Episode 6
The Architecture of Reinvention
With Balu Angaian
What if the biggest innovations aren’t the ones we see, but the ones quietly holding everything together?
In this episode of REWIRED, Akanksha Bilani sits down with Balu Angaian, Vice President & Senior Partner, Practice Leader at IBM Consulting, to take you inside that hidden layer of transformation. Balu brings nearly two decades of experience and a front-row perspective on how hyperscaler partnerships are enabling enterprises to modernize legacy systems, scale AI safely, and deploy agentic solutions that actually deliver measurable outcomes.
Together they explore how performance and infrastructure are quietly rewiring what's possible. From reimagining supply chains to modernizing federal systems, they unpack how collaboration between IBM, AWS, and Intel is turning complex modernization challenges into practical wins, because the biggest reinventions often start with what you can’t see, but can feel in every breakthrough that follows.
REWIRED Ep 6 Podcast Transcript
Akanksha Bilani (Host):
Welcome to Rewired, a podcast that shares the coolest stories of innovation and behind-the-scenes breakthroughs from Intel, AWS, and our favorite partners.
I'm your host, Akanksha Bilani. I'm the Global Alliance Director for AWS, helping bridge the path with AWS partners and customers. Today, I have the privilege of speaking with Balu Angaian, the Vice President and Senior Partner, and Practice Leader of IBM. Balu, thank you so much for being here.
Balu Angaian:
I'm happy to be here. You know, this is an exciting time for all of us. You know, with the evolution of Gen.AI, it feels like every day is a new day. I mean, literally a new day, right? So excited for what's coming and looking forward to our conversation here.
Akanksha Bilani:
Absolutely. So Balu, you're seeing a lot of cool things happening from your job at IBM. Can you tell us a little bit about your role?
Balu Angaian:
I lead the AWS practice for IBM Consulting across the Americas, and in the last few years, I've been focused on building our partnerships with hyperscalers, specifically with AWS. It's an exciting role, and I enjoy working with our partners like AWS and now with Intel as well.
Akanksha Bilani:
Fantastic. Awesome. In this role, which is kind of very groundbreaking, Balu, and I understand that completely, tell us maybe one or two exciting projects that you and your team have been working on as you've helped customers accelerate their motions and their journeys, either to the cloud and/or leveraging Gen.AI.
Balu Angaian:
Oh, gosh, we have so many client stories that we can talk about, right? And the ones that come to my mind right away are the stories where we are not only helping our clients do better at what they do, but impacting the end customers behind them.
I think if you look at what we are doing with one of the largest automakers in the world, right, you know where a customer, an end customer in this case, would go and then let's say buy a car and most of the times you won't even know when you're going to actually have the ability to drive the car home, right? Think about reimagining that supply chain such that the consumer that is buying the car, at the same time they're paying for it, they also get to know when the Green Monster is going to be ready for them to pick up and drive, right? So, you know, doing that for one of the largest automakers is no easy feat, and that's what we have been working on with that client, and it's been an exciting journey.
And then the other one that I would probably talk about is what we're doing with one of our federal agencies in the U.S. Helping them to really modernize some of the systems that they have been providing to taxpayers in this case. It's a humongous task in terms of getting the systems which were written back in the 70s and 80s, even with some assembler codes and modernize that system so that consumers, like you and I, can actually take much better use of the tool. So those are two stories that come to mind right away, but there are plenty of them, as I said.
Akanksha Bilani:
I'm sure. Absolutely. And tell me a little bit about your experience working with such customers and agencies that are in charge of basically the way in which people live today.
How open or apprehensive are they to technologies like Gen. AI or like cloud?
Balu Angaian:
The most common thing that we have seen is that all of our clients are very eagerly looking forward to realizing the benefit of what Agentic AI could bring to them.
But then comes the complexity of, look, we have systems that have been built for and they've been around for so many years, if not decades in some cases. How do you reimagine all of those? How do you modernize all of those so that we can take full advantage of the Agentic AI solution?
So I think the challenge that a lot of companies are dealing with is, are we modernizing to transform? Or are we transforming through modernization, right? So I think in my view, I think it goes hand in glove, right? So one can help the other. Obviously you need to modernize the underlying infrastructure and the applications to help your businesses to transform so that they can serve their clients better.
But at the same time, the drive also needs to happen very efficiently from the business side as well, so that the IT systems can modernize, can be modernized faster so that you can adopt and leverage the full potential of Agentic AI and everything that comes with it. So it's been an interesting journey, to say the least, and we do see a lot of opportunities to work with our clients and obviously working with our partners as well.
