Work & Research
Work & Research
AI voice agents live across three regions, a telecom infrastructure platform powering a quarter of a billion subscribers, a consumer voice app with 14 million+ downloads, and an independent research project on self-evolving AI agents. Here's what Vikas Goel is working on, and what he's built.
2026 — present
Independent research
ThinkerWave
ThinkerWave is an independent AI research project Vikas Goel started in 2026, investigating self-evolving agent systems. The first published work, Die to Evolve: When AI Agents Mutate Both What They Are and What They Seek, introduces a system where both the agent's identity (persona, strategy, reasoning approach) and its evaluation criteria evolve generationally, while accumulated knowledge — failures, heuristics, best prior outputs — persists across complete identity replacement.
The core insight: most self-improving AI systems can rewrite their own code, distill strategies from experience, and self-debug across iterations. But what they can't do is evolve their own definition of what success means. The ThinkerWave research addresses this evaluation gap through dual-space optimisation — searching the space of possible solutions and the space of possible evaluation frameworks simultaneously.
The work has been validated across five unrelated domains — pharmaceutical drug design, financial analysis, scientific reasoning, planning, and expert-knowledge tasks — using identical generic seed criteria with no domain-specific configuration. Patent application 202611044024 was filed at the Indian Patent Office in April 2026.
- Independent research project, started 2026
- Patent pending — self-evolving evaluation criteria mechanism
- Validated across pharma, finance, science, planning, and reasoning domains
- Built on the Claude family of frontier models
Oct 2025 — present
CTO
Nexiva — AI Voice Agents
Vikas Goel is the CTO at Nexiva, blackNgreen's AI-first venture launched in September 2025 to reimagine customer care through autonomous, human-like voice agents. He led the engineering effort behind the launch and was formally appointed CTO of Nexiva in October 2025. Nexiva made its public debut at MWC Barcelona 2025 (Booth 6F-82) and is now live across India, the Middle East, and Latin America, handling inbound service queries, outbound sales, and collections processes for telecom and BFSI customers.
The deep infrastructure expertise that powers blackNgreen's telecom platform — built over a decade — laid the foundation for Nexiva. Voice AI at carrier scale is unforgiving: latency must stay inside conversational thresholds, language switching needs to feel native, and a single hallucination is a customer-impact event, not a chat-window inconvenience. The Nexiva architecture is designed around those constraints from the ground up.
- Launched at MWC Barcelona 2025
- Live across India, Middle East, and Latin America
- Inbound service, outbound sales, and collections workflows
- Built on blackNgreen's carrier-grade OXM infrastructure
2017 — present
CTO leadership
MagicCall — Voice Changer App
Long before Nexiva's AI voice agents went into production, the team at blackNgreen — under Vikas Goel's CTO leadership — shipped MagicCall, a real-time voice changer for phone calls. Released in 2017, the app transforms a user's voice mid-call into a male, female, child, or cartoon character, layered over live background sound effects (traffic, music, ambient).
The numbers tell the story:
- 14 million+ downloads on Google Play (1.4 crore+) — Android alone, with additional iOS distribution on the App Store
- Live globally, with India as the launch and primary growth market
- One of the most-downloaded India-built voice apps on the Play Store
MagicCall matters beyond the numbers. It's where blackNgreen built the engineering competence that Nexiva is now built on: real-time voice processing at consumer scale. Speech in, transformed speech out, sub-second latency, running over a real phone call, at carrier-grade reliability — that's the same engineering shape as a modern AI voice agent. The decade between MagicCall (2017) and Nexiva (2025) is the decade Vikas Goel and the blackNgreen team spent learning, one production lesson at a time, what it actually takes to put voice AI in front of millions of users.
2013 — present
Chief Technology Officer
blackNgreen
Vikas Goel has been CTO at blackNgreen since 2013, leading engineering through the company's evolution from a telecom value-added services platform to an AI-native customer-experience company. The flagship product is the Omnichannel Experience Management (OXM) platform, which powers more than 160 telecom operators across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America, reaching upwards of 290 million subscribers.
The OXM platform is the foundation that made Nexiva possible. Carrier-grade reliability, multi-region deployment, and hundreds of millions of daily customer interactions create a uniquely demanding engineering environment — and a uniquely well-instrumented one. The lessons that transfer to AI voice agents are significant.
- 160+ telecom operators using the OXM platform
- 290M+ end-subscribers reached
- Deployments across Southeast Asia, MENA, Africa, and South America
1996 — 2013
Earlier work
Building the telecom backbone
Before blackNgreen, Vikas spent 17 years across CMC Ltd, HCL/LexisNexis, Hughes Software Systems, Aricent, and VNL (Vihaan Networks), working on signalling, switching, and rural GSM infrastructure. This is the unglamorous but foundational work that the modern internet and mobile experience are built on top of — and the source of most of his instincts about reliability, observability, and graceful degradation.
- VNL — Software Architect, rural GSM systems
- Aricent — Telecom signalling and switching infrastructure
- Hughes Software Systems — Production communications software
- HCL / LexisNexis — Software engineering
- CMC Ltd — First role, software developer (1996)
Read more
More on the thinking behind these ventures in the blog, or the full career story.