"Don't Mount a Jet Engine on a Wooden Cart": A Tech Strategist on Digital Transformation

Arzu Kurgan graduated from the Master’s programme ‘Science, Technology and Innovation Management and Policy’ in 2022. Her expertise and professional background are inherently built at the intersection of advanced technology, innovation and business strategy, and currently she serves as a Tech Strategy Lead at Sber.

© Kurgan Arzu

Looking back at your time in the Master’s Programme in ‘Science, Technology and Innovation Management and Policy’, what aspects of the programme influenced your professional development the most?

The programme acted as the perfect missing link between my research background and corporate reality. Coming from a systems engineering and applied research environment at Skoltech and Stanford, I understood complex architectures, but HSE taught me how to commercialize that knowledge. The curriculum gave me the precise tools to evaluate a technological trend not just as an engineering feat, but as a viable business strategy. It shifted my mindset from ''how do we build this innovation?'' to ''how do we properly manage, implement, and turn this innovation into a real-world market product?''

 

Your career focuses on technology strategy, digital transformation, and market expansion. How did your professional journey lead you to this field?

My career bridges systems engineering, applied research, and innovation management. I started with a background in process automation and advanced manufacturing at Skoltech, later conducting deep research in complex tech architectures at Skoltech and Stanford.

Driven to understand the business side of innovation, I completed my Master’s at HSE's ISSEK while launching my career in strategic consulting at Accenture. There, I designed cross-industry strategies for banking, retail, and oil & gas, learning how to align tech capabilities with corporate goals.

After building a strong portfolio of multi-industry transformations, I wanted to drive change from the inside. This desire to shape internal strategy for a major tech leader is exactly what motivated me to join Sber.

 

Could you tell us more about your current role at Sber?

As a Tech Strategy Lead, my key responsibilities center around shaping the company's technological development strategy, which encompasses both the creation of internal solutions for the Bank and the development of external market products. I am primarily focused on steering promising, innovative domains and advanced research (for instance such as NextGenAI). My core objective here is acting as the strategic link for research initiatives and R&D teams, helping them successfully translate their scientific breakthroughs and emerging innovations into viable, real-world products.

 

What motivates you the most in your professional work today?

What motivates me most is acting as the bridge that transforms complex scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations into real, functional products.

In deep tech and fields like NextGenAI, incredible research often remains confined to lab environments or theoretical papers. I find it incredibly fulfilling to use my strategic toolkit to uncover the business logic, build the scaling pathway, and bring that innovation into enterprise-wide deployment.

Ultimately, I love seeing a brilliant idea survive the journey from a research notebook to a massive corporate reality.

You worked with both established companies and startups. What are the key differences when advising large corporations versus emerging businesses?

The biggest difference comes down to what keeps the CEO awake at night.In large enterprises, it’s risk and coordination. They already have the users and the money, but they struggle to connect R&D to actual business units. My job is to act as a bridge—ensuring a tech prototype integrates into core operations and drives ROI without disrupting daily business. Essentially, you are fighting inertia to optimize a massive, moving engine.

In startups, it’s time and survival. They have agility but zero margin for error, so we focus entirely on compression. That means testing assumptions with minimal capital before the cash runs out, and designing the architecture so it doesn't collapse the moment they sign their first massive enterprise client. Here, you are fighting gravity, building the wings while falling.

Ultimately, corporate advising is about safely steering a cruise liner, while startup advising is about launching a rocket ship that is already taking off.

 

Many companies today are undergoing digital transformation. In your experience, what are the biggest challenges organizations face when trying to integrate technology into their business strategy?

The biggest pitfall is treating transformation as a pure ‘tech project’ run by the IT department, rather than a rewiring of the entire business model.

In my experience, true integration falls apart due to three critical friction points:

1. The KPI Disconnect: Digital initiatives fail when tech metrics are detached from actual business value. If an engineering team builds an advanced network of autonomous AI agents with incredible speed and latency, but the business team isn't involved to define commercial guardrails or compliance, the tool can give unprofitable responses. It becomes an expensive 'tech monument' rather than a business driver.
2. Lack of Co-Creation: If operational teams aren't active co-creators from day one, user adoption plummets. For instance, an sophisticated predictive AI-tool built by data scientists in a vacuum will ignore real-world logistical nuances, causing frontline teams to reject it and revert to manual spreadsheets.
3. Culture and Inertia: Companies often invest heavily in software but ignore change management. If a bank automates its workflows, but operations officers don't trust the automated scoring, they will add artificial human bottlenecks to 'double-check' the system, destroying the platform's efficiency.

Ultimately, technology acts merely as leverage. If the underlying business logic or human trust is flawed, technology does not solve the problem.

 

In your work – developing technology and IT strategies – what are the most important factors that organizations should consider when adapting to rapid technological change?

When technology changes at breakneck speed, the biggest mistake companies make is chasing every shiny new trend. Instead of running after the hype, successful organizations focus on four simple principles:

• Upgrade the engine, not just the paint: adapting to the AI era requires a complete overhaul of corporate infrastructure, not just a superficial update. Trying to patch advanced AI tools onto rigid, outdated systems is a recipe for failure. To put it simply: you cannot mount a jet engine on a wooden cart and expect it to fly. Your corporate foundation must match the power of the technology you want to use.
• Don’t just copy the neighbors: many companies look at what their competitors are doing and try to duplicate it exactly. But technology doesn't work in a vacuum; it has to fit your specific business house. True strategy means filtering out the market noise, looking at your unique strengths, and tailoring technological breakthroughs to solve your specific goals.
• Fall in love with the problem, not the tech: we must avoid 'innovation for the sake of innovation.' Technology is just a tool, not the destination. Its true value is unlocked only when it solves a real, frustrating problem for an actual human being – whether that is your customer or your employee. If it doesn't make someone's life easier, it’s just an expensive 'tech monument.'

