Ritika Suri

I sat down with Naveen Bhati for a raw, no-fluff conversation on what it actually takes to lead in today’s insane digital age — from quantum disruption to building high-performance teams and turning founders into CEOs who scale. Here are the 5 biggest takeaways I shared (straight from the episode): 1. Founder vs CEO Reality Check A founder builds a product. A CEO builds a company. Brutal stat: Only 25% of founders successfully make the transition to long-term CEO. 2. The Speed of Change is Brutal By the time enterprises adopted generative AI, agentic AI was already flooding in. Quantum tech is next — and it’s going to multiply use cases exponentially. Leaders who don’t stay alert and learn fast will get left behind. 3. VUCA World = Agility or Extinction Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity. The only answer? Stay agile in your tech roadmap, architecture, business model, and customer needs. 4. Mentoring That Actually Works Great mentors don’t hand you the map — they help you discover your own path. Proud moment: Three of my mentees have already built unicorns. 5. Go-to-Market Strategy Myth It’s NOT a fancy diagram. It’s a strategy in action — with exact numbers: how many customers, which logos, and what revenue in what timeframe. Anything else is just wishful thinking. If you’re a founder, first-time CEO, or tech leader trying to navigate this chaotic, high-speed world — this episode is for you. Watch the full conversation here: https://lnkd.in/d9x4fTYt Drop your biggest leadership lesson or hardest CEO transition moment in the comments Let’s connect and collaborate..... #Leadership #Startups #CEO #QuantumComputing #Mentorship #GoToMarket #Entrepreneurship #TechLeadership #FounderToCEO

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Over the long weekend, I came across Ekta Chopra's blog on GPT-5. It's a great piece on how executives should be looking at their business with the continued innovation of AI and LLM’s. She notes: “GPT-5 is not an end state — it’s a capability inflection point. The companies that will win aren’t the ones who plug it in fastest, but the ones who embed the ability to adapt, govern, and scale intelligently.” I’m a firm believer of this. AI is only getting better and better. If an org isn’t leveraging AI, the delta vs. orgs that are is increasing exponentially. A few themes stood out to me. Every new capability and launch such as GPT-5 increases both leverage and exposure. Build for humans alongside AI. Humans in the loop are critical to maximize output. Future proof your business. Build adaptive governance, capability audits, reusable playbooks to accelerate innovation. If you haven’t read her blog, I highly recommend it.

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#edgeai is hot and investors are getting into it - the frontier of AI is efficacy and closing the gap between where the data is created and where the AI is “actioned.” This talk at EDGE AI San Diego 2026 with Harinderpal (Hans) Hanspal will be a critical discussion of this new opportunity. See you there - https://lnkd.in/g4btc5Gd

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People ask me what the highest level of Executive Ecosystem Maturity looks like… Satya Nadella is a great example. He is talking about partnering in every breath, even in the heat of the moment, he knows partners are a Strategic asset to Microsoft’s competitive strategy. Satya Nadella has multiple horses in the AI race because of the deep partner strategy they have enacted. They have very strong odds to win. If you’re interested in benchmarking your Exec Ecosystem Maturity, here is the framework: Level 0: Nascent The executive team has no defined goals or expectations for partnerships, viewing them as irrelevant or non-existent in the company’s strategy. Level 1: Transactional The executive team expects partnerships to focus on a single objective, typically driving sourced revenue, treating them as a tactical tool rather than a broader lever. Level 2: Integrated The executive team recognizes that partnerships support multiple growth and efficiency objectives, such as driving new revenue, increasing close rates on influenced deals, enhancing product engagement, and improving retention metrics. Level 3: Strategic The executive team views the partner ecosystem as a core strategic asset, enabling the company to dominate its category by positioning itself at the center of industry developers, technology companies, service providers, and influencers.

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Excited to share insights from @Blaize CEO Dinakar Munagala on the future of physical AI transforming our cities, farms, and industries! Blaize’s innovative processors and practical AI solutions are driving real-world impact, making cities safer, boosting efficiency, and delivering measurable business value. The focus is on outcomes, cost savings, and data sovereignty. Watch the brief video to learn more - https://lnkd.in/gqcMJYgp #AI #EdgeComputing #Innovation #SmartCities

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While technologies have changed dramatically every year, there are some key mindsets, behaviors and capabilities that effective leaders and organizations consistently exhibit. That’s what we write about in MIT Sloan Management Review. The article summarizes what we found after five years of in-depth research on how to successfully lead in the digital era. Our research continues with a talented team from the HBS Leadership Initiative at Harvard Business School. Linda Hill Ann Le Cam Karina Grazina Lydia Begag Melissa Velez Liz K. Emily Tedards Letty Garcia

