Shikhar Sharma is a Principal Applied Scientist at Microsoft with over a decade of experience in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning. During his career at Microsoft, he has contributed to AI initiatives across Microsoft Bing, Microsoft Turing, Microsoft Weather, and Microsoft Research, including Microsoft's flagship LLM-based AI digital assistant, Copilot, formerly known as Sydney. He currently leads a team of data scientists and machine learning engineers powering Bing's Visual Search and image recommendations.

Before joining Microsoft, Shikhar was a Research Scientist at Maluuba, an AI startup acquired by Microsoft in 2017. He earned an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, where he studied with the university's Deep Learning and Machine Learning group, and a BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur. He has published research with leading AI academics, including Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Yoshua Bengio, Ashutosh Saxena, Thorsten Joachims, and Graham Taylor, and holds several patents in the field of AI.