There is a pattern that tends to show up in the careers of people who actually understand enterprise technology at its best. They deliver. They move on. They deliver again. And somewhere along the way, they start wondering whether any of that work is actually getting seen — not just inside their own company, but out in the world where it could actually matter.
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Sandeep Rachapudi has been living that pattern for more than two decades. He is an Engineering Project Manager at Tata Consultancy Services, one of the largest IT services organizations on the planet, and he has spent his career working with clients across fintech, cloud migration, digital transformation, and now the full shift into agentic AI. In 2025, he judged six BIG award programs — AI Excellence, Stratus, BIG Innovation, We Love Tech, Customer Service, and the SAMMY — which is also the definition of someone who takes IT industry recognition seriously.
So what actually pushed him toward judging? And what does a person with that kind of breadth see when they read through a nomination?
Recognition Does Not Happen by Accident in IT Services
Rachapudi describes the IT services world as one where you are basically always working for somebody else. You build something, you deliver it, you move on. Over two decades, he has worked with more than twenty clients — a new one roughly every six to twelve months. The work is real and the value is real, but the visibility tends to stay inside the client account.
“It sometimes gets difficult for employees to get themselves recognized,” he said. They get recognized within their unit or their org, yes, but how do you get recognized beyond the organization? How do you get noticed at an industry level? That question is actually what led him to start looking at judging opportunities in the first place.
He had tried presenting research papers at innovation seminars and had even been selected to present at an event in Bangalore — only to be relocated to the US before the date arrived. That kind of friction, he noted, is pretty common in IT. Moving across locations is just part of the deal. Physical presence requirements for recognition programs create barriers that simply do not fit the way people in this industry actually work.
What he found at BIG was different. The process was online, transparent, and accessible regardless of where he happened to be living. He sent over his profile and some research papers, explained what he had done, and asked if it looked useful. It did. That is more or less how it started.
What Rachapudi Actually Looks for When He Evaluates a Nomination
After evaluating hundreds of submissions across six programs, Rachapudi has a fairly clear sense of what separates the ones that stand out from the ones that do not.
The first thing he looks for is external links. A nomination that just has a lot of text is fine, but one that also links to a product portal, a media post, or a YouTube video explaining the work — that adds what he calls a “feel-good factor” for the judge. It shows some confidence in the work and makes it easier to verify.
The second thing, and arguably the more important one, is value. Not complexity. Value. He is very clear about this. “I look at what has been the outcome. How did it actually help the customer? What is the benefit they got out of implementing this complex technology?” A lot of nominations describe impressive implementations — identity access management in AWS, AI chatbots, supply chain tools — without ever quite landing the answer to that question. The ones that catch his attention are the ones that can say, simply and specifically, what the customer got out of it.
His favorite example is a nomination he still remembers even though he cannot recall the company name. They were using IT tools — computer monitoring systems across agricultural operations — to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by optimizing battery usage and irrigation timing. Simple data analytics. Real environmental outcome. The customer, in that case, was essentially nature itself. He found it memorable not because it was complicated but because it was so clear about what it was trying to do and why.
“Simple solutions give the maximum ROI,” Rachapudi said. “That’s my personal opinion. It tends to catch my attention — how simply this person was able to identify and bring value.”
How Judging Makes Him Better at His Day Job
According to Harvard Business Review research on cross-industry knowledge transfer, professionals who regularly engage with work outside their primary sector develop stronger pattern-recognition skills and more adaptive problem-solving approaches. Rachapudi is a good example of that principle in action.
He works mostly in fintech and regulated environments. Judging exposes him to law firms, car companies, chemical companies, agricultural technology startups, retail, healthcare — basically everything. He sees how AI and automation are being applied across sectors that his regular client work would never surface. And he takes that back.
“The knowledge I gain over here is something that I try to use as innovation,” he said. When he attends internal AI gatherings at his company, he shares perspectives from what he has seen in the judging process alongside what he has learned from his own project work. The two streams feed each other.
He also noted that he is currently registering for an agentic AI course — partly inspired by the ideas he has encountered through nominations. He is building his own AI agents on the side, informed by what he has seen people developing and submitting for awards. That is a fairly direct line from judging to applied learning to actual production work.
The Real Role of Recognition in a Career — and Why External Validation Changes Things
Rachapudi is thoughtful about the difference between internal and external recognition. Internal recognition — employee of the quarter, team shoutout, bonus — is expected. It happens more or less automatically if you are doing good work. But it does not travel. It does not tell anyone outside your organization that you are worth paying attention to.
External recognition, the kind that comes from a transparent, third-party program with real judges who are not AI, is something different. According to SHRM research on recognition and employee motivation, being recognized by credible outside sources creates a level of self-satisfaction that bonuses alone simply do not generate. Rachapudi put it simply: “What gives more satisfaction to anybody is being recognized.”
He also appreciated something specific about the BIG process — the human element. He noted that the Winner’s Circle podcast, where actual winners talk about what they built and why, adds legitimacy to the whole ecosystem. You can see who won. You can hear what they actually did. That transparency is not something you get from every recognition program out there.
He was also direct about something that most judges probably think but do not always say: a lot of award programs ask you to show up somewhere physically, sometimes with an entry fee, sometimes for a ceremony at a hotel or restaurant. Some of those are legitimate. Some make him a little less sure why he was invited. The online, accessible model that BIG uses fits how people in IT services actually live their lives — moving around constantly, working across time zones, not always able to commit to a specific city on a specific date.
And on the question of AI in the judging process itself — he noticed something. Every nomination reminder he receives from BIG includes a note that AI-generated responses are not accepted. Judges are human. Nominators should be too. He said he loved that reminder. It keeps the whole thing honest in a moment when it is genuinely hard to know what is human and what is not.
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