Lenovo gives Shirley Coses Dsilva a wider mandate, to lead APAC Commercial Comms 

Lenovo has expanded the remit of Shirley Coses Dsilva, elevating her from India Communications Head to AP Communications Lead (Commercial), a regional role that will see her lead communications for the company’s commercial business across Asia-Pacific. 

Dsilva, who joined Lenovo India in April 2022, announced the move on LinkedIn. In her new role, she will work with Sumir Bhatia and Lenovo’s wider commercial leadership team, focusing on commercial communications strategy, executive positioning, and the company’s storytelling around enterprise technology and Hybrid AI. She will continue to be based in Mumbai. 

On the surface, this is another senior communications appointment. But the move says something more interesting about both Dsilva’s trajectory and the changing job of corporate communications inside technology companies. 

For much of the technology industry, communications was traditionally anchored around products, launches, market share, corporate announcements, and media relations. That is becoming considerably more complicated. As AI moves from being a technology story to a business transformation story, technology companies increasingly have to explain not simply what they sell, but why enterprises should trust them to help build the infrastructure, systems, and capabilities required for an AI-driven economy. 

That puts a premium on communicators who can operate closer to the business. 

Dsilva’s new brief explicitly reflects that shift. Her mandate includes shaping Lenovo’s commercial narrative and executive positioning, while strengthening its enterprise technology and Hybrid AI storytelling across the region. In other words, the communications function is being asked to translate technology into business relevance, while also giving senior executives a coherent voice in a rapidly changing market. 

Her elevation also reflects the increasing strategic importance of Asia-Pacific to global technology companies. A regional communications mandate based in India suggests that the market is no longer merely a geography requiring local adaptation. It can also serve as a talent base from which regional functions are led. 

That is significant because India has become an increasingly important technology, engineering, and enterprise market, while also developing a deep pool of communications professionals experienced in navigating complex multinational businesses. 

Dsilva brings more than 19 years of experience across corporate communications, media relations, reputation management, crisis communications, internal communications, and executive communication. Before Lenovo, she held communications roles at Strategic Growth Advisors, Prose Integrated, Parle Agro, Reliance Capital, and Larsen & Toubro, among others. 

Her four-plus years at Lenovo appear to have been particularly important to the move. During her India tenure, her remit encompassed corporate and executive communications, stakeholder engagement, and the company’s external narrative in one of Lenovo’s important markets. Her public commentary has also pointed to a broader evolution in how communications effectiveness should be measured, arguing that the industry needs to move beyond counting media clippings towards measuring reputation, trust, perception, and business impact. 

That philosophy is particularly relevant to her new assignment. Commercial technology communications cannot afford to exist in a silo. The audience is no longer simply journalists or consumers. It includes CIOs, enterprise decision-makers, investors, partners, employees, policymakers, and senior business leaders. Each wants a different answer to the same question: what does this technology mean for my organisation? 

Lenovo’s decision to give Dsilva a regional mandate therefore looks less like a conventional promotion and more like a recognition of how the communications function itself is changing. 

The message is increasingly becoming part of the business strategy, not merely the packaging around it.