Ashok Divakaran

About Ashok Divakaran

Forward-thinking C-level business strategy, technology, and AI executive with leadership experience in multiple innovation-driven, global, and diversified industries. Experience across the value chain, both as Head of Strategy for a Fortune 100 / Dow 30 company, and as a Partner and practice leader in a leading consultancy. Direct experience as CEO direct report and member of company\'s Executive Committee at F100/F500 level. Former startup board member. Currently building a cutting-edge GenAI business focused on private LLMs (Large Language Models).My \"superpower\" is employing pattern recognition skills and first-principles thinking to connect the dots between strategy, technology, and shareholder value through an investor / investment banker lens. I am at my best with complex, novel problems without established or clear solutions; the greater the number of dots there are to connect, the more differentiated the value I can add. I bring a proven record in rapidly building high-performance teams and organizational cultures.Significant experience in:• Corporate & BU Strategy (growth strategy, portfolio management, M&A, capital allocation, operating model design, competitive benchmarking)• AI / GenAI / ML (deep neural networks, LLMs, synthetic data, AI data pipelines, high-performance compute, ML/LLMOps)• Digital Strategy & Transformation / Digital Products (digital business models, ecosystem development and sustainment, IoT full digital \"technology stack\"(analytics, cloud, 5G, digital twin, etc.) and multiple use cases (e.g, autonomous vehicles, smart / connected products, digital customer, Industry 4.0 / smart manufacturing, robotics, etc.) Set up and led digital disruption-focused corporate venture capital team, engaging extensively with startups.• Major Company Transformations (acquisitions / post-merger integration (PMI), divestitures / spins, cost transformation, enterprise technology deployments)• Cross-functional toolkit blending strategy, technology / innovation, and organization, with extensive experience and thought leadership in industry and management consulting in each areaOther distinctive spikes include:• Designing, championing and operationalizing C-level/Board-level cross-functional initiatives• Communicating through the CEO, Board, and Investor / Shareholder value lenses; significant experience with investor activism• Board Director experience • Experience in matrixed, global, multi-cultural environments (NA, Europe, ME, Asia, LatAm)

Experience

1. Principal (Partner) Chief Product Officer and Gm, Zora Ai

   Deloitte

   Nov 2024 — Present · New York, NY, US

   As Chief Product Officer and General Manager of Zora AI—the central business unit for all agentic AI products at Deloitte—I lead global product strategy, engineering and development, and go-to-market execution across industries and functions.• Zora AI is Deloitte’s enterprise platform for building and scaling agentic AI solutions—LLM-powered systems that reason, plan, and act autonomously across complex workflows. • I oversee the full innovation lifecycle: identifying high-impact use cases, architecting multi-agent systems, and operationalizing domain-specialized copilots that fuse structured and unstructured data. Our stack combines frontier foundation models (including LLMs, vision models, and speech interfaces) with enterprise-grade orchestration frameworks, retrieval systems, and fine-tuned cognitive agents, working closely with our strategic partners like Nvidia.• My team delivers production-grade AI systems that are secure, observable, and deeply integrated into client environments—whether cloud-hosted, on-premise, or hybrid. We focus on outcomes: accelerating decision velocity, compressing time-to-insight, and transforming latent institutional knowledge into live, reasoning intelligence - at scale.

Education

• Macalester College

  Bachelor of Arts - BA, Economics [major], International Studies [major], Political Science [minor]