Zoho CEO Shailesh Kumar Davey compares his steady leadership style to 'Rahul Dravid', calls Sridhar Vembu 'Virender Sehwag' of company

Zoho Corporation, one of India’s top tech companies, recently went through a major change in leadership. After Sridhar Vembu stepped down as the CEO to become the company’s chief scientist, Shailesh Kumar Davey has now taken over as the new CEO.

Inside the company, employees fondly describe Davey’s leadership style as “Dravidian” — comparing him to Rahul Dravid, the legendary former Indian cricket captain known for his calm, steady, and disciplined approach. Davey is believed to have a similar methodical and team-oriented leadership style, focusing on long-term progress rather than rushing into things.

Under his leadership, Zoho will continue following its slow and steady growth strategy. Unlike many tech companies that depend heavily on outside funding and fast expansion, Zoho prefers to build its technology from the ground up. Davey said, "We are willing to take the long-term bet, get the technology stack built from the ground up, and train our people."

One of the company’s current focuses is building AI models that work in Indian languages. Zoho is still in the research phase, trying to solve the linguistic challenges before launching its Indic Large Language Model (LLM). The company is training smaller models from scratch, aiming to scale them up to models of 7 billion, 32 billion, and eventually more than 70 billion parameters.

When it comes to investment in AI, Davey explained that Zoho has already spent USD 20 million on AI infrastructure, mainly on GPUs and other technology needs. He highlighted that most expenses in AI come from capital investments (CapEx), hiring talented people, and data curation.

Talking about the impact of AI on their work, Davey added that while there are claims online suggesting AI could replace up to 90 percent of the workforce, Zoho hasn’t seen that happening. Instead, the company is seeing around a 10 to 30 percent increase in efficiency, and they believe it’s still early to predict the full impact.