‘My Leadership Style Is Like Rahul Dravid's, Sridhar Vembu Is Like Virender Sehwag’: Zoho CEO Shailesh Kumar Davey

After Sridhar Vembu stepped down as Zoho Corporation CEO to take on the role of chief scientist a month back, Shailesh Kumar Davey is the company’s new chief executive.

Interestingly, Zoho insiders call Davey’s methodical and team-oriented style “Dravidian” leadership comparing the new boss’s steady and disciplined approach with India’s former cricket captain, Rahul Dravid.

Shailesh Kumar Davey - Rahul Dravid of Zoho

In an interview with Moneycontrol, Davey said, "My leadership style is like Rahul Dravid — more structured and playing with the team. Sridhar (Vembu) is like (Virender) Sehwag— taking more risks and playing aggressively.”

The Zoho CEO said the company will continue its "slow and steady" growth strategy, unlike other heavily funded tech firms.

"We are willing to take the long-term bet, get the technology stack built from the ground up, and train our people,” he added.

The Indian tech company is now working on building its models and conducting R&D on Indic language AI models which will be rolled out soon.

"We are training a model from scratch or a smaller size model which can become big. Initially, we are looking at numbers like 7 billion models, 32 billion models, going up to the 70 plus kind of numbers," Davey shared.

He also said that Zoho is still in the research phase, trying to solve linguistic challenges before fully launching an Indic LLM.

Speaking about AI investments, Davey said in the interview, “CapEx, talent, and data curation—these are the three areas where a lot of money is spent. We’ve already invested $20 million in AI CapEx, mainly for GPUs and infrastructure."

He further claimed the firm is witnessing around 30 per cent improvements because of AI.

"There are a lot of claims out there — on Twitter, somebody says 90 percent of the workforce is not needed anymore. We are not seeing anything like that...We surely are seeing efficiency gains but I would say it’s too early. Right now, we are seeing some 10 to 30 percent improvements," Zoho CEO remarked.

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