I'm Koushal Dutt.

From banking to cloud

I started at HSBC in India in 2002, in collections and then contact-centre operations. Over the next twelve years I moved into project and change delivery across India, Dubai and Hong Kong: FX services, back-office reengineering, and internet banking rollouts across eight Middle Eastern countries.

In 2014 I joined First Gulf Bank in Abu Dhabi, which merged with NBAD in 2017 to form First Abu Dhabi Bank. I worked on that post-merger integration, ran the enterprise PMO, and finally headed enterprise and group projects in a $150M technology portfolio, including cloud modernization and an IBM to AWS migration.

In 2022 I joined AWS as a Senior Customer Solutions Manager, working with enterprise customers on cloud adoption. The full career history has the details.

What I write about

Transformation as it is actually lived: governance, risk and people as much as technology. Cloud adoption, especially in regulated industries. And, increasingly, building with AI. I'm not a career developer; the systems I build now, including this site, are built with AI. I try to write about the trade-offs and the failures, not just the results.

Outside work

You'll find me gaming on my PS5 (at least an hour a day) or reading. I aim for 50 books a year, an ambitious goal I'm still working towards; the books page tracks it.

Why “Invent and Simplify”?

The name comes from one of Amazon's Leadership Principles. It describes what I try to do here: take complicated topics and make them simpler to act on.

I work for AWS. Opinions here are my own and do not represent my employer.