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My key takeaways from chatting with Pankaj Dugar (ex-Databricks, ex-AI21 Labs) regarding Enterprise partnerships: Here’s the short list I wish every founder had on their desk: 📣 PR = starting gate, not finish line. Launch → immediately run the plays. 📈 Make the partner seller hit their number. Spell out how you shorten their deal cycle, not your feature list. 🤝 Bring the big partner into your customer. Counter-intuitive, but it sparks momentum. 🎁 Amplify the first win. Win-wire + case study + internal enablement = more pipeline. 👏 Make people heroes. Name the SEs/PMs/sellers who helped. Champions are earned. 🛠️ Integration > slogans. Pre-build the boring plumbing. Remove “technical gymnastics.” One-click beats 65 steps. 💪 Sequence matters. Founder-led sales for ~10 logos → integrations → selective partners. 🔎 Map your ecosystem. CSPs/neo-clouds, hardware, ISVs, SIs, channel—choose why and when, not just who. 🤷‍♀️ Marketplaces ≠ demand. Great for discovery; design for private offers + near one-click deploy. 🌼 Cross-pollinate sellers. Trade account maps. Unlock upsell paths in the same customer. 🥷 Expect overlap. Today’s partner is tomorrow’s competitor—live in Venn diagrams. 🛑 Say “no” more than “yes.” Keep both a telescopic (12–24 mo) and microscopic (this quarter) view. 🏇 Land to expand. 20–50K land is fine—prove value, then 5× the account. If you’re building for the enterprise, this episode is a masterclass in doing the hard, boring, high-leverage work that makes quarters. ▶️ Watch the full episode: https://lnkd.in/gEmHgJYK #FounderToFortune #Enterprise #Partnerships #GTM #SaaS #Product

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**Amazon Expands OpenAI Product Offerings on AWS – A Game Changer for AI Integration** The announcement from AWS to launch new OpenAI model offerings marks a pivotal shift in the competitive landscape of cloud services. With OpenAI's decision to end its exclusive partnership with Microsoft, this opens the door for further innovation and accessibility in AI technologies. At ElevenX Capital, we believe this democratization of AI tools will empower startups and established companies alike to leverage AI for transformative solutions. How do you see this shift impacting your investment strategies? #investing #innovation #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

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A Conversation with InfraCore at AI INFRA SUMMIT 2025 - at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus 🔹 The real bottleneck in AI isn’t the model, 🔹It’s power, infrastructure, and time-to-market. I caught up with Sanjeev Rao and Jordan Oliverio from INFRACORE LLC to unpack how they’re reengineering the foundation of AI infrastructure with modular power innovation, phased deployment, and sustainable resource monetization. What You’ll Learn: 🔹How InfraCore cuts power deployment timelines in half using modular microgrids and off-grid power solutions. 🔹Why repurposed byproducts (like carbon nanoparticles and wastewater) are creating community value instead of waste. 🔹What small modular nuclear reactors, methane-to-hydrogen, and flare gas monetization mean for U.S. energy independence. 🔹How they’re transforming the image of data centers from resource drain to local sustainability engine. InfraCore isn’t just building data centers; it’s building infrastructure, redefining power, and giving AI room to breathe. No tax games. No PR gloss. Just real-world solutions with real-world outcomes. Want to be part of it? Visit https://infracore.ai/ to connect. #InfraCore #AIInfraSummit #DataCenters #EdgeAI #Microgrids #PowerInnovation #Sustainability #CarbonCredits #ModularPower InsightJam.com Forbes Technology Council AI Infrastructure Alliance Gartner Peer Experiences Theia Institute™ IgniteGTM IA FORUM 𝗡𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗲: The views within any of my posts, or newsletters are not those of my employer or the employers of any contributing experts. 𝗟𝗶𝗸𝗲 this? Feel free to reshare, repost, and join the conversation!

