In a sea of AI slop, originality is the only differentiator left. Amol Gaikwad believes technology changes fast, but adoption, trust and human relationships move the deal.
Amol is Head of Marketing, India & SAARC, at Splunk (a Cisco company). He didn’t set out to be a marketer; he set out to be around technology, and marketing is where he was most useful. A childhood visit to one of Mumbai’s first digital telephone exchanges, an engineering degree, a college side-hustle selling assembled PCs and a first job in PC sales led him to a career spent explaining why the machine matters.
In this edition of CMO Chronicles, Amol reflects on why a tool must improve the human connection rather than add a dashboard, why five tools give you the same signal five times, how AI has changed expectations more than it has replaced marketing, why an event is a “consent machine” in the DPDP era, and why meeting people is the accomplishment he is proudest of.
Here is Amol Gaikwad in his own words:
The Path to the Corner Office
I didn’t set out to be a marketer. I set out to be around technology, and marketing is where I was most useful.
My mother worked at BSNL, and sometime in the early 90s she took me to one of Mumbai’s first digital telephone exchanges. I still remember the screens and the lights and the sheer scale of the place, and I’ve been hooked on technology since.
I trained as an engineer, sold assembled PCs on the side in college, and my first job was as a PC sales guy. That’s where the marketing started: I was better at explaining why the machine mattered than at building it. From Prince of Persia on DOS to AI, I’m not sure the excitement has changed.
My first manager, Sarika, taught me attention to detail and stakeholder management. The empathy part I only understood years later, when I was the one making those calls. What stayed with me is belief in people — skills can be taught, trust and empathy can’t. That matters more in B2B than we admit, because we sell technology but deals move on human relationships.
The Ever-Changing Stack
I have one filter: does it improve the human connection, or does it just add a dashboard?
We’ve gone fewer and deeper. In India and SAARC my universe isn’t infinite — government, PSUs and defence, BFSI, large enterprise, IT/ITeS. A few hundred named accounts, and the same few hundred for every tool in the stack. Five tools don’t give me five signals. They give me the same signal five times, at five different price points, and one very confused BDR.
Retiring is harder than buying. Budgets shrink every year but tools are immortal once onboarded, because someone always has a report running on them. Most don’t get retired, they get quietly ignored until renewal. Take intent data: does it give me an accurate picture of my buyer? No. Will I stop investing? Also no, because it gives my sales team a better reason to pick up the phone.
Impact of Generative AI
Generative AI took the admin off our plate — repeatable tasks, templated outputs, first drafts, reporting. The biggest gain is time to market. Bias hasn’t gone anywhere, but I have ten options where I had one, so I can pick rather than settle. Content and personalisation stay human-led, because in a sea of AI slop, originality is the only differentiator left.
The part most people leave out is that AI hasn’t replaced marketing and probably won’t. What it has changed is expectation. Our output is faster and cleaner, so the assumption now is that we need less budget and fewer people to deliver the same results, and I don’t think the industry has properly reckoned with that yet.
Data, Privacy & the New Rules
When the goalposts move, the score doesn’t change. Only the route to goal does.
Honestly, DPDP hasn’t changed my numbers yet — the Rules were notified in November 2025, full compliance lands in May 2027, and most of us are still on the runway. I’d be sceptical of anyone who says their marketing has already been transformed by it, because what they’re describing is a plan rather than an outcome.
What I’m planning for shows up at events first, because an event is a consent machine — registrations, badge scans, partner delegate lists. India ran on lists for a long time, and plenty of B2B marketing here was built on data whose origin nobody could explain. That should change. Volume stops being a scoreboard and becomes a cost line: what did it cost to earn the right to talk to this account, and did the account move.
Pace of Technology
I’m a practitioner. The only way to keep up is to play with it, and use it badly for a while until it makes sense. Marketing enterprise technology isn’t glamorous — nobody’s making a film about a SIEM — and it’s harder than it looks, because you’re selling simplification to people who know more about IT than you do.
Technology changes fast, adoption doesn’t. My job isn’t to know everything, it’s to know what works and what it does for the person I’m selling to. Build fast, but build grounded.
Brand, Boardroom & the Bottom Line
The tension between brand and performance mostly disappears when the spend isn’t only mine to defend. A dollar on a campaign should have shared ownership — sales, product, support. When those teams are in the room for the decision, it stops being “justify your budget” and becomes “is this the right bet.” I’ve rarely had a hard budget fight where the other functions were bought in, and rarely an easy one where they weren’t.
So the real question is where marketing intersects the business priority. Market share or wallet share this year? Once that’s settled, you can put dollars against each pillar and account for them.
If you have to make a case for marketing spend, the job is already ten times harder, because you’ve walked into a room full of people who already have doubts. Marketing is the glue, though we rarely describe ourselves that way — the thread across frontline and backend functions that makes one customer story. When those functions participate rather than watch, the question stops being what value marketing brings and becomes how we grow it.
Money helps, honesty helps more, and the CFO stops asking about ad spend the moment the conversation is about retention and deal value.
Sustaining the Career
Patience. No work is small, no task is menial — respect every person you work with, vendor or peer or senior.
But respect isn’t deference. Being vocal matters, and you shouldn’t nod along to a decision you think is wrong just because of who’s making it. There’s a line between that and arrogance and it’s a fine one, which plenty of people cross without noticing.
Single most important lesson
Three Ps — perseverance, patience, performance, with honesty running through all of them. You’ll notice patience appears twice. Not an accident.
Reflections
Meeting people. Across functions, cultures and countries — North America, Europe, now India.
That’s the jam. The accomplishment I’d claim is sustaining the energy for it, still wanting to make the next connection after all of it.