Vikram Bapat is a PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Florian Urmetzer in the Ecosystems, Platform, and Strategy Research Group. His research investigates how organizations evaluate and engage with transformative AI, drawing on institutional theory, organizational analysis, and the philosophy of transformative experience. He is particularly interested in why systematic gaps emerge between expected and actual outcomes when organizations encounter technologies that reshape the evaluating organization itself.

Vikram brings over 25 years of industry experience in product design and research from Microsoft and Google. At Microsoft, he led teams building software developer tools across expertise levels and modalities. His notable contributions include launching the first version of Visual Studio Team System, steering several releases of Visual Studio's advanced developer tools over a decade, and developing low-code tools and platforms for IoT and HoloLens Mixed Reality developers.

At Google, he oversaw design and research functions for Android and Play Developer Tools, launching the first formal release of Android Studio and multiple iterations of the Play Developer Console. Over the last seven years, Vikram served as Product Design Director for Google Ads Platform, where he led design teams that built industry-leading fully automated campaign types for advertisers and shaped consumer experiences across verticals. His most recent work focused on Shopping on Google Search, spanning both near-term commercial execution and longer-horizon product vision.

Vikram's research interests return to questions he first explored at Carnegie Mellon, where his graduate work applied structuration theory to understand how groups appropriate collaborative technologies. His current research extends that inquiry to the organizational level, examining what happens to evaluation frameworks when the technology being assessed transforms the organization doing the assessing.

Vikram holds degrees in Architecture from the University of Pune, India; Industrial Design from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India; and Information Design from Carnegie Mellon University, USA.