ThoughtSpot’s New CEO: AI Is The New BI

Ketan Karkhanis, who took over as ThoughtSpot’s new CEO in late September, offers his views on the evolution of data analytics, the impact of AI, his new company’s positioning within the rapidly changing analytics industry, and the philosophy of being “2 percent done.”

On Sept. 26, ThoughtSpot, a leading player in the data analytics arena, said it had hired former Salesforce executive Ketan Karkhanis as the data analytics company’s new CEO.

Karkhanis (pictured) was tapped to fill the top executive post that has been open since Sudheesh Nair stepped down in March.

Karkhanis’ appointment comes as ThoughtSpot has emerged as one of the leading companies in the fast-growing, but highly competitive data analytics market with its on-premises, cloud and embedded analytics products.

The company recently said it recorded 40 percent growth in its software-as-a-service offerings in its fiscal 2024 and it was positioned as a leader in this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. ThoughtSpot has been listed on the CRN Big Data 100 and the CRN AI 100.

“I think it's an incredible position to be in the market,” Karkhanis said in a recent interview with CRN. “That's the intersection of AI and analytics and the journey ThoughtSpot has been on. ThoughtSpot is the de facto standard.”

Karkhanis’ appointment also comes as the business intelligence/data analytics industry is undergoing significant changes as IT vendors and their channel partners work to incorporate artificial intelligence and generative AI technologies into their data analysis products and services.

“AI is the new BI. We've got a large number of customers knocking on our door right now. And they want to know, ‘What does the future of AI and analytics look like?’” Karkhanis said. “What people are interested in is driving AI and analytics to drive business outcomes.”

Karkhanis joined ThoughtSpot after spending more than 12 years at Salesforce, working through two terms at the cloud application giant. Since April 2022 he was executive vice president and general manager of the Salesforce Sales Cloud business, which generated $7 billion in the company’s last fiscal year.

Between May 2020 and April 2022 he was chief operating officer of Turvo, a developer of supply chain management and collaboration software, that was acquired by Lineage Logistics in June 2022.

Before that Karkhanis worked at Salesforce in various management posts for just short of 10 years, between July 2010 and May 2020, reaching the position of senior vice president of product management. His earlier time at Salesforce included four years as general manager and senior vice president of product development of the company’s Einstein Analytics product – experience that was likely a factor in his hiring for the ThoughtSpot CEO post.

CRN spoke with Karkhanis and Ajeet Singh, ThoughtSpot co-founder and chairman, via video conference from the company’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. The two discussed Karkhanis’ new job, the CEO’s first day meeting employees and customers, his views on the state of the data analytics market, the impact of AI, ThoughtSpot’s work with the channel and his priorities over the next few months.

The following Q&A has been lightly edited for clarification and space.

What have you been working on in your first days on the job?

Karkhanis: Yesterday [Sept. 26] was day one. And after meeting a lot of the team and all hands – all the things that one would expect, I was like, ‘Whoa, I should have joined earlier. This is so exciting.’

I met with a couple of customers. We’ve got a large number of customers knocking on our door right now. And they want to know, ‘What does the future of AI and analytics look like?’ They want to know how they can get all their data in an experience that actually helps them get actionable insights, but more importantly, drives business outcomes. People don't want yet another chart. Rick, do you want yet another chart? We have enough charts that we see everywhere. I think so. What people are interested in is driving AI and analytics to drive business outcomes. That's the intersection of AI and analytics and the journey ThoughtSpot has been on with Ajeet [ThoughtSpot co-founder and chairman Ajeet Singh] and what he founded.

I think it's an incredible position to be in the market. AI is the new BI, and ThoughtSpot is the de facto standard because Ajeet was already doing this. And now with generative AI, it just gives us a tremendous tailwind into transforming businesses and organizations.

The second thing I'll tell you, which was so fascinating for me, was the quality of our team. It's just incredible. I met so many people yesterday. We’ve already scheduled, I don't know, 100 different one-on-ones in the next 10 days. It's pretty intense. We have a global team. We have a team in Hyderabad, we have a team in Bangalore, we have a team in London, we have a team in Japan, we have a team in Sydney, we have a team in Chicago. Of course, we have a team in the Bay Area and Seattle.

ThoughtSpot is a global organization. If you're a customer out there, we can support you wherever you are. That’s a very incredible thing. And these team members are world-class people. What I like is our culture is determined by their interactions and engagement. I'm sure Ajeet has talked to you about our culture of 2 percent done. It's a value. It's a key part of our culture, or selfless excellence.

Sorry, 2 percent done?

Singh: It's not a novel idea. It may be novel way of saying it. But the idea behind ‘2 percent done’ is that we don't rest on our laurels. We are in a very large market, we have a differentiated product, and I think we have come pretty far. But given the size of the market the opportunity is huge.

