Key takeaways
- The Rising 2023 honours women leaders who have significantly impacted the AI and tech sectors through dedication and expertise.
- Awardees were chosen based on nominations from prominent firms, showcasing their contributions to achieving business value.
- Anjali Iyer is recognised for her extensive experience in digital transformation and cloud data engineering.
- Debarati Sengupta is acknowledged for her role in developing scalable tech talent and innovative product models.
- Divya Gupta's expertise in digital transformation and consulting has been instrumental in her leadership at Dyson.
Analytics India Magazine’s ‘Women in Tech Leadership Awards 2023’ at The Rising celebrates leaders who have made a longstanding impact in the AI/ML and tech spaces with years of hard work, commitment and dedication.
We received submissions from leading firms that nominated people who have made massive contributions and demonstrated expertise in gaining business value. All submissions were assessed by our panel of editors and industry veterans, and awardees were selected after careful reviewing.
Check out the winners below:
Anjali Iyer, Senior Delivery Practice Leader at TheMathCompany Inc
With over 12 years of experience in digital transformation programs for Fortune500 clients, Anjali specialises in cloud data engineering, product engineering and multi-cloud MLOps. Her leadership skills have driven significant improvements in business metrics for all her clients.
Debarati Sengupta, Chief Product Officer, Futurense Technologies
Debarati currently serves as the chief product officer at both Futurense Technologies and Miles Education and has over 15 years of experience in building scalable tech talent. Her expertise lies in building and implementing data-driven skilling and setting up innovative products and business models.
Divya Gupta, Country IT Lead, Dyson
Divya is a seasoned expert with 13 years of experience in digital transformation and consulting. Having worked with top consulting firms like Deloitte, Accenture, and Cognizant, Divya now heads the IT division for Dyson India. Divya is also a PhD candidate in ‘Digital transformation’ from NMIMS Mumbai and has published several papers in the field.
Jayashree Arunkumar, Engineering Head, Wipro Digital
Jayashree is the engineering head at Wipro Digital Ltd with extensive experience in leading digital transformation initiatives for US clients. With expertise in Agile software development and AI/ML-powered platforms, Jayashree has successfully delivered global transformation programs for banking, media, and healthcare clients. A graduate from Madras University, Jayashree studied Disruptive Strategy and Innovation and Sustainable Business Strategy at the Harvard Business School.
Kavitha Krishnan M, Senior Manager of Data Science, Tredence
Aside from her role as the senior manager of the company’s data science team, Kavitha is also a global co-leader for their AI/ML projects. With over a decade’s worth of experience in all aspects of data science, Kavitha has built solutions for top retail clients in dynamic price optimisation, price microzoning, markdown optimisation and revenue growth management engines. Kavitha’s contributions have delivered annual cumulative benefits of more than USD 20 million.
Khushboo Singhal, Director of Insurance Analytics, WNS Global Services
Armed with experience in managing more than 100 data scientists, analysts and intelligent automation experts, Khushboo is skilled in data engineering, RPA automation and Tableau data visualisation among other things. Khushboo is a pioneer in developing voice biometrics for call centre augmentation and implementing sentiment analysis and survey analysis using AWS Comprehend and NLP.
Megha Sinha, Vice President, Genpact India
Having led successful end-to-end conceptualisation, development, and deployment of data integration solutions and enterprise applications, Megha has over 13 years of experience in data and technology strategy, consulting and enterprise application design and development.
At Genpact, Megha manages full-stack AI/ML solutions, strategic offerings, and new initiatives in cloud analytics and MLOps, working closely with Hyperscalers to create industry-specific offerings.
Monali Bhalerao, Director of Engineering, Eaton India Innovation Center
Monali has been with Eaton since 2009 and has led various groups and COEs, including the digital segment software groups and product cybersecurity and Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) CoEs.
With a BE in Electronics from the University of Pune, Monali has an impressive track record of leading product groups and technology CoEs, expanding teams to over 250 engineers, and operationalising labs. She has also filed one invention disclosure and presented two technical papers on industrial IoT and retrofitting wireless connectivity for hydraulic components.
Neha Singh, Client Partner, Fractal Analytics
Neha is a seasoned analytics and AI solutions provider with over 18 years of experience with clients from investment and retail banking, retail, and tech, media and entertainment (TME) verticals. Currently serving as the client partner and head of analytics consulting-India for TME at Fractal Analytics, Neha manages a team of more than 250 members and has worked with Fortune 500 companies in over 30 countries.
She specialises in enabling customer lifecycle management and product decisions through analytics. Notably, Neha is the product and vision owner for Trial Run, Fractal's experimentation product, which has enabled a major Fortune 500 Retail company to innovate by running and analysing over 200 experiments annually in their store.
