1. As a feature in Ortus Club’s Notes series, you recently talked about how field marketing has moved beyond event execution to customer understanding. As the Associate Director of Kyndryl’s Field Marketing, how can marketing teams meet customers in the moment while building lasting relationships?
When we talk about “meeting customers in the moment”, it should be about focus with purpose- understanding where the customer is in their journey, what pressures they’re under, and how they prefer to engage. I don’t mean chasing every new trend or flooding inboxes with generic campaigns. What I mean is listening more than talking and being consistent.
Relationships don’t form through one high-profile event. They build over months and years of showing up with substance, not noise.
By working closely with the leadership, sales, and delivery teams, we can achieve this through a one-to-one executive roundtable, a follow-up that exactly reflects what was said in a meeting, or an insight delivered at the right time. What matters isn’t the format- it’s the ability to connect relevance to the customer’s immediate challenges.
In my role, I’ve observed that the strongest relationships are formed when marketing stops behaving like a broadcast function and starts engaging in a conversation.
2. It’s a challenge to maintain stakeholder engagement and sustain the same momentum across extended decision-making cycles. Economic conditions change midstream, and millions get burned. Can you help our readers grasp how coordinated efforts, organization-wide and on the ground, help vamp marketing efforts?
The reality is that in long buying cycles, things go quiet.
Economic headwinds arise, priorities shift, and suddenly, the deals or relationships that once felt close drift into the background. That’s where coordinated effort makes all the difference. When everyone across the organization is aligned, the marketing efforts feel more like one steady rhythm that customers can trust and provides meaningful engagements that prove we understand their shifting context.
That level of coordination doesn’t merely preserve momentum but also builds resilience. It tells the world: we’re steady, even if the market isn’t. And in my view, the discipline of showing up, aligned, over and over again, is what earns confidence.
3. Kyndryl manages critical business systems and applications, where downtime incurs millions of US dollars in costs. And with customers wary of such disruptions, it’s crucial to convey the stakes involved without creating fear. What do you think is the best way forward, especially to differentiate from competitors who claim the same reliability?
The stakes are high when downtime has a direct impact on lives, operations, or economies.
Customers don’t want dramatic warnings. They want to know: have you done this before, at scale, under pressure? They need to be assured that someone is watching their systems with the same urgency they feel.
At Kyndryl, we’ve built our role around that quiet responsibility. It’s decades of running the systems that power airlines, financial markets, and hospitals. We focus on transparency, i.e., showing customers how we monitor, anticipate, and prevent disruption before it happens. This builds trust in a way that fear-based messaging never could.
Our role is not just about managing systems; it’s about ensuring the continuity of operations and the safety of the services that people rely on every day.
The best way forward is to speak to outcomes, not hypotheticals. Reliability isn’t a slogan but the peace of mind that comes from knowing your systems are protected by people who do this at scale, every single day.
4. The majority of businesses remain unsure where and how to position their mainframe within their overall IT strategy. However, Kyndryl’s platforms, Bridge and Vital, are actively reshaping this half-baked approach to digital transformation. What do you think sets Kyndryl apart?
Indeed, many businesses still hesitate when it comes to the mainframe. Our own Kyndryl Mainframe Modernization Report showed that uncertainty about how to position it in a broader IT strategy is one of the most significant barriers to transformation.
What sets Kyndryl apart is our collaborative approach. We don’t see the mainframe as a legacy burden. With Kyndryl Bridge, our open integration platform, customers gain real-time visibility and control across their entire IT estate- including the mainframe. And with Kyndryl Vital, our collaborative co-creation approach, we bring business and IT leaders together to design solutions that align technology to actual outcomes. This approach ensures that customers are not just recipients of our services but active participants in their own digital transformation journey.
At Kyndryl, we believe in continuous improvement. It’s not about rip-and-replace. It’s about clarity, orchestration, and confidence. We help customers move from half-baked plans to a clear, integrated strategy that makes the mainframe an active driver of digital transformation.
With our ‘Run, Transform, Run‘ methodology for modernizing IT environments, Kyndryl can continuously run and manage customer IT estates while simultaneously transforming them for better efficiency and innovations before running the transformed environment again to ensure continuous ROI and business outcomes. This combination of insight, platforms, and partnership is what sets Kyndryl apart and ensures the future readiness of your IT estates.
5. Data formats used in legacy systems often prove incompatible with modern relational databases. This introduces a hitch in the design intended to secure the transfer of data, making businesses vulnerable to cyberattacks. What’s Kyndryl’s approach to positioning itself as a reliable steward of mainframe migration– one that outlines you as a legacy systems expert and a forward-thinking partner of cloud?
