Ms. Sumedha Chatterjee
Associate Director-Marketing, AiRo Digital Labs
Sumedha Chatterjee is a marketing professional with around 14 years of experience. Currently, she is working as an Associate Director – Marketing at AiRo Digital Labs. She has led, built and scaled marketing teams across product marketing, market development, events, social media marketing, ads, events, and brand management for both the B2B & B2C audience segments for the North American / Europe & the South Asian markets for SaaS products.She is passionate about content, social, and tech – and an avid blogger.
Excerpts From The Vision Board Interview With Ms. Sumedha Chatterjee
You work with a company which is the future of technologies, in AI space and especially the Deep-tech space. So, if you can give us some understanding what AiRo labs is all about and how you are driving the marketing especially when it comes to Deep-tech?
AiRo is all about digital transformation and as we know the future of the enterprise is completely AI driven and that’s the future that AiRo is working on architecting. We are also a healthcare automation firm and we are also building the world’s largest AI RPA upscaling platform. So basically, driving more AI for healthcare across the world making healthcare more efficient.
Earlier all the organizations used to use social media to promote their product on the operations or in the purpose of the brand but from the last couple of years even big MNC’s are using their leadership team as the face of the organization and creating an ecosystem that can become a personal brand and which can directly impact the organization. So, what's your thought around this?
Brand Evangelism is here to stay and the companies that have been doing this for some time, now it’s becoming more and more prevalent but the reason why it is becoming so popular is because customers, prospects have a natural aversion to being sold to. But if the same message comes from a Peer, from someone who’s a friend or from someone who’s probably in my network, I’ll be much more receptive to it. The problem with brand evangelism is that it’s very difficult to Measure and Scale, it’s not just brand evangelism, even Word of Mouth is very difficult to measure & scale. And that’s why it hasn’t received the credit which it really deserves. I have seen a lot of leadership across organizations promoting brands which is a fantastic thing. If you don’t own up to what you’ve created and the value you’re generating for the world to see. How do you expect employees or prospects and customers to start seeing and believing in that value and i think organizations need to develop this more not just the employees of leadership but they are losing out on brand evangelism from their prospects or from the potential or even from the customers, from influencers. So, from everyone that you touch as a brand there is an opportunity to induct them into brand evangelism and smart brands are doing it really well. So, I’ve seen a lot of companies doing it, so just hope that it becomes more mainstream.
As per the recent study which is saying that there's only 13.76% Woman entrepreneur in India. So why we are not having more women leaders or women entrepreneurs in India?
For a woman to become successful whether she's at a CXO level or at an Entrepreneurship level there are a lot of enablers that need to be in place. Whether that support system coming in terms of Funding or having access to the right Pitch-ecosystem or perhaps having access to the right Mentorship. So, all of this plays a key part in in helping a woman become successful at any level that she operates
In India off-late, whether it’s Micro Entrepreneurship or even for that matter Entrepreneurs at any level this ecosystem is still developing. As a society, we need to be more open and supportive towards women even in the corporate world. The percentage of women in both positions across India is dismal, so that gets addressed right at the root level. So be it Entrepreneurship or be it the movement of women to really Senior or CXO level positions, all of that starts right at the induction phase. So, we induct the employees with potential, we groom them and of course, then we put them on the fast track to development. So, entrepreneurship or uh you know c-level positions for women will bring the outcome of these things done right consistently over a period of time
What are the suggestions that you want to give to the male leaders to nurture women managers to take a leadership role in the organization?
There seems to be this general mindset that there should be a level playing field and I’m all in for a level playing field but speaking on behalf of the women that i know, history has not always been kind to us. So, getting to the big table and sitting at that table takes perhaps a larger runway for women than most men. So my request to leaders, who are men is that give capable women in your team’s opportunities to stand up. They sometimes may not be confident enough that they can deliver on an ambitious project but if you display faith if you display trust in their abilities to deliver, because as women we bring very different skill sets to the table. We are definitely more empathetic, more emotionally intelligent and i stand corrected if research doesn’t support that. So, all those skills can create perhaps a more holistically balanced team. You need to have both type A and type B in an organization to succeed. Similarly, you need to have people across different genders with different skill sets to make it more inclusive.
Do you think in India, Small and Medium business community are now realizing the importance of Digital Transformation or they still think it as an expenditure?
So, Digital transformation is still seen as a good to have for organizations, not a must-have. For SMBs it can make a killer difference and they don’t realize it yet. Because to compete with the big players in the market you really need to get a lot of things lined up in some of those manual interventions perhaps you just cannot afford them yet on your books which is great. But automation can really turn you into an engine which can compete at the same level as some of your more well entrenched, better funded and more deep-seated competitors. So, for SMBs or SMB automation, i think it is not good to have, it as a must-have. They need automation, they need digital transformation not to compete but to survive.