Fujitsu Americas’ AI Transformation: CEO Asif Poonja Details Fujitsu’s AI Implementation and Transformation

In this episode of “TBR Talks,” host Patrick Heffernan speaks with Asif Poonja, Fujitsu’s Americas Region CEO, about how Fujitsu is evolving its consulting-led growth strategy, pursuing differentiated M&A, and navigating geopolitical and AI-driven disruption. Poonja explains how initiatives like Wayfinders and Uvance are expanding customer engagement beyond IT into business value creation, while AI adoption reshapes talent strategy and service delivery models.
 
From long-term transformation lessons to leadership advice for the next generation, this conversation explores what it takes for a 90-year-old technology company to continuously reinvent itself.
 
Episode highlights:

• The Fujitsu Way: Training to obtain trust and empathy
• Where growth will come from with Wayfinders
• Lessons from M&A opportunities and strategy moving forward

 
“In the Americas specifically, the last M&A we had was probably over 15 to 20 years ago — very long time. So, despite us doing several in Japan and Europe and Oceania, it was new for me. So, coming into my role, working on this, the first discovery was there’s so much out there. Right? There’s so much potential. I now see why competitors, like, who start with the letter ‘A’ and others, are constantly at it, but they have the machine, right? We have the machine; I just didn’t fully leverage it. And it was a lesson learned. But there’s so much out there, right? And so, in that weeding through all of that, the valuations on American companies are through the roof. So that was challenge number two. How do you address it with a very conservative background in a company? So that’s a challenge we’re working on all the way up to the board level, right? And they acknowledge. And so, because the valuations are so large, you’re going to be even more particular,” said Poonja.
 
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TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.
Edited by Haley Demers
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Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

 

 

‘TBR Talks’ on Demand — Fujitsu Americas’ AI Transformation: CEO Asif Poonja Details Fujitsu’s AI Implementation and Transformation

TBR Talks Host Patrick Heffernan: Welcome to TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms. Where we talk business model disruption in the broad technology ecosystem from management consultancies to systems integrators, hyperscalers to independent software vendors, telecom operators to network and infrastructure vendors, and chip manufacturers to value-added resellers. We’ll be answering some of the key intelligence questions we’ve heard from executives and business unit leaders among the professional IT services and telecom vendors.

I’m Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst and today we’ll be talking about Fujitsu, riding the waves of technological change, and AI, with Asif Poonja, CEO, Americas Region at Fujitsu.

Intro to Asif’s background

Asif, thank you so much for joining us on TBR Talks. It’s an honor. We’re here in your hometown of Toronto, hanging out here in the Fujitsu offices. So maybe you could give us a little bit of your background before we dive into some of the questions we just wanted to talk about with you.

Asif Poonja, CEO, Americas Region at Fujitsu: Sure, and thank you guys for having me here today. I lead the Fujitsu Americas business, CEO of Fujitsu Americas, but also a corporate executive officer. So, working very closely with our executive teams in Japan and around the world in terms of how we can leverage our technology to make lives happier. That’s the gist of what we’re trying to do in the world today.

Patrick: Right.

Asif: Yeah.

Patrick: And how about your own background? You’ve been with this company for a while now, a couple of decades, I think?

Asif: I’m not that old, but good try. Good try. Maybe just over a decade.

Patrick: Okay.

Asif: Probably eleven, just over eleven years. And it’s been an exciting journey. If I could just take you back maybe a little further. I started my career in the ERP space at the time where SAP was really hot. And I spent 12 years at Deloitte in the SAP space on projects throughout Canada, the Northeast US. Very exciting times. From there, I moved to CGI, led the SAP business for four years there in Canada, and then I joined Fujitsu to lead the North America SAP business. You get the theme. But what I’ve enjoyed about my 11 plus years here is that I’ve played five or six different roles. And so, the excitement is always there from leading the P&L in the SAP business to looking at our most strategic accounts, and the top accounts and engaging with executives. Being our CTO and getting knee-deep into core technologies, to leading our customer markets function, which is AKA sales, to now close to wrapping up my third year as CEO in what I like to say is the world’s fastest growing IT market. So, it’s exciting.

Patrick: It is exciting, and it’s amazing how you went from SAP, but you’ve reached a point now where all of the technologies are sort of available to you. As a leader, you’re not just sort of saying like, got to focus just on one technology and one set of services.

