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Product and General Management Executive with over 20 years of experience scaling global…
Articles by Ashok
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Ashok Bania posted thisThe "lack of documentation or process" etc. excuse is rarely about documentation. It’s about 𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 and 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆. We’ve all seen it (and many of us have been guilty of it at some point): a meeting doesn't go as planned, a key detail is missed, and the reflex response becomes "𝘐 𝘸𝘢𝘴𝘯'𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘬." "𝘞𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘢 𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘵𝘩." "𝘐 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘭𝘦𝘧𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘱." In most teams, everyone has access to the exact same visibility and information. The difference is that some employees don't blame the process or a system (which is easy to blame as it has no face), they take 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 and work towards fixing the issues. When you're responsible for a project, hiding behind fragmented docs or missing links burns credibility fast. Stakeholders aren't expecting you to be a human database, but they do expect you to own your stuff. If you want to build real trust, a few simple shifts go a long way: 1. Stop explaining why you don't know something. If you're caught without an answer, drop the defense. A simple "𝘐'𝘭𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸 𝘶𝘱 𝘣𝘺 3 𝘗𝘔" preserves far more trust than listing the tools or chats that failed you. 2. Anticipate the friction. Don't just show up to present what you finished. Figure out what people are going to ask next and go hunt down those answers beforehand. 3. It's easy to write a doc and feel productive, it's harder to align people. A doc is a tool but 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 (AI pun intended lol). People will read your docs if they know you create alignment. There are no shortcuts. Real ownership isn't waiting for clarity to be handed to you; it's actively going out to create it for everyone else. P.S. With AI, this problem is becoming ever more pervasive as everyone is a document creator. #ProductManagement #Leadership #WorkplaceCulture #Accountability #Ownership
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Ashok Bania reposted thisAshok Bania reposted thisGracenote asked an ungrounded LLM about Taylor Sheridan’s “The Madison.” Instead, it invented a reality show set in Wisconsin. The problem wasn’t the prompt. In a new byline for Streaming Media Magazine, Gracenote SVP, Product Tyler Bell explains why an LLM alone can’t reliably help viewers find what to watch. Accurate, up-to-date answers about movies and TV require domain-specific content intelligence to ground the model—and specialized tools to deliver that trusted information at query time. When an AI assistant serves the wrong show, cast or storyline, viewers don’t blame the model. They blame the experience. Read Tyler’s perspective: https://lnkd.in/gPGp6dscWhy Your LLM Thinks 'The Madison' Is in WisconsinWhy Your LLM Thinks 'The Madison' Is in Wisconsin
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Ashok Bania reposted thisAshok Bania reposted thisA Gracenote study found that people spend an average of 14 minutes looking for something to watch. AI can help streaming services shorten that search—or confidently point viewers in the wrong direction. The difference comes down to trust. Models need current, connected content intelligence to generate reliable responses about movies, TV shows and sports programming, including where they’re available. On Thursday, Aug. 13, Gracenote VP of AI Products Ashok Bania will bring that perspective to Streaming Media Connect’s virtual panel, “Find It Fast: Leveraging AI in CTV Discovery.” He’ll join Jon Giegengack of Hub Entertainment Research, Xperi Inc.’s Chris Ambrozic and Alok Ranjan of Future Today Inc for a discussion moderated by Dataxis’ Ophélie Boucaud. The group will examine how streaming platforms and electronic program guides are using recommendation architectures, real-time personalization and agent-assisted search to surface the right content at the right moment without sacrificing viewer trust. Register for free to join the conversation: https://lnkd.in/dZxCWzPK
