A bit about me.
Engineer, writer, and founder. Mostly known for stickers.
I started Rasa in 2016 to build open-source infrastructure for what the industry now calls agentic AI — because the closed, proprietary approach wasn't going to survive contact with real enterprise requirements.
The bet was that conversational interfaces would eventually matter to enterprise software, that doing them well would require real machine learning (not just keyword matching), and that the right layer to build at was open source. A decade later, Rasa's stack sits underneath a surprising number of the phone trees, support bots, and enterprise AI agents at banks, telcos, and governments.
What I actually do
Most of my time is spent on product and architecture decisions at Rasa — the kind of medium-term bets that don't show up in a sprint but shape what the platform can do in two years. The rest is writing (archive), speaking (talks & podcasts), and occasional advising.
Recurring theme: agents that don't fall over the first time a real user touches them.
Before Rasa
PhD in machine learning at the University of Cambridge. Undergrad in Chemical Physics at the University of Edinburgh.
downloads
(founded 2016)
the Rasa paper
A brief résumé.
The condensed versionFind me elsewhere.
LinkedIn DMs are the best way to reach me — open for speaking enquiries, advising, and the occasional "can you review our architecture". Thoughtful messages tend to get thoughtful replies.
Dr. Alan Nichol is the Founder & CTO of Rasa, which he started in 2016 to build open-source infrastructure for what the industry now calls agentic AI. Rasa has been downloaded more than 50 million times, and powers enterprise AI agents at banks, telcos, and governments worldwide. His writing has appeared in O'Reilly, VentureBeat, Forbes, and the Financial Times, and he's co-authored widely-cited papers and holds a patent on dialogue systems. He was named one of L'Opinion's 100 people shaping AI in Europe and to the CDI Foundation's 2025 Conversational AI Leaders List. He holds a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge and a Master's in Chemical Physics from the University of Edinburgh.