Grüezi! I am Bhuvan. I use research to figure out what is worth building, and whether it actually works.

I am a researcher working at the intersection of AI, technology, and people. I started as an engineer with a background in machine learning, but moved toward research because I realized the hard part was rarely the technology. It was understanding the problem well enough to know what was worth building.

Today, I work on AI products, running studies, evaluating what we build, and helping teams make better product decisions.

I am a builder at heart. I shape my ideas through prototyping. I am also curious, which is probably why I have lived and worked in six countries in the last decade.

Research Interests: Evals for AI, Qualitative research, Quantitative research, AI product strategy, Foresight research, Customer research & benchmarking, Data strategy, Strategic planning, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Artificial Intelligence, Product Management, Strategy, Human factors, Agile methodologies, Mixed reality

Featured Work

Three kinds of problem I work on

Evaluating AI

Judging whether AI systems are actually good, and being clear about what the evidence cannot carry.

Evaluating AI

Evaluating an AI Conversation Service (VSA & Copilot)

Evaluation of two RAG-backed AI chat surfaces at TOPdesk: a self-service assistant and an operator-facing Copilot. Four recorded sessions, 147 answers judged case by case with a stated reason on every verdict, clustered into a root-cause taxonomy and fifteen findings ordered by how much evidence sits behind each.

🧪 147 Answers Judged

🔍 15 Ranked Findings

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Built at TOPdesk. Prompts, results, and customer data are internal and omitted.

Evaluating AI

NalaBheem — Nutrition AI

Rigorous evaluation methodology for AI-powered nutrition advice, combining open coding of 100+ traces, custom error taxonomies, and systematic evaluation comparison.

🔬 100+ Traces

📊 65% Pass Rate

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Product and strategy research

Studies and frameworks that changed what got built.

Product and strategy research

TOPdesk Progress Trail Redesign

Comprehensive user research mapping opportunities in incident management workflows through interviews, affinity mapping, and journey mapping with 10 participants.

👥 10 Interviews

📊 7 Opportunities

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This project was completed in collaboration with team members at TOPdesk.

Product and strategy research

Intelligent Front Door — Readiness Framework

Readiness and maturity framework benchmarked against Gartner, Ivanti, HDI, SDI, and Forrester — mapping where customers stand on the path to intelligent service delivery, informing product strategy, AI roadmap priorities, and long-term platform vision at TOPdesk.

🧭 6 Capability Dimensions

📈 5 Maturity Stages

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Research systems and operations

The tools and playbooks that let research reach decisions without a researcher in the middle of every one.

Research systems and operations

TOPdesk Research Copilot

A copilot that lets any product role run real research on their own, so a decision does not have to wait for a specialist. Say or type what you are working on, and it routes you to the right task, grounded in TOPdesk's own product documentation. Twenty tasks across the research lifecycle, built as configuration rather than code.

🧩 20 research tasks

🔗 6 chained workflows

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Self-directed, for TOPdesk. Built; feedback and adoption metrics pending.

Research systems and operations

Research Buddy — AI-Assisted Research Retrieval

An internal tool, built and in use, putting six fragmented research and customer data sources behind a single plain-language query — qual and quant agents run in parallel, then a third synthesises findings shaped to the asker's role, so research data flows into product and AI strategy decisions.

🤖 5 of 6 sources live

🔌 3 role-shaped outputs

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Built at TOPdesk to help research reach more product decisions.

All eleven projects, including earlier doctoral and postdoctoral research →

Journey

Experience & Education

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Professional Experience

Jan 2025 - Present

Senior UX Researcher, Customer Insights and AI Strategy

AI & Conversational Interfaces

TOPdesk, Hungary

Feb 2023 - Jan 2025

Senior UX Researcher

TOPdesk, Hungary

Sep 2020 - May 2022

Postdoctoral HCI Researcher

INRIA/University of Rennes 2, France

Jul 2016 - Aug 2020

Doctoral HCI Researcher

HITLabNZ, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Jul 2018 - Oct 2018

Visiting Researcher

GRAIL Lab, University of Washington, USA

Education

Ph.D. Human Interface Technology

University of Canterbury, New Zealand

2016-2020

M.S. Human Interface Technology

University of Canterbury, New Zealand

2015-2016

M.Tech. Machine Intelligence

DAIICT, India

2012-2014

B.Tech. Electronics and Communication

Acharya Nagarjuna University, India

2008-2012

Grüezi! I am Bhuvan. I use research to figure out what is worth building, and whether it actually works.

Three kinds of problem I work on

Evaluating AI

Evaluating an AI Conversation Service (VSA & Copilot)

NalaBheem — Nutrition AI

Product and strategy research

TOPdesk Progress Trail Redesign

Intelligent Front Door — Readiness Framework

Research systems and operations

TOPdesk Research Copilot

Research Buddy — AI-Assisted Research Retrieval

Experience & Education

Professional Experience

Education

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