Prajakta Kalmegh
Head of AI — Scaling the next generation of Agentic AI
PhD Computer Science (Duke University) | Oxford Executive MBA | MS Computer Science (Georgia Tech)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Global technology executive whose 21-year career is a unique mix of leadership, entrepreneurship, research, and mentoring. Combines doctoral depth in distributed systems with executive commercial judgment from an Oxford EMBA. Proven track record converting advanced research into scalable revenue products, board-ready strategy, and operational outcomes across environments spanning 15+ enterprise customers and $60M+ complexity, driving sustained market category leadership and accelerating product-led growth.
CORE CAPABILITIES
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
- Own strategic direction for AI and Databricks product lines representing $5M+ annual revenue responsibility across 15+ enterprise customers.
- Direct four engineering teams while orchestrating alignment across sales, solutions, marketing, revenue, and business development priorities.
- Translate complex customer pain points involving connected data and relationship mapping into roadmap investments and measurable business outcomes.
- Architected advanced platform intelligence through AI observability, system memory, reasoning workflows, and automation capabilities.
- Act as executive product ambassador through strategic customer meetings, webinars, and external thought leadership to build market category.
- Built and launched a cloud-native digital marketplace platform from concept to commercial traction.
- Scaled ecosystem to 350+ vendors and 1,000+ customers within the first year of operations.
- Delivered 19% month-over-month growth through omnichannel commerce, partnerships, and lifecycle marketing integrations.
- Implemented AI-driven risk scoring that improved fulfillment performance by 73%.
- Automated operations saving 50+ hours per 100 orders while significantly improving customer experience.
EARLIER CAREER IMPACT
- Unravel Data Inc | Principal Engineer (2019–2021) — Designed executive decision tools for workload performance and accelerated ML solution delivery timelines by 60%.
- Persistent Systems | Module Lead — Led Hadoop adapters and improved query performance by 73% through Apache Hive architecture optimization.
- IBM | Systems Engineer — Delivered telecom data warehouse solutions selected for IBM Expo showcase; introduced agile delivery controls.
- Microsoft Research — Built ML-based performance diagnosis models and YARN simulation tooling.
- SAP Labs — Advised leaders on data warehouse and graph database initiatives; contributed to open-source analytics functions.
ADVISORY, RESEARCH & ECOSYSTEM LEADERSHIP
- Tech Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.
- Technology Advisor, Techstars Berlin cohorts; mentored startups on architecture, GTM, scaling, and technical bets.
- Doctoral Research focused on workload optimization, resource contention diagnosis, and large-scale distributed systems efficiency.
- Publications & Presentations at globally recognized venues including SIGMOD, VLDB, SoCC and related forums. Recognized speaker on AI, data observability, and modern analytics platforms.
BOARDROOM VALUE PROPOSITION
Rare combination of elite technical depth, founder mindset, enterprise operating scale, and executive communication. Effective with engineers, customers, investors, and boards. Capable of defining categories, and building the table, not merely demanding a seat.