The distance from Paresh Vankar's home in Princeton to the Coforge office is about 3.5 miles. He measured it himself when he announced his new job in June 2026: less than ten minutes in the car, followed by the admission that the journey to get there had taken considerably longer. The line works because it is modest and precise. It also sounds like a marketer who has spent a career finding the human scale inside a corporate announcement. A new chief marketing officer could begin with market opportunity, transformation or growth. Vankar began with his commute.
Behind those few miles sits a professional route through some of the largest names in Indian technology services. He trained first as an electronics and communication engineer at VJTI in Mumbai, then added management education at IIM Ahmedabad. He spent 17 years at HCLTech, leading global marketing for next-generation technologies and financial services. In 2023, he became chief marketing officer at LTIMindtree, taking on the delicate work of giving a combined business a coherent place in the market after the merger of L&T Infotech and Mindtree. Strategic sales at Onix followed, then marketing leadership at Quess GTS and Digitide. At Coforge, he now leads the global marketing function from New Jersey.
The engineer in the marketing room
Vankar's subject is marketing, but his vocabulary often belongs to an operator. He talks about data governance, access controls, model validation, pipeline movement and deal velocity. He wants sales and marketing teams to share goals and customer context. He recommends cross-functional training and regular alignment meetings, the unglamorous machinery that keeps a corporate story attached to the way a company actually behaves. His engineering background is not offered as a biographical ornament. It appears in how he breaks the work into systems.
That systems instinct showed up early. In a 2014 essay on the changing face of B2B marketing, he rejected the idea that selling to companies had to be dull. His examples moved from SpaceX to Intel's sponsorship of FC Barcelona, where the familiar "Intel Inside" joke became literal: the logo went on the inside of the players' jerseys. The larger point was that constraints can create invention. Enterprise products are complicated, the audiences are narrow and the decisions involve many people. Those conditions do not excuse weak marketing. They demand a more exact understanding of the product, the customer and the moment of intervention.
The C-suite isn't buying AI, they're buying outcomes.Paresh Vankar
That belief runs through his later writing on account-based marketing. A high-value enterprise account is not a faceless logo. It is a small collection of informed buyers, each carrying a different problem, incentive and tolerance for risk. Marketing must operate at that level of detail. A broad message may create awareness, but a decision changes when the story meets the buyer's actual context. Vankar was making the case for this kind of specificity before generative AI made mass personalization cheap.
A career spent translating
Technology-services marketing is a translation business. The raw material arrives as platforms, engineering methods, cloud architectures and industry expertise. The audience thinks in a different language: speed, resilience, efficiency, growth and the consequences of getting a large decision wrong. The marketer must preserve what is technically distinctive while removing everything that makes the value hard to see. Vankar's career has moved repeatedly across that gap. He has overseen both sales and marketing, worked in industry verticals where domain knowledge matters and built stories for organizations whose capabilities do not fit into a neat product box.
The LTIMindtree assignment made that challenge unusually visible. Mergers create a naming problem, but they also create a memory problem. Customers know the predecessor companies for particular strengths. Employees carry their own histories. Analysts need a clear category and competitors are happy to define the new entity if it cannot define itself. Vankar described his CMO role in four parts: growth driver, innovation catalyst, brand storyteller and capability builder. The last phrase matters. A brand is not merely launched. The organization must acquire the ability to repeat and prove it.
Digitide presented another version of the same puzzle. The company emerged independently from Quess with enterprise scale behind it and an AI-first identity ahead of it. Vankar framed the inheritance as discipline, credibility and trust; independence supplied speed and room to invest. During Digitide's public listing, his language joined privilege to responsibility. The market event was not only a celebration. It placed the story in front of a new audience that would expect the operating numbers to support every adjective.
The useful tension inside AI
Generative AI gives a marketer like Vankar more of nearly everything: signals, variations, speed, prediction and personalization. He sees practical gains in customer experience, growth and productivity. AI can help a team find intent, understand timing and free salespeople from repetitive work. Yet his enthusiasm comes with a detailed list of obligations. Protect data. Validate models. Understand the limits of prediction. Keep training the systems. Audit algorithms for bias. Preserve human intervention and accountability. The checklist is not a retreat from the technology. It is the condition for using it inside serious enterprises.
His sharpest observation about the marketing stack is also the least technical. Asked to name the one indispensable tool for an AI-driven organization, Vankar declined to pick one. Specific platforms age too quickly. The durable requirement is a team able to adapt, discard what stops working and learn faster than the tools change. This turns the familiar software question into a management question. Buying a capability is easier than building the habit that lets an organization use it well.
Insightful content isn't louder - it's more precise.Paresh Vankar
Precision is Vankar's answer to the flood of machine-made content. AI can increase output, but abundance makes restraint more valuable. His prescription is fewer, sharper points of view, grounded in real enterprise problems and validated by evidence. Instead of asking whether a person clicked, he asks whether the work influenced a buying committee's perspective. That is a much harder measurement problem. It also moves marketing nearer to the business. Pipeline movement, stakeholder influence, deal velocity and decision readiness become more meaningful than a bright dashboard full of attention without consequence.
Business remains personal
Across the changing vocabulary of his field, one idea has survived. B2B is still business-to-people. Companies may purchase cloud transformations or AI systems, but people assemble the case, test the claims and absorb the career risk of choosing badly. Empathy, in this setting, is not decoration. It is the work of understanding what each participant needs in order to move. Vankar has written directly about empathy as a marketing strength and repeatedly returns to communication between sales, marketing and customer teams. Silos are dangerous because the customer experiences the company as one thing.
This helps explain the 3Cs he offers as a daily philosophy: Customer, Confidence and Collaboration. Put the customer at the center. Act with enough confidence to make choices. Join sales and marketing around a seamless experience. The formulation is simple enough to remember, which may be the point. Enterprise technology generates complexity without assistance. A leader's language should reduce it.
At Coforge, Vankar has arrived at another inflection point. The company is presenting itself through AI-led engineering, deep industry knowledge and global delivery. His task is to strengthen that brand without allowing a crowded set of capabilities to collapse into familiar technology jargon. The public ambition is to build a future-ready brand and amplify its story. His record suggests that the work will begin closer to the customer: with the problem an executive is trying to solve, the proof a skeptical buyer requires and the alignment needed inside the company to keep its promise.
The short Princeton drive is therefore more than a tidy opening anecdote. It brings a global career back to street level. Vankar's professional journey has passed through mergers, public listings, new technologies and shifting definitions of the marketing job. He has kept returning to the same practical test. Does the story help a person understand the value well enough to act? The tools will keep changing. The miles between complexity and meaning remain.