Portfolio · Chennai, India

Uma Shankar

Designer by craft.  Graphic DesignerMultimedia ArtistCreative Ops LeaderAI Builder

20+ years taking ideas from pixels to print to production — and now to prompts. I build generative visuals, AI agents and AI-powered creative workflows.

Hi! I'm Uma

About

I started with halftone dots and CMYK plates. I spent two decades turning creative chaos into on-time, on-budget production. Now I teach machines to design, reason and run workflows — with a designer’s eye and an operator’s discipline.

The journey

Pixels → Prompts

01 — Pixels

2001 – 2003

Multimedia roots

Arena Multimedia · Pixel Studios

  • Taught multimedia at every level and mentored student portfolios
  • Produced two commercially released CD-ROMs — “Mother’s To Be” and “All About Multimedia”
  • Designed and ran studio websites and ad campaigns

02 — Print

2003 – 2006

Lead Graphic Designer

OfficeTiger

  • Logos, brochures, catalogues and direct-mail for global clients
  • Photoshop retouching and colour correction built on deep colour theory
  • Pre-press mastery — RGB, CMYK, spot colours and press-matched proofs

03 — Production

2007 – Present

Creative operations at scale

RR Donnelley · Straive (SPi) · HCL Technologies

  • Led a 25+ member graphics production team with P&L ownership
  • Standardised templates and workflows for media publishing
  • Run high-value accounts — budgets, SLAs and KPI dashboards in Power BI

04 — Prompts

2026 – Now

Building AI products

FitViz · PixCrew · SecureOps

  • FitViz — a live gym SaaS with a 28-tool Claude agent and an AI voice agent
  • PixCrew and SecureOps — web + mobile platforms for photo studios and guard companies
  • Designed, directed and shipped end-to-end with AI coding agents

20+

Years in design & production

25+

Person creative team led

+20%

Productivity lift from process redesign

6

AI-built products shipped in 2026

Selected work

Things I've made

AI Lab

Agentic & generative

Where two decades of design and production craft meets AI. I design the agents, the prompts and the workflows, and I keep them accountable to real deadlines, budgets and quality bars.

01 Agents & automation

FitViz AI Assistant

A Claude agent loop inside FitViz. Owners, trainers and members ask in plain language; the agent picks from 28 tools — members, attendance, renewals, inquiries, classes, equipment — within their role’s permissions.

ResultOne chat box instead of ten report screens

Case study →
Ask “Who expires this week?” Agent Claude plans tool calls Tools 28 role-gated APIs Answer Live gym data

Lapsed-Member Voice Agent

When a member stops showing up, FitViz escalates: staged WhatsApp alerts from 3 to 30 missed days, then an AI voice call. Call outcomes and summaries land back on the member’s follow-up trail.

ResultRetention chase runs itself, with a paper trail

Case study →
Trigger Missed training days Agent Vapi voice call Tools WhatsApp · webhooks Output Summary + follow-up note

WAT Job-Market Scraper

My Workflows–Agents–Tools framework: Claude follows a markdown SOP, runs deterministic Python + Firecrawl tools, recovers from failures and improves the SOP as it learns.

Result6,200+ job listings, resumable multi-hour runs

Case study →
Workflow Markdown SOP Agent Claude orchestrates Tools Python + Firecrawl Output Excel dataset

02 AI at work: operations

  • Problem

    Gym members drop off silently

    AI workflow

    Staged absence alerts at 3–30 missed days; replies captured as follow-up notes on a Defaulters board

    Renewal risk sorted by urgency

  • Problem

    Renewal and birthday reminders sent by hand

    AI workflow

    WhatsApp Business API automation, timed per gym, with delivery/read receipts and spend reports

    Zero manual reminders

  • Problem

    Wedding shoots too big to share for selection

    AI workflow

    Local agent dedupes, converts RAW/HEIC to web previews and resumes after crashes

    110 GB → 1–2 GB uploaded

03 Products built with AI

  • FitViz

    Gym management SaaS — memberships, kiosk attendance, GST billing, WhatsApp automation and AI agents.

  • FitViz Member

    White-label Flutter app for iOS and Android with workouts, gym traffic and progress tracking.

  • PixCrew

    CRM and selection albums for event photography studios, with a local upload agent.

  • SecureOps

    Web + mobile workforce platform for security companies: patrols, live map, payroll.

Toolkit

Craft & code

  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Illustrator
  • InDesign
  • UI/UX Design
  • Design Systems
  • Typography
  • Colour Theory
  • Pre-press
  • Brand Identity
  • Retouching
  • Multimedia
  • Web Design
  • Agentic AI
  • Claude API
  • Claude Code
  • Tool Use
  • Voice Agents (Vapi)
  • Prompt Engineering
  • WhatsApp Business API
  • Firecrawl
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Flutter
  • Node.js
  • PostgreSQL
  • Docker
  • Creative Operations
  • Product Ownership
  • Project & Account Management
  • P&L Ownership
  • Team Leadership
  • Process Improvement
  • Stakeholder Management
Let's talk!

Contact

Let's build
something bold.

Open to roles in creative operations, design leadership and generative/agentic AI. The quickest way to reach me is email.

© 2026 Uma Shankar Viswanathan

Designed & built with an AI co-pilot · Chennai, India