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Ashok Bania shared thisAI just exposed how badly the industry neglected the value of metadata. Folks who speak about revenue, metrics and profitability in entertainment companies, they love to talk about million $ content buys, slick UI designs, and conversational AI search. But behind every correct search result, seamless global launch, precise ad placement, and accurate royalty check is an unsung hero holding the entire foundation together: metadata. Without clean structured identifiers: - AI search models deliver polished, confident nonsense. - Premium ad inventory gets packaged under generic "entertainment" tags. - Rights windows get missed, and partner deliveries get rejected. As highlighted in the article AI Exposed the Value of Streaming’s Most Ignored Asset, streaming platforms are building expensive interfaces on top of fragmented data foundations. #StreamingIndustry #Metadata #AI #MediaTechnology #DigitalMedia #EntertainmentTech #ContentStrategy https://lnkd.in/gnr3E9YpAI Exposed the Value of Streaming’s Most Ignored AssetAI Exposed the Value of Streaming’s Most Ignored Asset
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Ashok Bania reposted thisAshok Bania reposted this"Too much content, too little shelf space" has been the story of OTT & CTV discovery for years. Is AI flipping the script? On August 13 at Streaming Media Magazine's #StreamingConnect, join TiVo's Chris Ambrozic, Gracenote's Ashok Bania, Dataxis' Ophélie Boucaud, Hub Entertainment Research's Jon Giegengack, and Future Today Inc's Alok Ranjan for the action-packed panel "Find it Fast: Leveraging AI in CTV Discovery" for a wealth of insight on the current and future state of streaming discovery and content visibility. Register here (it's free!): https://lnkd.in/ge6s6UAx Read all about it: https://lnkd.in/g3GB-8Yu
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Ashok Bania shared thisI will be at the Stream TV conference today and tomorrow. Ping me if you are attending. Our team will be talking a variety of topics from the role of AI in content discovery to new metrics to measure engagement and live sports data. #ai #data #streamingAshok Bania shared thisViewers have more ways to watch than ever. Finding the right thing isn't getting easier. According to the Gracenote Data Hub, FAST channels now total 2,120 globally, up 19% in the past year, alongside expanding SVOD libraries and live sports experiences. The opportunity now is turning that abundance into relevance — and content intelligence is becoming the connective tissue for better discovery, stronger engagement and clearer signals of what people value. Next month at #StreamTVShow2026 in Denver, three Gracenote leaders will explore what that shift means for the industry: John Morash, Global Sports Lead, on Streaming Sports Monetization and Discovery — who controls the fan relationship, and what drives the next wave of sports revenue growth. Nandita Arora, Senior Director of Product, on Reimagining Content Discovery — where AI is moving the needle on discovery, and where trusted data still matters most. Shuchi Mathur, Head of Global Solutions Engineering, on The New KPI: Key Passion Index — what “engagement” really means when follower counts and viewer numbers stop being enough. Proud to be back at StreamTV Show. Looking forward to great conversations and reconnecting with industry friends and partners. #StreamTVShow2026 #FAST #ContentDiscovery #ContentIntelligence
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Ashok Bania shared thisInstead of talking to a chatbot such as Claude, Gemini app and ChatGPT, if you use the underlying frontier model as it is, you will soon notice that it's sometimes makes up facts or doesn't know stuff beyond the cutoff date of training. The first problem is called "hallucinations" and the second problem is "knowledge locking". These chatbots are grounded by factual authoritative datasets. Another example is "Ask Maps" (Google) is a result of Gemini Model grounded by Google Maps data. When the domain has dynamic data that changes very quickly, your application needs that data along with the LLM. Read what Gracenote found in our latest study on grounding.Ashok Bania shared thisViewers are turning to LLMs for content recommendations. But are the models working from facts — or fiction? That question drives Gracenote’s new report, “Plot Holes in AI: Why Ungrounded LLMs Can’t Fix Content Discovery.” We tested a leading LLM across 2,600 popular movie and TV titles in 13 countries, comparing answers drawn from training data alone with those grounded in Gracenote global video data via our MCP Server. The headline finding: For nearly one in five titles, the ungrounded model invented every attribute we measured — the very details that power search, discovery and recommendation experiences. Swipe through to see where ungrounded AI breaks down and why verified, current content intelligence is essential when viewer trust is on the line. For the deeper story, download the report: https://lnkd.in/eYCZsFAW The conversation continues at StreamTV Show in Denver, where Nandita Arora, Gracenote’s senior director of product, will explore insights from the study on the “Reimagining Content Discovery” panel, moderated by Tyler Aquilina of Luminate. #StreamTVShow2026 #ContentIntelligence
