Devika Bulchandani

About

“What is it that you want to do with your career?” When Harris Diamond, then CEO of McCann, asked Devika Bulchandani this question in 2014, she worried that she might be getting fired. Instead, it marked the beginning of something big. “Either I got fired or I’m getting a big promotion. I don’t know which one it is because it was an awkward conversation,” Bulchandani recalls telling her husband, Ashwin, at the time. What followed was a rigorous cycle of internal switches, with her taking on different hats every three months. “He would always tell me, ‘You’re going to run something one day, and I’m going to make sure you’re ready.’ And I owe him,” she says. Eight years later, Diamond’s words proved prophetic when Bulchandani’s new boss Mark Read, CEO of WPP, asked her to lead the global Ogilvy team. Now, after three years as Global CEO of the world’s No. 1 creative agency, she has built an empire spanning 93 countries. More importantly, revenue across regions has remained stable and consistent over the years, minimising dependence on specific economies. Born in Punjab’s Amritsar, Bulchandani moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) with her parents at 10. Being told that boys ran the family business while girls were married off only fuelled her hunger to go abroad. “It was the best motivation I ever had in my life. [I was] so glad that [I] was told I couldn’t do something because I was a girl, because it created this hunger,” says Bulchandani, the only person in her immediate family to have settled abroad. She calls her advertising career “the happiest accident of her life”. Drawn to the field, she saw clients as family. But to excel, she soon realised, she had to embrace the culture around her. “I realised that understanding products alone wouldn’t make me better at my job, but embracing the culture would.” Bulchandani is now gearing up for the AI wave. “Our focus is on redefining our business through AI—not replacing human imagination,” she says.