From Cisco to IBM: How Professional Services Became the Most Important Role in Enterprise Tech w/ Sanjay Pal, WW VP of Software Professional Services at IBM

Episode notes

Justin sits down with Sanjay Pal , Worldwide VP of Professional Services at IBM, to explore what it really takes to lead services at global scale and why the role is more strategically important now than ever before. Sanjay draws on his journey from Cisco to Accenture to IBM to break down what has fundamentally changed about services delivery in the AI era, and what has stayed the same. He shares how IBM thinks about standardizing delivery across 16 global markets without sacrificing client experience, why the forward-deployed engineer model is gaining momentum, and how professional services leaders need to evolve from deployment executors into trusted business advisors. He also shares a personal story about his father, who wrote 52 books with pen, paper, and a stack of research clippings, and what that means for what's possible now. Chapters [00:00] Intro and Sanjay's Path to IBM [02:33] What's Changed in Services, and What Hasn't [05:00] How AI Amplifies Delivery Without Replacing Judgment [08:01] Standardization vs.

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