EXPERIENTIAL Industry Keynote Panel
Moderators:
Anshel Sag, Principal Analyst - Moor Insights & Strategy
Ross Rubin, Founder and Principal Analyst - Reticle Research
Panelists:
Ziad Asghar, Senior Vice President and General Manager, XR, Wearables and Personal AI - Qualcomm
Anuj Gosalia, Serial Director of Engineering - See Bio
Marcello Majonchi, Chief Product Officer - Arduino
Thor Schaeff, Developer Experience Engineer - Google DeepMind
Yiqi Zhao, Product Design Lead - Meta
About the Speakers:
Ziad Asghar serves as Senior Vice President & General Manager of XR at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., where he spearheads the company's global XR business unit. Ziad’s responsibilities include product management, P&L, market entry strategies, technology & strategic planning, as well as mergers and acquisitions. Additionally, he handles ecosystem development, partnerships, and business development for XR products that span virtual, augmented, and mixed reality segments, as well as the broader spatial computing ecosystem.
Over the last five years, Ziad has formulated and driven GenAI technology, strategy and roadmap to establish Qualcomm’s leadership in on-device AI. In addition, custom CPU, camera, graphics, audio, video, memory, peripherals, and security technologies were planned and advanced under his management, all of which have helped strengthen our industry leading VR, MR and AR system solutions.
Ziad's previous responsibilities also included overall Qualcomm chip roadmap planning & competitive analysis, collaborating with engineering, product management, and other teams across all business units, including mobile, automotive, computing, XR, edge cloud, and IoT, to maintain and enhance Qualcomm's industry-leading roadmap.
He has more than 25 years of experience in the wireless semiconductor industry where he has held a broad set of leadership positions from R&D to product management. Prior to joining Qualcomm, Ziad was at Texas Instruments where he worked on systems design of UMTS & LTE and OMAP Product Management. Ziad played a pivotal role in the design of the first UMTS chipset at Texas instruments.
Ziad holds an MBA from UCSD and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Purdue University and Southern Methodist University. He is a senior Member of IEEE.
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Anuj Gosalia is a senior engineering leader who has spent two decades building foundational technologies across immersive computing, graphics platforms, and large-scale AI systems. Most recently, he served as a Research Engineering Manager at OpenAI, where he led the inference team responsible for shipping GPT-4o, 4o-mini, O1, O1-mini, Advanced Voice, Prompt Caching, and Structured Outputs, and for re-architecting a new high-performance inference stack for next-generation models.
Previously, Anuj was CVP Immersive Experiences Architect at Microsoft, where he proposed and built Windows 365 MR, enabling rich mixed-reality experiences streamed from cloud GPUs for immersive productivity and collaboration. He also served as SVP and Chief Software and Cloud Officer at Magic Leap, leading a company-wide turnaround toward enterprise AR, reshaping the product roadmap, and modernizing engineering culture and execution.
Earlier in his career, Anuj was Senior Director of Engineering at Google, where he led ARCore from inception to over one billion installs, built the Google Lens client, powered AR features in Google Maps and Search, and aligned the Android OEM ecosystem around AR. At Oculus (Meta), he ran the core VR software stack for Rift and Gear VR, including graphics, drivers, APIs, and engine integrations, helping pioneer industry-defining techniques such as asynchronous time warp. He began his career at Microsoft, overseeing graphics platforms and helping drive the development of DirectX 12 and the modern Windows driver model.
Across roles at OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Magic Leap, and Oculus, Anuj has consistently worked at the intersection of human perception, real-time systems, graphics, and AI—building the technical foundations behind today’s immersive and intelligent platforms.
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Marcello Majonchi is the Chief Product Officer at Arduino, where he leads product strategy and innovation for one of the world’s most influential open hardware and developer platforms. He is also a public speaker and an Executive in Residence at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, where he works with founders and product leaders on scaling technology ventures and building customer-centric product organizations.
Marcello brings over 20 years of global leadership experience in product management and innovation, spanning both high-growth startups and large technology companies. Prior to Arduino, he held senior product leadership roles at DocuSign and Amazon, where he helped build and scale widely adopted digital platforms and services.
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Thor Schaeff is a Developer Experience Engineer at Google DeepMind. Before joining Google, he championed AI-driven audio at ElevenLabs and helped Supabase scale from 800 to over 2 million databases. He launched his career at Stripe, building customer engineering teams across Europe and APAC. Now, he focuses on helping developers create delightful user experiences and build the next generation of AI-powered applications with Gemini.
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Yiqi Zhao, Product Design Lead at Meta, specializes in AI-driven spatial computing and wearable devices.
Her team has delivered human-centric innovations, including the Meta Quest headsets, Metaverse 3D AI effort like Meta Horizon Engine, AI NPC, WorldGen, AssetGen and Creator Assistant. With an HCI research background at Harvard and MIT Media Lab, Yiqi began her 3D journey in brain-computer interfaces (EEG) and wearable AI. Previously, she led Unity’s platform initiatives, including visionOS for Apple Vision Pro. She also made her mark in the gaming sector by shipping Destiny 2. Additionally, she leads Deepcake, an AIGC community with global awards.