The Fujitsu Way: Training to obtain trust and empathy

So, I do want to ask about yesterday at the event, you mentioned the Fujitsu Way. And one of the things you said was how that includes trust and empathy. And you said that we actually, we meaning Fujitsu, actually trains people on the Fujitsu Way. I don’t know how you train someone to get trust and empathy. So how does that work?

Asif: You know, so it’s part of the onboarding process to educate what these things mean to us, right? So, showing examples of that, walking through, we have a series of videos that we engage in. How do we deal with difficult situations? How do we manage diversity? What does it mean to have bias? You know, so things like that, we start to get into some of those cultural areas that are of a nuance. We also talk about what it means to work in a global workforce and how do you manage different cultures.

We’re a proud Japanese company. As an American or Canadian in the Americas market, it’s hard because the cultures are very different. It’s taken a while to adapt, right? And it’s not because of one or a group of individuals. It’s just how we do business in every single country is different. And so, it’s educating on that. And then throughout the lifecycle is addressing issues and challenges if they come up, right? And making sure that we don’t tolerate certain behaviors and ingrain that in the leadership and the culture. And so, it’s more of a soft approach. You’re right. It’s not an easy thing to adapt, but when you do see bad behaviors, it’s addressing them and not accepting them, right?

Patrick: Yeah, and I’m curious too, so that you talk about training for that means that you believe, and I’m guessing the rest of Fujitsu believes, that the culture here is very deep. And you mentioned, Deloitte, you mentioned CGI, don’t need to necessarily say how deep their culture is, but more importantly, do you feel that the – because I think Boz and I in our experience in working with lots of different companies, some places you feel that culture is really deep and some places you feel it’s just a veneer, it’s on the surface. Here it seems like it’s pretty deep, yeah?

Asif: It is. And I’ve always tried to figure out, is it deep because of the Japanese heritage or is it deep just because of the Fujitsu Way?

Patrick: Right.

Asif: I haven’t figured that out. Maybe I’ll figure it out in my second decade, as you’ve told me a couple decades, right? But it’s interesting because I wasn’t born in North America, okay? I was actually born in East Africa. I’m African by heritage. You know, my ancestors came from India. And so, we’ve gone through generations of change. And so, I’ve seen cultures, I’ve traveled the world. I had not spent a lot of time in Japan or Asia before this role. But now having spent a significant amount of time there, I had about 5 trips last year to Japan, the culture is very different. There’s a huge culture of respect, of integrity, of trust. And so, I’m leaning towards the notion, it is the Japanese culture that is adding significantly to the culture of Fujitsu and the way to do business.

Where growth will come from with Wayfinders

Patrick: Right, And I do want to come back to that longer view based on all your experience and the different companies you’ve worked for, and we’ll talk about technology. I want to ask a very specific question about Wayfinders, and then I’ll have Boz jump in as well. So, you come to your clients, Fujitsu comes to its clients with a technology and an engineering background. That’s your core, that’s what you all do really well. Now you’ve launched Wayfinders, which is bringing in consultants to, as you described yesterday, broaden the conversation. That all makes sense to me, but then I think about your role running the Americas and how that’s a challenge. Now you’ve got to think differently about the way that you’re approaching clients, and maybe you have to think differently about where is our growth going to come from? Where are our new opportunities? So, can you talk a little bit about that?

Asif: That’s an interesting one because when I go back in my career, I started as a developer. I was a techie, okay? How did I become a CEO from being a pure techie, okay? There was, in my 12 years at Deloitte, I spent a year in the management consulting space. Oh my God, my performance review kind of dropped. Here I am used to being an A player, great. I get like a B- and I freak out on the partner. Poor partner, now I realize how silly it was, but you know, I freaked out at the partner. What do you mean B-? I did everything. “Yeah, but Asif, you know, you have to get better at presenting the business case and this and that.” And you know, in hindsight, you look at those challenges and say, well, I’m glad I did that. And so, I’ve had that in my roots as I’ve grown in my career.

You know, I come here now and we’re so strong in our strength of engineering, of technology and the depths of that, that we’re having these conversations with customers. And don’t get me wrong, we’re having business conversations with the customers. But how many times are we taking it to the next level of actually talking about the depths of these business cases, the return on investments, looking at the different scenarios in the market, in the industry? Not enough, okay. And so that’s what we’re augmenting with Wayfinders now, right? And so that we can go and sit, not just with the CIO or not just with one executive, but we can go to the head of supply chain, the factory floor, the CFO, the CEO, and go through other executives to broaden that story to deliver. And so, I look at where do we grow from here.

