Christian & Timbers is pleased to announce the placement of Ashok Paranjothi as Senior Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Acosta Group. The appointment marks a significant step in Acosta's enterprise AI agenda, bringing to the organization a leader with more than two decades of experience building and scaling AI and digital transformation programs at global scale.
The Role and the Mandate
Ashok joins Acosta Group with a clear and substantial mandate: lead the enterprise AI strategy, establish a pragmatic AI Center of Excellence, and embed AI as a governed, scalable capability across the full breadth of the organization. His accountability spans governance, operating model design, platform strategy, and the translation of AI innovation into measurable business outcomes across operations, finance, customer support, and go-to-market functions.
This is not a theoretical role. Acosta Group operates at genuine enterprise scale, with more than 60,000 associates across five continents, serving consumer packaged goods companies and retailers across the United States, Canada, and Europe. The organization brings together Acosta, ActionLink, CORE Foodservice, CROSSMARK, Mosaic, Premium Retail Services, and Product Connections, delivering end-to-end solutions from headquarter sales to omnichannel retail, integrated marketing, and advanced data and insights. Deploying AI responsibly and at speed across an organization of this complexity demands a leader who understands both sides of the equation: the technical architecture required to build scalable platforms and the organizational discipline required to make them perform.
A Career Built on Enterprise AI Transformation
Ashok brings to this role a career defined by exactly that combination. He spent more than two decades at PepsiCo, most recently serving as Vice President, AI for Work and Global Head of Digital Workplace Services, where he led large-scale AI and digital transformation across the global workplace. His accountability in that role was end-to-end: strategy, architecture, engineering, operations, and governance, with a consistent emphasis on measurable business impact.
Prior to leading the AI for Work function, Ashok built deep experience across digital workplace services at PepsiCo, developing an understanding of how large, complex organizations adopt technology, where friction occurs, and how governance structures need to be designed to enable rather than obstruct innovation. That institutional knowledge, accumulated over two decades at one of the world's largest consumer goods companies, is a rare and valuable foundation for the work ahead at Acosta.
His philosophy on AI reflects the maturity of someone who has operated at this level for years. He approaches AI as a governed, enterprise-ready capability, one that augments decision-making, accelerates execution, and scales responsibly across complex organizations. The emphasis is on balance: between innovation and discipline, between speed and security, between ambition and responsible deployment. This is not someone chasing AI for its own sake. It is a leader focused on durable enterprise value.
Why This Appointment Matters for Acosta
Acosta Group is at an inflection point. The organization has grown significantly, most recently through the acquisition of CROSSMARK and Product Connections, which brought its associate base past 60,000 and extended its capabilities across additional retail and consumer segments. As the organization scales, the need to embed intelligent, AI-enabled capabilities across its workflows becomes both more pressing and more complex.
The establishment of an AI Center of Excellence under Ashok's leadership signals a deliberate and structured approach to AI adoption. Rather than deploying AI as a series of disconnected point solutions, Acosta is building the organizational infrastructure to make AI a durable, cross-functional capability. That approach, grounded in governance and operating model design from the outset, reflects the kind of strategic thinking required to generate real ROI from enterprise AI at scale.
For Acosta's clients, which include some of the largest consumer packaged goods companies and retailers in the world, this investment in enterprise AI leadership creates direct value. Better data, faster insight, smarter workflow execution, and more responsive go-to-market capabilities are all downstream benefits of getting AI infrastructure right at the organizational level.
A Strong Placement for a Critical Moment
Christian & Timbers is proud to have supported this search and to have placed a leader of Ashok's caliber in a role of this strategic importance. The intersection of enterprise AI leadership and large-scale organizational complexity is one of the most demanding talent markets in technology today, and Ashok's profile represents the best of what is available in that space.
Congratulations to Ashok Paranjothi and the Acosta Group leadership team on this appointment.