We all know that AI, analytics and tech roles are witnessing a major boom right now, both in India and worldwide. A Naukri JobSpeak report said that demand for technology professionals continued to rise as the sector saw an 85% Y-O-Y growth in October 2021. Rightfully so, companies are appointing leaders with exceptional capabilities to provide a competitive edge through analytics, decision making, and software backed capabilities. As the year is coming to an end, here is a list highlighting some major AI, analytics and tech leadership appointments in 2021.
AI and Analytics
PayU Finance, the NBFC unit of PayU, has elevated Piyush Gupta as the company’s new Chief Data Scientist. At this new position, he will work to create and execute the data strategy for PayU Finance through innovations in AI and ML. The focus will also be on building ethical AI algorithms.
Pankaj Rai has been appointed as the Group Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Aditya Birla Group Management Pvt. Ltd. Previously, he was working with Wells Fargo as the Senior Vice President Strategy.
OLX Autos announced that it has appointed Rohit Pandharkar as their Global Head of Data Science. Before this, he was the Vice President and Head of Data Science at Mahindra Finance.
Zee
Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd. (ZEE) has appointed Nitin Mittal as President – Technology & Data. Mittal will be leading the technology and data teams creating strategic initiatives in tech, data, AI, ML and digital across the company.
CarDekho announced key senior level positions with Manjeet Dahiya as vice president – artificial intelligence, machine learning and data sciences. Aditya Kumar will take the role of vice president of product strategy and analytics while Dharmesh Gandhi will be vice president of products. Sandeep Singh and Mayank Kapoor have been hired as vice presidents of engineering.
Infogain
Human-centred digital platform and software engineering services, Infogain, has appointed Anil Kaul, PhD, as its Chief Artificial Intelligence (AI) Officer. He will also continue to serve as EVP – AI and Analytics, at Infogain, and CEO at Absolutdata.
Tech
SpaceX
Sanjay Bhargava joined SpaceX in October as the Starlink Country Director India. He had served in Citibank for 18 years and then quit it to join Paypal as a member of the founding team.
Google Cloud has announced that it has appointed Subram Natarajan as the Director of Customer Engineering at Google Cloud India. Natarajan has more than 30 years of experience across product development, technical sales and business development. Previously, he was leading the technology team at IBM as the CTO for India. Natarajan will be working directly with Andrew Hobby, Director of Custom Engineering (APAC), based in Singapore.
Adobe
Adobe appointed Prativa Mohapatra as Vice President and Managing Director for Adobe India. She will lead Adobe’s India business across Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud and report to Simon Tate, Adobe’s President for the Asia Pacific.
Salesforce
Salesforce has appointed Sanket Atal as the Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Sites (India). He will be playing a key role in driving the next phase of Salesforce’s growth in India with design thinking and digital strategies.
Wipro
Wipro announced the appointment of Subha Tatavarti as Chief Technology Officer. She will lead Wipro’s Service Transformation, Topcoder, Robotics, SVIC, Technovation Centre, Open Innovation and Applied Research teams, Previously, she worked at Walmart where she led product, technology development and commercialization of Enterprise Infrastructure with Security, Data Science and Edge platforms.
Global
Tech
Intel announced the appointed technology industry leader Pat Gelsinger as its new chief executive officer from 15 February 2021. An industry veteran, Gelsinger has more than four decades of technology and leadership experience with 30 years at Intel. Previously, he served as the CEO of VMware since 2012.
VMware
VMware appointed Rangarajan Raghuram as Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors. Before this position, Raghuram held the position of Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Products and Cloud Services at VMware.
Open Source
Github
GitHub recently announced Thomas Dohmke as the new CEO. He will take over from current CEO Nat Friedman. Dohmke had joined GitHub in 2018 after leading the acquisition by Microsoft with Friedman. GitHub also appointed its first-ever Chief Security Officer, Mike Hanley.
JFrog
JFrog appointed Sagi Dudai as Executive Vice President of Product and Engineering. Dudai comes with more than 25 years of global experience ranging from large-scale software Platform-as-a-Service to AI and machine learning.
SUSE
SUSE appointed Vishal Ghariwala as its first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ), and Greater China regions. Ghariwala comes with more than 20 years of experience in cloud computing, cloud native applications and middleware with half of his career spent in working in open source companies.
