Her Story
About Zainab
I joined Genpact in June as a consultant under banking and capital markets, and after doing well, our CTO reached out to me in September to join his office as a Programs and Strategy Analyst. In this role, I have three core responsibilities that all center around making our CTO's life easy. First, I manage our health of the business, overseeing and helping our leaders coordinate across finance metrics, sales, client delivery, and resource management, then turning those numbers into qualitative insights that allow for actions to be taken on a week-to-week basis. Second, I contribute to thought leadership - I had the opportunity to help write our first primary research paper called 'Autonomy by Design' that we published in January, and my role now involves taking insights I see in our market and from our clients and what my boss and his counterparts are talking about, and putting them into research. Third, I focus on innovation by taking the insights from our thought leadership and making them into reality for our clients. For example, from Autonomy by Design, we talked about the idea of an autonomous enterprise and how AI can help boost not just productivity but personal growth in the workplace by handling mundane tasks so humans can focus on strategic, judgment-intensive tasks. We decided to create a capability in Genpact called Agentic Advisory, and I'm now helping set up that capability with its different tools, the team, and the day-to-day operations of building a capability from the ground up. Before joining Genpact full-time, I had internship experience starting my freshman year as a human resource intern at Genpact, then my sophomore year as a data analytics research intern at the World Bank, and junior and senior year summers as a business strategy and insights intern at Zurich North America.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Zainab
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to having people who believed in me before I believed in myself, and being pushed outside my comfort zone. My boss Sanjeev gave me the opportunity to help write our Autonomy by Design paper even though I was scared and didn't necessarily believe I could do it myself. But he believed in me, and that push allowed me to grow in ways I didn't expect. When I told him 'I can't believe I did that,' he said 'well, why do you think I let you do it? I knew you could do it.' That experience opened my eyes to a new world of professionalism. I'm also very competitive and a little hard on myself, but that helps me get to where I am today. Achieving things allows me to take a step back and believe that I can do it further and further. When my boss asked what my hope was for this role, I told him 'I want you to make me a CEO,' and he said 'alright, let's do it.' Since then, I've just been thrown into the jungle, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I also think my volunteer work fostering animals from a very young age prepped me for life in ways I didn't realize - the emotional growth it allowed me to access was exponential, and I genuinely attribute a lot of the things I do today and the way I react to certain situations to that experience.
02What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
The values most important to me are staying human in business and recognizing that artificial intelligence doesn't exist without human intuition. I say this all the time: business doesn't have to be robotic. We spend like 90% of our time with our coworkers, so it's okay to have discussions where you disagree, and it's okay to be human in the business world. In a world where AI is so prominent, I always say that artificial intelligence is amazing, it's immaculate, but it doesn't exist without human intuition. I genuinely believe that, and whatever role I end up in, that's the philosophy I would like to continue to follow. I also find it extremely important to look back and know that the opportunities I've gotten are directly connected to the fact that women before me fought against the grain so much harder than I could ever imagine. Being part of a community of people who have worked their butts off to be where they are, from all walks of life, is a very beautiful thing. As a first-gen immigrant whose parents came here when I was like 8, staying connected to my roots through my work with the Kashmiri community is super important to me. It allows me to preserve and promote our culture and identity while contributing to meaningful impact through strategic planning and governance.
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