And so in terms of mentality, sometimes you have companies where they become too proud of what they've done in the past. I think everybody has to be proud of where they come from. But if it [gets] in the way of creating a new future – the best future – then that's not the right kind of pride to have.

So the idea behind ‘2 percent done’ is that we are very open to [the] changes that are happening around us. And we don't only react to them, we actually take opportunities to thrive on them. And that has given us longevity. Analytics is a very rich market, but it's also a very competitive market. Without this mentality that we can constantly reinvent ourselves, we wouldn’t be a leader in [Gartner’s] Magic Quadrant in Analytics. So that’s the general idea.

I don't think I've heard that phrase. That's why I was thrown off. I'll have to keep that one in mind.

Karkhanis: To put a final cap on that answer, [we are] also getting ready for next week. We have this amazing event in New York, Data Renaissance. It's becoming the premier event in analytics and AI. And we do it all over the world. We are in New York next week. I think Sydney's coming up, Japan is coming up. This is where our customers get together and share insights of how they're transforming their organizations. In New York, I think we have JP Morgan Chase, who's going to be doing a lot of sharing.

What attracted you to the job? You've already talked about the quality of the team, you've talked about the opportunity. Is there anything else that attracted you to this position?

Karkhanis: I want to say Ajeet’s charming smile. Besides that [laughter]. No, I'll tell you. I bring him up because I spent almost two months, at least, more than two months, almost every other day, we were meeting in person and either having a coffee or sharing a meal or grabbing a beer or whatever, just talking. And through all those conversations, I really felt like we were aligned on what the future of the analytics world needs to look like, and the vision of – the mission of – creating a fact-based world is very fascinating.

I feel like ThoughtSpot has a bigger role to play in the industry and we're going to be punching way above our weight category. Obviously, we are the number one product you will choose if you want to increase your revenue, if you want to increase your customer satisfaction, if you want to optimize your factory output, if you want to optimize your supply chain if you want to deliver the best health care, if you want to deliver the best education system.

But ThoughtSpot is going to go beyond that. Data has a power to change the world. I think we can help farmers know which crops to plant. I think we can help education specialists know what career curriculums to pursue. I think we can help NGOs [non-governmental organizations] understand where to direct their funds. This is fascinating, the power of data to do good. And it sounds aspirational, because all good things start with an aspiration. All good companies have a dream, and this is our dream, a fact-based world. That’s what really brought me here.

And finally, on what I would say, more tactical from that vision and aspiration to the more day-to-day of the quarter, months and the years: If you look at the industry, we are entering an upgrade supercycle. The enterprise stack five years from now is going to be completely different than the enterprise stack of today. We are in cloud 2.0. Everybody is looking at, ‘What does my enterprise stack need to look like?’ And a key constituent of that is, ‘What does my intelligence layer look like? And does it have AI built in or is it AI on the side?’

There are a lot of providers out there who have AI on the side. That's just a sideshow. ThoughtSpot embeds AI. One of our fastest growing products is Thoughtspot Embedded … because it makes every business application a data application. So you could be a company with your application and you have ThoughtSpot embedded in it. It's like putting intelligence inside your own application.

So I see tremendous potential for helping every company out there transform their organization and get ready for this crazy new world of AI. And that's the platform we will be. In many ways, we have become an AI company.

Singh: We always were. But if we went to customers in 2016 2017, 2018, 2019, and said, ‘We are selling AI to you,’ they would say they have no budget, that’s a science project. But now AI has become mainstream, so I think it's our moment, certainly.

Talk about your prior experience, your work history and so forth, and how that prepared you for this job. Part of the time you were with Salesforce you were working with their Einstein analytics software, for example.

Karkhanis: I'll tell you, I'm so grateful to Salesforce and the team there. I had such a great time. Sometimes I joke that I grew up in Salesforce. I spent so much time there and I got to do so many different things and work with some of the brilliant visionaries and technologists of the world, whether it's [CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff], or [CTO and co-founder Parker Harris], or anybody. When I got a chance to build the analytics business for Salesforce, it was very exciting. But at that time I didn't know I was going to become CEO of ThoughtSpot.

But what it helped me do was build scale [with the Salesforce Data Cloud business], which was going from, well, almost zero to touching, crossing, $400 [million] globally, and doing it through the lens of what I call relentless focus on customer success and disruptive innovation. I call this disruptive innovation. Ajeet uses the [phrase] ‘2 percent done.’ They are two sides of the same coin. They kind of mean the same thing.

And so I think that focus really helped me understand the analytics business, deeply; the ecosystem, the partners, the customers, the challenges. It’s so funny, when the announcement [of his appointment as ThoughtSpot CEO] came out, all my old friends from that time were [reaching out to him]. So that was really exciting. And we had a great time doing that.

