Q&A: Uma Thirugnanam of Aviva, AI and Software Development Awards finalist

'My focus has been on creating clarity, consistency, and confidence'

The AI and Software Development Awards showcase outstanding achievements and solutions in the fields of AI and software development from organisations, personalities and teams.

This year's winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Thursday, 14th May in London.

Uma Thirugnanam is a finalist in the Software Leader of the Year category.

Uma is Quality Engineering Architect Lead at Aviva, driving enterprise‑scale quality transformation across platform teams.

With experience working across the UK, France, Canada, and India, and a career spanning SAP development, CRM consulting, test automation, and enterprise QE architecture, she is a passionate people‑first leader, championing psychological safety, mentoring engineers, and influencing senior stakeholders to embed quality by design.

She leads the definition of modern QE standards, governance, and GenAI‑enabled testing alongside automation, digital transformation.

What is your/your company's proudest achievement over the past year?

While Aviva celebrates many successes (innovation events, apprenticeships, community presence, sustainability champions), none are amplified as prominently or as consistently as the company's overarching financial and strategic performance, which:

On a personal note, my proudest achievement was being named among the Computing Top 50 Tech Women Celebration 2025 role model which helps inspire women in technology.

What have been the biggest challenges of the year so far, and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that?

A major challenge this year has been strengthening our cyber resilience while modernising a complex, fragmented data estate. As cyber threats shift from opportunistic attacks to large‑scale operational disruption, we needed to redesign our approach - simplifying platforms, embedding security earlier in delivery, and accelerating real‑time visibility and automated controls. Our teams faced deeply siloed operational data, duplicated platforms, and inconsistent data quality, which slowed insight generation and added avoidable cost

By launching a multi‑year change programme, our people stepped up - hiring for critical architecture roles, improving data mastery, and driving adoption across business areas. Their collaboration and willingness to change long‑established ways of working have been pivotal to overcoming these challenges.

Why do events like Computing AI and Software Development Awards 2026 matter?

Events like the Computing AI and Software Development Awards 2026 play a vital role in separating genuine innovation from industry noise by offering trusted, third‑party validation in a rapidly growing and highly competitive AI landscape. They provide a national platform where rigorous expert evaluation highlights measurable impact, technical excellence, and meaningful business value.

For organisations like ours, these awards elevate credibility, increase visibility among influential decision‑makers, and showcase the teams and technologies driving real transformation. They also help shape industry standards by signalling what “good” looks like in areas such as automation, responsible AI, and scalable engineering practices.

Internally, they boost pride, engagement, and recognition for our people reinforcing that the work they do matters and is competitive at a national level.

What would winning this award mean to you?

Winning this award would be deeply meaningful to me because it represents recognition not just of individual achievement, but of the people‑first, quality‑led transformation I’ve worked to build. As a Quality Engineering Architect Lead, my focus has been on creating clarity, consistency, and confidence - through a unified QE framework, intelligent automation, and GenAI‑enabled innovation - so teams can deliver sustainably at scale.

On a personal level, it would validate a leadership approach grounded in trust, inclusivity, and continuous learning, and reinforce the importance of investing in people as much as technology. Most importantly, winning would allow me to shine a spotlight on the teams and communities behind the work, using recognition as a platform to inspire others and scale what we’ve achieved together

What do you see as the main opportunities for your industry in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on them?

The biggest opportunity for our industry in the coming year is moving from AI experimentation to AI operationalisation embedding AI safely and responsibly into core delivery, underwriting, claims, and engineering workflows. Insurers are now prioritising AI enablement built on strong data foundations, cyber resilience, and measurable business outcomes, rather than isolated pilots.

For Quality Engineering specifically, this creates a powerful opportunity to lead shifting from traditional testing to engineering‑led assurance that validates AI‑driven systems, data quality, and operational resilience at scale.

I plan to capitalise on this by scaling GenAI‑enabled QE capabilities, strengthening governance and outcome‑based metrics, and embedding quality early across the SDLC ensuring innovation accelerates delivery without compromising trust, security, or customer outcomes.

The AI and Software Development Awards will take place on 14th May in London. Click here to view the shortlist and here to book your table.