At Autodesk, Vikram Dutt is helping shape how the company enters new markets and builds its next phase of growth. As VP of Industry, Product and Emerging Business Marketing, he leads product marketing across every industry Autodesk serves, along with its content studio, community, and revenue marketing for emerging businesses. Growing at roughly twice the rate of the company, these nascent businesses are challenging Vikram’s team to introduce new products to new audiences and scale their stories with agility, impact, and relevance.
An engineer by training, Vikram holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in robotics and computer graphics. After beginning his career in engineering and product management, he earned his MBA from the Berkeley Haas School of Business and moved through roles spanning pricing, business models, strategy, and mergers and acquisitions.
Named to our Marketers to Watch list, Vikram shared his perspective on redesigning marketing workflows with AI, building a broader career foundation, and leading with empathy during periods of rapid change.
What book or podcast do you recommend to marketing leaders?
I do not consume many marketing-specific podcasts. I find more value at the intersection of business strategy and marketing. Masters of Scale is a favorite because it features real stories from founders and operators about what actually drives growth.
Outside of marketing, I am a big fan of Huberman Lab. It is grounded in science and evidence but explained in a way that makes it genuinely practical rather than purely academic. I appreciate how rigorous and nerdy it is while still being useful in everyday life. I am a big believer in pushing yourself in productive ways, and the podcast reinforces that mindset.
How are you and your team currently using AI?
We have gone all in on AI, driven by the need to do more with leaner teams and sharper prioritization. We started with the obvious use cases, including content drafting, research, and insights. The bigger shift, however, has been rethinking entire workflows rather than individual tasks.
Campaign development and product marketing drafts once required pulling information from multiple teams and sources one at a time. Now, we have built agents for competitive intelligence, market insights, and deep knowledge of specific audiences and industry segments.
As a result, our product marketers can reach a draft that is 90 percent complete much faster, freeing them to focus on judgment, strategy, and the final thinking that AI cannot provide.
What’s a prediction you have for marketing over the next few years?
Marketing is moving from a support function to a true revenue driver. Buyers are conducting far more research and evaluation on their own before ever speaking with sales. This means marketing’s fingerprints are on a much larger share of the buyer journey by the time sales becomes involved.
I expect this shift to accelerate in both product-led growth models and sales-led motions. Marketing will continue moving closer to bringing products to market and driving revenue outcomes, rather than focusing only on awareness and pipeline generation. That shift is exciting and empowering for marketers who embrace it.
What’s the most innovative or exciting project you’ve worked on recently?
Defining why Autodesk has a durable and sustainable advantage in an AI-native world has been one of the most enjoyable projects I have worked on.
As frontier models become more sophisticated, every software company must answer why its workflows and products will not simply be subsumed by AI. Helping define Autodesk’s answer, grounded in our domain expertise, data, and experience, has had a tremendous impact on how we position the company within the broader AI narrative.
What’s the most pressing business challenge you’ve faced in the last year and what have you done to solve it?
Autodesk has traditionally been strongest on the design side. Over the past few years, we have expanded into “Make” through construction and manufacturing. These are newer businesses for us, with new audiences, new products, and fierce competition.
The challenge has been scaling these businesses, which are growing at roughly twice the rate of the company, with agility, impact, and relevance while avoiding the growing pains that typically accompany that pace.
The real unlock is not the strategy alone. It is ensuring that every marketer and seller across the company is equipped to tell the story consistently and confidently. Solving that challenge has been one of the most rewarding parts of the past year.
What leadership muscle is most important for marketers to exercise?
Empathy. First, marketers must have empathy for the customer by remaining grounded in where customers are, understanding the challenges and pressures they face, and maintaining an audience-first mindset in everything we do.
Equally important right now is empathy for our own teams. Marketing is a language-intensive profession, which means AI is having an enormous impact on the work. That creates real uncertainty for people. Good leaders make space for that uncertainty while still creating urgency around change.
Finding the right balance between empathy and momentum is one of the most important muscles marketing leaders need to exercise today.
What’s the most game-changing piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
Do not focus solely on vertical movement. Climbing the ladder within one function can limit both your long-term trajectory and your satisfaction along the way.
The advice that changed how I think about my career was to build a broader foundation before building height and to embrace opportunities even when they do not fit the plan. I never set out to lead a product and revenue marketing team, but I moved across product management, pricing, business models, and strategy, saying yes whenever a new opportunity appeared.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Each detour taught me skills I did not know I would need. In hindsight, those experiences are exactly what made me a more effective marketer, particularly for technical products like Autodesk’s. They have also made the journey itself far more satisfying.
What gives you energy and inspiration outside of work?
My wife and children are my greatest sources of energy and inspiration, along with my golden retriever, Oski, of course.
I also love designing and making things myself. I am always in the middle of a project, whether it is a home addition or a remodel. There is something deeply rewarding about the entire process, from developing the concept and creating the design to building it. It is a meaningful personal parallel to the work I get to do professionally.
Marketers to Watch is a recognition series to spotlight highly innovative and forward-thinking marketing leaders in the community. If you have someone you’d like to nominate for the series, apply here.
