Practo announced the appointment of Cijo George as Vice President of Artificial Intelligence. Cijo joins Practo to lead its AI charter across the platform, working closely with teams across the organization to strengthen how AI is applied to care navigation, provider tools, and platform intelligence. His appointment comes at a pivotal phase for Practo, as the company continues to scale in India while expanding across international markets including the UAE and the United States.
In this role, Cijo will partner with Practo’s product, engineering, and clinical teams to further integrate AI into how patients discover and access care, and how providers deliver care with greater accuracy, reliability, and consistency at scale. He will report to Shashank ND, Co-founder and CEO at Practo.
“For the last 17 years, we have been building deep healthcare intelligence across patients, doctors, clinics, and outcomes,” said Shashank ND, Co-founder and CEO, Practo.
“AI unlocks the full potential of this data, helping patients get better outcomes and enabling doctors with insights that can genuinely improve care delivery. Cijo brings exceptional depth in building real-world AI platforms, and his belief in using AI to drive meaningful impact strongly resonates with our purpose. We’re excited to have him on board and look forward to building the next phase of Practo’s AI journey together.”
Cijo brings close to two decades of experience across machine learning, AI platforms, and product-led engineering. Before joining Practo, he held senior leadership roles at Observe.AI, where he worked at the intersection of AI, platform engineering, and product to build large-scale, production-grade AI systems used by global enterprises.
Earlier in his career, Cijo led Platform & AI at Belong.co, focusing on search and personalization in the HR technology domain, and was part of the Advanced Technology Group (CTO Office) at NetApp, where he worked on machine learning and data science approaches for large-scale distributed systems. He holds a Master’s degree in High Performance Computing from the Indian Institute of Science.
“What drew me to Practo is the opportunity to apply AI in ways that can directly improve how patients experience care and how doctors deliver it,” said Cijo George, Vice President of AI, Practo.
“Practo operates at unmatched scale and has built deep, longitudinal healthcare data across patients, providers, and outcomes over many years. Combined with its position as a neutral platform across the ecosystem, this creates a powerful foundation to build AI systems that can meaningfully improve health outcomes at scale, and I’m excited to contribute to that journey.”
