Q1. Could you start by giving us a brief overview of your career, especially how your work across governance, delivery and large-scale telecom/IT programs shaped your approach to leading complex transformations?

• 30+ years of experience at TCS and more than 35 years in the industry
• As the Global Head, was responsible for Corporate Delivery Governance, ensured the enhancing customer experience through strategic oversight of key transformation programs.
• Provided valuable advisory services at the CXO level, ensuring alignment with our client's strategic goals.
• Taken a proactive approach in managing critical programs that are significant to the CEO and COO,
• Successfully recovered many programs working with customers and the TCS team.
• Offered guidance/ mentoring to business units on large transformation programs even from the deal stage, valued between $25 million and $200 million, helped them to achieve business objectives.
• As Head of the Delivery and Operations of the communication business unit, with revenue of $800 million annually, strived to grow, optimize delivery performance, and improve client satisfaction.
• As Business Head for British Telecom and Vodafone (a $200 million business unit), achieved improved customer relationships, and employee satisfaction, improved top & bottom lines, and expanded into new service portfolios.
• Formed the global pre-sales org and led the pre-sales initiatives in the telecom sector, resulting in the successful acquisition of four new logos in one year, which contributed to exponential growth.
• As relationship owner, created and nurtured strong relationships with key telecom clients, including elisa, British Telecom, hutch global, Telefonica Germany, Qwest (CenturyLink), and orange telecommunications.
• As Program Manger Delivered significant transformation projects tailored to clients in both the insurance and telecom sectors, ensuring we exceeded their expectations.
• Enhanced my knowledge with industry advancements in AI/ML, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and other emerging technologies to provide innovative solutions.
• Hold an Agile Ninja certification and possess a wealth of expertise in software engineering, program management, and digital transformation, allowing me to effectively lead teams toward success.

I am committed to continuous learning and driven by a strong quest for knowledge. Over my career, I have executed more than 20 large programs and governed over 100 programs. Governance, in my context, has often meant leading SWAT teams and stepping in directly to drive execution when required.

I began my career with a banking transformation project for Brazil at TCS, and since then have successfully delivered major programs for Qwest, Hutch, BT, and several other telecom clients. I strongly believe in process discipline, tool adoption, and automation as core enablers of consistent delivery.
I have played key roles in governing and delivering large-scale, business-critical transformations for Tata Motors, Tata Steel, and Tata AIG—programs that were reviewed at the board level due to their strategic importance.

My hands-on expertise in Agile and program management, coupled with deep domain knowledge and a collaborative leadership style, has enabled me to navigate complex environments and build a successful career

Q2. When organisations attempt enterprise-wide AI adoption, what governance gaps most commonly trip up delivery — and what concrete controls or checkpoints have you found work best to close those gaps?

When the org starts it is an evolution. Generally, will start like touching the water. Testing the technology.  I have seen many organisations stopped in the middle as they don’t have org plan. How to get ROI, often issues with internal security team and compliance team. Too many products to choose and every dept will have its own preference.

The org policies, system, data and business should be ready to deploy AI. There is a big OCM effort is to be factored. For example, the following are must as AI governance

1. Business Alignment Review
2. Architecture Compliance Review
3. Data Quality & Source Validation
4. Security Review (PII, prompt injection)
5. Risk Assessment
6. Guardrail & Safety Review
7. Prompt Review & Versioning
8. Model Validation (offline & online tests)
9. Cost and Scalability Assessment
10. Human-in-Loop Design Approval

Q3. Large-scale telco/cloud programs often require balancing vendor diversity with operational simplicity. How do you decide which vendor relationships to centralise versus decentralise, and what criteria drive that choice at scale?

Centralise vendors where consistency, control, and compliance matter; Decentralise where innovation, workload diversity, and competitive differentiation matter — and use a platform governance layer to enforce guardrails across both.

For Global Telcos, Centralise the platform; decentralise the ecosystem.

Centralise:

• cloud landing zones
• network control planes
• orchestration & automation
• RAN intelligent controller baseline
• identity / IAM
• FinOps & operations instrumentation
• AI governance & safety layers

Decentralise:

• AI/ML use-case-specific models
• regional deployment partners
• localised customer-facing applications
• domain-specific analytics vendors (OSS/BSS fragments)

Q4. In large global delivery organisations, culture and people change are the hardest parts. Give one or two examples of organisational mechanisms (not high-level platitudes) that you’ve used to speed adoption and reduce friction during big IT/telecom rollouts.

This is very important one, organaisational change management is the only answer for this. Planning, keep it secret and deploy the changes Big Bang as much as possible. Taking people into confidence, telling them about their role change, new training required, transition to roles is very important. If required, we may need to talk about possible job cuts also and take them into confidence.

Q5. If you were an investor evaluating companies that run global delivery and governance for telecom/cloud/AI programmes, what single, high-impact question would you ask their senior management to judge whether they can sustain and scale value?

The question will be   “Please show me the percentage of engagements where you are able to achieve deal margin and have objectives of the engagements met with value additions and leading to customer delight and show me  one programme where you improved customer outcomes while simultaneously reducing delivery effort or cost — and walk me through the exact operating mechanisms that made it repeatable.”