There’s two areas we’ve been discussing. One is, let’s start with our existing account base. Our existing account base, the majority of accounts in the Americas, right now we’re single threaded. And what I mean by that is if we look at our seven service lines, we’re delivering only one service line in most of them. Why is that? We’ve developed a relationship maybe with the CIO or this director, and it’s kind of stayed there. Wayfinders can help us broaden that thing. We all know how hard it is to build a new logo, right? And so that’s strategy number one, is expand our market share, our pie, take away from others, however you want to call it, right, on those existing accounts.

Patrick: Right.

Asif: And so, we’re already starting to see that play out. So that’s growth number one. Growth number two is, and you guys were in some of the first analyst days we’ve had, when I started in my role. And the guidance I got from you guys and everyone was, you’re doing too much. You’re doing too much. So, we reduced the number of industries down to two primary industries. However, for long-term growth, you need to do more. So, what Wayfinders is doing, they have the depth in public sector and manufacturing, which is the core route right now. We have pieces of work in transportation and energy and utilities and financial services. So, they’ve hired experts in those other areas too, and they’re going at it. And so, I’m looking, how do we expand into the third industry, third big industry for us? And so, they’re helping us do that right now while we get our existing team focused on the revenue of today. So, their mandate is, yes, bring some revenue today, but also be thinking about the revenue of the future. I hope that helps.

Patrick: It does. It makes me think, and I know Boz has a question that follows up on that beautifully, but it does make me think that part of your challenge now going forward is challenging your own people and doing that in the right way that you’re not sort of, you’re not driving people away. You’re encouraging them to go out and find those extra opportunities that you need at the clients you already have. And that’s a management and a leadership challenge.

Boz, I know you had a question.

Lessons from M&A opportunities and strategy moving forward

Boz: Yeah, I think, kind of like, the point about expanding, right, the portfolio and the opportunities in front of you, and I think yesterday you mentioned how you have looked into four or five different M&A opportunities over the last year or so. So, just curious, what did you learn from those attempts and how has it changed the profile of the potential new kind of targets that you may be going after as you’re thinking about that portfolio expansion? I mean, are you looking more into more IP unicorns, are you looking more for scale? Just trying to bring in that inorganic component as I think it’s part of pretty much everyone’s growth strategy. And I heard you guys have been trying to do some.

Asif: Yeah, so in the Americas specifically, the last M&A we had was probably over 15-20 years ago. Very long time. So, despite us doing several in Japan and Europe and Oceania, it was new for me. So, coming into my role, working on this, the first discovery was there’s so much out there. Right? There’s so much potential. I now see why competitors, like, who start with the letter “A” and others are constantly at it, but they have the machine, right? We have the machine, I just didn’t fully leverage it. And it was a lesson learned. But there’s so much out there, right? And so, in that weeding through all of that, the valuations on American companies are through the roof. So that was challenge number two. How do you address it with a very conservative background in a company? So that’s a challenge we’re working on all the way up to the board level, right? And they acknowledge. And so, because the valuations are so large, you’re going to be even more particular. And so, we’ve gone through learning, we made some mistakes in the beginning. So, we stopped them during due diligence, to be fair, right? There’s others where then there were geopolitical challenges that hit us last year. And so, you look at, you know, is there a change in the strategy of resourcing and talent in the US now because of visa issues? Is there a change when you look at the tariff strategy of bringing products in and out of the country? And so, we had to stop some of those. And so, we’re taking a step back saying, wow, you know, how do you work in this new world order? I don’t know if any of you had the opportunity to hear the Canadian Prime Minister speak at the World Economic Forum this week.

Patrick: Brilliant.

Asif: Exactly. As a Canadian, I was so proud. And his comment about the old-world order is no longer and will not come back hit home very hard in my role and what we’ve been doing over the last three years. And it’s very relevant to this M&A because I was like, we have to reset and think about the new world order. And so, if we’re looking at, and I’m making this up now, product related, do we need something that is fully contained in the US supply chain if we’re to look at a US entity, right? Do we need to look at resourcing strategy if we’re going to take a capability play, et cetera? And so, we’ve kind of done a reset now, and I feel comfortable, but this is the changing landscape for us.