Akanksha Bilani:
Yeah, I agree with you. It's always been a push and a pull situation, I would say, when it comes to technologies like Gen.AI, technologies like cloud, but it's really about the data, right? It's about how quickly can they take advantage of the data for it to actually do the work for you as an organization so you could show up for your clients a little better, and there's organizations that really care about agility and accelerating technology to drive impact for their products, and then there's companies and organizations that are a little apprehensive.
So I love that as IBM and especially your role within IBM, you're able to scale through different personalities and different use cases and really showcase the success and giving them the comfort they need. So we as an organization, as well as an industry, can accelerate using the latest things that are going on in technology today.
Balu Angaian:
I think that's where companies like IBM Consulting and AWS and Intel can come together in helping our clients to actually get through that process of a journey from going from where they are today to where they could be going and taking advantage of the full potential of Agentic AI technologies, right? So it is going to be an evolutionary journey. But at the same time, we will have to help our clients to pick the right spots to make the most impact, right? And the ones that I would say that we would highly recommend for our clients, and we see that in action as well, is clients picking the processes that they have full control on and yet easy to measure the outcome.
So when you start there, that actually creates the flywheel for you to go to the next set of processes and next set of processes and so on and so forth. So I think having a very well thought out strategy on where to get started, I think is going to be key. And we are already seeing a lot of our clients embracing the journey.
Akanksha Bilani:
Yes, absolutely. I think it's partners like yourselves that because you have played this and rinsed and repeated it, coming up with the best trained model, pun intended, into a world that is actually going to be offering more support to customers that are starting their journey.
It's super, super important. So I love that you guys do that and kind of pioneer and trailblaze through offering that as support to our industry today.
Balu Angaian:
Yeah, and it is interesting for all of our practitioners as well, because we do have homegrown AI platform, right? We call that as IBM Consulting Advantage, and that really provides all of our practitioners the assistance and the tools that they need to be more efficient on their day-to-day activities, right?
Like, for example, if I want to create a client pitch, I don't have to be creating that from scratch, but I can do it using tools and agents, which actually makes me that much more smarter because I can now focus on the messaging as well as focusing on the words and the shapes of the lines that go in a PowerPoint slide. So I think, you know, embracing that kind of environment, for us to be more productive is going to be key as we move into helping our clients also to be that much more productive.
Akanksha Bilani:
Absolutely. And I love that you actually dropped that you are a personal practitioner, because nothing's better than learning and then being able to dissipate that knowledge to people that are still apprehensive. Take advantage of Gen AI, like you said, be more productive, be focused more on the task at hand versus the how, I think is very exciting.
And exactly to that point, Balu, can you make a very outlandish prediction of where you see the future of our industry?
Balu Angaian:
That's a very interesting question. Look, everything is changing on a dime, right? And it's all for good, right?
So I think in terms of what lies in front of us over the next 10 years, I can only say that things that we would otherwise be spending a lot of time doing manual stuff, I think they will disappear in no time.
And then comes the physical automation. Having robots roaming around or sitting next to us and then working along with us. I think it is not far-fetched, right? So I think we need to be creative about how we want to take advantage of those evolutionary stuff that's going to come in front of us and apply them to everything that we do. I mean, one thing that I've seen people are getting very comfortable with ChatGPT and Copilot and so on and so forth, in their personal lives.
I think what we will see going forward, in my view, is the same level of ease with which we will use robots at work. So I think things are going to change for better, right? It's going to make all of us a lot smarter, a lot more productive. There's a lot to unpack there in terms of what could be the possibilities over the next five, ten years.
Akanksha Bilani:
The possibilities are tremendous. Applying the technology to make us just live better lives, whether it's to find a new vacation, that you don't need to go through like 15 million sites on, or figuring out how you can make the best rolled sushi, and maybe not having to do it yourself and have your robot do it.
Balu Angaian:
Yeah, I mean, the refrigerator can talk to the oven and, you know, it can bring the food to the dining table. We'll take it.
Akanksha Bilani:
Absolutely. It's all about driving ease for lifestyles. I love that. That's awesome. Well, that wraps up our show today. You've been listening to Rewired, the podcast celebrating innovations on the bleeding edge brought to you by Intel, AWS, and IBM today.
Check out our show notes on the Rewired page at www.rewired-podcast.com or wherever you listen to podcasts for links to share more about what we discussed today.
I'm your host, Akanksha Bilani, and I would love to extend a very warm and a big thank you to you, Balu, for being here and sharing these awesome stories with us.
Balu, thank you so much for coming.
Balu Angaian:
Thank you as well, Akanksha. It was nice talking to you.
Akanksha Bilani:
Absolutely.
