About the Founder

Riding the Third Wave

Dr. Warren Becraft is the founder of B-Sharp AI. Artificial Intelligence has gone through significant developments and popularity in three distinct and powerful waves in Warren's career – and he has been riding the wave of each of them.

The First Wave (1950s–1970s) established AI as a formal discipline, built on symbolic reasoning and early optimism that human-like intelligence was within reach. HAL 9000 – the fictional AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey – captured the cultural imagination of what AI could become, as well as the fear of what it might do. Warren's keen interest in the possibilities of artificial intelligence had begun.

The Second Wave (1980s–2000s) brought expert systems, the revival of neural networks through backpropagation, and the first wave of enterprise AI adoption. Warren caught this wave directly: his doctoral research at the University of Queensland explored hierarchically-structured neural networks and neuro-symbolic computing, bridging symbolic AI with the emerging power of neural computation. The Terminator arrived in cinemas as a metaphor for AI anxiety, highlighting the power of neural network technology. Warren's postdoctoral years at Osaka University, collaborating with Professor Fukushima, inventor of the Neocognitron, placed him at the precise origin point of modern deep learning.

It was during those years in Japan that Warren first encountered Hokusai's Great Wave – and the image has stayed with him ever since. The choice of Hokusai to frame this story is not metaphor alone: it is a direct tribute to Japan, to Professor Fukushima, and to the research that laid the foundation for everything that has followed. In laboratories and industrial plants, Warren was later deploying these capabilities commercially – at SimSci and then AspenTech – before most organizations knew what machine learning was.

The Third Wave (2010s–present) is where we are now: deep learning, large language models, generative AI, and the agentic systems that B-Sharp AI is built to deliver. ChatGPT made AI impossible to ignore at the boardroom level – it had already reached hundreds of millions of people before most executives had noticed. Agentic AI takes the intelligence behind your answer-bot and empowers it with the ability to make things happen. The difference this time is that the tools are ready, the data is available, and the business case is proven.

B-Sharp AI was founded in this third wave – by someone who has been building AI since before the hype.

Dr. Warren R. Becraft

Founder & CEO, B-Sharp AI Pte. Ltd.

Dr. Warren Becraft has spent 35+ years at the intersection of advanced technology and enterprise operations – a career that began in neural network research and neuro-symbolic computing, and has culminated in leading-edge agentic AI consulting.

Warren holds a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Chemical Engineering and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Queensland (1991), where his doctoral research focused on hierarchically-structured neural networks and neuro-symbolic computing. This foundational work led to a postdoctoral fellowship at Osaka University as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) / US National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellow, working directly with Professor Kunihiko Fukushima, inventor of the Neocognitron – the world's first multilayer Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) (1979). Their three joint publications on stereoscopic neural networks represent some of the earliest applied deep learning research.

From 1993 to 1998, Warren served as Engineering Services Manager and other roles for Simulation Sciences (SimSci) across Japan and Singapore, delivering process simulation – the original precursors to what we now call “Digital Twins” – and other advanced technologies to oil refineries and chemical plants. He led the development of the first Japanese-language version of PRO/II, the leading process simulator at the time, capturing 100% of the Japanese oil refinery simulation market, and winning a company award for the effort.

Warren then spent 26 years at Aspen Technology (AspenTech) in numerous roles including Senior Principal Solution Consultant – the longest tenure of any consultant in the firm's Asia-Pacific history. Over that period, he delivered optimization projects generating US$100M+ in annual client benefits across energy, refining, chemicals, and supply chain.

In July 2024, Warren founded B-Sharp AI Pte. Ltd. to bring the same depth of technical and operational expertise to the agentic AI era. B-Sharp AI is built on a simple premise: AI that is actually deployed, actually integrated, and actually measured – not AI that is promised.