Introduction
This week I’m joined by Ellora Sengupta, the CIO of EverCommerce.
Today, many organizations are building an AI council to guide their AI efforts across the organization. Ellora discusses how her organization leverages both an AI council as well as sub-councils. She outlines her perspective on how to move AI from thought to action. Ellora also talks about how she has evolved as a leader and how your team is not your family. With the mounting requirements for the CIO, she shares how she keeps balanced as she runs a marathon…not a sprint.
Speaker Profiles
Ellora LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellora/
EverCommerce: https://www.evercommerce.com
Audio File
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#CIO #Leadership #CEO #DigitalTransformation #CIOitk
Podcast Transcript
Tim Crawford 0:00
The companies are looking for new ways to transform their business to remain relevant and differentiated within their industry. Technology now plays a central role in this transformation. Hello, and welcome to the CIO in the Know podcast, where I take a provocative but pragmatic look at the intersection of business and technology. I’m your host, Tim Crawford, a CIO and strategic advisor at Avoa. This week, I’m joined by Ellora Sengupta, the CIO of Evercommerce. Today, many organizations are building an AI council to guide their AI efforts across the organization. Ellora discusses how her organization leverages both an AI council as well as sub councils. She outlines her perspective on how to move AI from thought to action. Ellora also talks about how she has evolved as a leader and how your team is not your family with the mounting requirements for the CIO. She shares how she keeps balanced as she runs a marathon, not a sprint. Ellora, welcome to the program.
Ellora Sengupta 1:13
Hi, Tim. I’m really excited to be here today.
Tim Crawford 1:16
I am as well, and I’m really looking forward to getting into this conversation. So, let’s just kind of kick things off. So, Ellora Sengupta, the CIO of Evercommerce, and for those listening, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role as CIO?
Ellora Sengupta 1:35
Sure, so I grew up in India, I have an engineering degree, and my early career was in India before I came to the US, and my career now spans three plus decades. So, as you can imagine, during that time I’ve seen all kinds of technology transitions. In my current role, I’m leading assistance transformations to enable business growth and improve our security posture and improve efficiency, and my scope includes enterprise applications, enterprise data and analytics, core IT and infrastructure security, and enterprise project management office.
Tim Crawford 2:15
Wow, that’s a mouthful, you know, and this is something that I think all of us as CIOs can probably relate to, is when you’re serving as a CIO, it can be a bit overwhelming for some. How do you kind of manage through that?
Ellora Sengupta 2:33
Yeah, so it depends on how you look at it, right? The one can choose to feel overwhelmed, or one can choose to look at it as a rewarding experience, where you get to solve unique problems every day, and the way I see it is our work is not really rocket science. There’s a solution for almost every problem, and when things get overwhelming, to chunk it out into bite-sized and solve one problem at a time, one day at a time, and not get overwhelmed.
Tim Crawford 3:05
That’s impressive, because I think one of the things that that I always think about is, you know, when you have that full plate and people are coming at you from all directions, it seems these days it can be a little challenging to kind of manage through that, wouldn’t you say,
Ellora Sengupta 3:22
yes, it is, but again, you know, really to put things in perspective, because if you look, things may seem challenging in the moment, but when you solve the series of problems and it really enables the business, and you look back, that is so rewarding, and I think it’s important to keep that in mind,
Tim Crawford 3:42
and we’re going to talk a little bit about that, that reward in a few minutes. One of the things that has been coming up again and again, especially in this day and age, and I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about it, is this technology called AI, and it’s, it’s impacting organizations, right? It’s impacting us as leaders. It’s impacting organizations. I’m curious, kind of your take on how you see AI kind of bringing change to organizations, and what you think it means for CIOs.
Ellora Sengupta 4:16
Yeah, I think AI will become – I shouldn’t say will become probably has become center stage in a lot of different companies. We are embarking on the journey and making that a reality in our own company as well. The way I see it is for CIOs, there’s so much interest not just within the technology team but even in the businesses to start using AI and make a difference. How do we as CIOs empower and enable that in a safe and secure way? Right, so if we can enable the pilots quickly and have quick security and compliance reviews and enable the businesses to do what they want to do, I think that would be key.
Ellora Sengupta 5:00
To success.
Tim Crawford 5:01
Yeah, I think one of the things that comes up that I hear again and again from our peers, from fellow CIOs, is the shadow aspects of it, right? If you’re not enabling folks, if you’re kind of becoming the department of no, that can push problems out to the edge when it comes to AI. I don’t know if you’ve kind of thought through that and how to manage that and create that balance that you talk about between security and innovation.
