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Work

Selected work

A sample of recent engagements and solo-built products spanning sovereign AI, applied ML, real-estate technology, and enterprise data platforms.

Sovereign AI & document intelligence

AI applications

Entertainment-industry client · 2024–2025 · multimodal media analytics + production rollout

Media analytics & creative intelligence for an entertainment client

An entertainment-industry client produced large volumes of creative assets and promotional media every quarter and needed a way to predict which ones would resonate with their audience before committing distribution and paid-media spend. Existing analytics surfaced post-launch performance but offered no signal during the pre-launch window where decisions actually get made.

MultimodalMedia analyticsEntertainment
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Entertainment-industry client · 2025 · email classification + routing

LLM email triage for entertainment industry

An entertainment-industry company was drowning in inbound email — agent submissions, press requests, fan/PR escalations, legal notices, internal team threads — all flowing into shared inboxes with no time to triage cleanly. Important threads slipped through; routine ones consumed disproportionate attention.

LLMClassificationEntertainment
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Luxury fashion / accessories brand · 2025 · multimodal recommendation engine

AI-based recommendation system for a luxury brand

A luxury brand needed a recommendation system, but standard collaborative filtering breaks for luxury — purchase frequency is low, statistical co-occurrence between customers is sparse, and brand aesthetic matters far more than price clustering. A customer who buys one piece does not follow the same pattern as the next.

RecommendationLuxuryMultimodal
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International NGO · 2025 · LLM-driven email triage + response drafting

NGO — AI email management for the communications team

An NGO communications team was processing tens of thousands of inbound emails — donor enquiries, partner requests, press, volunteer applications, advocacy correspondence — all flowing into shared inboxes. The team had a small full-time staff who were spending most of their day routing and drafting initial responses to repetitive enquiries.

LLMNGOEmail automation
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Real estate & PropTech

Applied ML & data science

Climate-finance research client · 2025 · econometric impact analysis

Climate finance — policy impact analysis

A climate-finance research organisation needed to quantify the impact of specific policy interventions on capital flows and emissions — separating the policy signal from confounding macro factors, sector trends, and pre-existing trajectories.

Causal inferenceClimate financePolicy
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Financial-services client · 2023 · real-time inference + monitoring

Real-time fraud detection pipeline

A financial-services client needed real-time fraud detection on transaction streams — flag suspicious activity within milliseconds of a transaction, with low false positives that would otherwise burn customer-experience budget on legitimate users.

Fraud detectionReal-timeFinTech
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Enterprise client (Upwork Enterprise) · 2021 · ETL + ML model deployment

AWS Enterprise ETL + ML on SageMaker

A US-based enterprise client needed a cloud-native ETL and ML platform on AWS — ingest raw data from multiple operational sources, transform it into model-ready features, train and deploy production models on SageMaker, and serve predictions back to downstream consumers with proper observability.

AWSSageMakerMLOps
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Agri-tech / SMB lending client · 2025 · invoice-data ML pipeline

Agri-credit scoring from invoice data

An agri-tech lender needed to extend credit to SMB farmers and food producers without traditional credit-bureau coverage. The available signal was raw invoice data — purchase orders, payment histories, supplier relationships, seasonality patterns — sitting in unstructured PDFs and accounting exports across the borrower's existing book.

Credit scoringInvoice MLAgri-FinTech
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Mid-market e-commerce client · 2024 · churn modelling + retention pipeline

E-commerce churn analysis & predictive retention

A mid-market e-commerce client had rising customer-acquisition costs but no reliable signal on which customers were about to lapse. Standard "haven't bought in 90 days" rules flagged everyone too late — by then the customer had already moved to a competitor.

ChurnE-commerceSurvival analysis
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US local political campaign · 2024 · precinct-level data analysis

County-level voter analysis for a US local political campaign

A US local political campaign at the county level needed precinct-level targeting — where to door-knock, where to spend on local ads, which voter segments to focus on. The campaign had voter-file data, demographic snapshots, and turnout history but no one to turn it into operating decisions.

Political analyticsVoter filePrecinct
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International NGO · 2025 · NLP analysis on free-text survey responses

NGO — survey response analysis with NLP

An NGO ran a large-scale survey across multiple regions and received tens of thousands of free-text responses to open-ended questions. The communications and policy teams needed to surface themes, sentiment, and regional variation — but had been doing it by spreadsheet for previous waves and missing patterns in the long tail.

NLPNGOSurvey
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Solo-built products

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Most engagements above started with a 60-minute scoping call.

Aru Bhardwaj

Fractional CTO architecting sovereign AI systems for startups and scale-ups across Europe. Custom ML, agentic RAG, and secure LLM infrastructure. 7+ years turning complex data into production intelligence.

Malt
Upwork

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Services

  • Fractional CTO & AI Strategy
  • MVP Development & Rapid Prototyping
  • Sovereign LLM Deployment (OVHcloud, Scaleway)
  • Multi-Cloud AI (AWS Bedrock, Vertex AI, Azure)
  • RAG Pipelines & Autonomous Agents
  • GDPR & EU AI Act Compliance
  • Generative AI & Prompt Engineering
  • Machine Learning & Predictive Analytics

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© 2026 Insightrix SASU. All rights reserved.Aru Bhardwaj, Fractional CTO & AI Strategist

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