Peter Zatloukal

Peter Zatloukal is a technology and engineering leader whose career has moved between major technology companies, startups and applied AI research. His work has included leadership roles at Microsoft, Amazon, Xnor.ai and Apple, spanning software engineering, computer vision, machine learning and the challenge of turning emerging research into products used at scale.

His interest in technology began long before his professional career. As a child, Peter became fascinated with programming before his family even owned a computer, initially working through BASIC with pencil and paper. That early desire to create things through software remained a consistent thread through a career that would eventually take him into some of the most consequential technology teams of his generation.

Peter worked at Microsoft across multiple periods of his career, including leading engineering connected with Kinect. At Amazon, he led engineering for Alexa voice shopping before making a significant career gamble: leaving a large role to join the small AI startup Xnor.ai as Vice President of Engineering. The company was developing techniques that allowed sophisticated computer-vision models to operate efficiently on edge devices rather than relying entirely on large cloud infrastructure.

Xnor.ai was subsequently acquired by Apple for $200 million. Peter joined Apple and went on to lead an applied AI research organisation, working across machine-learning efficiency and technologies connected with products including iPhone, Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence.

Today, Peter is a Partner at Techquity, bringing experience from big technology companies, startups, acquisitions and engineering leadership into advisory work. For Peter, this next stage is also about remaining close to the work, continuing to learn and passing on some of the difficult-to-acquire knowledge that others shared with him throughout his career.