When Two Rams Walk Into a Podcast…

Ram Viswanathan is Global Head of Digital Employee Experience at Philips and if you want to understand what it actually takes to keep a global workforce productive in the hybrid era, this is your episode. Over coffee at the Philips Innovation Campus in Bangalore, the two Rams covered AI adoption, the generational office divide, Dutch decision-making, and why AI is basically oxygen now.

We didn't get confused. Much.

Ram Viswanathan on AI & Hybrid Work: What stood out

The generational office split is real — and it's backwards. Here's a counterintuitive one: at Philips, it's the younger generations who are less enthusiastic about coming to the office, not the older ones. Ram V's take? People who started their careers during Covid proved to themselves they could work remotely. So now they're asking the obvious question: why change what worked?

"They're questioning — I did this pretty well for two or three years. Why should I come to the office?"

Culture is invisible until you're in the room. Ram joined Philips in June 2020 — peak pandemic — and didn't meet a colleague in person for seven months. His reflection on that period was one of the most honest things said on this show in a while.

"Virtually it was very difficult to understand the culture. When you come into the office, the body language, the energy, that gives you a sense of the culture. That was missing."

Dutch vs. American decision-making. Having worked at GE and Cisco before Philips, Ram had a front-row seat to the contrast. US companies move fast and align later. Dutch companies deliberate (sometimes painfully), but once a decision is made, everyone's on board and execution is clean. Neither is wrong. Both will frustrate you at some point.

AI is oxygen. Ram has been using AI for about two years now and put it plainly: he can't work without it anymore. But he also flagged a personal downside worth thinking about: he's delegating less, because he knows he can just do things faster himself. A leadership trap hiding inside a productivity tool.

"I don't think I've seen any change like what I'm seeing with AI. This is as big as the internet was twenty-five years ago. Actually, it's way bigger than that."

The next frontier: AI that reads your email and books your flights. Ram mapped out where this is all heading: agentic AI that senses a travel need from your inbox and asks if it should book the ticket. Convenient? Absolutely. A little creepy? Also yes. His word, not mine.

One thing I'll keep thinking about

Ram pointed out that in the next few years, it's going to be genuinely difficult to tell what's real and what's AI-generated. We're already seeing the edges of it. That's the one place, he said, we really have to watch out for.

Hard to disagree.

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