I’m excited to welcome Akilesh Bapu to lead our Agents product at Hightouch.
Akilesh was previously co-founder & CEO of DeepScribe, a leading AI healthcare startup, deployed across 1,500+ medical organizations across the U.S., including the US Oncology Network, Ochsner Health, and more.
Now, Akilesh has joined Hightouch at an exciting moment to help us build the future of marketing.
At a personal level, Akilesh and I have known each other for more than a decade, first meeting at hackathons before he founded DeepScribe in 2017. At a company level, I see hiring Akilesh as a keystone moment in our transformation of Hightouch into an AI-first company.
2025 has been a momentous year at Hightouch so far — our revenues are growing 100%+ YoY, we’ve been expanding our team globally, and we’ve been more committed to innovation than ever.
My cofounders and I have been spending dozens of hours per week with customers, reading about AI late into the nights, and hacking with our product team on LLM-based agents that we believe will allow marketers to move faster and be more strategic than ever. It’s honestly been a lot of fun.
Last year, we launched our first AI product — AI Decisioning, which uses reinforcement learning to decide what content & offers go to which customers on a 1:1 basis. While AI Decisioning is growing rapidly, it’s only the first inning of agentic marketing for Hightouch.
After seeing the early success of how our Agents could solve even wider marketing use-cases for customers, we felt it was time to beef up the team. We couldn’t be more excited to have Akilesh leading and accelerating our progress in this new product area. His past experience as an entrepreneur building in AI, combined with his endless curiosity and hunger, is a rare asset for any company.
Stay tuned for more Agent launches very soon.
In the meantime, watch or read my conversation with Akilesh on why he chose to join Hightouch, what he thinks will define the long-term winners in the AI world, and thoughts on the future of marketing.
PS: If this sounds exciting, we’re hiring across all teams. Check out our careers page.
Why did you choose Hightouch?
Tejas: Deciding what company to join next is a really big decision — especially after you started a company in the past, you probably had a totally different perspective than you would've had back in college.
Tejas: Tell me about the factors that were important to you when deciding what to do next.
Akilesh: I spent a lot of time thinking about it. There were three main things.
The first was the transformative impact I could have on an industry. With DeepScribe, before we started, AI wasn’t even part of the conversation in healthcare technology. Now, AI is part of patient conversations across the U.S.
When I think about Hightouch, I believe marketing will look completely different in the next five years — and Hightouch is well-positioned to be part of that.
The second factor was the divide between foundation model companies and application companies. It’s clear that foundation models are going to commoditize, but it’s still unclear which application companies will win. The winners will be those with a unique data advantage — and Hightouch has that.
The third factor was the team. I wanted to bet on a team that could execute, and Hightouch had that edge.
Why is context so important in AI?
Tejas: There’s so much talk about moats in AI — which companies will disappear as foundation models get better, and which will stick around. What is a unique advantage you can build as a startup? What made Hightouch stand out there?
Akilesh: AI is only as good as the context you give it. People are starting to notice that the data on the internet is becoming sparse, which means it’s not improving model performance as much anymore. The real question is: what net-new data can you provide?
Hightouch is uniquely positioned because it’s one of the very few companies that integrates directly with your first-party data — other than infrastructure players like Snowflake or AWS.
That’s what makes Hightouch special: the ability to bring completely new, proprietary data into the equation. When you layer something like ChatGPT or Claude on top of that data, you get far more informed and personalized decisions.
Tejas: Yeah, and beyond data access, we also connect to every marketing application and channel — ads, websites, email — so we have context on what ideas you’ve tried, how campaigns performed, and where you can improve. That’s something you don’t get from a foundation model out of the box.
What makes this team different?
Tejas: You also mentioned that you wanted to join a winning team. How do you define that?
Akilesh: The first part is culture. In a world where many AI-first companies are working on similar ideas, speed and execution determine whether a company wins or loses.
Speed comes down to work ethic and ambition — the drive to keep going until the job is done. Those qualities weren’t always present in the other companies I considered, but they’re very clear at Hightouch.
We’ve had numerous late-night whiteboarding sessions at the office that really exemplify that drive.
The second part is growth — both rate and quality. Hightouch’s retention is off the charts. It’s rare to see a customer switch off of Hightouch.
And it’s impressive to see how fast Hightouch is growing with a core product that isn’t even an AI product. Plenty of companies have grown quickly off the LLM wave, but Hightouch’s growth is powered by core infrastructure — which means layering AI on top is going to be even more powerful.
How is AI going to transform marketing?
Tejas: How do you think the marketer’s workflow is going to change?
Akilesh: Execution speed is going to become everything. Marketing is only as good as the number of experiments you can run.
Right now, most marketers operate on quarterly or monthly cadences. Imagine a world where AI is constantly scanning user behavior, suggesting experiments daily, and not just suggesting them but running them for you — and iterating on them faster than ever.
That’s where it starts to get really exciting.
Tejas: Totally agree. Velocity is something we’ve been trying to solve since the beginning of Hightouch. We’ve made a lot of progress on the data side, but there are still so many problems that generative AI can uniquely unlock.
What is your favorite AI hack?
Tejas: Internally, the team knows you not just as the person leading the agents product but also as the productivity expert who tries every new AI tool on day one.
What’s your top hack or workflow that more people should be using?
Akilesh: My favorite fairly non-obvious hack is using Cursor or Claude Code, even if you’re not coding.
I feel like they’re so much better than web interfaces because they remember context across everything you do. They’re excellent at planning and handling multi-step workflows. I use them constantly for pretty much everything.
Tejas: Amazing. Really excited to have you on the team, and excited to share more publicly about everything we’ve been building with AI.
Akilesh: Thanks — excited to get started.
