Spotlight On: Abhi Uppal
Abhishek “Abhi” Uppal, is SVP & CIO at Callaway Golf Company, with experience spanning digital transformation, enterprise applications, analytics, automation, and GenAI. His career has included building global capability centers, leading large consulting teams, and driving technology initiatives focused on operational efficiency and innovation.
Connecting Through Community
Abhi initially became involved with Innovate@UCLA for the networking and peer benchmarking—the opportunity to be part of a trusted group of peers facing similar challenges, while also benefiting from the UCLA academic connection.
What he values most today is the depth of those relationships and the opportunities to engage with thought leadership, students, research, and emerging talent.
Leading Through Change
Looking back at his career, one experience that shaped Abhi’s approach to leadership was a large digital transformation initiative. It taught him an important lesson:
“The hardest part of change isn’t the technology — it’s the people.”
Getting buy-in from business units, managing resistance, and translating a technical vision into language executives and frontline teams could rally around taught Abhi that being a CIO means translating between technology and the business, not just being a technologist.
That lesson still shapes how he approaches transformation today.
Building Teams for Transformation
For Abhi, building strong teams starts with hiring for curiosity and adaptability over pure technical pedigree. Skills can be taught, but the ability to learn quickly and collaborate under ambiguity is harder to develop.
He also views psychological safety as an important part of team performance.
“Psychological safety is a performance lever, not a soft skill,” Abhi says. Teams that feel safe flagging a failing project early can help organizations address challenges before they become bigger problems.
When it comes to transformation at scale, Abhi has learned that successful rollouts depend on change management as much as technology. Even the right platform can fail if the organization is not brought along. Stakeholder alignment, communication, early wins, and thoughtful pacing all play a role in sustaining momentum.
Turning GenAI Into Business Value
Having worked across automation, enterprise applications, and analytics, Abhi sees GenAI as the next step in a technology foundation that organizations have been building over time.
He believes the real opportunity is not to treat GenAI as a standalone pilot, but to embed it into existing business processes and use it to augment knowledge work at scale. High-volume, judgment-heavy tasks can be supported by AI, allowing people to focus more on decisions rather than assembly.
For Abhi, the organizations making the most progress are not necessarily the ones chasing the flashiest demonstrations. They are the ones taking well-scoped workflows from pilot to production with real governance behind them.
There is also a cultural component. Building trust and AI literacy is essential to helping people adopt these tools rather than work around them.
“Treat GenAI as a change management problem with a technology component, not just an engineering one,” Abhi says.
Aligning Technology with the Business
Abhi’s approach to stakeholder alignment begins with a simple principle: start with shared business outcomes, not technology.
Stakeholders are more likely to align around goals such as reducing time to decision or improving customer onboarding than around a platform or roadmap. Technology becomes the means, not the argument.
He also believes stakeholders should be involved early in the process. People who feel heard while a strategy is being shaped are more likely to support it later. Transparency about trade-offs is equally important.
For Abhi, the qualities that matter most in a technology leader today come down to three things: the ability to translate technology into business value, the humility to listen and adapt as conditions change, and the courage to make decisions under uncertainty.
His recent recognition as a finalist for the SoCal ORBIE Award is meaningful to him not simply as a personal accolade, but as recognition of the team behind the work. As Abhi puts it, the recognition reflects the contributions of everyone who helped build and execute the strategy.
Ultimately, his perspective on leadership comes back to the same principle that has shaped his approach to transformation: technology matters, but people and judgment matter just as much.
We are proud to spotlight members of the Innovate@UCLA community and share the perspectives of leaders who continue to shape the future of technology and innovation.