Mala's Podcast

About Mala's Podcast

Welcome to Mala’s Podcast, where honest conversations meet the future of AI, startups, and leadership. Mala sits down with CEOs, founders, and innovators leading the world’s most exciting AI companies — from Silicon Valley to Singapore and beyond. Each episode uncovers what really happens behind the scenes: building teams, surviving chaos, scaling products, and shaping the next era of intelligent technology. If you’re curious about how the AI revolution is being built — one decision, one founder, one story at a time — you’re in the right place.

Publisher

Mala Ramakrishnan

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

15 Oct 2025

Latest episode

20 May 2026

Latest episodes

32 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   20 May 2026

   Why customer-centric companies always win | Insights from Customer Support Executive

   In this episode, Mala sits down with Kshama Swamy, VP of Customer Engineering and Success at CircleCI, for a practical conversation on customer engineering, AI adoption, enterprise software, and what it takes to build customer-centric teams at scale. Kshama’s career spans consulting, the Department of Defence, Cognos, IBM, Intapp, PAR, and now CircleCI. Across these roles, she has led support, services, customer success, and customer engineering teams across legal tech, restaurant tech, and developer infrastructure. In this conversation, Kshama shares how curiosity shaped her career pivots, why support is one of the best places to deeply understand a product, and how customer-facing teams can become more strategic by aligning to revenue, leading indicators, and shared accountability. Mala and Kshama also explore how AI is changing customer success and support, where automation works, where human relationships still matter, and how leaders should evaluate the flood of new AI tools entering the market. The conversation also gets into a critical question for today’s AI era: are teams truly creating business outcomes, or are they just experimenting? Kshama brings a grounded view from CircleCI, where AI-generated code is increasing rapidly, but the real test is whether that code reaches production and delivers value. This episode is especially relevant for founders, customer success leaders, support leaders, product teams, SaaS operators, AI builders, and anyone selling into technical or enterprise customers. ________________________________________________________ Timestamps 00:00 – Introducing Kshama Swamy, VP of Customer Engineering at CircleCI 01:10 – Cognos, IBM, and the early path into customer success 02:08 – Moving from legal tech to restaurant tech with Punchh and PAR 02:33 – Joining CircleCI and entering the CI/CD developer infrastructure space 03:56 – How executives manage the learning curve in a new role 04:24 – Why support is the best place to understand product and customer pain 05:42 – Building customer-centric organizations through internal language and shared accountability 06:30 – Aligning support, success, product, marketing, and revenue 07:12 – How CircleCI uses AI across support, success, and services 09:00 – Evaluating AI tools and choosing vendors that can evolve with you 10:02 – Advice for founders selling into customer engineering leaders 11:26 – Navigating leadership, gender, and customer relationships 12:35 – AI-generated code, experimentation, and the production gap 13:45 – Why AI ROI will matter more than experimentation 15:10 – Upskilling teams through quarterly goals and hands-on AI implementation 16:10 – Measuring which AI experiments actually land ________________________________________________________ 🔗 Connect with Kshama Swamy → https://www.linkedin.com/in/kshamaswamy/ 🔗 Connect with Mala Ramakrishnan → https://www.linkedin.com/in/malaramakrishnan 🎧 Subscribe to the podcast Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnL3D6aI60R-cCvypFIkh4A Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1NIDE4cT5fuVjC3HaGbCDK?si=eoSTNmhqQNKHQl9d1Jx0UQ Apple Podcast: https://podcastsconnect.apple.com/my-podcasts/show/talking-to-the-leaders-of-ai-the-ceo-series-with-mala/22ad2bae-502b-4eb1-aa74-53bc79754db7 Visit our Website: https://malaramakrishnan.com (https://malaramakrishnan.com) | https://founderscreative.org (https://founderscreative.org) #MalasPodcast #KshamaSwamy #CircleCI #CustomerEngineering #CustomerSuccess #CustomerSupport #AIAdoption #EnterpriseAI #CICD #DeveloperTools #SaaS #TechLeadership #WomenInTech #CustomerCentricity #AIinBusiness #B2BSaaS #ProductLeadership #EngineeringLeadership #FutureOfWork #StartupFounders

2. 