And then I was a COO at Turvo, a supply chain management [application] company, which really helped me understand the operational aspects of running a business. Not just building scale, but the operational aspects from success to services to HR and everything in between. And we had a fantastic time building Turvo, which was used and is used by amazing organizations like Ryder and Lineage Logistics.

So I think I'm very fortunate. I always got these really great opportunities to work with great customers and great teams. And my teams have done all the hard work, and I have gotten all the credit, so it's working great.

In Sales Cloud, my last job in Salesforce, I really got to operate at scale. It was already a scaled business. When I came in, it was like five and a half [billion dollars] or something like that. How do you take something at scale, operate it at scale and then actually scale it further? Today it's more than $7 billion in revenue.

All these experiences have helped me shape my leadership style, but [also] develop a deep understanding of enterprise B-to-B and customer focus. As I say, I still feel like I still have some learning to do. I would always say that. I learned the need to have a beginner's mind. It's very important to have a beginner's mind. But it's been a very exciting journey, and somehow ThoughtSpot is almost like the highlight of my career journey, is how I think about it.

I want to ask Ajeet, what did he see, in as far as your background, as important since he was the person making the hiring decision?

Singh: Positive energy. You need to have that to be the CEO. But look, when you recruit people, whether it's for the CEO role or anything else, there is the resume and there is the person behind the resume. In general, I find people get too caught up in the resume. Ketan has an amazing, amazing resume. You know, he's built things, he’s scaled things, he's been in this [analytics] space. I think he checked more boxes than what I hoped any CEO would check.

Now, that said, I think what really impressed me a lot more is – what tilted us towards Ketan – is a genuine passion for what ThoughtSpot has built and what we could be. And that is something you cannot fake.

We are one of the very few companies that is in a $20 billion market, a $150 million business, growing rapidly with a differentiated product. So we had a lot of interest. There's not too many CEO jobs that are available like that. We had a tremendous amount of interest. People that have been CEOs before, people that have been presidents running large sales organizations in public companies. So we were very fortunate that way. But at end of the day, to build for the long term, you need to have fundamental passion for what the company does. And if you don't have that, then that can be difficult.

Certainly, the actual experience he has – that you can read from his LinkedIn. But also, the genuine passion that he brings for the company and for the analytics industry. Because the world is, I mean, when I say ‘2 percent done,’ I'm not joking. I mean the world is changing so fast, if you have any other mentality, it doesn't matter how large a company you are, you will very, very quickly disappear. So that, I would say, was the number one reason for us.

What's your assessment of the data analytics market right now and ThoughtSpots’ position in it?

Karkhanis: There’s almost a generational change. We are moving from the age of flip phones and BlackBerries to the age of smartphones. I think that's the easiest way for me to explain the massive disruption that's going to happen.

One of the most important things that customers – it’s always important to look at this from the side of the customer – is they really want AI to drive their analytics, and they just don't want to keep having dashboard after dashboard after dashboard, thousands and thousands of dashboards, dashboard sprawl, that nobody uses. They want autonomous agents that are answering questions when they come up. In fact, we are getting ready to launch a new product at the end of October, an analytics agent. It's going to be very exciting.

They really want simplicity of experience. They don't want partial analytics. They want complete analytics. And by that, what I mean is, they just don't want to know what happened in their business. They want AI to help them understand how they can make things better in their business, what happened in their business.

And all these things are creating a new kind of analytics product which is AI first, not AI on the side, they are AI first. And ThoughtSpot, I sometimes joke with Ajeet, it’s like he probably saw this before. ThoughtSpot Always added AI at the heart of its architecture. And good architecture matters in this business. And now, with generative AI and autonomous AI, we are becoming the de facto choice, the first thing customers look at when they think about, ‘How do I solve all these critical business problems?’

AI is the new BI and that's where we are. And ThoughtSpot is the leader, not just the Gartner Magic Quadrant leader, which was a huge accomplishment for this team, but also an industry leader in driving AI into the world of analytics. So we've got a lot of building to do, but I think that's where the industry is going. You're going to see everybody move away from this idea that analytics is charts, pictures. They just don't want pretty pictures. They want good outcomes and that's what we're going to help them do. Ajeet do you want to add anything?

Singh: I think you covered most of it. The only other lens I might apply to this is the structure of the industry. When we started, Tableau and Qlik were, sort of, around $100 million or so. In 2012 they were in similar stages to where we are right now, which is that they had proven a new way of doing analytics, but they were still not a big enough company. And you had Business Objects [acquired by SAP] and Hyperion [acquired by Oracle] and Cognos [acquired by IBM], and MicroStrategy, and so on. That's where the world was, and in this industry, every 10 years or so that happens.

