“Servitization succeeds when the product becomes a subset of service.”

That is Umayal Palaniappan’s bold take on what it truly means for manufacturers to embrace a service-led business model.

Drawing on two decades of shaping services strategy in a global engineering company, Umayal joins Copperberg Conversations to unpack what it takes to move from product to outcome, and why AI should be seen as a helpful enabler rather than the headline. This episode explores the human, operational, and commercial shifts driving servitization, providing leaders with practical insights to scale with confidence.

Inside the Episode:

• Origins and Curiosity: How early influences and a systems-first mindset carried Umayal across continents and functions.

• AI as a Supporting Tool: Why AI is not a magic wand, where it supports smarter service models, and why adoption often falters without operating model change.

• Scaling Servitization: Clear routes to value, early KPI signals that pilots are ready to scale, and the role of modular offerings in balancing personalization with efficiency.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: The lived-experience empathy needed to bring engineering, service, and business teams together.

• Leading Change: What a penguin colony on a melting iceberg can teach us about urgency, alignment, and the humility to pilot, fail fast, and iterate.

Servitization is not won on strategy alone. As Umayal points out, it is clarity, collaboration, and trust that carry transformation across an organization. For leaders, the challenge is less about technology and more about bringing people along the journey.

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Time Stamps:

00:00 Introduction

02:12 Early Influences and Curiosity in Engineering

04:47 The Rise of Generative AI in Manufacturing

09:39 Understanding Servitization and AI's Role

12:56 Scaling Servitization Initiatives

15:38 Challenges in Cross-Functional Collaboration

17:48 Leading Change and Building Trust

20:35 Aligning Organizational Goals with Customer Value

27:17 Key Performance Indicators for Success

29:52 The Future of Servitization

33:06 Outro

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Stay Connected:

- Connect with Umayal Palaniappan on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/umayalpalaniappan/

- Join Copperberg’s online Business Manufacturing Community - https://bit.ly/3ZiYUoe

- Follow Copperberg:

→ LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/cpprbrgLi

→ YouTube - https://bit.ly/cpprbrgYT

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Music sourced from Pixabay - https://bit.ly/3XZ2KSE