Ellora Sengupta 5:27
Yeah, I think you know, I really don’t look at it as shadow IT or shadow tools, and very interestingly, when I started my career, I was in a shadow IT function myself, so I really look at not a shadow, it, but how are we going to enable the business, because it can only do so much at a certain phase, but we need to scale that by enabling the businesses to do what they need to do, but in a safe and secure way with guardrails, and what I care about is the architecture. Right, I don’t want to be complicating our architecture. I don’t want to have 10 tools doing the same thing, so that’s where I care about if I already have an AI tool that serves a purpose. Then I like my team to present it to the business. Would you consider using this versus going yet yet after another tool, because that just complicates the landscape, and it’s harder to manage the multiple tools.
Tim Crawford 6:28
Yeah, and that kind of brings the conversation to talking a little bit about governance, right? When you start to think about how to pull things together, you know, and in a past conversation, one of the things that you and I spoke about was the role of an AI council, or even sub councils. You had mentioned kind of curious, like how you see that playing out, and the role of a council when you think about governance and kind of building that balance between security and innovation.
Ellora Sengupta 7:00
Yeah, and actually I’m really excited that you know when we’re talking about the AI council, especially in the context of my current company, and how we’ve set it up, it’s not only playing the role of governance but also an enabler, right? So we have a main AI council that is led by my boss, who’s the president of the company, and it’s represented by senior executives from not just the central teams, but our vertical business units, and we have the four vertical business units. Then we have sub councils, and we have eight of those. For example, we have a go-to market sub council, we have an operations and efficiency sub council. So I lead the operations and efficiency sub council, which is represented by ops leaders from the various functions, right, and we look at how do we roll out AI to help our cross-functional workflows, and you know, make it faster and better, right. So, the way these ASAP councils are working is we have these eight sub councils, but three of those are horizontal, for example, there’s a tooling and infrastructure sub council that takes in the request from all the other sub councils on what tools are we evaluating, and they vet it from an architecture and technology standpoint, and I have the leader of my IT team, the leader of security in that sub council, and once that is vetted, then we say yes, you can go ahead, and you know, use the tool, or versus you can’t. So I think it’s become an enabler more than governance. It is also serving the purpose of governance, but it’s really helping us accelerate how we start using AI. It’s no longer just a thought, we’re actually moving it into action.
Tim Crawford 8:42
Yeah, I like how you’ve kind of organized this, because there’s a lot of conversation about the importance of building out an AI council within an organization and ensuring that it’s a cross-functional representation of the broader org, but the piece that I also find really interesting is this role of the sub councils and how they play into the mix and ensuring you have the right number of them, but also not too many or not too few in the mix, that it’s not just one council that that governs everything
Ellora Sengupta 9:18
exactly, and I think the key to success here is where there’s involvement at the top, to hear the president of the companies leading the main AI council, and then each of us executive leaders have a leadership role in one of the eight sub councils, and then our sub councils are represented by leaders from other cross-functional teams, so that’s how I think we’re getting the engagement across the company.
Tim Crawford 9:44
Yeah, I love that. If you were in a different company and didn’t have the support of the president, which you obviously do in your current company, and that’s great. Do you think that the CIO role could serve as lead? Being the AI council,
Ellora Sengupta 10:03
yes, it could, and I also think the CIO role will be successful in the role if they have the sponsorship and support from the CEO of the company.
Tim Crawford 10:15
Okay,
Ellora Sengupta 10:16
I think that’s important, because this, the CIO alone cannot go and say, hey, go to market function, go and use these tools or product and engineering, go and use these tools or other sub functions. I think if you really want to make that impact, it needs to have the sponsorship at the very top level.
Tim Crawford 10:35
Gotcha. Now that makes that makes a lot of sense, and you know, when we kind of talk about action, you know, one of the things that often comes up is that move in AI from thought to action, you know, kind of coming up with the ideas, and this is something you’ve talked about extensively. How do you do that? And I kind of want to touch back to your earlier comments about that balance between security and innovation. How do you do that in a responsible way,
Ellora Sengupta 11:03
yeah. And that’s what I, where I was mentioning, that of the eight sub councils, the three are horizontal, one of them is tooling and infrastructure, the other is risk, security, and compliance, and the CISO, who’s part of my organization, actually is in both of those sub councils. So the very first step that happens when a new AI tool is requested, it goes to the tooling and infrastructure just to vet from an architecture standpoint, and that sub council is represented not only by my leaders in my team but also by other cross-functional business leaders. Once the tool is vetted from an architecture standpoint, then it goes to the risk security compliance sub council for further vetting from a security compliance, and you know, privacy, all of that. Once it’s approved, only then can we move forward with that too.