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Ashok Bania posted thisI’m excited to share that I’ve joined Gracenote as Vice President of AI Products. For more than two decades, I’ve built products across consumer technology and music - spanning search and discovery, creator tools, subscriptions and growth. In roles at Yahoo, Spotify, Headspace, Tumblr and most recently SoundCloud, one question has consistently guided my work: How can we help people find the content, creators and communities they love? Over time, I’ve come to appreciate that the answer often depends on infrastructure consumers never see. This realization drew me to Gracenote. AI is transforming how audiences discover entertainment and how platforms deliver it. As these experiences become more conversational, personalized and multimodal, content intelligence is now the essential foundation for powering what’s next. That’s the work I’m excited to take on: building AI products that make content discovery smarter, more intuitive and trusted across video, sports and beyond. As I look ahead to this next chapter, I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has been part of my journey so far especially the SoundCloud team. Your creativity and collaboration have been inspiring, and I’m proud of what we built together. I’ll be cheering you on. #EntertainmentAI #ConversationalSearch #ContentIntelligence #Gracenote #Nielsen
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Ashok Bania shared this[Post 8 - Building in public] Claude Design: When designers and engineers don't wanna speak to each other. Oddly familiar? For new readers: I started posting the mess of AI coding (by a non-CS degree holder PM) so the product folks quietly thinking "everyone gets this but me" have some company. I developed my first app, www.MooMee.io, for my husband and I to use for our household and I built with one AI tool - Claude Code, inside VS Code. This post is about app 2 (a music app: more on the reveal later) - the one where I got clever and used Claude Design as well. One to imagine the product in real visual designs (and not designs that looks like printed in a dot matrix printer), one to make it real. A dream team. Right? Here's the biggest problem: the two tools don't talk to each other. And this poor sub-intelligent human is the mule to carry the hand off. For about a day it felt like magic. Claude Design handed me gorgeous, detailed screens; Claude Code built them. Then the drift started: 1. The design is what I PLANNED. The code is what actually SHIPPED. A few rounds of changes in, the two no longer matched and neither tool noticed. 2. I became the mule copying specs out of one tool, pasting them into the other, ferrying feedback back. 3. My own documentation started lying to me. My product spec listed components the code had never built. Cleaning up before saving my work, I found a component in my own spec called "OnboardingShell." It did not exist. It never had. My documentation was hallucinating my product back to me. I asked myself: Is the real problem that Claude Code lives in an IDE like VS Code? I don't think so. The friction is simply that the design tool lives in one place (server) and the code tool lives in another (local files), with nothing connecting them. Move Claude Code into a browser tab and you'd get the exact same drift. So here's what I'm actually doing about it - the duct tape, until Claude Design grows out of its experimental phase and the handoff between the two tools gets real: -> I split my spec into two layers - a. what we designed. b. what is "built" - a running log of what ACTUALLY shipped. When the two disagree, the "built" layer wins. -> New rule: nothing gets written down as "shipped" until it's checked against the actual code. That one rule is what caught OnboardingShell. -> A tiny handoff log. Every time a design changes or the code diverges add it to the log. -> A cleanup pass before every save: read the docs against the code, fix whatever drifted. Here’s the reframe that made me feel grounded: I thought the problem was that I wasn’t technical enough. But the job was never to out-code the AI. It was to keep the story straight across tools, specs, and reality (like a mule lol). That’s product management. And the joy is still right there. Watching a screen that lived only inside a design tool become a real thing that never stopped feeling like magic. #claudecode #claudedesign #productmanagement
Ashok Bania commented on a post
3w
Yuval Harari has a good framework on consciousness. Intelligence solves problems but consciousness feels things (pain, panic, suffering), experience, sense stimuli and have desires. A conscious entity, reacts to its experiences by actively wanting things to be different.
