About this episode

Ketan Karkhanis discusses the future of data teams in the context of AI and analytics.

Data and AI platforms are racing toward agentic and even autonomous analytics. But the bottleneck is rarely the model—it’s data readiness: governed metrics, clear metadata, and a semantic layer machines can read. For data engineers and analysts, this shifts work from hand-built SQL and dashboard tweaks to designing meaning and trust. If an agent can draft column descriptions, propose a model for a new business question, and build the first dashboard layout, where do you add the most value? What do you measure to prove ROI in 30 days? How do you prevent “shiny demos” from driving strategy too early. Ketan Karkhanis is the CEO of ThoughtSpot. Prior to joining the company in September 2024, Ketan was the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Sales Cloud at Salesforce. He returned to Salesforce in March 2022 after his time as the COO of Turvo, an emerging supply-chain collaboration platform. Before that, Ketan spent nearly a decade at Salesforce, where he led product areas in Sales, Service Cloud, Lightning Platform, and finally Analytics, wherein as the Senior Vice President & GM of Einstein Analytics, he pioneered incredible innovation, customer success, and business…

People in this episode

Host: Richie

Guest: Ketan Karkhanis

Topics covered

• AI
• analytics
• data readiness
• data engineering
• business strategy

Keywords

• data analytics
• AI agents
• data engineering
• business intelligence
• ROI

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: ThoughtSpot, Salesforce, Turvo, Cisco Systems

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