InterGlobix Magazine’s Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Jasmine Bedi, met with Shivani York to discuss how transacting in real time falls under her remit as COO and how that affects both order fallout and operational planning. York also highlights what she has in mind for making The Connected World even more effective for different buyers and sellers.
After five years as COO of Ookla, you joined Connectbase in 2025 to lead global operations and customer experience. Why is what Ben Edmond cites as the third requirement for AI buildout—real-time transactions—part of your remit?
The ability to transact at real-time speeds sounds like a software claim, but it’s an operations one—and I own the part of the business where real-time either survives contact with the physical world, or it doesn’t. Quoting fast is the easier half of the problem. Delivery is where connectivity commerce still breaks: Industry estimates generally place order fallout between ten and twenty percent of orders, and Connectbase has previously observed rates exceeding one in five in parts of the market.
The expectation gap is the thing I’d point to first. Buyers have spent a decade in cloud. They provision compute in ninety seconds. Then they come to connectivity and discover it involves a permit, a landlord, a truck, and sometimes a trench. Buyers aren’t wrong or unreasonable to expect better. Most of what makes connectivity slow isn’t physics—it’s coordination. The trench is real. The three weeks of email establishing whether the trench is necessary is not.
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ABOUT SHIVANI YORK
Shivani York leads global operations and customer experience, driving strategic planning, product marketing, customer operations, revenue growth, and cross-functional alignment. She also oversees execution of the entire customer journey, from onboarding to expansion, ensuring every interaction is seamless, high-value, and rooted in measurable outcomes. An award-winning executive, York brings more than two decades of experience in scaling businesses, driving profitability, and leading global transformations. Her career spans executive roles across industry innovators, including Ookla, The NPD Group, Ziff Davis, Ellevation Education, TIME, and The New York Times. She has a proven track record of building accountability-driven cultures, executing M&A strategies, and implementing AI/ML-driven innovations to enhance performance and scalability.
