Arun Pillai

About

Interested in what actually works — not what looks good on a slide.

My career started in engineering, writing software for insurance systems before I'd ever heard the phrase “digital transformation.” Since then it's run through implementation, consulting, and eventually building and scaling entire service portfolios from a blank page — subscription-based services and large-scale business transformation programs alike, taken from concept to global scale.

The thread that runs through all of it is the same: design a service, build the operating model underneath it, then get it to market in a way that actually holds up once real customers are using it at scale. That arc — design, build, scale — is what I keep coming back to, role after role.

These days I think mostly about how enterprises actually absorb new technology — cloud platforms, agentic AI, the operating models underneath them — and why the absorption rate rarely matches the announcement rate. The writing here covers product, portfolio strategy, customer success, frontier models, hyperscalers, and the behavioral patterns that decide whether a service gets adopted or shelved.

When something interests me, I build it. The working theses below are how I stay honest — it's easy to have opinions about things you've only read about.

The interesting questions rarely fit on a page.