Priya Kanduri, CTO & Senior Vice President, Happiest Minds Technologies
Priya is a veteran in IT security with over 23 years of experience in cyber risk, cloud security, data privacy and protection, access governance and compliance. She has played a significant role in developing next-gen managed security platforms and SaaS (Security-as-a-service) platforms. She is also the diversity and inclusion champion at Happiest Minds and has conceptualised innovative initiatives to promote diversity, like a women-only hackathon annual event at the company.
Rashmi Ramesh, Functional Head and Principal Engineer, Société Générale Global Solution Centre
Rashmi leads the platform development and tooling practice at Société Générale and directs the engineering strategy and adoption of hybrid cloud platforms. She also leads global communities like the development and open source experts guild and the developers community for DevSecOps enthusiasts.
She was recognised as ‘Manager of the Year in 2021’ for her efforts in driving innovation and inclusivity while mentoring future leaders.
Reji Rajendran Nair, Associate Director for Cloud and DevOps Platform Engineering, Verizon India
Reji is a key player in shaping strategy, engineering and governance of the cloud and software Agile/CICD platform for all Verizon IT divisions globally. As the India chapter lead for WAVE (Women's Association of Verizon Employees), Reji helps with creating a pipeline for women leadership. She has won numerous awards for her work including the ‘TrendSetter Woman in IT by eWIT’ in 2020.
Ruma Mukherjee, Principal Engineer, Intel
A technical and strategic leader with around 20 years of experience in data-driven tech solutions, Ruma is a principal engineer at Intel and leads the company’s analytics and DevOps group in Bangalore. Having worked with companies like IBM Labs, Juniper and Novell in the past, she is an expert in data science, MLOps, statistics, AI/ML-based product development, research and consulting in hybrid cloud environments.
She also has three patents to her name and acts as an advisor to industry and government AI/ML initiatives driven by non-profit organisations across India.
Safala V Revankar, Associate Director of Cloud Area Practice, Kyndryl
Safala started her journey as a hardware engineer and rose to the position of SME at Logica within a year. After a stint as a program manager at IBM, she currently leads a team of more than 160 engineers in day-to-day services for public cloud services at Kyndryl.
Safala is also a mentor to more than 50 employees as a part of the Women in Technology program.
Seema Ramachandra, Head of Customer Engineering for Data, Analytics & AI, Google India
Seema has developed a recommendation engine for short video content, a vernacular voice bot for multiple Indian languages apart from working with agritech customers to provide accurate recommendations on crop care and financing for farmers.
She is also an active advocate for women in tech and serves on the DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) Council for Google Cloud, India.
Shanthi Srinivasan, AVP and Head of Marketing, InfoCepts
Shanthi has been delivering transformative data and analytics solutions for over 20 years to large scale enterprises. She is behind the go-to-market strategies, brand awareness and driving demand for customer and talent acquisition for many clients. Shanthi has also developed reusable solutions for common data and analytics problems, bringing home several awards for InfoCepts.
Sindhu Ravindranathan, Global Director, Analytics, Unilever Industries
At Unilever, Sindhu is currently responsible for leading the industrialisation of AI at scale for its distributor management systems. In a career spanning 26 years in business transformation, Sindhu has a track record for implementing data solutions for top retail, entertainment, and manufacturing companies like NBC, Marks & Spencer, ABInBev, Dell, Tesco and Unilever.
Sneha Utturwar, Program Director, Saama Technologies
Sneha is currently leading the overall delivery of cloud-based data analytics products in the life sciences clinical domain at Saama. She has a proven track record of account management and delivery of complex IT programs in the clinical data analytics space with expertise in custom implementation of clinical data platform projects in data analytics and AI/ML.
She has worked with top 20 pharma companies and helped them quicken the drug research process using data analytics and AI/ML.
Soumya Sethuraman, Director of Analytics Consulting, Tiger Analytics
Across the seven years of working with Tiger Analytics, Soumya has built AI/ML-based end-to-end solutions for clients from retail, banking, technology and auto sectors. As a delivery partner, she handles a portfolio of more than 90 clients. Soumya is an expert at designing analytics roadmaps and discovery workshops for client organisations.
Susmita Chaudhury, Partner, Deloitte India Consulting
With a background in economics and statistics, Susmita’s work is focused on financial analytics, pricing strategies and marketing analytics. She co-founded an analytics firm, SCAnalytics, which developed and deployed cutting-edge analytical software solutions for global clients before being acquired by Marketing Management Analytics in 2010.
Currently, Susmita’s work at Deloitte is around building analytics assets, complex global data engineering and analytics transformational engagements while also enabling DevOps delivery models.
