Ishit Vachhrajani

Ishit serves as CTO for AWS Marketing with a dual mandate: leading global technology, AI, and analytics while overseeing the Executives in Residence organization. His technology portfolio spans the entire MarTech ecosystem including marketing automation, channels, campaign, and content management platforms. He leads enterprise-wide AI innovation and adoption across marketing, while building sophisticated measurement and analytics frameworks that power AWS Marketing's performance. The Executives in Residence organization under his leadership comprises former customer CXOs who provide strategic guidance to AWS customers and internal leadership.

Before AWS, Ishit spent the majority of his career in technology leadership positions with companies like A+E Networks, NBCUniversal, and GE. As Chief Technology Officer at A+E Networks, he led a major transformation of the technology function moving to the cloud, breaking down silos, and reorganizing the team for agility. He led a complete revamp of the core revenue products including global content sales and advertising sales, successfully integrated several international acquisitions, implemented global financial and HR platforms, and built an industry-leading data analytics platform. Ishit and his team also created AI-driven products to solve tough challenges around content discovery and monetization. He now shares his experiences in driving transformation, and his lessons on what worked (and what didn’t), with AWS customers to help them accelerate their own journeys.

One frequent topic of conversation with customers is how to accelerate their transformation. Ishit encourages leaders to start now, start small, then pivot and make adjustments along the way. Ishit believes that people learn best by doing, not by planning. While planning is important, overthinking can stand in the way of progress. He also advises customers that adopting cloud is not an end goal in and of itself. Cloud goals need to be based around the outcomes that cloud enables—like launching a new product or reaching customers in a new way.

Ishit is passionate about building high-performing teams, mentoring, and growing the next generation of leaders. He encourages executive teams to focus on their people. Succeeding at large transformational efforts requires building teams with a diversity of ideas and skills that can adapt with the ever-evolving customer needs.

Equipping new leaders goes beyond skills—it’s also about the right mindset. For example, Ishit has observed (in himself and others) that one of the biggest barriers to progress is indecision. To get past that barrier, and overcome fears of the unfamiliar, he advises leaders to be decisive and to recognize the difference between decisions that can be easily reversed and those that can’t.

Outside of work, Ishit and his family share a passion for discovering new places, often hitting the road on the weekends and determining their destination as they go along. He applies the same principle of discovering the unknown to his cooking, noting that his favorite recipe is, “Whatever I have never made before.”