So, we’re still committed, right? Size and scale. But what we’ve realized is we can get size and scale. Everyone has size and scale. But what’s winning in the market is that unique differentiator. So, I take our acquisition in Germany of GK Software. Incredible. POS in the cloud. Easy. They’ve just launched and I forget what it’s called, 7 or something (RETAIL7). And I just got a demo on it this morning, which was how can smaller shops get onto POS cloud in like 7 weeks or something? Like I was just like, wow. Imagine the market that’s just opened up and you don’t need a lot of hardware or anything, right? And so, there’s lots of plays like that.

So, if we come back to Uvance, right, which is our portfolio and looking at cross-market, cross-industry solutions, are the unique plays when we think about the challenges in the US market around supply chain, demand management. I think there’s significant opportunities in sustainable manufacturing, circular economies, et cetera. So, looking for unicorns, as you call them, are unique plays or differentiators that can be add on to the existing shop floor strategy, MES strategy that we have today.

Now, it doesn’t just have to be an acquisition. What we’ve also come to the conclusion is that there will be partnerships or there will be joint ventures. So, on the partnership side, we could even look at brand names like Siemens and Rockwell Automation, because they’re doing fantastic work in the automation space as well. Right? Rockwell is our customer today, right. But we also partner with them, right. So, these are other areas that we’re exploring. And so, expansion, not just in the legacy terms of M&A, but in different areas as well.

Patrick: And you’ve ran that playbook with Palantir already. You made that investment with them.

Asif: Yes.

Patrick: So, you could run it similar.

Brand positioning for Fujitsu

Boz: I had a follow-up question, and I appreciate you bringing up the GK and Uvance. Maybe not a fair question I’m going to ask you.

Asif: Okay.

Boz: But I’m going to frame it that way. It’s like, so how would you say customers want to see you, know of you, a little bit of branding positioning here? Fujitsu, Fujitsu Uvance, GK, what’s the kind of, you know, the vision for the branding moving forward?

Asif: I think that is a challenge we are addressing right now. So, you started your question with how do you think customers want to view us? I don’t know, I’ll ask them, right? That’s a good question, right? And I think that we need to go through an exercise in that space. We- we’re a 90-year company. The name has been Fujitsu. Uvance came out as a refresh of our portfolio and go to market. There’s marketing around Fujitsu Uvance to show that new branding, right? GK is an acquisition. You see it, “GK, a Fujitsu company” right? And so, there’s these different brands. Yes, we have to figure out the next step in that. And that is a topic of conversation going on, right? And so, part of that is we’re just ending our three-year planning cycle, and we’re starting the next phase. And so, we’ve had a lot of discussions around where do we want to be in 2030? In 2035? 2035 is a critical year for us as we hit 100-year milestone. As part of that heritage, we’ve gone back to our roots. And so, 90 years ago was the factory in Kawasaki where we started manufacturing electronic components, et cetera. We had head office in Tokyo for many, many years. Just last year or the year before, we moved back to Kawasaki as our head office on the grounds where the factory was. We’re building a quantum lab beside that now and looking at our future and investing back into the community and the economy in Kawasaki. I think this is the beginning of answering your question. Okay, don’t have an answer.

Boz: No, I get it and so I was thinking about what’s customer- how do customers want to see you, but so-

Asif: Yeah. So, right now we go out-

Boz: Yeah.

Asif: And all my messaging and the messaging is Fujitsu.

Boz: Yep.

Asif: There is a Uvance component in that, but at the end of the day, we are Fujitsu.

Boz: Yeah.

Asif: Okay.

Boz: Thank you. Yeah.

Patrick: Did you want, I know, did you have any other questions specific on Fujitsu? I do want to broaden the discussion and talk a little bit more about, sort of technology and where we see it going, because you brought up quantum, which we can get to, but-

Aspirations for the next 5 to 10 years

Boz: I had one more. I think he had started answering earlier, but I’ll kind of maybe expand and maybe the point about 2030 and 2035. You know, you shared where the America’s business is today, yesterday during the presentation. I understand that there may not be a specific number that you want to share with us or maybe, but just thinking like, what’s kind of the aspiration for the Americas as a region in the next 5 or 10 years? And what are the kind of key levers that you think that are critical that you can lean on and help you to get to those goals?

