Ashok Balasubramanian, Technology Architect at Apple, discusses the rise of generative and agentic AI, which is expected to automate repetitive tasks; maintaining business continuity while adopting new tech is a tough balance, and coming prepared to contribute enhances event experiences.
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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Hiring the right talent and helping existing teams adapt to rapidly evolving technologies remain ongoing challenges in IT leadership.
- CTOs should minimise duplicate work and split teams into platform and business continuity roles, improving efficiency.
- Good mentorship involves not just supporting enthusiasm but also giving clear guidance and defining areas of focus to avoid distractions.
- A common IT mistake is launching initiatives without considering their return on investment. Every project should be tied to measurable value.
Introduce yourself and your role
My name is Ashok, and I have been in the industry for almost 20 years. Currently, I work as a tech architect for Apple. I’ve managed a team of around 15 people, taking care of applications, from managing platforms to DevOps to planning infrastructure, etc.
What challenges are you currently facing in the IT landscape, and how are you addressing them?
Over a period of time, I have noticed that technology has been changing, and the evolution of these new technologies means the challenges are still catching up to the pace of the new technologies. At the same time, we are also supposed to make sure that our operations are working and continuing to work. So, hiring the right talent resources and bringing the right technologies into the industry has always been a challenge.
Of course, I understand. How do you think the IT sector will evolve in the next three to five years? What major shifts are on the horizon?
The world is moving towards AI and a lot of automation and agents. Agentic AI is another thing which is very commonly used. That is going to make a lot of repetitive work more automated. So, that is what the world is looking like. What I’m looking at is maybe the role of developers is going to get reduced, because a lot of automated code is coming.
What trends or technologies will have the biggest impact on the IT sector?
One of the things is the GenAI and AI sector. GenAI has proven successful, especially with the evolution of ChatGPT and OpenAI. There are also other AI technologies that are catching up, like Llama from Facebook, which is becoming a big hit. There are also other AIs, like Claude and Perplexity, who are trying to catch up with OpenAI. So, they are going to make life a lot easier, and a lot of people who are using Excel sheets for their work are now going to get that work automated using AI and make life easier for them.
How do you balance the need for innovation with the demand for stability and security in your IT systems?
That is one of the things which is always a challenging part. One is what they call business continuity. Business continuity is making sure that whatever is working fine keeps continuing to work fine, and at the same time, when new technology comes in, it has to be adapted. So, for that purpose, what we are working on is to make sure that there are certain automations coming in place for the business continuity processes and a couple of other things that we have been doing.
One is to make sure that the ecosystem is automated. Right now, we are working mostly on building an automation system, and eventually, we are working towards agentic AI, which would help in reducing repetitive activities so that we focus on the ideas behind it. On the innovative ideas, the challenge we have is that the existing team needs to be groomed and brought up to speed on the technology because they are not ready to adapt easily. For example, now we have come up with a framework, but it is really challenging for the existing team to start learning anything new and adapting at a faster pace as technologies are coming faster, but the adaptability of the technologies by teams is a little bit slow.
What is the most memorable insight you’ve applied in your work?
As a leader in my team, I have to be up to date on what’s happening, so I read a lot of tech blogs and attend a couple of conferences. What I have done is start having monthly or quarterly sessions with my team, talking about the new technologies and frameworks that are coming into the market. Any new frameworks that we want to adapt—when someone provides me with a webinar, they provide business use cases on how to use them. What I do is to understand that, see if it’s a right fit, and try to present it, taking our business use cases into the picture, and say, “Hey, this is how our architecture would look in the future.” Then, we build a team to build a small prototype and see how it works and if it’s the right fit for our team. Once it’s the right fit, we will start moving on to our updates.
What advice would you give someone attending an Ortus Club event for the first time to get the most value out of their experience?
I have attended one in-person event, and what I learned is that the people who attend these events are pretty smart. So, you are going to be talking to a lot of smart people at the table. So, be prepared to have your knowledge shared across them. They are also pretty well organised. The speaker and the coordinator helped and gave chances to every individual person at the table, and I really enjoyed that experience. You’re going to be sitting in a pool of smart people. So, be ready to enjoy it.
What’s one question all CTOs should be asking themselves today?
One thing I have noticed in mid-level project companies is that there is a lot of duplication of work and also a lot of manual operational work. So, I would like to make sure that CTOs take that into consideration and say, “Okay, I don’t do any duplicate work. If there is a team doing it better, make sure that they are building their expertise.” Another thing I learned with my company, as well as my friends’ companies, is to keep a team that is going to be doing a platform and a team that is going to do the business continuity work. So, when you are doing a platform, that particular team is going to be up-to-date on technologies, trying to do a lot of R&D work, whereas the team who is going to do the business continuity focuses on the business operations and makes sure that it is working as expected.
How do you approach mentoring the next generation of leaders within your IT team?
Part of my work is to groom my team. My team is pretty much tech-savvy, and they love doing something new. So, what I would usually do is to make sure that these prototypes work, whatever we are talking about; take care of these prototypes, keep them busy with hands-on work, and try to provide them with more knowledge on a regular basis. A key thing I would say is to guide them in the right direction. I have seen that most of the time, everybody likes to do something, but they are not given the right guidance on how to do it or what exactly their area of focus is. So, having that right area of focus is something that, as a mentor, you should take care of so that they don’t get distracted by something off-topic. The focus will make them focus on what is exactly needed.
What is the biggest IT-related mistake you see companies make, and how can they avoid it?
They implement something without understanding the return on investment. I would always say to focus on the return on investment, try to see what you are going to achieve and how much value it is going to bring into the market, and then step into it.
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