Interview #90 Ketan Karkhanis, CEO of ThoughtSpot

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**Dr. Tony Hoang** (1:00)
Welcome to The Artificial Intelligence Podcast, ranked the top 2% of over 7 million podcasts on Spotify.
I'm your host, Dr. Tony Wong. Today with with Ketan. Ketan, can you give us like a brief description of your background?

**Ketan Karkhanis** (1:13)
Well, Tony, first, thank you for having me and congrats on the 2%.
I mean, that's pretty incredible. There's quite a lot of podcasts out there. I'm glad to be on your show and a big hello to all your listeners. Ketan Karkhanis, I'm the CEO of ThoughtSpot.
We are an AI platform for analytics. And what we have been doing is transforming the world and bringing it from the world of legacy BI into the world of AI-driven analytics. We are out here in Mountain View, so I'm right here in my Mountain View office. We've got this wonderful space here. So if you guys ever happen to be in the neighborhood, come by. We'd love to host all of you and show you what we're doing. Thank you.

**Dr. Tony Hoang** (1:51)
So for the last 20 years, Tableau, BI, Booker, they sold like self-serve BI as the end game.
And what they actually ship was the right to build your own dashboards. So I guess like who wakes up wanting to build another dashboard?

**Ketan Karkhanis** (2:09)
I mean, you know what?
It's kind of sad.
I just call it like the whole thing has been, in a weird way, it's self-service has been a hoax.
You know, it's like, oh, I'm going to give you self-service quote and quote insights. What does that mean? You need to build your own dashboards. Tony, do you know some of my customers come to me and they are like, Ketan, we have 50,000 dashboards built over years, and we have no idea what to do with them. The answer to every question cannot be, give me yet another dashboard. And I think so the idea of self-service, though great in intent, has been terrible in terms of actual reality on the ground. You ask any business user today is, where do you get your insights? And most of the time, they'll struggle to tell you where they get it from. It's very simple. You have a question, you need an answer. And I think so finally, ThoughtSpot, we have a simple vision in life. We think the distance between you and the insight should be a question you ask. And what we did is we put the search and we said, hey, why can't you just talk to your data?
That's our idea. But we went one step further. It's not just about talking to your data and getting the insight. It's connecting that insight to action. That is the second big missing part. The first big missing part was just give me the insight when I need it, where I need it. And the second part is why do you need these insights? You're trying to do something. Let's say you are a support leader and you want to drive NPS. Let's say you're a sales rep and you want to know whether this opportunity has any upsell chances and so on and so forth. The second piece, the missing link is the action link. And I think this is the key part where ThoughtSpot plays a big role with AI, is not just giving you the insights that you need, but also connecting it to the actions you have to perform. Because the goal of data is not just, you know, if your BI is just giving you good-looking charts, I mean, it's just a pretty picture. You want a better picture of the future, and that's what ThoughtSpot's focused on. And we're having a lot of fun doing that across customers, such as Veres, Khayat, Navan. We'll talk more about those along the show. But it's a very important point you mentioned. The distinction I draw is, I think so dashboards don't really exist five years from now. The idea of self-service is now more real with what the agentic transformation we have done.