About Anisha Vaswani
Anisha Vaswani, Chief Information and Customer Officer at Extreme Networks, spoke at TiEcon 2025 about AI adoption and leadership. She described her role as overseeing both IT and customer experience at the networking company. Vaswani stated that AI adoption requires both executive leadership driving the initiative and a resurgence of early adopters among employees. She emphasized the need for AI literacy and education, citing risks related to data, brand, and reputation. Vaswani noted that the stakes are high for companies that adopt AI well, and that close partnership between CIOs and CMOs is essential.
In earlier appearances, Vaswani discussed her career journey and personal experiences. She described being the youngest editor at 24 of two magazines and later founding a creative wedding consultancy. She stated that self-belief and resilience are important, and that networking is key to finding opportunities. In a TEDx talk, she recounted personal challenges, including her family's financial struggles and the demolition of their property, and said she turned to education and teaching as a path forward.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Anisha Vaswani's recent appearances.
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Transcript (9 segments)
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Anisha Vaswani0:05
I'm the CIO and the chief customer officer at Extreme Networks, which is a networking company, provider of networking solutions and software.
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Interviewer0:12
Lovely. And your thought process today in the panel, how was it and what were the takeaways from an AI point of view?
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Anisha Vaswani0:18
It was a great panel. I sat in on a couple of the earlier sessions as well. It was great to get different perspectives. I heard Ji Bansal and his journey as an entrepreneur and his mindset about how you scale companies. And it was great to have the CMO panel right before the CIO panel, because you got to hear the marketing perspective on how you sell solutions in an AI world. And then I think we provided a dose of reality in terms of how do you get CIOs to buy AI solutions. So I thought it was a very comprehensive panel. It's also interesting to actually see the challenges on both sides of the coin.
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Interviewer0:52
Was that like a little bit of a grin around like 'now I understand you' kind of a moment?
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Anisha Vaswani0:58
Yes, absolutely. It was funny to hear the CMO's perspective on partnering with CIOs because they have to do that. And our perspective is, well, the CMO is just one of many customers we serve internally. So how do you balance those two? But I think the key message is you have to partner closely. There's tremendous value to be tapped into with AI, and companies that do it well are going to succeed going forward. So the stakes are high, and it's really important that CMOs and CIOs partner.
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Interviewer1:27
One important thing that I learned in this entire conversation is unlike other adoption of technology, it's usually a little bit of executive leadership needs to know a little bit, while it's more bottom up kind of a thing. But AI is all about top down approach. You all are supposed to know things first before you're even enabling it. Your thoughts on that?
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Anisha Vaswani1:46
I think it's both. Honestly, if you look at what happens on the ground, it is both. It's executive leadership driving, and the most forward-thinking CEOs talking about how AI has to be embedded in how we do everything. And you have a great resurgence in the community of early AI adopters in your employee base that are also very excited about adopting. So I think a couple of things as a CIO we need to think about is how do you drive AI literacy in general, because it's not without risks and downsides in terms of data risk, brand risk, reputation risk. So I think it's really important that there be a skilling or education component to this so we drive AI adoption successfully.
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Interviewer2:29
Lovely, thank you so much for talking to us.
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Anisha Vaswani2:31
Thank you.
