Practical AI Nepal  ·  Founder

Kshitiz Rimal

क्षितिज रिमाल — संस्थापक

AI Developer, Data Scientist, and Founder of Next AI. Google Developer Expert in AI/ML since 2018. Former Senior Data Scientist at Brainly and former Intel AI Ambassador. Founder of Practical AI Nepal.

Practical AI AI governance AI sovereignty Open models Edge AI Local inference
The work is not to imagine AI for Nepal. The work is to make AI Nepal can actually use, govern, run, adapt, and improve — inside its own institutions, in its own languages, on terms it sets.
— On the work
§ Bio

Biography.

Kshitiz Rimal is an AI Developer, Data Scientist, and the founder of Next AI — a leading AI consulting firm in Nepal committed to building purposeful, impact-driven AI solutions. With over a decade in technology and 8+ years of hands-on work in artificial intelligence, he has shipped systems across commercial, educational, and humanitarian domains.

He has been recognised as a Google Developer Expert in AI/ML since 2018 and is a former Intel AI Ambassador, with an international reputation for AI development, research, and community leadership. He previously served as a Senior Data Scientist at Brainly, the world's largest edtech platform, leading initiatives that scaled personalised learning to millions of students globally.

A long-time advocate for AI for Good, he has led and contributed to projects for visually impaired individuals, post-disaster structural assessment, and humanitarian aid technologies. As a founding member and former Head of Research at AI for Development, he worked at the intersection of AI and policy — influencing public conversation and driving social innovation through data.

He is also a seasoned international speaker and trainer, having won global AI competitions and delivered workshops across continents. Through Practical AI Nepal, his focus now is sovereignty, governance, open models, and edge AI — bridging cutting-edge capability and real-world institutional impact.

§ Credentials

Roles, recognition, and rooms entered.

Recognition

Google Developer Expert — AI / ML

Recognised by Google as a community-facing expert in AI/ML, working at the intersection of practical implementation and developer education.

Education

MSc Artificial Intelligence — University of Leeds

Postgraduate study in artificial intelligence, with a focus on machine learning systems and their deployment in real-world settings.

Founder & CEO

Next AI

Implementation arm. Works with major Nepali clients across edtech, journalism, legal tech, archiving, CRM AI enablement, AI agents, and generative AI systems.

Founder

Practical AI Nepal

The public framework. A policy-to-practice institution focused on governance, sovereignty, open models, edge AI, and institutional implementation in Nepal.

Former

Senior Data Scientist — Brainly

Production data science and ML at international scale on the world's largest edtech platform, scaling personalised learning to millions of students globally.

Former

Head of Research — AI for Development

Founding member and former Head of Research at the nonprofit, exploring the intersection of AI and development — influencing policy and driving social innovation through data.

§ Domains

Where the work has actually shipped.

01

Edtech

Learner-facing AI, content systems, assessment integrity, and teacher-facing tools.

02

Journalism

Newsroom AI, fact-checking workflow, synthetic-media disclosure, deepfake response.

03

Legal tech

Document understanding, retrieval over Nepali legal corpora, human-reviewed drafting.

04

Archiving

OCR over scanned Nepali text, structured retrieval, and long-term institutional memory.

05

CRM enablement

AI features inside customer-facing systems, with privacy and human review designed in.

06

AI agents

Workflow agents grounded in real institutional data, with audit logs and approval gates.

07

Generative AI

Production-grade generative systems with disclosure, evaluation, and incident response.

08

Public sector

Briefings, policy-to-practice translation, and AI readiness conversations with ministries.

§ Affiliations

Recognition & rooms entered.

A short list of the international programs, awards, and bodies the work has been associated with.

2018→

Google Developer Expert — AI/ML

Recognised by Google as a community-facing expert in machine learning since 2018.

ITU

ITU AI for Good — U4SSC

Member of the United for Smart Sustainable Cities initiative on guiding principles for AI in cities.

Intel

Intel AI Ambassador

Former Intel AI Student Ambassador (Top Ambassador 2017, 2018) and DevMesh AI Spotlight Award 2019.

IBM

IBM Call for Code 2018

Runner-up at the global Call for Code challenge for humanitarian-aid technology built with AI.

City AI

CityAI Kathmandu Ambassador

Local ambassador for the global CityAI network, connecting Kathmandu's AI community to international peers.

Cloud

Google Cloud Champion Innovator

Champion Innovator in Cloud AI/ML, recognised for production work on Google Cloud's AI platform.

The public framework

Practical AI Nepal

Builds the public conversation, the frameworks, the briefs, the academy, the edge network, the readiness report, and the annual forum. Independent and policy-to-practice. The institution.

The implementation

Next AI

Implements the framework inside real institutions. AI readiness assessments, AI policy packs, sovereignty assessments, model gap evaluations, local inference work, human-in-the-loop systems, edge AI pilots, academy training. The studio.