The real challenge with legacy data isn’t the technology itself; it’s the risk of breaking trust when systems don’t connect securely. If businesses can’t move data safely, they expose themselves not only to downtime but also to vulnerabilities that undermine their resilience and erode customer trust.
At Kyndryl, our role is to protect and strengthen that trust while enabling transformation. We’ve spent decades managing the world’s most critical systems where security and resiliency are simply non-negotiable.
For instance, with Arab National Bank in Saudi Arabia, we worked to reinforce cyber resiliency and modernize operations without disrupting the services their customers rely on every day. This involved a comprehensive review of their existing systems, the implementation of robust security measures, and a seamless migration to a more modern and security-rich IT environment.
What differentiates us is that we don’t do this in isolation. We bring the depth of our security and resiliency expertise together with the scale of our alliances. These alliances include hyperscalers such as Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud, which provide the infrastructure and tools that enable us to deliver the optimal solutions to our customers. This ecosystem approach ensures customers can modernize at their own pace, with the right balance of protection and innovation.
In practice, this means we’re not just a migration partner. We’re the backbone of continuity and architects of progress, securing the core while opening safe, practical pathways to the cloud and beyond.
6. Global branding is a continuum with absolute standardization on one end and total local adaptation on the other. As per your expertise, what truly hits the nail on the head when trying to remain locally relevant and maintain global brand consistency, especially within emerging markets?
Global branding only works if it’s rooted in a clear framework. But it is also flexible enough to adapt to local markets. Absolute standardization may look neat on a brand deck, but it falls flat when customers feel the message isn’t speaking their language- literally and culturally. On the other hand, total local adaptation risks diluting the brand to the point where it becomes unrecognizable.
From my perspective, the way forward is to anchor in global purpose while tailoring to local proof points. The sweet spot is to define non-negotiables at the worldwide level, such as values, tone of voice, and visual identity- and then allow local teams to adapt the expression to their specific context with relevant local examples. In emerging markets, where trust and relationships carry more weight, relevance often stems from how you present yourself in the moment: a message tailored to national priorities, a partnership with a local ecosystem, or even selecting the right platform where the audience is actually engaged.
In summary, consistency isn’t about sameness; it’s about coherence. If a customer in Riyadh or Dubai feels the brand “gets” their reality while still reflecting a global identity, then you’ve hit the nail on the head.
7. AI has already seeped into every crevice of the business landscape. Looking ahead at 2026, what are the top emerging trends in enterprise IT infrastructure that you can foresee impacting field marketing? How is Kyndryl gearing up to lead this change?
By 2026, I don’t think the conversation will be about “AI” as a shiny new thing. It will be about whether it actually delivers measurable value.
The companies that win will be those who combine innovation with trust, a measure that executives will care about, and less about big promises and more about proof. That’s where the messaging around infrastructure is heading- less about what’s possible, more about what’s proven in production.
I see three significant trends shaping the field.
First, performance becomes the product: executives won’t buy into AI hype, they’ll look for proof that systems deliver real outcomes at speed, with resilience and cost discipline built in. Second, regulation and sovereignty move center stage: where workloads run, how data is protected, and who’s accountable will be non-negotiable in markets like the GCC and beyond. And third, data freshness/quality becomes the new currency: if insights don’t arrive in time, the business impact is lost. So security-rich, governed data will be as critical as the models themselves.
Kyndryl is well placed to lead in that space. We’ve built our reputation on running the IT systems that keep your business running, which cannot fail. And we’re extending that same discipline into how AI and modern infrastructure are deployed. That means hardening the core, modernizing it.
Hence, it delivers real outcomes and solutions alongside hyperscalers and local partners, enabling customers to obtain designs that are both globally advanced and locally compliant. Most importantly, we don’t just talk about trust and resiliency; we show it in practice.
That’s the difference between a concept and a commitment, and it’s how we intend to help customers make AI truly work for their business.
Jessica Tavira Augusto, Associate Director – Field Marketing for EMEA Strategic Markets, Kyndryl
Jessica Tavira is a systems-minded strategist who helps organizations turn complexity into clarity and alignment. With a background in international business and certified by ABM ITSMA, she focuses on connecting purpose, performance, and people to drive growth with integrity and foresight.
Her work spans strategy, marketing, and cross-functional leadership across the Middle East and Africa, where she champions digital transformation and human-centered impact.
