Vivek Zakarde

Vivek Zakarde holds a mandate most Indian enterprises still split across two desks: he is simultaneously IndiaFirst Life's data and AI head and its Data Protection Officer. In the DPDPA era, that combination is the job's most interesting feature — the person scaling AI is the same person accountable for privacy compliance, consent architecture, and audit trails. His published blueprint for a DPDPA-compliant unified data and AI ecosystem has circulated as a reference design among BFSI architects, and his current build at the Bank of Baroda-promoted life insurer runs on a Google Cloud stack: a BigQuery lakehouse, Vertex AI orchestration, and Gemini Enterprise-powered agentic AI deployed across sales, call centre, and branch operations under IRDAI-aligned, DPDP-compliant controls. Foundry's CIO100 award in 2025 recognised the approach — privacy-first transformation rather than transformation with privacy bolted on.

Zakarde's route to the role runs through an unusually wide cross-section of Indian financial services. Immediately before IndiaFirst, he spent a year as Global Chief Data and Analytics Officer and Head of CRM at IDBI Bank, preceded by analytics leadership at IndusInd Bank, data services leadership at IKS Health, and a technology VP role at IIFL — with earlier work spanning insurance, NBFC, broking, healthcare, utilities, banking, and telecom. A Delhi College of Engineering electrical engineer with an MBA and PMP, he represents a distinct CDO archetype on this list: the governance-native data leader, where regulatory architecture is the foundation the AI stack gets built on. As IRDAI tightens data residency rules and DPDPA enforcement hardens, that archetype is moving from the cautious choice to the obvious one.