Sandi Besen is an AI Research Engineer and Ecosystem Lead at IBM Research, where she drives initiatives in research-to-product translation and ecosystem development. Her work focuses on turning cutting-edge research into scalable solutions, often in collaboration with the open-source community to accelerate innovation. Previously, as an Applied AI Researcher at Neudesic, she designed multi-agent AI systems and authored widely cited research papers and meta-analyses. She is also an active AI advisor to startups, guiding them from concept to deployment and aligning technical capabilities with strategic goals.