Asif: So, one of the things we did is we did a deep analysis of the top integrators, you know, service providers in the Americas. And Fujitsu, I don’t know, is, and this is based on revenue, revenue just in the IT services space.

Boz: Yeah.

Asif: So, we’re like 68 or something, right? And the list is, I don’t know, 150 or whatever. You guys would know more than I would, right?

Boz: Yup.

Asif: It was interesting. The dialogue we had around the table was analyzing the top 10. I was a bit blown away at where the 10th place person was on revenue.

Patrick: Probably much closer to you than it is to #1, right?

Asif: No.

Patrick: Really? That’s not what you saw, okay.

Asif: No, and I can share that later.

Patrick: Yeah.

Asif: And so, I sat there saying, wow, how do we go from where we are to 10th if we want to?

Boz: Yup.

Asif: But the desire is to move up. The desire is to be relevant, very relevant in a few niche spaces and grow from there. So, when you think about sustainable manufacturing or you think about consumer experience and retail products, can Fujitsu be in the top three? That’s the challenge we have put ahead of us, right? And so that’s what we’re trying to figure out. Where are the key plays? How do we make that happen? Global leverage, right? And looking at acquisitions accordingly?

Patrick: So, let’s stick with the 2035.

Asif: Yeah.

Patrick: So, you mentioned earlier, you’ve had five or six roles in the 11 years that you’ve been here. So, you’ve got 10 more years to 2035. What are the- this is a totally unfair, we have a saying, we call it Honest Fridays.

Asif: *laughs* Okay, it’s Friday today.

Patrick: You should probably never talk to us on a Friday. But we call it Honest Friday. So Honest Friday, what are the five or six roles you see yourself playing here with Fujitsu over the next 10 years?

Asif: Wow, that’s amazing. First of all, I’d like to continue as CEO for a little while. *laughs* Completing three years at the end of March. So, I’d like to continue in this role. I think that there’s an opportunity to definitely help out, or not- I shouldn’t say help out. That’s not fair. Provide stronger alignment amongst the other international regions. Love to get involved. You know, Europe’s going through a lot at the moment. Looking at, I talk constantly with my peer in Oceania, Asia, etc. So, I think that there’s opportunities there as we look at the international regions and what can we do. I could go back to my roots and look at global delivery. You know, I’ve played delivery in a long, long term. I could definitely help out on portions of the portfolio or industry strategy as well as we look at more globalization. So, you know, it’s hard to say where your career takes you. I never had the aspiration to become a CEO, right? It just kind of went with the flow as you progressed.

Patrick: Yeah.

Asif: When I got a call from our chairman of the board, I said, Me? Really? You sure? *laughs* And we had a joke about it, right? He goes, oh, do you think you can’t do it? I said, no, no, I can do it. I just want to make sure that you’ve called the right person. *laughs* And we had a good joke. You know, but it was the same thing around when I became CTO, our current chairman of the board was the global CTO. Same conversation, he called me. So, it’s like, I thought he was joking the second time he called me. But the first time he called me, he said, we want you to be CTO. I said, really? Me? You’ve got the wrong person. And he goes, why? I go, because I’m not like a deep, deep techie. I can speak to you at a higher level, but you guys start to grill me at the next level of AI and quantum. Hold on, let me go get our CTO or someone else today. And he goes, no, that’s why we want you. I go none of this is making sense. He goes, we’ve realized our labs are too far removed from reality of customer asks. They’re doing great work, right? But how do we bring it closer to the front end? He goes, so we need someone, especially in the Americas, to put a business lens on this now. I thought Oh my God, I’m in trouble.

Patrick and Asif: *laughs*

Asif: So, of course I said yes. And I kept poking, okay, what does this mean for a customer? How about this industry? And so, we’ve seen that evolution throughout, right? And so, it’s hard to say what the next challenge is going to be that Fujitsu wants us to address or wants me to address and leverage my skills. But those are all different areas I’m passionate about and that I could make a difference.