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Ashok Bania liked thisAshok Bania liked thisPeople often ask me what I look for when hiring Product Managers. Sure, there’s the usual checklist: strong vision, sharp prioritization, and the drive to ship. But the attribute I value most is curiosity. (Fun fact: I once thought about naming a new company Curious!) A curious mind is restless. It’s never satisfied with a surface-level understanding of how systems work. The PMs who consistently make the best decisions are the ones who refuse to stop asking “why.” That curiosity usually shows up in three ways: 🔹 Curiosity about human behavior = Empathy. You can't build a great product until you truly care about the person using it – their struggles, their habits and what they actually need. 🔹 Curiosity about other perspectives = Humility. The best PMs actively look for ways they might be wrong. They look at problems from different angles to make sure they get it right for the user. 🔹 Curiosity about how things work = Relentless progress. This is what drives momentum. It's the constant urge to uncover a better, simpler way to solve a problem. It comes back to a deep refusal to accept the constraints you're given, and the will to find a way. Skills help you ship a product, but curiosity is what helps you build something people truly love.
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Ashok Bania reacted on thisAshok Bania reacted on thisToday is my last day at Bird. It's been a long ride with lots of ups & downs, learnings, and most importantly, lots of new friends made. I got to work with a bunch of great people (too many to list) to ship lots of great features, like: Reservations, Long Term Rentals, PayPal, Group Rides, Ride Pass, Bird+, Increment & Capture Preauth, Adyen (Korea), AI Translations, Receipts & Invoices, Ublox Sidewalk Riding Detection (B3), Preload & Auto-Reload, Deeplinks, Locals/Tourist Targeting, AI Parking Photo Review, AI Support Agent, Rider Score, Tutorials, IDV, Quickstart, Lyft, FreeNow, … Looking forward to starting my next adventure on Monday...
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Ashok Bania liked thisAshok Bania liked thisWe’re growing our Legal & Compliance team in India! 🇮🇳 Looking for a new challenge? Come join us and help shape the future of Emma! 🚀
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Ashok Bania liked thisAshok Bania liked thisAnnouncement! I’ve authored and am teaching a Berklee MA-level course on technology’s impact on music. The course is also being offered à la carte in addition to the new global MA in music supervision. It has been a tremendous year-long process of taking 26 years of knowledge and experience and putting it into a lesson plan around licensing, disruption, tech vs music industry POV, business models, gaming and XR and of course music rights. https://lnkd.in/gqebMSwNBerklee Online Taps Music Tech Strategist Vickie Nauman to Lead New Supervision Course - Music Industry WeeklyBerklee Online Taps Music Tech Strategist Vickie Nauman to Lead New Supervision Course - Music Industry Weekly
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Ashok Bania liked thisAshok Bania liked thisHeading to Amsterdam for Amsterdam Dance Event this week! 🇳🇱 I’m teaming up with Harry Manion, Jordan Pettinato, and Tiffany Yu to run a masterclass called SoundCloud Artist Pro: The Playbook to Getting Heard. Making great music is only half the game now. We’re digging into how SoundCloud can help creators get heard, build an engaged fan community, use audience insights to make smarter career decisions, and diversify revenue beyond streaming. If you’ll be at ADE, come hang out and say hi. Would love to see you there. https://lnkd.in/e7eYAH_9
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Ashok Bania liked thisAshok Bania liked thisLast week, we announced Gemini 4 Argon - to accompany the launch, our teams shared an in-depth look at the safety, security, and performance of the model. The full Safety Report is 217 pages with an entire section on the model's performance in health -- across a range of benchmarks, use cases, and locales. We've been hard at work making Gemini better - especially in health, and you can see the results for yourself starting on page 175. Full details: 🔗 Launch blog post: https://lnkd.in/gBbnSMzK 🔗 Safety report (with HealthBench amp; Mental Health): https://lnkd.in/gwrVUCV8 🔗 Model card: https://lnkd.in/gpenJRBG
