Cloudwerx appoints new leaders to drive growth, design and delivery

Technology consultancy Cloudwerx has recruited Accenture’s Ashleigh Sword as its new chief growth officer, while appointing Kylie Willett and Supriya Shonnard to revamped director roles.

Sword joins Cloudwerx in Sydney after the past decade at Accenture, most recently as a managing director for strategic AI pursuits, while Willett and Shonnard step up to their new respective roles as ‘Tesseract’ design and delivery product directors in Brisbane and Sydney.

Sword’s addition continues the Accenture-Cloud Sherpas senior leadership trend at Cloudwerx, with its 170-strong Asia Pacific team led by alum Toby Wilcock. Other execs sharing that background include Brendan Connolly, who was appointed COO toward the end of last year.

“Kylie, Supriya, and Ashleigh are exactly the kind of leaders we want representing Cloudwerx; they’re commercially minded, deep experts, and passionate about solving complex problems with clients,” Wilcox said, adding that with the trio leading growth, design and delivery the firm would now scale its “innovative methodology” to new offerings, clients, and markets.

Cloudwerx, which is backed by private equity firm CVC and recently became a local OpenAI foundation partner, dubs its human-centered and customisable design approach ‘Tesseract’, while the firm has also adopted a ‘modular’ delivery model based on fixed-price units to provide clients with greater flexibility and assurance rather than locked in project schedules and scope.

Ashleigh Sword
Responsible for leading that go-to-market approach and commercial strategy will be Ashleigh Sword, who has spent more than a decade and a half in a variety of tech-focused GTM, sales, and business development roles between Accenture and Fujitsu, including with a focus on Microsoft, Salesforce, and ServiceNow and for a year at Cloud Sherpas prior to its 2015 acquisition.

“AI is rewriting the rules, and in technology delivery the labour scale is no longer the advantage,” Sword said. “My firm belief is that smaller, specialist partners are leading the market in packaging frontier technology into practical business outcomes which solve problems and make adoption commercially straightforward, and that’s exactly where Cloudwerx is different.”

Kylie Willett
Riding a decade worth of M&A waves, Willett has been a product & design director with Cloudwerx since late 2024, joining the firm upon its acquisition of Salesforce specialist Lightfold, which had earlier spun out of her previous employer GrowthOps. Prior to that, Willett worked at Accenture, from which GrowthOps emerged, and of course Cloud Sherpas before that again.

Supriya Shonnard
Shonnard meanwhile joined Cloudwerx shortly after its initial 2018 founding, having previously worked in a global marketing automation lead role at Cochlea. Since crossing, Shonnard has served as a functional consultant to clients across a variety of industries, before then being appointed as the firm’s strategic operations lead and principal technology strategy consultant in 2024.

As per the firm, she will now focus on leading the innovation and continuous development of its rapidly expanding inventory of modular, customisable solutions and results that it says its Tesseract methodology can deliver, while Willet will oversee the development of new AI-native design systems, services, and interfaces, reshaping how customer ideas are shaped into practical outcomes.

“For decades, buying and delivering IT services has been harder than it needs to be, but we’re changing that,” the firm stated. “We’ve assembled the leadership team. We have incredible technology partners. And we’ve turned what we do into a catalogue of AI, data, integration and CRM services that are simpler to buy. Now, we’re bringing that commercial model to market.”