Josh Everett on Building AI Into Zinnia India's Technology Stack
In a Q&A with CIO Now, Zinnia India CEO Josh Everett talks through how the company is treating AI less as a productivity add-on and more as infrastructure — starting with its own engineering organization. Zinnia is building an in-house coding-agent platform tuned to each team's tech stack, layered alongside tools like Claude Code and Cursor, with the goal of shortening delivery cycles rather than just making the same work marginally faster.
From Add-On to Agentic Operations
That same logic extends outward to customers: Everett describes AI's biggest opportunity in distribution as using data to match offerings to the customers they're actually relevant for, done with real governance rather than as an unchecked automation push. He also frames a shift in what technology leadership means day to day — less about incrementally speeding up old processes, more about deciding which manual hand-offs and workflow steps should be eliminated entirely, a model he calls agentic operations. On investment priorities, he points to Zinnia Live, Zahara, and Market Connect as where technology and data capability are being built out fastest, paired with a phased approach to modernization that keeps governance and compliance built in from the start rather than retrofitted.
A Global Innovation Capability
Asked about his priorities running Zinnia India, Everett pushes back on the idea of India as simply a delivery center, describing it instead as a global innovation capability with growing ownership over problems that affect Zinnia worldwide — and ties that back to a leadership philosophy about unlocking talent rather than just hiring it.
Great talent creates the value when people are put in a position to use their skills to the fullest.
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