Bet on people, not just software: Technology changes much faster than corporate hiring or purchasing schedules. Your ultimate defense against being disrupted isn’t the expensive software you buy today – it is your team’s ability to learn, unlearn, and adapt tomorrow. A strategy fails when it stays trapped on a PowerPoint slide; it succeeds when your people are agile enough to live it in real time.

You have worked on market entry strategies and international projects. What lessons have you learned about scaling businesses in complex or rapidly evolving markets?

The single most critical lesson I have learned is that localization always beats copy-pasting. You cannot take a successful business model from a mature market and assume it will organically scale in a volatile environment.

Successful scaling requires an ecosystem mindset built on three pillars:

1. Map the Hidden Terrain: look below the surface. Understand regional regulations, assess local digital maturity, and uncover hidden infrastructure bottlenecks before making major investments.
2. Ditch the master plan for an MVP: enter the market with a lean, highly adaptable Minimum Viable Product. Launch quickly, listen to local users, and iterate based on real-time feedback.
3. Be a chameleon, not a bulldozer: don't try to force your way in with sheer size. The winners are the companies that can adapt their business logic to blend seamlessly into the local environment.

Ultimately, scaling abroad isn't about duplicating your past success—it's about learning how to reinvent it.

 

What emerging technologies or trends do you believe will shape business strategy in the next 5–10 years?

Over the next decade, we will shift from treating software as a passive tool to embracing software autonomy and intelligent agents. This transition is giving rise to what the tech industry calls the Agent Economy, where we will oversee networks of autonomous digital and physical entities. This future is built on three waves.

• Autonomous agents: we are moving past basic chatbots toward active execution networks. Gartner predicts that 40% of enterprise applications will soon embed task-specific AI agents, up from under 5% historically. To see this in action, look at everyday operations like B2B client onboarding: instead of human employees manually moving paperwork across departments, a master AI orchestrator automatically deploys specialized sub-agents. One agent verifies customer data and flags compliance issues, another drafts the customized contract based on legal frameworks, and a third synchronizes billing across accounting systems—handling the entire workflow end-to-end.
• Tangible autonomy – Physical AI:  the next frontier is Physical AI, where digital intelligence gains a physical body. We are shifting from AI that simply writes code or analyzes data to AI that interacts with the material world via smart robotics and autonomous transit. In factories and supply chains, these machines don’t just follow pre-programmed paths; they see, think, and adapt to unexpected real-world changes in real time. For businesses, strategy is no longer just about optimizing digital data pipelines—it’s about making physical operations move at the speed of software.
• Next-Gen Quantum Infrastructure: сonnecting billions of digital and physical agents will eventually create a computational traffic jam that classical computers cannot handle. While quantum infrastructure belongs to a longer-term horizon, forward-thinking enterprises aren't waiting for it to mature. Instead, they are actively researching and co-developing quantum algorithms and hardware through dedicated R&D labs and academic partnerships today. They understand that actively participating in these scientific breakthroughs right now is the only way to secure an insurmountable strategic advantage tomorrow.

 

In your opinion, what skills would be needed to successfully combine business strategy with technology and innovation?

The era of isolated tech and business units is dead; today's market demands 'hybrid professionals' who act as bilingual translators. To successfully bridge these two worlds, a strategist needs four core capabilities.

1. Technological literacy: you don't need to write code, but you must understand tech architectures, AI capabilities, and data structures. This knowledge is what allows you to look at a trending new technology, separate short-term hype from a foundational shift, and immediately identify where it can create a new revenue line or optimize an operation.
2. Advanced data literacy: true innovators look past surface-level dashboards. You need the ability to dive into complex datasets to diagnose operational bottlenecks, predict shifts, and uncover hidden customer pain points. This moves an organization away from intuition-led guessing and into predictable, data-driven strategy.
3. Systems and critical thinking: critical thinking allows you to objectively challenge market assumptions and evaluate technology risks before committing capital. Systems thinking ensures you never look at a software tool in isolation. Instead, you map out how a single digital change ripples across the entire corporate ecosystem – affecting workflows, compliance, and human behavior.
4. Targeted stakeholder communication: an innovative strategy is only as good as your ability to sell it. You must be able to translate abstract technical limitations into financial metrics (like ROI or market share) for executives, while seamlessly reframing those same corporate goals into clear, actionable requirements for engineering teams.

Ultimately, the most valuable skill isn't mastering business or technology individually—it is the rare ability to orchestrate the two simultaneously.

 

What advice would you give to current students or young professionals who want to build careers in technology strategy, innovation, or consulting?

If I could give just one piece of advice, it would be to master the art of translation. To succeed in tech strategy or consulting, you need to become a bilingual professional.

On one hand, you must understand the technical world – how data flows, how products are built, or how systems scale. On the other hand, you must master the business language of costs, revenues, and market share.

The most successful young professionals don't just pick one side. They build a 'T-shaped' profile: they develop deep expertise in one specific analytical tool or technology, while maintaining a broad, human-centric view of business and psychology.

Your highest value as a strategist isn’t just knowing how the technology works – it is your rare ability to deploy it against specific business goals, translate it into new strategic meanings, and explain exactly how it unlocks long-term value for the enterprise, its employees, and its customers.