Chandra Shekhar Prasad

Chandra Shekhar Prasad has run data at Mahindra First Choice Wheels since June 2021 — five years in seat at the Mahindra group's used-vehicle business, where data is the product as much as the function. MFCW's valuation and pricing intelligence, anchored by the Indian Blue Book, prices a market that trades largely on opacity, and Prasad's mandate spans the ML, data engineering and B2B SaaS product stack underneath it; his ETCIO sessions on monetising data assets and turning information into impact describe the operating thesis directly. The work reaches beyond the subsidiary too: he built MahindraVision.AI, a no-code computer vision platform for group companies designed to cut CV project go-to-market from four-to-six months to one, has pushed into manufacturing-compliance GPT territory (SOP verification from assembly-line video across 45 stations), published DPDP preparedness frameworks, and volunteers with MIT Media Lab's NANDA initiative on decentralised AI agent architecture — an unusually forward research affiliation for an operating CDO.

His route is the consumer-internet one, and it's distinct from everyone else on this list. Telenor India for customer lifecycle analytics, then founder-director of Zynga India's analytics and data science practice — churn, matchmaking, LTV and ad monetisation at gaming scale — then MobiKwik, building alternative credit risk models for wallet lending, then CarDekho as VP of technology, AI and analytics across the Girnarsoft marketplaces. Three data science practices built from scratch, a claimed $14.5 million in incremental revenue impact, an IIT Delhi B.Tech-plus-M.Tech, and a spot on HotTopics' world top 100 Data Activators in 2022. The archetype: the digital-native data scientist who learned the trade where experimentation velocity is survival, now applying it inside a legacy group's mobility business — and the list's only marketplace/auto entry.