Tim Crawford 11:53
That’s fascinating. So you actually will move projects from one sub council to another, because the sub councils are functionally unique in what they represent to the strategy of around AI,
Ellora Sengupta 12:06
exactly. So, all the leaders of the sub council are part of the main council, so and that is led by my boss. So, the main council meets every two weeks, but at the sub council we also meet every two weeks, but it’s an alternate week.
Tim Crawford 12:22
Yeah, so
Ellora Sengupta 12:23
we meet as a sub council, and we take back our updates and reports back to the main council, so the other leaders of the other sub councils hear it, and then we prioritize.
Tim Crawford 12:32
So, when folks within the organization are raising questions around AI, or they, they want to bring something forward, does that start with a sub council or does that start with the main council?
Ellora Sengupta 12:46
It starts with the sub council, because sub councils are very functional oriented, like I lead the operations and efficiency, and as I said, it’s represented by ops leaders from across functions, so anything operations related will come through the sub council that I lead, and then I’ll take it. I don’t have to necessarily go to the main council, I can take it to the tools and infrastructure sub council, and they will vet it, which, interestingly, is represented by some of my own team members.
Tim Crawford 13:15
Interesting.
Ellora Sengupta 13:16
Yes, and then once that is vetted, it goes to the security sub council, and then we take it back to the main council. Hey, this is approved, this is not approved, and if there’s any contention, we discuss it at the main council.
Tim Crawford 13:28
No, that’s great. That’s great, and I love the degree of sophistication that you’ve enacted with the role of the council, the main council, and the sub councils, and then the membership, and how they interact with one another, it’s just fascinating to me. Let’s maybe move on a little bit. Let’s talk about Elora. Let’s talk about Laura’s role as CIO and also as a leader. You talked at the top of the episode about your history and kind of how you’ve progressed. What have you learned over that time? I think this is something that, that when people are listening to these episodes, they’re always looking for something that they can take away. And I’m curious, you’ve had a great history as a leader. What have you learned over that time, and how has that changed you?
Ellora Sengupta 14:19
So early on in my career or as a leader, I used to look at my team as my family and try to carry on every team member, and what I realized is if you have non-performance of the team, you have to actively manage performance, otherwise it’s detrimental to the rest of the team, and over a period of time, even people who are performing tend to then get into that zone of not performing if you’ve not managed the non-performance. So it took me a while to come to the realization that my team is not my family, it’s a team, and we are here for. Business, and every individual in the team needs to play their role, and if they are not, they need to be coached, and sometimes, you know, you actually, a lot of the time, you do get success by coaching and helping improve performance, but there are times when that doesn’t happen, and you have to make the hard decision, and I think that’s very important as a leader to recognize who to keep on the team, who’s coachable versus not, and who not to keep on the team. And that took me a while to realize.
Tim Crawford 15:33
Do you find that that changes over time as well with those players, meaning you might have a good team of folks, but as your organization moves, maybe the team needs to move, and maybe not everyone on the team is ready to move.
Ellora Sengupta 15:49
Absolutely, you know, as companies grow or the businesses change, there are people who are able to adapt to the change, whether it’s business growth or a different business model, and it’s perfectly fine, so team members can adapt and transition to a new role, but sometimes some people are not able to do that, so the ability to have that authentic conversation and even helping the individuals who are not able to transition to the new way of working, and I’ve had that even in my current role and previous role, where we’ve changed how we’ve structured the team, we’ve changed people’s roles just to position us better for scale, and everybody doesn’t, is not able to adapt, most people are, but some are not, and that’s okay. Then we, as leaders, need to help them find another role elsewhere in the company, or even sometimes even outside, where they’ll be successful, because what we have currently may not be the right thing for them.
Tim Crawford 16:49
Yeah, this is something that that I would talk about with my teams too, is even if this isn’t the right place for you, how can I help you find the right place? Because that’s beneficial for us as leaders, but it’s also beneficial for them. These are these are human beings, they’re good people. We just need to find the right place, or as you put it, the right position to play.
Ellora Sengupta 17:10
Yes, exactly, exactly.
Tim Crawford 17:13
You know, as part of that leadership role, though, AI is having an impact on how we think about being a leader, whether it does change us or not, that’s probably debatable. I’m kind of curious, like, what’s your take on the intersection of AI and ours, our role as a leader? Is it impactful? Is it not? Where does it kind of fit in? What’s your take on that?