Riding the waves of technology change

Patrick: So, when we, and I’m glad you put it that way, because when we look at what the challenges are that are facing a Fujitsu. When we look at what’s going to happen to IT services and consulting, and you guys are starting a new consulting business. When we look at those businesses now and we think about the long-term, again, the longitudinal look at what technology is doing to enterprises, what it’s doing to IT services companies, there is so much disruption that’s coming. Now, we say that because we’re here today now. But when you think about where we were 20 years ago, there was disruption coming and five years ago, there was disruption coming. It feels like it’s constant. So to take a giant step back, when you think about where the evolution of all of these businesses are going to be and the customers you’re serving, do you think we’re at the beginning of a massive change or do you think we’re riding the same technology changes that we’ve been riding for a while now?

Asif: Oh my God, I still have decades stuck in my head when you started that. *laughs* So now I’m thinking decades back. You know, When I started my career, I was on R/2 mainframe SAP. Okay.

Patrick: R/2.

Asif: R/2. I know.

Patrick: Yeah.

Asif: I’m not dating myself, am I?

Patrick and Asif: *laughs*

Asif: And I think about the transformation then, and then the move to client server with R/3 SAP, their client server version, and now where they are with S/4HANA. And then they’ll have something else after that. And now they’re embedding Joule and AI and all of that. And that’s just SAP. And then you can look at ServiceNow and Oracle and Microsoft and all of them. I think just in this space, there will always be disruption, always be transformation. It’s just you’re going through pockets of it, right? Ups and downs. You know, I look at the .com era and all of us freaking out about the year 2000 and coding for that, you know, and then it calmed down because I think everyone just needed to take a breath. And then it picked up again with the internet. And then it picked up again with the next thing and the next thing. And there’ll always be something. And that’s what I’ve learned over the years is this constant push and change and evolution. Everyone has to constantly adapt. As I shared with you guys last year, Fujitsu’s adapted in probably three major iterations in its 90 years.

Patrick: Right.

Asif: And that’s what keeps us going. You saw the increase in profitability levels, the increase, exponential increase, in share price, et cetera. That doesn’t happen in a company that cannot transform, right?

Patrick: Right.

Asif: And so, we’re part of that transformation. We’re seeing that IT services alone is not going to be enough in the future. We know our competitors are hurting, but what we do see is bringing in that business value and trying to co-create and solve problems as part of it. The other piece is bringing in core technologies and keeping on top of those to take you to the next level, right? And so, whether it will be people engagement or AI bot engagement or robot engagement as we displayed at CES 2 weeks ago, or the next level of quantum and high-performance computing engagement, we’re on that curve, right, to add.

Technology shifts and people shifts in the age of AI

Patrick: And when you talk about all of those technologies and you put that in the, again, the longitudinal view. But then you think about what you said earlier with respect to what the market looks like right now with the political and economic disruption and tariffs and all that kind of craziness. One thing you said yesterday was about in this sort of uncertain and chaotic market, these are the things that Fujitsu is focused on. And I couldn’t help but notice that at least two out of or three out of those were very people-centric, very talent-centric. So, when you think about the 90 years of those major shifts in Fujitsu, has it always been because the company has had the technology but focused on how you deploy people the right way? And how is that going to change if you’ve got an agentic colleague, not just, you know, Manuel sitting here across from us, right?

Asif: Yeah, no, it’s great. It’s funny because just had this discussion this morning as I presented my budget. *laughs* Good timing, you know, and so part of our budget was actually looking at AI in each of the seven businesses. And we all know Americas is somewhat stalled at the moment, but it’ll pick up. And so, we looked at the growth rates from many different analysts and research and kind of said, okay, the growth rate is A. How can we do A plus three? That’s always the challenge.

Patrick: Right.

Asif: So committed to A and said, I’m willing to sign up for A plus three, but I need to implement this AI solution here. We’re going to need to do this with these customers. And we mapped out the whole landscape. And so, yes, we have been brilliant at the deployment of resources and it’s getting even stronger as we look at our global resource management pool and look at how we do things more globally through our global delivery centers, et cetera. But the next challenge is the mix of technology and human.

Patrick: Right.

Asif: So, we’ve started that on some customers and it’s a journey, right? Not easy. Some you see benefit, some customers resist, some employees resist. But that is where the future is going. And the success of that model is critical, right? And that means tough decisions too, right? I remember Julie Sweet, Accenture’s CEO, was it six months ago? She said, “we will be letting go of people who do not adapt to AI.” I’m not saying that I want to let go of people, but we all in all of our careers, all of us even sitting around the table here, if we don’t adapt, we’re dead.

