Venke Sharma to Deliver Keynote at AsiaStartupExpo Q3 2025: a practitioner’s roadmap for AI-driven marketing

When startups step onto the pitch stage, investors want more than a good idea,  they look for traction, clarity, and the ability to scale. At AsiaStartupExpo Q3 2025, keynote speaker Venke Sharma will show founders how to harness AI and customer insights to punch above their weight. Drawing on his leadership at Disney Star and Sprinklr, Sharma distills decades of global experience into actionable lessons tailored for early-stage companies.

AsiaStartupExpo Q3 2025 will feature Venke Sharma, a senior marketing and product strategy leader who closely works in the industry of brand, data and AI. Sharma joins the Expo as keynote speaker on September 19, 2025, bringing more than two decades of experience leading digital transformation initiatives across agencies, broadcasters and enterprise technology platforms. His session will focus on practical ways startups can use AI and social intelligence to accelerate growth, improve customer engagement, and build resilient brands.

A career built on practical innovation

Venke Sharma’s career blends creative marketing, commercial rigour and product strategy. After leadership roles at global agencies such as Tribal DDB and Leo Burnett, and landmark work on campaigns that helped define India’s early digital era, he spent eleven years at Disney Star where he built The Distillery, a data-and-insights capability that applied social intelligence to programming and marketing across the Asia-Pacific. That initiative won international recognition and helped Disney Star evolve how it planned content and commercial strategies. BW People

In 2024 Sharma moved to Sprinklr as Global Head of Product Strategy for Sprinklr Insights, where he led product strategy work around customer intelligence and the integration of AI capabilities into enterprise social insights. Under his leadership Sprinklr’s Insights offering earned prominent industry recognition, and he left the company in April 2025 after guiding several AI-centred product initiatives. ETBrandEquity.com+1

Practitioner + scholar: research that informs practice

What sets Sharma apart is that his practitioner experience is reinforced by serious academic work. He recently completed a PhD in Management Studies at the University of Mumbai, researching how social media behaviour maps to television viewership. That study combined large-scale primary surveys across multiple markets with AI-enabled analysis of millions of social interactions, producing actionable findings about platform effectiveness, timing, and audience segmentation. Key takeaways he highlights include the outsized role of platforms such as YouTube and WhatsApp in driving intent, the stronger responsiveness of non-metro audiences, and the surprising resilience of viewership to negative social sentiment. 

Thought leadership and influence

Sharma has also authored The Indestructible Brand: Crisis Management in the Age of Social Media, a practical handbook on brand resilience and crisis communications in today’s always-on environment. His writing and speaking sit alongside an active practice: he advises AI startups, runs AI-marketing workshops, and teaches marketing and consumer-insight courses at business schools, a mix that keeps his work directly applicable to founders and product teams. SAGE Knowledge+1

What Sharma will cover and why it matters for startups

Sharma’s keynote will be tactical and outcome-oriented. Expect three interlocking threads:

Data to action: how to turn customer and social signals into measurable marketing responses (campaign triggers, personalization rules, and ROI measurement). This is about building practical feedback loops that improve acquisition and retention.

For startup founders, the value is immediate: the keynote will provide frameworks to prioritize growth experiments, judge vendor/product fit for AI tooling, and structure data collection so it becomes an asset rather than a cost. For investors and ecosystem partners, Sharma’s talk will surface practical signals to evaluate whether a startup’s marketing approach is defensible, scalable and capital-efficient.

How this ties into AsiaStartupExpo’s mission

AsiaStartupExpo Q3 is designed as a curated, outcome-focused forum where founders present concise, investor-ready pitches and receive structured feedback. Adding a keynote from a leader who has repeatedly translated social and customer data into commercial outcomes raises the event’s practical value: founders receive both investor attention and operational guidance in one session. This alignment, investor access plus concrete go-to-market counsel — is what makes the Expo a useful short-cut for startups trying to compress months of outreach into a single high-impact day.

A note on format and follow-up

Venke’s session will be followed by a live pitch showcase where selected startups present to a panel of investors and receive feedback. Attendees should prepare to use the keynote concepts as lenses for evaluating pitches: look for founders who demonstrate data-driven customer acquisition, quick feedback loops, and a clear path to scaling marketing ROI. After the Expo, AsiaTechDaily and partners will publish follow-up material summarizing key lessons, practical checklists, and curated interviews so the learning continues beyond the session.

About Venke Sharma: a marketing and AI practitioner, author and educator with a portfolio of agency work, enterprise product leadership and academic research. He has advised startups and conducted workshops that help teams adopt AI responsibly and effectively. (For background and media enquiries, see Venke’s profile and selected commentary on his personal site and professional posts.) venkesharma.com

AsiaStartupExpo Q3 2025 will be held virtually on September 19, 2025 (1:00 PM – 3:30 PM SGT) and brings together curated startups and investors across AI, SaaS, consumer tech and sustainability. For registration and program details visit the event page.