In this episode of HFS Unfiltered Stories, Saurabh Gupta, President of Research and Advisory Services at HFS Research, sits down with Jay Desai, Head of IT Infrastructure Operations at JTI, for an eye-opening conversation on bridging the often-disconnected worlds of business, IT, and cybersecurity.

Jay shares hard-earned lessons from leading Global Business Services (GBS) through geopolitical shocks, shifting into IT and cyber leadership, and navigating the GenAI hype with realism and grit. This is a rare look into what it really takes to drive enterprise transformation, from aligning C-suite incentives to overcoming organizational resistance.

Whether you're scaling GenAI or building connected enterprise models, this conversation is full of truth bombs, leadership insights, and the kind of wisdom that only comes from being on both sides of the transformation divide.

Key discussion points:

• Breaking Functional Silos: Why IT, GBS, and cybersecurity leaders must adopt a shared vision to enable true enterprise-wide transformation.
• The Moral Hazard in Transformation: How misaligned ownership of costs vs. benefits creates friction between business and IT, and how to solve it.
• Why the 'OneOffice' Vision Still Eludes Us: The challenge of aligning incentives and OKRs across finance, IT, and HR departments.
• GenAI: From Hype to Reality: Why GenAI is stuck in POC purgatory, and what leaders must fix to unlock real value.
• Enterprise ‘Debts’ Beyond Technology: Cultural, process, and people debt are just as critical as technical debt in holding back transformation.
• Leadership Lessons in the AI Era: Jay’s real-world advice to aspiring leaders, embrace failure, earn trust, and be unapologetically authentic.

Tune in now to hear what it really takes to lead across silos—and why the future belongs to those who can connect dots others can't.