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Just wrapped our earnings call and wanted to share a few highlights from the quarter. Bottom line: We’ve got great momentum across our AI platform and our family of Copilots, fueling our increasing investments in both capital and talent. We’re building a planet-scale cloud and AI factory. We’ll increase our AI capacity by 80% this year, and nearly double our DC footprint over the next two. That includes Fairwater in Wisconsin, the world’s most powerful AI datacenter, which will scale to two gigawatts alone. We are building a fungible fleet that spans every stage of the AI lifecycle and is constantly optimized to deliver the best ROI and TCO for us and our customers. One example: during the quarter, we increased the token throughput for GPT-4.1 and GPT-5 by more than 30% per GPU. Our family of Copilots and agents also surpassed over 150 million monthly active users across high value domains: • Information work: 90 percent of the F500 now use Microsoft 365 Copilot – and we’re shipping updates very fast • Coding: GitHub Copilot now has 26 million-plus users • Security: 36+ agents integrated across Entra, Defender, Purview, Intune • Science & Health: We helped document 17 million-plus patient encounters, up 5X year over year • Consumer: Tons of new capabilities announced over the past two weeks, from Groups and Mico in Copilot, to "Hey Copilot" in Windows And this week, we signed a new agreement with OpenAI, a milestone for both companies. It’s been an incredible investment, with nearly 10X return and no carry. All the value goes straight to shareholders. Another thing I feel super proud about is that Microsoft is now behind two of the largest nonprofits in the world! You can read more about our results here: https://lnkd.in/gxtVeMk2

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🤖 Before you build AI… fix the foundation first. In this episode of Mala’s Podcast, @Ravi Shankar, CMO & SVP at @Denodo, joins @Mala Ramakrishnan to discuss what it really takes to succeed in the AI era — from modern GTM strategies to the growing importance of trusted, real-time, governed data. With leadership experience across Denodo, Oracle, and Informatica, Ravi shares insights on: 🔹 Why #GTMStrategy is becoming the new competitive advantage 🔹 How AI is reshaping enterprise marketing and productivity 🔹 Why human judgment still matters in an AI-driven world 🔹 The role of contextual, governed data in powering trustworthy AI 🔹 How enterprises can prepare for autonomous #AIAgents 💡 Key takeaway: #AI success doesn’t start with the model — it starts with the #DataFoundation behind it. 🎥 Watch the full conversation here: https://okt.to/kp5ZzH #DataManagement #DataGovernance #TrustedData #GoToMarket #DataforALL #NoAIWithoutData

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When it comes to business model innovation, it’s not about chasing shiny new ideas. It’s about how they fit - with operational rigor, customer value, and ecosystem strength - that drives long-term success. 🔹 Research of nearly 300 companies across two tech eras reveals: Novelty alone won't guarantee top performance. The magic is in the system design, not just the spark. 🔹 Spotify, for example, revolutionized music streaming through novelty, yes, but also balanced that with efficiency and customer lock-in to dominate. 🔹 In 2025, AI is not just a tool but a strategic lever for business model innovation. According to IBM, 85% of executives expect AI to enable new business models this year, while 44% plan to use AI specifically to drive innovation. Key principles for leaders considering business model innovation now: 1. Pair novelty with operational discipline — don’t sacrifice efficiency for the new. 2. Design to lock in customers by delivering ongoing value. 3. Build complementary partnerships to amplify reach and capabilities. 4. Tailor innovations to your company’s unique context — size, strategy, industry trends. 5. Leverage AI and emerging tech thoughtfully, to transform value creation and capture. The best innovators don’t just do new. They engineer balanced, adaptable systems designed to win in complex markets.

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Proud to share that Base10 Partners has led a $4M round into InfiniteWatch. We believe that the next phase of AI adoption will be dependent on whether or not companies can trust, monitor, and operationalize AI agents at scale. InfiniteWatch is building the observability and deployment layer required for that future. Adeyemi Ajao Ajao, myself, and the team here at Base10 are honored to be partnering with Pablo Molina Candel, Inaki Berenguer, Alberto González Lizán, and the great team behind InfiniteWatch—many of them with experience scaling platforms while at CoverWallet, an Aon company. Under their leadership, InfiniteWatch is already analyzing millions of customer interactions each month, turning AI visibility into real revenue impact in days instead of months. Excited to partner alongside Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz scouts, Kibo Ventures, as well as a group of exceptional founder-investors. Please join us in welcoming InfiniteWatch to Base10! https://lnkd.in/g4wsaWME

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Bret Taylor, Clay Bavor and team Sierra are building a generational company! Grateful to be early and continue backers at Conviction. Agents built on Sierra Platform will level up customer experiences and help enterprises optimize their most important processes.

