Nokia Accelerates AI and Partnership Focus with New Leadership Appointments
The changes are made to strengthen the company’s capabilities in technology innovation, bring better support to business development, and create more focused organizations.
Nokia has announced leadership changes and the creation of two new organizations – a Technology and AI Organization and a Corporate Development Organization. The changes are made to strengthen the company’s capabilities in technology innovation, bring better support to business development, and create more focused organizations. The two new organizations will be effective 1 October 2025.
“To succeed in the AI supercycle, we need to focus on where we can drive differentiation through our core technologies, strengthen our capabilities in security and AI, and maximize the value of partnerships in our ecosystem. Having a dedicated Technology and AI organization will be an important asset for us and our customers. The new Corporate Development organization will accelerate our strategy evolution and execution, and support our businesses.”
– Justin Hotard, President and CEO, Nokia
The Technology and AI Organization will integrate Nokia Bell Labs, Technology and AI Leadership, and Group Security. This organization will be led by Pallavi Mahajan, previously Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Data Center and Artificial Intelligence Software at Intel. She has significant experience from networks, software and AI. Mahajan has held several executive roles, including leading Intel’s innovation at the intersection of networking, mobility, cloud, edge and AI. At HPE, she pioneered supercomputing programs and led the company’s hybrid cloud strategy. Earlier in her career at Juniper Networks, she spearheaded the development towards self-driving networks.
Corporate Development Organization will integrate Corporate Development, Strategic Partnerships, Mergers and Acquisitions, incubation activities and NGP Capital. This organization will be led by Konstanty Owczarek, who has broad experience in corporate development, investment banking, investing and strategy. He has held executive positions at HPE’s High Performance Compute, AI & Labs business, where he led strategy and business development, including the strategic pivot to Generative AI, as well as product life cycle management and other operating management. Before HPE he was Head of Strategy and Innovation for AIG’s Life and Retirement business.
“I am delighted to welcome Pallavi to Nokia. She is recognized for her rare combination of deep technical expertise, commercial acumen, and proven ability to scale multi-billion-dollar product portfolios at the intersection of AI, mobile, and edge computing. I am also excited to welcome Konstanty to Nokia. He brings with him a unique combination of expertise spanning strategy, corporate development and finance across a variety of industries.”
– Justin Hotard, President and CEO, Nokia
Nishant Batra has decided to step down as Chief Strategy and Technology Officer and from the Group Leadership Team on 30 September 2025.
“I would like to thank Nishant for his contribution to Nokia over the past five years. He led a transformation of Nokia Bell Labs, helped to position Nokia at the forefront of 6G, accelerated our digital and security transformation, and led the execution of our innovation strategy.”
– Justin Hotard, President and CEO, Nokia