   18 May 2026

   Why most IT teams don't drive growth | Insights from a Chief Information Officer

   In this episode, Mala sits down with Sumit Johar, CIO of BlackLine, for an insightful conversation on AI transformation, enterprise IT, finance technology, cybersecurity, and what it takes to drive change inside highly regulated organizations. Sumit leads technology at BlackLine, a SaaS company serving finance organizations across the world. In this conversation, he shares why AI adoption in finance is especially challenging, because hallucinations, vague outputs, and “almost accurate” results simply do not work in environments where trust, predictability, auditability, and governance matter. The conversation traces Sumit’s journey from growing up in Kurukshetra, India, to working with consulting companies like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro, then moving into technology leadership roles at TIBCO, MobileIron, Automation Anywhere, and BlackLine. He explains how he moved from engineering into IT leadership, how he became a CIO without a perfectly planned path, and why solving business problems became the turning point in his career. Mala and Sumit also discuss what it means for IT to become a change agent instead of a cost center, how CIOs can influence product roadmap, how to create small transformation teams, how to fund innovation under budget constraints, and why AI adoption must be balanced with security, governance, and discipline. This episode is especially useful for CIOs, founders, enterprise SaaS leaders, AI builders, cybersecurity teams, product leaders, and anyone selling into conservative or highly regulated enterprise environments. __________________________________________________ Timestamps 00:00 – Introducing Sumit Johar, CIO of BlackLine 00:20 – What BlackLine does and why finance customers are different 00:52 – The challenge of AI where hallucinations are unacceptable 01:25 – Sumit’s journey from Kurukshetra, India, to global technology leadership 02:08 – Early career at TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and the move to the U.S. 02:42 – Choosing IT over engineering at TIBCO 03:15 – Falling in love with solving real business problems 04:05 – Moving from director and VP roles into the C-suite 05:36 – Learning cybersecurity by becoming customer zero 06:25 – How internal IT started influencing product roadmap 07:30 – Becoming a CIO by expanding impact beyond IT 08:35 – What organizations really expect from a CIO 09:35 – Automation Anywhere, CIO branding, and selling to other CIOs 11:15 – How IT can stop being seen as only a cost center 13:35 – Balancing AI innovation with AI governance and security 14:50 – Creating a small internal transformation team 16:10 – Working across departments to fund innovation 17:30 – Why AI transformation increases work in the short term 18:45 – Why AI is essential for survival, not just productivity 20:05 – Managing AI adoption, cybersecurity, and employee access 21:00 – Building disciplined AI usage in a regulated company __________________________________________________ 🔗 Connect with Sumit Johar → https://www.linkedin.com/in/sumit-johar/ 🔗 Connect with Mala Ramakrishnan → https://www.linkedin.com/in/malaramakrishnan 🎧 Subscribe to the podcast Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnL3D6aI60R-cCvypFIkh4A Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1NIDE4cT5fuVjC3HaGbCDK?si=eoSTNmhqQNKHQl9d1Jx0UQ Apple Podcast: https://podcastsconnect.apple.com/my-podcasts/show/talking-to-the-leaders-of-ai-the-ceo-series-with-mala/22ad2bae-502b-4eb1-aa74-53bc79754db7 Visit our Website: https://malaramakrishnan.com (https://malaramakrishnan.com) | https://founderscreative.org (https://founderscreative.org) #MalasPodcast #SumitJohar #BlackLine #CIO #AITransformation #EnterpriseAI #FinanceTechnology #FinTech #SaaS #Cybersecurity #AIGovernance #EnterpriseIT #TechLeadership #DigitalTransformation #ResponsibleAI #AIAdoption #ProductLeadership #BusinessTransformation #StartupFounders #EnterpriseSoftware

3. 

   7 May 2026

   What it takes to make AI work in enterprises | Head of Product Strategy ⁨@rackspacetechnology⁩

   What does AI strategy look like inside industries that are still catching up to cloud? In this episode, Mala speaks with Madhavi Rajan, Head of Product Strategy for Rackspace’s Private Cloud business, about her journey from NASA-funded research to enterprise infrastructure and AI strategy. Madhavi shares hard-earned lessons from 20+ years in deep tech, including how to move from engineering to product, why enterprise customers adopt technology slowly, and how leaders should think about private cloud, responsible AI, security, and business outcomes. This episode is especially relevant for founders, product leaders, infrastructure builders, enterprise SaaS teams, cloud strategists, AI operators, and anyone building for industries that move slowly but matter deeply. ________________________________________________________ Timestamps: 00:05 – Madhavi Rajan’s journey into cloud and AI strategy 01:34 – Early career in semiconductors and networking 02:36 – The cancelled project that changed her career 04:13 – Moving from technical execution to strategy 05:07 – Breaking into product management 06:04 – What private cloud means for enterprise customers 07:45 – Private cloud, public cloud, and regulated industries 08:55 – How AI workloads fit into private cloud 09:41 – AI sandboxes for sovereign and enterprise customers 10:52 – Why security is horizontal across AI and infrastructure 12:39 – Technology waves, enterprise laggards, and the reality of infrastructure adoption 15:26 – Responsible AI, GPUs, CPUs, and business outcomes 17:48 – Enterprise AI for efficiency vs revenue generation 20:10 – Why Copilot adoption is not the same as an AI strategy 24:26 – Infrastructure partnerships, ecosystems, and what real AI adoption will require 26:07 – Rapid fire with Madhavi 28:07 – Leading through ambiguity in AI strategy ________________________________________________________ 🔗 Connect with Madhavi Rajan → https://www.linkedin.com/in/madhavi-rajan/ 🔗 Connect with Mala Ramakrishnan → https://www.linkedin.com/in/malaramakrishnan 🎧 Subscribe to the podcast Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnL3D6aI60R-cCvypFIkh4A Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1NIDE4cT5fuVjC3HaGbCDK?si=eoSTNmhqQNKHQl9d1Jx0UQ Apple Podcast: https://podcastsconnect.apple.com/my-podcasts/show/talking-to-the-leaders-of-ai-the-ceo-series-with-mala/22ad2bae-502b-4eb1-aa74-53bc79754db7Visit our Website: https://malaramakrishnan.com | https://founderscreative.org #MalasPodcast #MadhaviRajan #Rackspace #PrivateCloud #AIstrategy #EnterpriseAI #CloudComputing #Infrastructure #ProductStrategy #WomenInTech #TechLeadership #ResponsibleAI #HybridCloud #DataCenters #AIInfrastructure #ProductManagement #EnterpriseTechnology #CloudStrategy #Founders #DeepTech

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Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.