Patrick: Right.

Asif: And so, I joked with someone the other day, I go, do you think the next CEO will be someone who’s completely AI quantum centric or someone who’s status quo? And that might have delivered well. I think I would lean towards the AI quantum centric person. Right? I go, so it’s just the reality. If I don’t adapt, right? And so, the pressure’s on my leaders at the moment to adapt and their leaders to adapt. And we’re watching, right. Some are adapting, some aren’t. So, you coach, you train, but at some point you cannot continue because your business will die.

Patrick: What you said just there is so important. You talked about the need for the next leader to have that quantum centric, but then you said, so you coach and you train. So, no matter what, it comes back to people and being able to manage people and lead people.

Asif: Yeah, that-

Patrick: That’s what makes your job difficult.

Asif: Yeah, sorry. Yeah, that’ll always be there. That will always be there, right? Like at the end of the day, we are in the people business. Yes, technology is there, but don’t forget, technology is an enabler.

Patrick: Right.

Asif: Technology is not driving it, right? So, when we go out and support customers’ applications, it’s not fully autonomous.

Patrick: Yeah.

Asif: Yesterday we talked about the agentless desk, right? There’s still some human element that is required. You’re just reducing that human element. But you can take the human element and make it more strategic, more analytical, provide more value add to the customer versus the tactical day in and day out.

Patrick: Right. Services is a people business no matter what at the end.

Asif: Oh yeah, and that’s not changing.

Patrick: That’s not changing. Yeah. Boz, any, I have one last question, but do you have any other?

Boz: No, I think I had the question he just answered. I was thinking about how much you’re going to be leveraging AI and basically protect margins, but I think you answered it. You elaborate very well on it. So.

Career aspirations at 22 years old and advice for 22-year-olds in 2026

Patrick: Yeah, I just I want to wrap up with something that is more of a personal question.

Asif: Sure.

Patrick: And so, I have a daughter. She’s- I have three kids and our youngest is in her last year, her last semester of university. It’s very exciting. So, she’s about to be 22. The whole world is open to her right now. And it would be a stretch for me to go back and remember what I was thinking when I was 22, because that was a long time ago. But you’re a lot closer to 22 than I am to 22.

Asif: *laughs*

Patrick: So, I know, as a twenty-two year old, you didn’t think, I want to be the CEO of Fujitsu Americas, but what did you want to be when you were twenty-two, finishing up university, looking at the world ahead of you? And I’ll tell you, one of your, and a little more on this, one of your colleagues shared last night that if she had thought things through at the time when she was 22, she would now be on one of the engineering teams for the Formula One racing team. So that was her, like, if I had rewritten my life, it would be this.

Asif: Wow.

Patrick: So, go back to 22-year-old Asif, what did you think you wanted to do?

Asif: So let me start at 19, then go back a few more years, you know. So, you know, you sit with your guidance counselor, you go through things and like, you love math. You’re amazing in math. You should become an actuary. So silly me doesn’t do his homework and said, yeah, great. It makes a lot of money, right? And so, start year one. I was like, oh my God, boring. Sorry for the actuaries out there. My apologies in advance.

Patrick: Don’t think we have a lot of actuary listeners.

Asif: Okay, good. But you know, I have a lot of family members that are actuaries. But anyways, I was like, there’s no way I can do this for the next 30-40 years. So towards the end of first year university, barely made it through, thinking, Oh my God, I’m gonna be a train wreck here. I move over to- I stayed in the same faculty at Waterloo, Faculty of Math, so then I flipped from Actuarial Science to, they had a business information systems options, because I enjoyed computers as well. And back then, computers were just ramping up. I got my first Commodore 64 before I entered university, whatever, you know, I was excited. I was like, oh, this is cool, tech and everything. And so, I started to take, you know, the business courses were offered by a business school next door called Laurier. Amazing business school. And so, I did computer science and business, and I started to gel the two together. I was in a co-op program. So, I went out to Nortel, if you remember Nortel at the time. I got a hard-core computer science work term. Hated it. I thought, oh my God, what am I gonna do now?

Patrick: Strike two.

