Abhinav Sharma

<p>Fractional Field CTO & Enterprise AI Transformation Advisor — Independent Advisory Practice</p><p><em>April 2026–Present</em></p><ul><li>Leading business-driven enterprise AI transformation for CEOs, boards and investors—helping organizations decide where to invest, what to build or buy, how to operationalize AI at scale, and how to prove the value created. </li><li>Across ~15 accepted engagements (2025–2026), advised enterprise, SMB/mid-market and PE-backed clients on AI strategy, investment prioritization, agentic AI architecture, operating-model design, technology due diligence and AI-native customer experience(CCaaS, voice AI, enterprise chatbots), and telecom/cloud AI infrastructure, supporting $5M–$25M+ technology investment decisions and reducing AI planning and decision timelines by 30–50%.</li></ul><p></p>

<p>VP, Head of Engineering & Customer Success, Cloud Native Services — HCL Technologies | $80M P&L, 500+ Professionals Across US, Europe, Asia & Middle East, 65+ Accounts</p><p><em>October 2010–December 2020</em></p><ul><li>Built HCL's MTaaS platform from concept to $35M+ in annual revenue, serving 50+ global enterprise and mid-market clients across Energy, Pharma, HiTech, and Automotive with a 200-person delivery team, delivering 60%+ margin improvement over two consecutive years.</li><li>Onboarded 65+ strategic customers onto cloud-native platform architectures, contributing approximately $15M (direct/indirect) to platform transformation revenue — built by establishing Google, Azure, and AWS Cloud Business Units at HCL from the ground up.</li><li>Led a $30M+ Elastic Cloud Operations (300+ engineers globally, across AWS, Azure, and GCP — extending the repeatable GTM model established across HCL's cloud business units to enterprise-scale delivery.</li></ul><p></p>

<p>Earlier Career — Tata Consultancy Services (IT Analyst, August 2001-2004); Citi (Application Support Manager, 2004-2005); Quark Software (Senior Service Delivery Manager, 2005-2006); Infosys Technologies (Head, Enterprise Infrastructure Services, 2006-2010)</p><ul><li>Progressive Applications, data, and technology leadership across IT infrastructure modernisation, intelligent process automation, enterprise application delivery, and ITIL-based service redesign across BFSI, publishing, and global technology services sectors.</li><li>Led enterprise database migration and BCP/DR programs at Infosys — reduced potential downtime 70%, incident resolution time 50%, and improved query performance 25-40% while achieving ISO 20000 certification; also served as Lead Auditor, BSI UK (Business Continuity Management).</li></ul><p></p>

<p>Chief Technology Officer — BIG Language Solutions | Full P&L Accountability</p><p><em>August 2025–March 2026</em></p><ul><li>As BIG Language Solutions' first external CTO, took the company — a mid-market language-services business — from AI pilots to a production-grade, GenAI-native, agentic AI operating model, replacing a 10-year legacy platform with multi-tenant, event-driven architecture (Kafka, Istio) at enterprise scale.</li><li>This included direct architecture-level integration with third-party multi-model harnesses — including Anthropic, GPT, and Mistral models — and ServiceNow, within the platform's production technology stack, alongside contact-center integrations spanning NICE CXone, Genesys, and Twilio, and healthcare-workflow integration via Epic (Hyperdrive/SMART-on-FHIR)</li><li>Commercialized three agentic AI product lines (Virtual Interpreter, Real-Time QA Assessment Agent, Agentic IBO), shifting the business toward platform-led revenue — with an estimated 15–20% of total revenue shifted to recurring, platform-led models within the first two quarters, reporting directly to CEO and Board on AI investment, risk, and platform strategy.</li><li>Managed a $35M IT budget — including AI investment — and built and led a 50-person AI team through the full build-to-production lifecycle.</li><li>Built the AI governance framework (model versioning, prompt registry, evaluation harnesses, drift monitoring, compliance controls) meeting telco/BFSI procurement and regulatory standards, establishing the AI operating model and prioritization process for how new AI initiatives were evaluated, funded, and governed enterprise-wide.</li></ul>

<p>CTO: AI & Automation, Customer Experience, APJC — Cisco Systems | $135M AI Business, 50+ Accounts</p><p><em>April 2021–March 2025</em></p><ul><li>Owned the AI transformation and commercialization agenda for Cisco's $135M automation business across 50+ enterprise accounts in telecom, BFSI, healthcare, and manufacturing across Asia Pacific, Japan, and China.</li><li>Operated within Cisco's Tier-1 AI ecosystem (NVIDIA, Mistral AI, ServiceNow), translating enterprise AI infrastructure and joint-solution capabilities into customer-facing automation and observability outcomes.</li><li>Reduced NOC false alarms by 65%; delivered 92% accuracy on predictive-maintenance models; automated 40% of high-priority incident diagnoses, cutting MTTR from 6 hours to 3.5 hours.</li><li>Unified 5+ disparate data sources across 350,000+ network devices, processing 2TB of data daily; saved $3M/year in infrastructure over-provisioning via ML-driven capacity forecasting.</li><li>Responsible for technical evaluation and reconciliation of enterprise AI infrastructure initiatives — including assessment of data-center deployments aligned with Cisco's Silicon One/NVIDIA compute roadmap and programs under Cisco's $1B AI Investment Fund — informing regional infrastructure and workload-readiness decisions.</li><li>Served as Cisco's public face for AI transformation across APJC — keynote speaker at industry events, media engagements, and government/regulatory briefings in Singapore, Japan, India, and Australia, including 95%+ customer satisfaction scores maintained across the account portfolio.</li></ul>