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Grateful to join Shripati Acharya and the Prime Ventures Podcast to discuss Uniphore’s journey and what it really takes to bring agentic AI into production at the world’s largest businesses. We covered a few themes that keep coming up with CIOs and business leaders I speak with: what industrializing AI looks like beyond pilots, why a horizontal enterprise platform (data, models, security, agents) is essential for scaling responsibly, and the challenge of making AI agents more deterministic through architecture, guardrails, and workflow design. I also shared why small, fine-tuned models can be the right approach for many business use cases, balancing accuracy, control, and cost at scale. At the center of this is the Uniphore Business AI Cloud: an end-to-end platform that helps businesses bring their data together, fine-tune models, and build and deploy AI agents with the security and sovereignty large organizations require. And, it’s increasingly enabled by a strong ecosystem of strategic partners across compute, data, and cloud, working together to help customers move from experimentation to measurable outcomes. I’m confident the next chapter of Business AI will be defined by disciplined execution and real impact at scale. Thank you Shripati for a thoughtful conversation. Let’s do it again soon. #BusinessAI

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Google is building its largest data center outside the United States — right here in Vizag, India. A $15-billion AI hub that promises to transform India’s digital future. But behind the shiny promise lies a serious question: What is the cost of this AI dream in terms of real-world resources? The intersection of AI and climate is a complex topic, no doubt. We have tried to unpack some parts of it in a video that looks at the environmental impact of this data center on the Vizag landscape and it's people. https://lnkd.in/g8aTXfJg

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#AI is no longer a futuristic concept - today it's already become central to how nations govern and serve citizens. Nowhere is this more true than in #India, where government strategy and public and private-sector adoption are driving a nationwide AI transformation. This was highlighted this month when India hosted a four-day 𝐀𝐈 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐭 attended by executives from major AI labs and Big Tech, including OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Google. Further, this week Ness Digital Engineering appointed Sudip Singh as its next CEO - a leadership move that underscores the company’s intention to be a key partner in India’s AI-enabled growth story. Read more at #HorasisInsights:  https://lnkd.in/ejJbQE5e #Horasis #InspiringOurFuture

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In our view, hyperscalers are high-quality customers of neoclouds. We take a positive view on the sustainability of neocloud demand, underpinned by the quality of hyperscalers as customers, many of whom are making billions of dollars of multi-year commitments to secure AI compute capacity. For example, Microsoft has signed over $50 bn of multi-year data center commitments with companies like IREN and CoreWeave – all of whom are buying servers from DELL & SMCI. Hyperscalers are able to fund these investments with the free cash flow they generate in their core advertising, software, and cloud computing businesses, which we view as much more sustainable than startups that are leaning on vendor financing or the private credit markets to fund investments. In our view, hyperscalers won’t be major customers of the neoclouds forever. We expect that hyperscalers will shift critical workloads to their own facilities over time once the supply/demand environment for accelerated compute gets closer to equilibrium, though we believe that the lead times around building data centers & securing power means that this could take several years.

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What happens when a father and son set out to teach generative AI across the globe? We found out on this week’s Sidecar Sync podcast, where Mallory Mejias, AAiP and I had the pleasure of sitting down with Finn and Conor Grennan, the first father-son duo we’ve had on the show. Conor is NYU Stern School of Business's Chief AI Architect, advising top-tier organizations like NASA, Google, and PwC on AI adoption. Finn? He’s just finished his sophomore year of high school…and is already shaping his school’s AI strategy and leading workshops in Nepal. Yes, Nepal. What stood out? - AI feels like magic. Whether you’re a nonprofit leader in the U.S. or an educator in Nepal, the awe, curiosity, and fear are shared across borders. - Peer-to-peer learning matters. When Finn, a teenager, led sessions on AI for educators and NGOs, the response was powerful. Why? Because when the messenger feels relatable, the message lands deeper. - Education is ripe for disruption. For centuries, the cycle has been teach → memorize → test. GenAI challenges this, making it harder to tell if it’s the student or the AI being tested, and that forces us to rethink what learning truly means. - The AI adoption blueprint is surprisingly universal. Whether you're in pharma, finance, or a remote village, it's less about prompts and tools, and more about starting with what you actually do. From there, AI becomes your second brain. I’m inspired by Finn’s clarity, Conor’s humility, and their shared mission to democratize AI education. For #associations, there’s a key takeaway: build guardrails, not roadblocks. Empower your members to experiment safely. Encourage bottom-up innovation. Catch the full episode on Sidecar Sync. It’s heartwarming, eye-opening, and a blueprint for how associations can lead in the AI era. Link in comments. Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction 2:09 Backgrounds in AI: From NYU Stern to Sophomore Year 8:52 How Schools Handle AI Guidelines 15:55 The Nepal Trip: Why They Went and What They Did 19:32 Structuring the AI Workshops for Teachers and NGOs 23:06 Cross-Cultural AI Challenges and Common Concerns 28:30 Addressing Critical Thinking and Student Cheating Fears 35:02 Peer-to-Peer Influence and Student-Led AI Learning 42:45 Democratizing AI Education 48:45 Final Thoughts #AIforGood #GenerativeAI #AIInEducation #Nonprofits #DigitalTransformation #Leadership #SidecarSync #AssociationInnovation #AIAdoption #FutureOfWork

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