Prativa Mohapatra, the new Vice President and Managing Director for Adobe India, joins a growing band of women leaders in India who are grabbing the corner room in the highly competitive tech world. SAP Labs’ Sindhu Gangadharan, Cisco’s Daisy Chittilapilly and Nasscom’s Debjani Ghosh to name just a few.

Mohapatra, who joins Adobe from IBM where she served as Vice President of Digital Sales for APAC, has clocked over 25 years in the tech industry with experience in leading business transformation, scaling teams to meet hyper growth and evangelising Artificial Intelligence technology with customers. The computer science and engineering alumnus of NIT Rourkela and MBA from Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar, who was a keen badminton player in her college days, started her career at PwC India.

Ask her about the progression of women to leadership roles, and she admits that it has been undoubtedly slow. But, she says, “The optimist in me is drawn towards the wave of positive changes all around us. It excites me to observe increasing consciousness and acceptance, as more women are filling corporate leadership roles than ever before.”

As for the challenging task of leading a company in a world disrupted by the pandemic, she thinks Adobe is sitting in a good place now. “We are experiencing the largest health crisis of our generation, and during this time, digital experiences have played a vital role in making every aspect of our lives possible — including keeping families and co-workers connected, enabling new ways of learning, powering digital commerce and ensuring continuity of essential business operations,” she points out. “As we became a digital economy nearly overnight, I believe that Adobe’s mission to change the world through digital experiences has never been more relevant than it is today,” she says.