There is a particular species of business problem that follows Samir Gulati around. It arrives wearing a dense technical name, usually an acronym. It promises to change how an organization works. Then it sits down in front of a buyer and must answer the impolite question: what, exactly, is this for?
Gulati has been answering variations of that question since 1988. His public career begins in product management at GE Healthcare, crosses electronic commerce at GE Information Services, and runs through enterprise integration, hosted email, business process management, field service software and low-code automation. In 2026, the trail reached Hirevue, where he became chief marketing officer as the company pushed further into skills validation and AI-assisted interviewing.
That list sounds like a museum catalogue of enterprise computing. It is more revealing as a record of translation. Each category began close to the engine room. Each eventually had to be explained to executives, employees and customers in language that did not require a glossary. Gulati built his career in that crossing.
The bilingual advantage
The résumé contains an early clue. Gulati earned a master’s degree in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. He later completed an MBA in marketing and strategic management at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Technical depth came first; commercial framing followed. On paper, that makes him bilingual in two departments that often believe the other one is speaking too loudly.
At GE, the education met the work. He moved from product management at GE Healthcare to logistics marketing and electronic-commerce programs at GE Information Services, including responsibilities connected to Asia-Pacific. This was the mid-1990s, when “electronic commerce” described less of a shopping habit and more of a corporate construction project. The job demanded enough command of the plumbing to explain why anyone should renovate the building.
By 1998, Gulati had entered the enterprise-software circuit in earnest. At SAGA Software and Software AG, he held product and marketing leadership roles around integration technology. A former executive later credited him with building the product-marketing team and helping revenue growth and global expansion. The compliment is instructive. Product marketing was not treated as the decorative ribbon tied around completed software. It was part of how the company understood the market.
Ten years in one fast-moving room
After executive marketing roles at Pegasystems and Apptix, Gulati joined Appian in 2007. The timing matters. Business process management was maturing from specialist software into a platform argument. Cloud delivery, mobile interfaces and low-code development would alter both the product and the words used to sell it. Gulati stayed for a decade.
His Appian years left a trail of small, telling public moments. In 2009, he wrote about a company conference centered on speed and leaner process work. In 2010, he discussed the benefits of cloud-based process software for federal agencies. By 2015, he was presenting an application marketplace as a way to accelerate deployments. The nouns changed; the commercial rhythm held. Make the platform useful sooner. Show the use, not merely the architecture.
“Great processes are evolved, not invented.”Samir Gulati, discussing public-sector BPM in 2010
It is the cleanest sentence in his public record, and perhaps the most personal. The line rejects the fantasy of the immaculate launch. A process becomes good through observation and correction. So does a product story. So, for that matter, does a career.
In 2016, Gulati described Appian World with a question: how can a company become better at being itself? It is a pleasantly strange line for an enterprise-software conference, almost mischievous among the usual promises of optimization. It turns transformation away from costume and toward character. A year later, Appian completed its initial public offering. A later ServicePower biography credited Gulati with helping the company grow rapidly toward that milestone.
- GE
Product management, logistics marketing and electronic-commerce programs. - Software AG, Pegasystems and Apptix
Integration software, process platforms and hosted communications. - Appian
A decade leading marketing through cloud, mobile, low-code and the company’s IPO. - ServicePower
One executive brief spanning both product and marketing. - Bizagi
Marketing strategy and go-to-market work for process automation. - Hirevue
Skills validation, hiring science and AI-assisted interviewing.
When the product leaves the screen
Gulati’s next chapter put consequences in the foreground. He joined ServicePower in 2017 as chief marketing and product officer, with responsibility for market strategy, roadmaps, demand generation and corporate marketing. The software coordinated technicians, contractors, routes, parts and customer expectations. A missed promise no longer lived quietly in a dashboard. It stood on somebody’s doorstep.
His writing from that period kept returning to the customer’s experience of operational complexity: the arrival window, the status update, the ability to self-schedule, the calm professionalism required during a difficult insurance claim. In a 2019 interview, he argued that field-service technology had moved beyond dispatch efficiency. The product now had to improve the customer experience while meeting cost, revenue and service commitments.
That view also explains why combining product and marketing made sense. A promise about a technician arriving on time is easy to write and hard to keep. The route optimizer, workforce model and mobile workflow must all agree with the sentence. Marketing becomes a useful test of product truth.
In 2022, Gulati moved to Bizagi as chief marketing officer. The company said his brief was to evolve its marketing strategy and go-to-market initiatives as it expanded low-code process automation. The setting was familiar: complicated software, cross-functional buyers, and an argument about turning diagrams into working systems. His public posts there emphasized the relationship between process, governance and AI, years before every software homepage acquired a sparkling robot.
The trust assignment
Hirevue makes the translation problem sharper. The company has traveled from shipping webcams for remote interviews to offering assessments, structured video interviews, workflow automation and conversational AI. Its technology does not merely reorder back-office work. It helps shape decisions about people seeking jobs.
Gulati arrived during a busy first half of 2026. Hirevue launched Assessment Builder and AI Interviewer, reported that new customer bookings had more than tripled, and added him to the leadership team as it expanded into new markets. The company’s stated position is that hiring should move beyond credentials toward validated skills, supported by selection science, transparency and governance.
That produces a marketing brief with no room for the usual AI mist. Speed is easy to advertise. Trust is slower. Employers need to understand what the system measures, candidates need a fair encounter with it, and both sides need confidence that the machine’s fluency is not being confused with judgment. In his own public note about AI Interviewer, Gulati stressed what sat underneath the interface: validation work around accuracy, fairness and reliability.
The category changes. The assignment stays remarkably stable: turn machinery into meaning without sanding away the consequences.
His long route to this role is useful precisely because it is not a straight march toward artificial intelligence. It passes through the less glamorous systems that taught companies how to connect, coordinate and automate. Hosted email once needed explaining. Cloud process software once needed defending. Low-code once sounded suspiciously like a shortcut. Each became ordinary only after products worked and buyers learned where to place them.
AI in hiring is not ordinary, and perhaps should not become so too quickly. The questions are larger because the subject is a person, not a purchase order. Gulati’s career offers no guarantee about how those questions will be answered. It does suggest he knows the difference between a technical capability and a credible business story.
There is another useful continuity here. Gulati has repeatedly worked on platforms rather than single-purpose tools. A platform asks its buyer to imagine more than one use, more than one department and more than one year. It also tempts a marketer to say everything at once. His better lines do the opposite. “Great processes are evolved” gives the customer room to begin. “Better at being yourself” frames transformation without pretending that software supplies a new identity. Both lines leave the buyer present in the picture.
That restraint matters at Hirevue. A candidate is not an input to be tidied, and a recruiter is not a spare part awaiting automation. The company’s skills-first argument works only if the technology makes human capability more visible and its own reasoning more legible. The marketing challenge is to hold several truths together: employers want speed, hiring teams need evidence, candidates deserve consistency, and novelty is not the same thing as validity. It is a difficult sentence to write. It is also the work.
The lovely irony of enterprise marketing is that the more sophisticated the software becomes, the less patience anyone has for a sophisticated explanation. Gulati has watched that compression happen across nearly four decades. His work now sits at its narrowest point: a complex system, a consequential decision, and a few plain sentences in which to earn trust.