So I think where we are as a company now, if you look at the market, there is no other company of our scale. Tableau has been acquired by Salesforce. Looker has been acquired [by Google Cloud], [Microsoft] Power BI keeps doing their own thing. But I feel like we are at, I would say, our perfect inflection point in the industry where the market is looking for the next, new, big thing. And we have that opportunity, we have the product, we have the customers, and we have the team and technology to really build upon. So I'm pretty thrilled. And Ketan joining couldn't have been better timed for us.

Karkhanis: And I want to double click on one very important point he mentioned. We keep talking about ThoughtSpot, like, the time is now. I'll tell you why. I'll just go a little bit – one more level – deeper. A lot of people are also thinking now that LLMs [large language models] have become very popular, they're taking these LLMs and they're trying to do analytics using an LLM. And very quickly they realize it doesn't work, because there are things that are important, like the LLM doesn't really understand structured data that well. It doesn't understand that the column name ‘LOC’ means ‘location’ and not something else. It does not respect data security, that row-level security, which is very critical.

What ThoughtSpot does is – we've got our internal benchmarks and we're going to put these out by the end of the month – it captures the best of all these worlds and really gives you an interface that both transcends your structured data, respects your corporate security and your data security, but still gives you the power of talking to your data in a whole new way.

So that's what I mean by customer expectations. They want a ChatGPT-like interface for their data. And they try to do it with a DYI way and they quickly come back to us and say: ‘I tried it. I only got 15 percent accuracy,’ is what one customer told us yesterday. And then they come to us and then the product is working. So it's helping us a lot in the market. It's a tailwind for us.

ThoughtSpot has a very active channel program and you work with quite a few channel partners. How important do you see the channel to ThoughtSpot’s strategy and success right now? And are there any specific ideas or plans that you may have, as far as channel efforts go, that you could talk about?

Singh: For me, partners have always been an extremely important part of scaling a business. As you know, [cloud infrastructure provider] Nutanix was the first company I co-founded. We were a 100-percent channel company there and channel there meant more resellers.

At ThoughtSpot, as well, partners are extremely important, though the mix tends to be [different]. We have tech partners like Snowflake, Databricks, Google, AWS and so on, and we have system integrators. These tend to be the most important partners for us. Some of the SIs also act as resellers and we work with them. They are an extremely critical part of our strategy.

We have tight integrations with our technology partners as they are bringing out new AI platforms, the new LLMs. We are integrating with those as well, because at the end of the day we are the best … for analytics. Analytics is a very deep stack. There are transaction systems and then you have ETL [extract, transform and load], and you have data warehouses, and then you might have other database links.

But what the business actually consumes, is the interface that we deliver. So with us, we are able to increase the value of their underlying data platforms. That's why the technology partners are very interested in working with us.

And then we have system integrators, where, given the changes that have happened in the industry that I talked about earlier, with the acquisitions, certainly, there is a large segment of SIs that are somewhat disenfranchised because they were building big businesses with Tableau and Looker and others. And with [these] acquisitions, the approach that the large acquirers, Salesforce and Google and others, have taken may not necessarily be the most friendly to these SIs. And so we are seeing many of those SIs come to us to say, ‘We want to bring the next generation of analytics – and now AI – to our customers.’ We have very good programs for that.

We also have programs where we are helping our customers modernize their analytics stack. So if a customer is looking to move from, whatever it might be, it could be Tableau, it could be Business Objects, it could be any other legacy BI platform, we'd work with the partners to help them migrate and modernize.

I think it's a great time to be in this industry. Things are changing. And when things change, it creates opportunities for everyone. And we are seeing that. We are able to come together with this SI community to give them the [data analytics] platform that is the next generation.

So Ketan, what's at the top of your to-do a list for, say, next six months? What things are you going to really focus on?

Karkhanis: Number one on my list is my customers. We've got so many wonderful customers and they are doing incredible things with ThoughtSpot. Incredible. We talked about JP Morgan Chase. We can talk about Schneider [Electric], we can talk about Wellthy. We can talk about all these customers.

But it's not just our customers. We have so many people knocking on our door right now, [to] help them navigate this crazy world of AI, because their boards, their CEOs, are asking them, ‘What is our AI analytics strategy?’ And ThoughtSpot has their answers. We are having numerous meetings every day with our sales teams, our customers. So serving my customers is my number one thing.

Number two for me is, obviously and very close to my heart, is our team. I told you, we've got a phenomenal organization, our culture, our values, our principles, our benefits, are just incredible – world class, I would say.

And deeply connecting and listening to all of my team members across the world, all of our partners, whether [they] are technology partners, resellers, SIs, GSIs [global systems integrators], all of them, and bringing them together in this aligned team to create this new fact-based world. That is my focus, our teams, our partners, our customers, bringing all of them together to create a more fact-based world. That's what I'm focused on. It's an incredible honor and opportunity to be here. I'm quite humbled, I must say that. I'm very humbled. And I'm very excited that we're going to have a lot of fun.