Dr. Karthik Soman is an AI researcher and practitioner working at the intersection of agentic AI, knowledge graphs, and large language models. He is the inventor of KG-RAG (Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval Augmented Generation), a framework that combines knowledge graphs with LLMs to enable holistic, context-aware, and evidence-grounded reasoning. He currently serves as a Data Science Expert at SAP America, where he leads research and development of enterprise-scale agentic AI systems, with a focus on multi-agent orchestration, federated AI architectures, and intelligent cloud operations.

Prior to SAP, Karthik was a Research Specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, where he developed large-scale biomedical knowledge graph and machine learning systems for problems ranging from early detection of Parkinson’s disease to Multiple Sclerosis research. He holds a PhD in Computational Neuroscience from IIT Madras.

His research has appeared in leading publications including Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Aging, Cell, and Bioinformatics. His AI based work has also contributed to collaborative research initiatives involving NASA, NSF and NIH. He serves on the editorial boards of multiple peer-reviewed AI and bioinformatics journals and has been invited to speak at venues including the Knowledge Graph Conference and the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. His work spans federated AI architectures, knowledge graph-based reasoning and production-scale agentic AI, resulting in multiple patent applications across these areas. Most recently, he was featured on the ContextOps podcast discussing the evolution of knowledge graph-based reasoning in agentic systems.