Ellora Sengupta 17:38
Yeah, I think as leaders, you know, with AI coming in, we need to get used to the fact that the hybrid workforce is going to be consisting of humans and bots working alongside each other. So, when we refer to the hybrid workforce, it’s not going to be, “Why are you remote? Are you coming to the office? It’s going to be, you know, how many bots are you working alongside?
Tim Crawford 18:03
Interesting.
Ellora Sengupta 18:04
And then I think performance management becomes unique, because then you, as leaders, we have to manage not just the humans, but we also need to be managing the bots, right? I think it’s going to be a whole different shift in how we lead. I think we are all going to learn through it together, but I think that’s where we are headed.
Tim Crawford 18:25
When you think about that interaction between bots and agents and humans who manages the technology aspect, right? We have the the CHRO that has has a whole system and helping guide and lead and support the people side, the human side of the organization, but what about the agents and the bots, because there are a lot of characteristics there that are similar to the human side. The other thing that I’ll add is there’s been some discussion as to maybe those two need to come closer together in terms of how we manage it, or maybe not. What’s your take on that?
Ellora Sengupta 19:05
I know I definitely think those two things need to come together in the way we manage it, because when you have a mix of humans and bots on a team, and like they’re little co-workers, right, so we need to be able to really gage the performance of bots versus humans or humans versus bots, and I think we are not quite there yet, because we are all still in the early stages of deploying all the bots, but we will get there, so I think it’ll be an interesting problem for all people leaders, alongside with, you know, the HR team to really figure out how will we do this performance management when we have humans either working alongside with bots or humans themselves being aided by bots.
Tim Crawford 19:50
Fascinating. All right, so getting beyond bots and agents and bringing this back centered on you when. We talk about the role of the CIO, and this is something that’s fascinated me about each of our conversations that we’ve had, is how you keep yourself balanced as a CIO, as a leader, but then also outside of the organization, how do you keep balanced?
Ellora Sengupta 20:20
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And Tim, you’re a CIO, so you probably appreciate this, that you know many times the role of a CIO can seem like a thankless job, right? Where, when things run smoothly, nobody notices, right? But sometimes, if you know one thing isn’t working well, that you know, it seems like you know it’s a thankless job, but as a result, I think what’s really important for not just CIOs, but the teams as well, to really know have a life outside of work, it can be whatever, like whatever they enjoy doing, for example, I love to travel with my family. I enjoy news with my family. I have events almost every weekend with my friends, so that just keeps me recharged. If I have a life outside world, right? And I think that’s really important for, and I would say it’s not just the CIO for any job. I think it’s really important that people have a life outside their work, and they need to be passionate about the work, for sure. But work can’t be on there, they’re doing 24 by seven, and I like to say it’s a marathon, not a sprint. So save your energy for the marathon, don’t burn out in the sprint,
Tim Crawford 21:41
you know. I was just having a conversation today with one of our colleagues, fellow CIO, and one of the things that they were mentioning is those activities outside of work are what recharge them for work.
Ellora Sengupta 21:56
Yes,
Tim Crawford 21:56
I don’t know if you, you have a perspective on that.
Ellora Sengupta 22:00
No, absolutely. I think activities outside of work does recharge you, right? Because you can’t just be thinking work all the time to get your creative juices flowing. To really start thinking out of the box, you need to empty your mind sometimes and do go do something else, right? Give me a break, exactly. And that’s something I like to ask in my when I hire for people on my team, I always like to ask, what do you do outside your work to recharge?
Tim Crawford 22:28
Great question, great question. All right, so we’re almost up on time here. One of the things before we close out the episode, I want to ask you about is when you think about the role of the CIO. What excites you most today and moving forward?
Ellora Sengupta 22:46
Yeah, I think you know, for many years we’d said the CIS job was to enable and support business growth and water efficiency and compliance and security, but I think more and more, the CIOs’ job is shaping how the business is going to be, right? It’s not just enabling. So, I think that part is exciting, and especially in the AI era, we as CIOs have a tremendous role to play to turn this hype into reality, right? Because we are just not talking, we are actually going and evaluating and implementing these AI solutions. So, I think that’s extremely interesting. And the question no longer is, can we do this? It’s like, how fast can we do it?
Tim Crawford 23:39
Good to know. We’re going to have to leave it right there. Elora, thank you so much for taking part in today’s episode.
Ellora Sengupta 23:46
Thank you. I really enjoyed being here. Thanks, Tim.
Tim Crawford 23:50
For more information on the CIO in the Know podcast, visit us online at CIO in the know.com You can also find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast, please subscribe, and thank you for listening.
Unknown Speaker 24:03
Thank.
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