Apoorva Joshi

AI System Design: From Idea to Production - Apoorva Joshi, MongoDB

Jun 28, 2026 · 28:53

Apoorva Joshi presents a structured framework for designing AI systems from idea to production, arguing that thorough product specification and evaluation are now more critical than coding itself. Using a health insurance claims review system for MDB Health as an example, she walks through four phases: defining business problems with measurable success metrics (e.g., reducing urgent claim processing from 2 days to 1 hour within 90 days), designing data strategy and architecture using patterns like RAG, control flow, and human-in-the-loop, establishing guardrails and evaluation metrics such as faithfulness and cost per recommendation, and optimizing for accuracy, cost, latency, and reliability before shipping. She emphasizes building evaluation in from the start and iterating from the simplest system.

Building Multimodal AI Agents From Scratch — Apoorva Joshi, MongoDB

Jun 27, 2025 · 36:58

Apoorva Joshi, an AI developer advocate at MongoDB, leads a hands-on workshop on building multimodal AI agents from scratch. She defines agents as systems using LLMs to reason, plan, and execute tasks with tools, contrasting them with simple prompting and RAG. The workshop focuses on processing mixed-media documents (text and images) by converting each page to a screenshot, embedding it with Voyage AI's multimodal (VLM-based) model to avoid the modality gap of CLIP, and storing embeddings in MongoDB for vector search. The agent uses Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash as the multimodal LLM, implements REACT (reasoning and acting) for planning with feedback, and manages short-term memory via session IDs. Participants build a tool-calling agent that retrieves relevant page screenshots, passes them with conversation history to Gemini, and generates answers for queries like analyzing charts or extracting insights from documents.

Build an AI Research Agent: Apoorva Joshi

Oct 25, 2024 · 27:33

In this workshop, Apoorva Joshi, an AI Developer Advocate at MongoDB, teaches how to build an AI research agent using MongoDB as the memory provider and knowledge store, open-source LLMs from Fireworks AI (Fire Function V1) as the agent’s brain, and LangChain to orchestrate the workflow. The agent searches for research papers, summarizes them, and answers questions based on past research, using tools like ArXivLoader and a MongoDB vector store. Joshi explains key agent concepts—planning with chain of thought and react patterns, short-term and long-term memory, and tool creation—then guides attendees through hands-on sections to build the agent step by step. Attendees learn to create agent tools, implement reasoning with react, and add short-term memory persisted to MongoDB. The workshop emphasizes that agents enable complex, multi-step tasks through iterative reasoning, tool use, and memory, trading higher cost and latency for improved accuracy.