In this episode, Mala sits down with Kshama Swamy, VP of Customer Engineering and Success at CircleCI, for a practical conversation on customer engineering, AI adoption, enterprise software, and what it takes to build customer-centric teams at scale. Kshama’s career spans consulting, the Department of Defence, Cognos, IBM, Intapp, PAR, and now CircleCI. Across these roles, she has led support, services, customer success, and customer engineering teams across legal tech, restaurant tech, and developer infrastructure. In this conversation, Kshama shares how curiosity shaped her career pivots, why support is one of the best places to deeply understand a product, and how customer-facing teams can become more strategic by aligning to revenue, leading indicators, and shared accountability. Mala and Kshama also explore how AI is changing customer success and support, where automation works, where human relationships still matter, and how leaders should evaluate the flood of new AI tools entering the market. The conversation also gets into a critical question for today’s AI era: are teams truly creating business outcomes, or are they just experimenting? Kshama brings a grounded view from CircleCI, where AI-generated code is increasing rapidly, but the real test is whether that code reaches production and delivers value. This episode is especially relevant for founders, customer success leaders, support leaders, product teams, SaaS operators, AI builders, and anyone selling into technical or enterprise customers. ________________________________________________________ Timestamps 00:00 – Introducing Kshama Swamy, VP of Customer Engineering at CircleCI 01:10 – Cognos, IBM, and the early path into customer success 02:08 – Moving from legal tech to restaurant tech with Punchh and PAR 02:33 – Joining CircleCI and entering the CI/CD developer infrastructure space 03:56 – How executives manage the learning curve in a new role 04:24 – Why support is the best place to understand product and customer pain 05:42 – Building customer-centric organizations through internal language and shared accountability 06:30 – Aligning support, success, product, marketing, and revenue 07:12 – How CircleCI uses AI across support, success, and services 09:00 – Evaluating AI tools and choosing vendors that can evolve with you 10:02 – Advice for founders selling into customer engineering leaders 11:26 – Navigating leadership, gender, and customer relationships 12:35 – AI-generated code, experimentation, and the production gap 13:45 – Why AI ROI will matter more than experimentation 15:10 – Upskilling teams through quarterly goals and hands-on AI implementation 16:10 – Measuring which AI experiments actually land ________________________________________________________ 🔗 Connect with Kshama Swamy → https://www.linkedin.com/in/kshamaswamy/ 🔗 Connect with Mala Ramakrishnan → https://www.linkedin.com/in/malaramakrishnan 🎧 Subscribe to the podcast Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnL3D6aI60R-cCvypFIkh4A Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1NIDE4cT5fuVjC3HaGbCDK?si=eoSTNmhqQNKHQl9d1Jx0UQ Apple Podcast: https://podcastsconnect.apple.com/my-podcasts/show/talking-to-the-leaders-of-ai-the-ceo-series-with-mala/22ad2bae-502b-4eb1-aa74-53bc79754db7 Visit our Website: https://malaramakrishnan.com | https://founderscreative.org #MalasPodcast #KshamaSwamy #CircleCI #CustomerEngineering #CustomerSuccess #CustomerSupport #AIAdoption #EnterpriseAI #CICD #DeveloperTools #SaaS #TechLeadership #WomenInTech #CustomerCentricity #AIinBusiness #B2BSaaS #ProductLeadership #EngineeringLeadership #FutureOfWork #StartupFounders