Kinetic IT’s new Chief transformation officer on AI, complexity and why experience matters

Kinetic IT’s Kishore Jayaram explained why partners can’t keep single business technology concerns “in their own lanes” anymore.

Kinetic IT has seen a flurry of new hires over the past six months, with a new digital transformation lead and a fresh CEO joining the company.

This week Kinetic IT boosted its management headcount with a new role, appointing Kishore Jayaram as chief transformation officer.

The role is a new one for Kinetic IT, and speaking to CRN, Jarayam commented that the reason for its creation was largely customer-focused.

“It's about recognising that our customer’s environments are getting more and more complex by the day” he said.

“There are definitely a lot of things around cyber sovereign concerns, legacy modernisation and AI added on top of that, and that's increasing the complexity for our customers. So, technology decisions, transmission strategy, and service delivery can't sit within their own lanes anymore” he stated.

Transformation for Kinetic IT is also, as per Jayaram, about opportunity for the company, using its existing managed services foundation to “deliberately scale into new sovereign digital services, and AI enabled solutions.”

Business transformation often involves changes in head count, but Kishore declined to specifically comment on whether or not that would mean an increase or decrease in Kinetic IT’s existing workforce of around 1,500 employees.

Jarayam’s broader strategy in terms of headcount relates to focusing in on how the company can grow while providing better services for customers.

As well as operational transformation to allow Kinetic IT to scale and then identifying the capabilities that the company needs to develop to deliver on those promises to customers around improved and expanded services.

He joins Kinetic IT after previous roles at NCS, Thoughtworks, Accenture, Cisco and McKinsey & Company.

Jayaram said he’s been “very privileged to work in a range of organisations” with a strong customer focus, seeing trends come and go over time.

“When you think about things 15 years back, it was around cloud and digital transformation and then came IoT, and then different ways of working with agile transformation. And today, it's AI,” he added.

Jarayam feels that this breadth of experience gives him a “multi-dimensional perspective on things. That's what I'm bringing to Kinetic IT.”

“There are some amazing people and amazing capability within the organisation, and my role would be really to connect the dots and bring them all together and track this change going forward” he ended.