Ashwin Rao in

Ashwin Rao

Login to view DISC.
Chief AI Officer at QXO
📍 Palo Alto, California, United States

Ashwin Rao serves as the Chief AI Officer at QXO and is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, specializing in applying AI to complex business problems. A Ph. D. graduate from the University of Southern California, his career spans quantitative finance at Goldman Sachs, retail AI leadership at Target, and now building materials distribution.

Ashwin is a proud father who actively supports his daughters career development by leveraging his professional network. He shows deep personal passion for his field, referring to pioneers like Richard Sutton and David Silver as his "Reinforcement Learning gurus. "

Interesting fact: Following QXO’s recent acquisition of Beacon, his team instantly grew from a couple of dozen to 8, 000 employees.

Read the full overview →
Current Role
Chief AI Officer
Job Level
Leadership
Location
Palo Alto, California, United States
Personality Overview

How Ashwin shows up

Communication Style
Decision Approach
Work Preference

Behavioral traits and communication patterns that shape how this person evaluates opportunities, builds trust, and makes decisions in professional settings.

Login to view personality overview.
Priorities

Topics Ashwin cares about

AI-driven Growth
His primary focus at QXO is using cutting-edge AI to boost revenue and expand margins, particularly in demand forecasting, inventory management, and e-commerce.
Reinforcement Learning
He teaches and researches this topic at Stanford and co-authored the book "Foundations of Reinforcement Learning with Applications in Finance. "
+5 more topics Login to view topics
Career

Work history

Chief AI Officer
QXO
Adjunct Professor, Applied Mathematics (ICME)
Stanford University
Founder and CTO
CX Score
Vice President of Artificial Intelligence
Target
Advisor
Hired, Inc.
In the press

Media appearances

QXO Hires an AI Chief to Help Sell Items Like Pipes and Lumber. Featured in The Wall Street Journal
See now
QXO Hires Ashwin Rao as Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer. Featured in GlobeNewswire
+4 more appearances Login to view media
Education
1989 - 1993
B.Tech
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
1993 - 1998
Ph.D.
University of Southern California
Social presence
in
Behavioral profile

DISC profile (public)

DISC behavioral profile

Dominance, influence, steadiness, and calculativeness scores with guidance on how this person prefers to communicate and decide.

Login to view DISC.

Other QXO Employees

Explore more public profiles from related professionals.

More profiles

Discover additional public profiles from our index.

Unlock the full playbookSee exactly how to sell to Ashwin. Free, 10 seconds.