When you speak with Swati Ranganathan, what stands out is how naturally he blends the technical with the philosophical. Today, he serves as CISO and VP of Information Technology and Systems at Uniphore, a business AI company.
However, his career began in a very different place: teaching engineers how to design furniture, cars, and even aircraft using 3D CAD systems at PTC Inc. (formerly Parametric Technology Corporation), a company that built CAD software for various industries.
That early immersion in design reshaped his perspective. “It wasn’t just about designing a product,” Swati recalled. “It was thinking end-to-end, all the way through product inception to retirement, including manufacturing, sourcing, supply chain, support, reliability, swap out, and so on. And very early in my career, it clicked for me: I want to drive best practices.”
That realization became the anchor for his career.
“Who better to drive best practices than a CIO, right? So everything I’ve done since that job has been to achieve that mission, to solve how do we make things better, how do we provide the best service possible.”
For Swati, the CIO was never just a systems owner. It was the role that connected the dots across the business and delivered better outcomes, a vision that continues to guide him today.
Listen to the full conversation here or grab the key highlights below.
That vision is rooted in how he defines leadership itself. Swati pushes back on the neat separation between “individual contributor” and “manager.” He sees leadership as something anyone can practice, regardless of title.
You don’t need a manager title to be a leader. You form an opinion, you figure out what the right thing is, and you become vocal about it. You have a healthy dialogue. That's what a leader does… (they) ‘lead’ as a verb. - Swati Ranganathan
This philosophy shaped his growth. For Swati, empowerment starts with behavior: taking responsibility, voicing ideas, and fostering dialogue.
Like many engineers, he began with deep technical expertise. But stepping into executive roles required a mindset shift.
“The pieces I value are ownership, accountability, driving results, and getting things done. But I also had to realize I won’t know everything, and that’s okay. The key is to trust, hire, and delegate to those who know more.”
That transition, from being the expert to leading experts, demanded both humility and confidence. It also meant learning to see through multiple lenses. “You need to think like a CTO, because what you build must be designed for excellence. You need to think like a customer success leader, because you’re running a service organization. You need to think like an FP&A leader, because IT consumes big budgets. The CIO role is about blending all those perspectives.”
If there’s one trait Swati credits for sustaining that growth, it’s curiosity. Early in his career, he worked as a program manager with no direct reports but full accountability, an experience that forced him to influence without authority.
“You have to be inquisitive to learn from people who’ve been there 10–15 years, instead of insisting on your own way. That curiosity has always been part of me. Each company, each industry, was a chance to ask: what problem are we solving, and how do we delight the customer?”
That willingness to listen and learn has helped him succeed across different industries, each with its own challenges and opportunities.
At Uniphore, Swati is in the middle of another transformation: the rise of AI in IT and business. He believes AI will soon be so ingrained in daily work that no one will even call it out.
AI is going to be everywhere. In IT, (it means) logs, intrusions, threats, user behavior, system failures, and then driving automation. We started with a data layer, focusing on assets and tickets. From there it’s about insights, then automation, then building toward agentic systems. - Swati Ranganathan
He frames AI adoption as a journey: start small, prove value, then scale. Level-one tasks like resetting passwords are easy to automate. More complex tasks take longer, but the payoff is bigger.
And the biggest challenge? Orchestrating AI across the enterprise. “RevOps likes to own their tools. Finance likes to own their tools. HR likes to own their tools. At the end of the day, you need a common construct, a platform for what I call master data: employee, customer, vendor, product. Once you have that data layer, you can decide where to apply AI, but it always comes back to the customer journey, whether that’s your end customer or your internal customer.”
But even with the right foundation, transformation rarely comes without friction. Swati remembers his first job, when many engineers resisted moving from 2D AutoCAD to 3D design systems.
“They thought they could do designs faster in 2D, until they saw the proof. The same is true for AI. It’s not about losing jobs, it’s about retooling and embracing change.”
He draws a clear parallel to earlier waves of automation. Robots didn’t eliminate work; they boosted productivity and created new kinds of jobs. AI, he believes, will follow the same path.
Looking ahead, Swati envisions a future where employees interact with a single AI interface that handles tasks across multiple systems.
Do you really need five different apps and five different UIs to run your business? At some point, I believe it’ll just be one AI interface that figures out what you’re trying to do and executes across those systems. AI won’t replace the underlying tools or business processes, but it will become the single layer of command and control.
For Swati, there’s no such thing as a final state in IT leadership.
“You’re never done. For me, thought leadership means embracing the new use cases that are popping up and leaving behind old mindsets that say, ‘this doesn’t seem practical.’ To adopt something truly new, you have to think in a new way, without boundaries.”
That mindset, he argues, is what makes the CIO role vital. Every major technology wave, from Y2K to SaaS to AI, has created an inflection point where businesses needed someone to bring order to chaos. The CIO, in his view, is that person.
Swati Ranganathan’s story is one of constant reinvention, from CAD systems to enterprise AI, from program manager to CIO. His career underscores a simple truth: leadership is all about curiosity, ownership, and the courage to drive change.
Watch the full episode here.
