Ajit Desai, PhD

Ajit Desai currently work at the intersection of payment systems, central banking, and emerging technology. His focus is on how AI and tokenization can improve the safety, efficiency, and resilience of financial market infrastructure. 

At the Bank of Canada, he lead and contribute to strategic research and experimentation on AI agents, tokenized settlement, wholesale payments, cross-border payments, and next-generation payment systems. His current focus is on building practical insights for central banks as payment systems evolve toward more automated, programmable, and data-driven infrastructure.

He have also worked with the BIS Innovation Hub as an advisor, where he contributed to international projects on tokenization (Project Agorá), non-traditional data for central-bank analysis (Project Neo), and Agentic AI in payments (Project Agenti). His broader research includes AI-driven liquidity management, reinforcement learning in payment systems, quantum computing applications in settlement, and the use of non-traditional data for central-bank analysis.

He holds a Ph.D. in Computational Science and Engineering from Carleton University and an M.S. in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.*