KUSHAGRA SHARMA
Director and Head of Marketing India and SAARC Veeam Software
Evolving Marketing Strategy for the AI Era
At Veeam, our evolution has been from campaigns and communications towards becoming a growth engine that is accountable for outcomes across the customer lifecycle.
Our starting point remains human-first. We first understand the customer’s pain points, business priorities and the challenges they are trying to solve, rather than immediately positioning a solution. AI and data then help us scale that understanding through deeper insights, hyper-personalisation and more agile customer journeys. AI is an amplifier of human intelligence and creativity, not a substitute for either.
This becomes particularly important as enterprises move from experimenting with AI to deploying agentic AI. Veeam’s shift towards becoming the Data and AI Trust Company reflects this changing landscape, with trust, resilience and governance becoming critical to responsible AI adoption. The same principle applies within our own marketing organisation. We are increasingly looking at AI not simply as a tool for faster content creation, but as a way to redesign repeatable workflows, automate low-value tasks and give teams more time for strategic thinking and creativity.
Ultimately, I believe marketing has to move beyond visibility and vanity metrics. We look at brand equity, customer lifetime value, marketing ROI, pipeline, retention and renewals. Growth is important, but sustainable growth comes from earning customer trust and building relationships that last.
Brand Positioning in Competitive Market
Our first priority is to sharpen Veeam’s market narrative as it evolves into the Data and AI Trust Company. We want to move beyond the traditional backup and recovery conversation and build stronger associations with data resilience, trust and confident AI adoption, while making these themes relevant to customers, partners and the wider ecosystem. As the category becomes more complex, clarity itself becomes a differentiator. Customers need a simple way to understand what matters, particularly as data resilience increasingly converges with security, governance and AI.
The second priority is commercial accountability. Marketing needs to demonstrate a clear connection to business performance, which means looking beyond visibility metrics to marketing ROI, customer lifetime value, pipeline, revenue contribution, retention and renewals. At the same time, I believe sustainable growth comes from loyalty and renewals rather than simply chasing one-off wins.
The third is to use marketing as a platform for ecosystem impact and industry influence. Through initiatives such as Bharat CyberSuraksha and the DSCI partnership, we can engage with broader conversations around cyber resilience, data governance and secure AI adoption.