Asif: So, I’m in Ottawa, it’s minus 40. I said, I’m miserable. I don’t know what I’m gonna do with my life. They call me back. The job market’s tight. I’m like, do I risk trying to look for another job? No. I make the silly mistake. I go back. Great company, don’t get me wrong. Another term of pain. I don’t know why I went back for a third term. I can’t remember what my logic was. Maybe I was just having fun to be away from home. So finally, from that, I said, enough is enough. The job market’s picking up. I got a job at the Toronto Stock Exchange. I said cool the floor, the trading floor was still around at that time. And I got a job working in Oracle Apps. So, I finally clicked. I said, okay, I’m not into the widgets. I’m into more the business level of CompSci.

Patrick: Right.

Asif: I loved it. So, I went back for the second work term. And then my last work term, I decided to go with one of the big banks in Canada just to do something different. Now, that job ended up being on the mainframe, and I was writing scripts and stuff, and I thought, what am I doing? But I didn’t know what I wanted to do still, but I enjoyed computers and business.

Patrick: Right.

Asif: So that’s when I got a job offer from another company to get into SAP. I didn’t know what SAP was at the time.

Patrick: Right.

Asif: Holy. Like, wow. And that kind of led the journey. So that’s kind of a long answer to your question. You don’t know. But I think the key in what I’ve told my daughter, she’s entering university next year, is I said, you don’t have to figure it all out. She’s interested in health sciences. I said, look, whatever you do, I’m just going to leave this advice for you, is think about AI, think about technology, because honestly, technology is changing everything in the world, everything. And, you know, I have a friend, my previous trainer is studying dentistry right now. And so, I told him, I said, you know, my dentist loves technology. So, when I get in there, I hate the dentist. I like him. I just hate dentists in general. We start talking about technology and he’s- he brings all the latest gadgets into his office. And so, he was showing me something around AI.

Patrick: In dentistry.

Asif: In dentistry and how they’re scanning gums and, you know, and then analyzing and I’m blown away, right? And he’s explaining all this to me is that actually, I shouldn’t say this out loud, I love my dentist visits now.

All: *laugh*

Patrick: It’s honest Friday. *laughs*

Asif: *laughs* Yeah, yeah. So what I’ve told my daughter and what I think I’ll tell everyone is you don’t have to be a techie, you don’t have to be passionate about it, but you have to understand how to use it or how it’s going to impact you. Jobs are still going to exist. People are so afraid. But if you bring it into your world, you’ll be that much stronger over the competition.

Patrick: Right.

Asif: Period. Right.

Patrick: Right. That’s fascinating. And it’s amazing that your epiphany came with Oracle. And then you built a career starting with SAP.

Asif: I know. That’s amazing, huh.

Final thoughts

Patrick: Asif, this has been fantastic. Enjoyed this so much. I will extend the offer to come visit us in Hampton, New Hampshire, in our offices and come into the studio. We can record another episode there. But this has really been just a fantastic couple of days here.

Asif: So, I have to ask you one last question.

Patrick: Yeah, sure.

Asif: So, you just said New Hampshire. So how far are you guys away from Mount Washington?

Patrick: Not far.

Boz: Two and a half hour drive.

Asif: Because we go skiing there every March.

Patrick: Okay.

Boz: So if you just keep skiing down towards the beach.

Asif: *laughs* Okay, sounds good.

Boz: You’ll hit our office. *laughs*

Patrick: A few summers ago, I did a run, a Reach the Beach Race, where you’re on a team.

Asif: Wow.

Patrick: And you run, I don’t know how many miles it is total, but you start at Cannon, which is even further north than Mount Washington. You run right by that area.

Asif: Okay.

Patrick: You do a little segment of the run, and you end up in Hampton, right near our office.

Asif: Fantastic.

Patrick: You’re not far. So, you’re welcome to come anytime. And I’m positive we’re coming back to Toronto soon.

Asif: Oh, good.

Patrick: Because I love the city.

Asif: Then we have to do another event here.

Patrick: Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you so much for this. Really appreciate it.

Asif: Thank you, guys.

Boz: Thank you.

Patrick: Tune in next week for another episode of TBR Talks. Don’t forget to send us your key intelligence questions on business strategy, ecosystems, and management consulting through the forum in the show notes below. Visit tbri.com to learn how we help tech companies, large and small, answer these questions with the research, data, and analysis that my guests bring to this conversation every week. Once again, I’m your host, Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst at TBR. Thanks for joining us and see you next week.