When Sohil Shah first encountered generative artificial intelligence, he was skeptical.
“It didn’t seem to have practical use cases—it was about as helpful as Microsoft’s Clippy,” said Shah ’15 MS (computer science). “Once I saw agentic AI, I knew it was getting real.”
Today, Shah leads development of an agentic AI system that is helping PayPal’s reliability engineering team operate at a new level. The multi-agent orchestration framework can autonomously manage the full incident life cycle, starting from detection and intelligent triage to stakeholder communication, automated mitigation, and post-incident root cause analysis.
By leveraging agentic AI, Shah said, PayPal has reduced incident repair time from about 45 minutes to less than 5 minutes.
Shah explained that agentic AI is a major step forward because it shifts AI from a passive tool into an autonomous partner. AI agents can build on previous context, plan multi-step processes, and use tools to accomplish goals on their own. Shah’s aim is to help agents get to their goal in a smaller context window—essentially reducing the cost of AI agents.
Before PayPal, Shah worked on TikTok systems at ByteDance and rose to vice president of Software Engineering at JPMorganChase. Now, he’s become a leading voice in agentic AI while speaking at industry conferences, including the AI and Sustainability Global Summit.
Shah said that the scope of work software engineers can do now with AI agents is becoming wider and the quality will be richer. Soon, engineers could manage a whole team of multimodal AI agents collaborating with each other. The human engineer in the loop will play an important role in compliance, providing feedback, and making sure agents are achieving goals.
“With assistance from AI agents, my work has become more meaningful,” said Shah. “I can focus on delivering value and that’s exciting.”
Shaping new careers
The Fall 2026 RIT University Magazine highlighted alumni who are thriving in professions that didn’t exist a generation ago.
RIT’s new Strategic Framework promises to prepare graduates for the opportunities and challenges of tomorrow—including careers in fields yet to be imagined. That’s a promise grounded in experience. Alumni are already building professions in fields that were unthinkable a generation ago.
Meet some more of them.
- Lauren Tamburro ’04 (biochemistry), a cannabis food scientist
- Malcolm Zale ’23 (motion picture science), a 3D-workflow and technology specialist
- Michael Kormos ’17 (biomedical engineering), a 3D heart mapper
- Hema Madaka ’22 Ph.D. (sustainability), a life cycle assessment manager
- Ben Garvey ’21 (applied arts and sciences), an esports country club founder
- Laura Faria ’16 (mechanical engineering), ’17 MS (science, technology, and public policy), a cybersecurity incident commander at Cisco
- Olivia Svrchek ’11 (biomedical sciences), a concierge nursing executive