predict preferences, and validate synthetic methods against real-world data. He has 15+ years of experience leading product, engineering, and technology strategy, including roles as VP of Product and CTO across companies from early stage to acquisition. Ishan is also known for his AI enablement and training consulting work, making complex AI systems understandable and actionable for businesses, most notably through Spreadsheets Are All You Need, an educational project and companion course that implements GPT-2 entirely in Excel.
Session (1)
Additional Speaker Details
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Anand is the creator of "Spreadsheets are all you need" (and its vanilla-JS successor), which reconstructs GPT-2's full forward pass with no ML framework so the internals of transformers — tokenization, attention, embeddings — become tangible. Attend to get a clear, hands-on, demystifying tour of how LLMs actually work under the hood, aimed at engineers and product people who want depth without the math fog.
Speaking style
Recent talks (2)
GitHub
@ianand- ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need★ 1,600Implements the full GPT-2 forward pass entirely in an Excel spreadsheet (no VBA/macros) to teach how LLMs/transformers work.
- ianand/tasklet★ 3Syncs Google Tasks to events on your Google Calendar.
- ianand/google-apps-scripts★ 2Collection of scripts for Google Apps.
Recent writing (3)
- Software is Content Now · blog · Jun 2026
- In the Backrooms of AI · blog · Jun 2026
- A Strategy Litmus Test · blog · Oct 2025
Podcasts & interviews (1)
- Building GPT-2 in a Spreadsheet — Everything You Wanted to Know About LLMs (But Were Afraid to Ask) · AI Tinkerers "One-Shot" · Oct 2025