Amit Shah has a title that fits neatly on a conference badge and a job that refuses to stay inside it. At Zycus, he is the Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Global Business Development. The official remit keeps going: global marketing, demand generation, sales operations, bid desk and sales enablement. In a less orderly company, this might look like several departments accidentally sharing one calendar. In Shah’s telling, it is a single commercial system.
That system sells software for procurement, a field built from contracts, suppliers, spending controls and enough three-letter abbreviations to furnish a small government. Zycus is betting that artificial intelligence can make much of this machinery more autonomous. Shah’s parallel project is just as interesting: applying AI to the machinery that takes enterprise software to market, while deciding which parts should remain uncomfortably, productively human.
It is a question he arrived at by a scenic route. Mechanical engineering came first. Then management school, strategy consulting, banking, a London fintech chapter and finally enterprise procurement software. Each move enlarged the system in view. Machines became organizations; organizations became markets; markets became conversations about what people will trust.
A title too small for the job
The modern CMO is frequently asked to be both poet and plumber: construct a memorable idea, then explain why the pipeline has sprung a leak. Shah’s portfolio makes that contradiction explicit. A campaign cannot be separated from the sales team using it, the operating data beneath it or the bid process where a grand promise meets a procurement questionnaire.
His public recruiting language offers a useful window into the operating style. For a demand-generation role, he described ownership across virtual, digital and field channels, paid and organic. The person could decide what worked for the region. The desired combination was “left brained analytical thinking” and “right brained creativity.” Then came the sentence most job advertisements carefully iron out: some things would work, and some would bomb. The culture, he wrote, promotes this.
There is more managerial information in that admission than in a dozen declarations about innovation. Experimentation without the permission to fail is merely theater with dashboards. Shah leaves the possibility of embarrassment in the room. He also leaves the decision close to the person doing the work. That is an operator’s instinct, not simply a marketer’s flourish.
An engineer learns to translate
Shah studied mechanical engineering at REC Surathkal, now the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, graduating in 2001. Engineering is an unexpectedly sensible beginning for his later work. It trains attention on systems, dependencies and failure points. Marketing eventually supplied a different discipline: how to explain the system to people who do not wake up longing for a diagram.
At NITIE, now IIM Mumbai, he studied strategy and finance from 2005 to 2007. His public profile records a second-place class rank, a role as student placement coordinator and a run of business-school competitions, including first prize in Godrej’s All India Business Architect competition. The details make a revealing pair. There was the student who scored well, and the student who helped connect a class to employers. Analysis and outward motion were already sharing a desk.
Early roles included Larsen & Toubro and Tata Strategic Management Group. The sequence moved him from an industrial company into consultancy, from working within a large operating system to advising one. It also prepared the central skill of his career: translation between people who hold different pieces of the same problem.
The bank as a brand laboratory
At YES BANK, Shah’s remit expanded across strategy, planning, marketing and communications. He was also a founding member of the YES Institute, the bank’s think tank. A bank sells trust in unusually concentrated form. Its brand cannot live only in advertising; it travels through policy, public argument, customer experience and the behavior of the institution itself.
That period brought public recognition. LinkedIn named him among its Power Profiles in India in 2016 and again in 2018, according to his Zycus biography. Reputation Today included him in its 40 Under Forty class in 2017. He served on FICCI’s fintech committee and later on the advisory board of S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research. These were extensions of the same outward-facing job: building a point of view, then exposing it to rooms beyond one’s own company.
Shah still returns to classrooms. In 2022, he spoke to students at IIM Udaipur and IIT Madras about B2B marketing. One lecture title asked what was happening “out here” while students were “in there” at business school. The joke carried a warning. Marketing changes faster than its tidy case studies.
London, enterprise software, and a wider map
Before Zycus, Shah was based in London as a managing director at OakNorth. His work supported enterprise engagements across the United States, Europe and Australasia. The geography matters because B2B software is never sold into a generic “global” market. It meets local buying committees, regulatory habits, budget cycles and distinct tolerances for risk.
By the time he joined Zycus in 2021, Shah had moved from explaining a bank to helping sell technology to large institutions. Procurement added another twist. His prospective customers are themselves professional buyers. They know how to interrogate a claim, inspect a contract and wait out a vendor. Marketing to procurement is rather like performing a card trick for an audience of magicians: the mechanics had better survive attention.
Zycus’s answer is a platform story that stretches from source-to-pay software toward intake, orchestration and autonomous negotiation. Shah has become one of its public interpreters, writing about agentic AI, procurement transformation and the shift from dashboards toward systems that can take action. His 2025 line about the industry had a useful sting: “Everyone’s been playing it safe, automating the obvious.”
The comment accompanied an experiment with an AI version of Zycus founder Aatish Dedhia, trained to hold conversations with executives. Shah did not pretend the avatar had reached perfection. He said it had a long way to go. What interested him was the attempt. Audacity opens doors, he argued, that caution will never approach.
The useful boundary
Enthusiasm, however, has not dissolved his sense of limits. In a 2026 fireside conversation on AI and enterprise sales, the dividing line was crisp. Technology can sort information, study signals and help a team prepare. It cannot conduct every consequential part of a long enterprise relationship. People close deals. People handle pricing resistance, difficult conversations and executive trust.
Give the machine
- Signal sorting
- Account preparation
- Pattern detection
- Repeatable execution
Keep for people
- Executive trust
- Pricing pushback
- Hard conversations
- Final judgment
This is the most practical idea in Shah’s AI worldview. The debate is often staged as machine versus person, a contest designed to produce either panic or a keynote. Shah’s version is job architecture. Decide which tasks improve through scale and which become more valuable when performed by someone accountable for the relationship.
He applies similar balance to marketing decisions. In a 2025 podcast conversation, he emphasized data without treating it as an oracle. Gut instinct remains in the room, provided it is accompanied by customer knowledge, technological awareness and business fundamentals. Data can narrow the fog. It cannot tell an executive which uncertain bet deserves conviction.
Curiosity after lockdown
Shah traces part of his own AI journey to a pleasantly ordinary scene. In 2021 or 2022, after pandemic restrictions had eased, he attended a mixer run by Pepper Content. It was among his first outings. The people there were talking excitedly about GPTs and large language models before those initials colonized every strategy deck. He listened. Years later, he publicly credited that gathering with helping set his path.
Origin stories are usually polished until coincidence disappears. This one retains the useful accident: an executive went to an event, met younger founders, heard unfamiliar enthusiasm and chose not to dismiss it. Curiosity did the work before strategy acquired a slide.
His subsequent public writing keeps some of that looseness. There are ellipses, asides and visible delight. Praising the Zycus social team in 2026, he wrote that he was “falling in love with the posts” and asked who knew the work could be so much fun and informative. Corporate grammar would object. Human readers can hear the grin.
The job still changing beneath him
Shah once summarized twenty-five years of change in a single looping sentence: what he used to do, what he does now and what he will do next have all changed and will change. It is not polished futurism. It is a working executive’s recognition that expertise can harden at precisely the wrong moment.
His career offers a defense against that hardening. Engineering taught systems. Consulting taught diagnosis. Banking taught institutional trust. OakNorth widened the commercial map. Zycus has forced the pieces together at the moment AI is redrawing both the product and the organization selling it.
The interesting result is not a marketer trying to become a machine. It is an operator becoming more exact about what machines are for. Let them prepare, compare, categorize and carry the repeatable load. Then ask people to do the harder work: choose, persuade, negotiate, admit uncertainty and earn confidence.
A title may eventually catch up with this collection of responsibilities. Until then, CMO will have to do. Shah appears too busy redesigning the job to worry much about naming it.