Ani Adzhemyan Makes the Invisible Infrastructure Interesting

The wooden utility pole is almost perfectly designed to escape attention. It stands where it has always stood, carries what it has always carried and asks for no applause. Then a storm arrives, a new attachment is proposed or an engineer needs to prove that the structure can bear its load. Suddenly the anonymous pole has a biography: measurements, images, equipment, standards, calculations, ownership and risk. Ani Adzhemyan's job is to make that biography intelligible before urgency writes the ending.

She is the chief marketing officer of ikeGPS, the infrastructure-software company whose products collect, manage and analyze information about poles and overhead assets. Adzhemyan leads marketing, communications and brand. The compactness of that sentence hides a broad assignment. She must connect field acquisition, digital imagery, structural analysis and workflow automation to the concerns of utilities, communications companies and engineering firms. There are easier nouns to put on a billboard.

Yet the difficulty suits the career. Adzhemyan has spent 19 years in industrial and energy marketing, moving through IBM, GE, ABB, Hitachi Energy and an industrial-automation startup before joining ikeGPS in 2023. Her work has crossed North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The scenery changed; the recurring task did not. Take something technically consequential, learn its language and explain why it deserves a decision.

A career measured in marketing eras

Adzhemyan recently summarized the changes with the delight of someone leafing through an old box of office equipment. Events marketing was once king. Feedback came on paper. Automation tools arrived. Account-based marketing became an obsession. Now marketers have more data, fast experiments and capable AI systems. Her conclusion was not that one age had defeated another. She wrote that she had loved every stage and every step.

“I've always been passionate about marketing through all the big shifts.”Ani Adzhemyan

That line is revealing because marketing careers are often narrated as a sequence of conversions. The new medium appears and the old one is pronounced dead by lunchtime. Adzhemyan's version is less theatrical and more useful: tools accumulate, habits change and the person doing the work remains curious. She regards the current moment as a golden age because data and AI enlarge what can be tried. The condition she attaches is experimentation. Possibility is not a dashboard; somebody still has to ask the next question.

The route also explains her comfort with technical audiences. IBM services are not impulse purchases. Power systems do not reward fuzzy claims. Industrial automation asks marketers to understand both software and the factory floor. Utility infrastructure adds standards, public safety and long-lived physical assets. Each stop narrows the tolerance for empty language. A campaign may be clever, but a buyer still needs to know what the product does, where it fits and whether the evidence can survive scrutiny.

The website becomes a working machine

At Software Defined Automation, Adzhemyan described a practical system built around consistent storytelling, thought leadership and content development. LinkedIn was the leading source of customer awareness. Organic posts brought people to the company website; the website was expected to do more than look composed. It had to behave like a lead-generation engine.

That sounds obvious now, which is often the fate of a good operating idea. In a young category, however, the company cannot rely on buyers searching for a phrase they do not yet use. It has to teach the problem in public. Industrial automation is especially unforgiving: oversimplify it and practitioners tune out; explain every technical branch and everybody else gets lost in the shrubbery. A useful story carries enough precision to earn trust and enough momentum to invite the next click.

Her move to ikeGPS sharpened this translation problem. A pole record can begin with images and measurements acquired in the field. That information can flow into analysis, inventory management and structural decisions. The customer value appears in fewer return visits, clearer records, more efficient workflows and choices that can be defended. Marketing has to preserve the chain. If it begins with a grand claim and skips the work in the middle, an engineer will notice.

The mountain earns the metaphor

During the startup chapter, Adzhemyan posted a group selfie from a ski slope. She fills the foreground in a hat and dark glasses; colleagues stand and kneel up the snowy incline. “Conquering mountains, literally and figuratively,” she wrote. It is the kind of phrase that ordinarily arrives wearing a lanyard. Here, at least, everyone had brought skis.

The photograph supplies what executive biographies usually edit out: work is social. A startup is not merely a line between funding events or product releases. It is a collection of people learning a market together, making explanations, correcting them and trying again. Adzhemyan's public recommendations echo that view from the other side. One former colleague remembers her as a leader who listened to ideas, gave constructive feedback and offered advice that helped the colleague grow. Another describes her as tireless and direct.

Those accounts sit comfortably beside her emphasis on cross-functional teams. Industrial marketing cannot be manufactured inside marketing alone. Product experts know what is possible. Engineers know what is accurate. Salespeople hear the objections. Customers know which part of the workflow is genuinely painful. The marketer's power comes from arranging those voices without sanding away their meaning.

The ordinary pole is not the story. The chain of decisions attached to it is.

A golden age, with work gloves

Adzhemyan's enthusiasm for AI is grounded in this long view. She has seen the profession migrate from paper feedback to automation and from quarterly campaign rhythms toward real-time measurement. More data can shorten the distance between an idea and its result. AI can accelerate production and analysis. Neither relieves a marketer of choosing what deserves attention.

At ikeGPS, that choice is unusually concrete. The company wants to become a standard for collecting, managing and analyzing pole and overhead-asset information. Its products cover field data acquisition, structural analysis and intelligent automation. Adzhemyan's brand must make a connected whole from that portfolio while speaking to distinct groups: the person capturing an image, the engineer checking a load, the manager overseeing attachments and the utility leader answerable for risk.

A 2025 product post offers a small example. Announcing PoleForeman 1.1, she pointed to bulk data import, analysis configuration and modeling. These are not features that require confetti. They promise more control over structural analysis and better-grounded decisions. The restraint is the point. In infrastructure, credibility is often the more persuasive form of excitement.

Her career therefore runs in two directions at once. The marketing machinery grows faster, more measurable and more automated. The subject matter remains physical: factories, power systems, poles, wires, field crews. She operates between them, bringing contemporary methods to industries where a careless abstraction eventually meets gravity.

Curiosity is the portable advantage

There is no single channel that explains Adzhemyan's progression from regional roles to global team leadership and the C-suite. There is, instead, an increasingly rare willingness to remain interested. Her public writing does not mourn the old marketing calendar. She remembers it, then turns toward the larger canvas.

That attitude has practical value. A marketer crossing regions learns that context travels poorly. One moving between large corporations and a startup learns that process must fit the size of the room. One moving from digital power to software-defined factories to overhead infrastructure learns to rebuild the story around a new user's work. The transferable skill is not a slogan. It is the patience to learn what matters here.

For ikeGPS, “here” may be a backyard pole photographed from several angles, a structural model with one consequential assumption or a record that must be trusted years later. Details that look modest on a screen can determine whether a crew returns, an attachment proceeds or an investment goes somewhere more urgent. The invisible infrastructure becomes visible for a moment. Adzhemyan's task is to use that moment well: keep the technical truth intact, make the stakes legible and give the right person a reason to act. The pole still will not ask for applause. Good marketing knows it does not need to.