Her Story
About Bhavana
I've been working in technology for over a decade, and my journey has taken me through some fascinating spaces. I started doing tech for big clients at Oracle, and ever since then, I've invested my career in making technology work in non-traditionally core technical industries. I've worked with hedge funds, private equity, and banks, and for the last 6-7 years, I've been focused on AI deployment - most recently agentic AI deployment. Today, my main area of expertise is AI adoption on the people side and AI workflow creation. I go into an industry and translate their workflows and departmental workflows into how we can create automated workflows or agentic AI workflows for them, basically deploying their ERPs and agentic AI. As chief of staff at my company, which is a private equity firm, I interface with the technology team daily to make sure they're up-to-date and meeting their mandates, focusing on the right pieces of the roadmap. I keep in touch with all the department heads to track how adoption is going within their specific functions, whether workflow load is increasing, if there are QA issues or defects, or if the tools are erroring out or not fitting their workflow. We operate across different functions - asset management, acquisitions and underwriting, reporting, portfolio management - and my job is to keep an eye on the workflow of each department and business domain, highlighting any use cases or pieces of workflow which are ready for automation or should be automated first. I keep the tech team in alignment with what the business needs day-to-day, quarter to quarter, through regular daily huddles, quarterly meetings, and weekly business reviews with the C-suite.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Bhavana
01What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I've ever received actually came from my husband, believe it or not. He always says that you should never care about your comp structure, especially when you're early in life. You should pick up the person who you admire, and you should try to work for them, even if it's for no compensation at all. You will learn a lot in the business, and that is eventually what will become your skill that people would want to pay for. I think eventually, I did not realize it in the beginning because I was chasing corporate, but eventually I realized that, yes, it is meaningful advice because it also helps develop, you know, personal identity over time. And therefore, I consider it one of the best advices I've ever received.
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