What does Prima Partners do?

Prima Partners is the advisory practice of Prasanna Walimbe. It operates in three modes: AI & IT strategy advisory for CXOs, corporate AI enablement and delivery, and angel investment plus mentoring for early-stage founders in fintech, supply chain and applied AI.

Who is Prasanna Walimbe?

Prasanna Walimbe is a deep-tech operator with 20+ years of experience across AI evaluation and safety, AI/ML architecture, and financial research. He is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Calcutta and a Certified Independent Director advising boards on cross-border AI investments, operations and compliance.

Which sectors does Prima Partners focus on?

Fintech and BFSI, supply chain, manufacturing, and applied AI across enterprise use cases. Assurance work is mapped to the EU AI Act, ISO 42001 and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

How do I engage Prima Partners?

Email pw@prima-partners.com to start a conversation. Engagements run globally on a remote-first basis from Dubai.

What is AI governance consulting and what frameworks do you use?

AI governance consulting maps an organisation's AI systems, decisions and controls to a recognised risk framework — typically the EU AI Act, ISO 42001 and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework — and closes the gaps. Prima Partners runs checklist-based evaluations, model-risk reviews and board-level assurance for financial services, supply chain and applied-AI use cases.

Do you serve boards as an Independent Director?

Yes. Prasanna Walimbe is a Certified Independent Director and advises boards on AI strategy, cross-border investment and operations, and compliance obligations across jurisdictions — with a specialisation in fintech, supply chain and applied AI.

Do you offer corporate AI training and enablement?

Yes. Corporate AI enablement includes executive workshops, leadership AI literacy, hands-on programmes for delivery teams, and practical playbooks — AI realism vs hype, ML deployment, GTM for AI products, and the founder's mindset inside corporates.

Do you mentor or invest in startups?

Prima Partners writes angel cheques and provides hands-on mentoring to pre-seed and seed founders in fintech, supply chain and applied AI. Support covers technical architecture, GTM, commercial modelling and board readiness.

Which AI model should an enterprise standardise on?

The Stanford 2026 AI Index shows the performance gap between top models has collapsed, so standardising is now a switching-cost and security decision rather than a capability one. Reframe long-running evaluations around integration risk, data-egress controls and exit paths instead of another round of benchmarks.

Should companies slow junior hiring because of AI?

The Index's data on entry-level task exposure argues for redesigning the junior role, not deleting it. Cutting the pipeline solves an immediate headcount problem but removes the bench that becomes your senior engineers and managers by 2028.

Where do AI agents actually belong on the enterprise roadmap?

The Index's agent-benchmark results locate a narrow band of workflows where agentic systems clear the reliability bar today — mostly bounded, tool-using tasks with human review. Broader deployments across open-ended enterprise workflows are a 2027 conversation and should be scoped as such.

Can enterprises trust reported AI productivity gains?

The Index places self-reported productivity uplift directly beside realised-output figures and the two diverge sharply. Boards should measure cycle time, defect rate and unit economics on specific workflows rather than treat satisfaction survey scores as evidence of P&L impact.

Who should sign off on enterprise AI governance?

The Index's transparency scores show foundation-model vendors are disclosing less each year, so control cannot be inherited from the vendor stack. Governance sign-off belongs with an internal owner running a checklist mapped to the EU AI Act, ISO 42001 and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

I'm Actually Glad UC Berkeley Failed Them

2026-06-10 · AI Evaluation & Safety · 6 min read

The evaluation didn't fail. It finally told the truth.

The analysis

A public failure in an assessment process is usually treated as an embarrassment to be contained. It is more useful read as information: the moment a measure stops flattering the system it measures is the only moment you learn what the measure was actually doing.

Most institutional evaluation drifts toward agreeableness. Criteria get softened where they generate conflict, edge cases get resolved in favour of the institution's preferred story, and over time the assessment converges on confirming what everyone already believed. The result is a process that produces confidence without producing knowledge. A visible failure interrupts that drift, and the discomfort it causes is proportional to how long the drift had been running.

The parallel to enterprise AI evaluation is direct. Teams build harnesses that their systems pass, then treat passing as evidence of readiness. When a model fails badly in production, the instinct is to question the deployment rather than the harness — even though the harness is the artefact that promised readiness and did not deliver it.

The healthier posture is to design evaluations that are allowed to fail loudly and to treat a failure as a finding rather than an incident. In practice that means holding out genuinely adversarial cases, refusing to tune the benchmark after seeing the score, and giving the evaluation owner enough independence that reporting a bad result is not a career decision.

Full essay on Substack: I'm Actually Glad UC Berkeley Failed Them.

More on AI Evaluation & Safety

Discuss this with Prasanna: pw@prima-partners.com · book a 30-minute call.