Malhar Deshpande, MBA, M.S., B.E., is Senior Director of Product Engineering – AI at Clean Harbors, where he leads the company’s AI Center of Excellence and enterprise AI product engineering strategy.

Over more than a decade at Clean Harbors, Malhar has progressed from a software engineering to senior technology leadership. Today, he leads multidisciplinary teams developing and scaling machine learning, generative AI, computer vision, and agentic AI solutions across environmental services, field operations, safety, and regulatory compliance.

His work focuses on moving AI beyond experimentation by embedding intelligent capabilities into mission-critical business workflows. He is responsible for establishing the engineering platforms, governance frameworks, human-in-the-loop controls, and operating models required to deliver responsible AI solutions at enterprise scale.

Malhar also contributes to the broader technology community as a venture mentor, judge, author, industry speaker, and technical reviewer for publications covering large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge graphs, and modern AI agents. He holds an MBA and a Master of Science in Information Systems from Northeastern University, a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Telecommunications from the University of Mumbai, and an executive specialization in Artificial Intelligence from the MIT Sloan School of Management.