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Ashok Bania liked thisAshok Bania liked thisA founder who received a therapy grant from the Kabila Founder Mental Health Fund sent me this email Friday, and I wanted to share it with names removed. When the grant came through, she was in the middle of a move and life was life-ing really hard. It took her a while to even get that first session on the calendar, which makes total sense. Friday she finally sat down with her therapist, and afterward she wrote to tell me she'd been in a really dark place but is starting to feel some hope again. She said it sometimes takes the right people to remind you that you're in this for a reason, you're not crazy, and this IS hard. That's exactly why we do this. Most founders I talk to aren't looking for someone to fix their company. They just need to hear that what they're feeling is normal and that they don't have to carry it alone. A therapy grant is a small thing on paper - "only" a few sessions. But for a founder holding everything together with no margin left, it can be the thing that keeps them in the game. If you're a founder who's struggling right now, reach out. And if you want to help us fund the next round of grants, visit KabilaMentalHealth.com. Be well, y'all. 🤠 P.S., Shoutout to Grant Winns and the Yuna Health team for their generous donation of 300 licenses for their mental health AI support app. If you're a founder and want free access to the app, hit me up. I use it daily and it's made a big difference in my mental health.
Experience & Education
Patents
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Social Sharing and Influence Graph System and Method
Issued US 13/292,958
See patentSharing of content by users via the network is facilitated. Sharing suggestions are made to a user, the sharing suggestions including making a suggestion of one or more users with whom the user might wish to share content. A user's influence on other users and the user can be prompted to share content with other users based on the identified influence.
Projects
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Early Detection of Trending
- Present
Machine Classifier that predicts trending based on early information. This ML algorithm is used in Trending Now product in Yahoo Homepage as well as other properties and it results in XX% increase in CTR.
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Trending Summary
- Present
Using trending signals from search queries and corpus of content Yahoo has, we have presented a shot snippet of summary for users so that they remain abreast of not just what's trending but also why they are trending.
Try now - https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Anna+Kendrick&fr=fp-tts-578&woeid=2487956&fp=1&fr2=p:fp,m:tn,ct:all,pg:1,stl:crslOther creators -
Smart Guide for Smart TV
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With all the choices available on your TV today from traditional channels, to Video On Demand, to Web video such as Yahoo Screen, finding what to watch is harder than ever. I’ve always wanted to come home and simply flip on the TV to find shows that are automatically suggested based on my previous viewing tastes and availability.
With Yahoo’s Smart TV platform, it’s just that easy.
Yahoo Smart Guide scans thousands of program options and learns from your viewing habits to…With all the choices available on your TV today from traditional channels, to Video On Demand, to Web video such as Yahoo Screen, finding what to watch is harder than ever. I’ve always wanted to come home and simply flip on the TV to find shows that are automatically suggested based on my previous viewing tastes and availability.
With Yahoo’s Smart TV platform, it’s just that easy.
Yahoo Smart Guide scans thousands of program options and learns from your viewing habits to recommend content that’s personalized just for you. The recommendations include a combination of shows that are about to start, interesting in-progress content like a football game, Video On Demand content and the Web.Other creatorsSee project -
Reputation Scores for Y! users
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We have calculated various scores attributed to a user's activity or inactivity (in some cases) so that these scores can be used to intelligently make decisions - Personalization, Rewards and Recognition, Gamification, Customer Treatment touch points etc. We used machine learned models to do the same.
Other creators
Honors & Awards
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Top 25 Product People of the Year
Product School
https://www.productschool.com/product-people/
Organizations
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Queer Capita
Advisory Board Member
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Product School
Lead Instructor
- Present
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