Why every AI conversation should be an ROI conversation - with Ketan Karkhanis, CEO ThoughtSpot

**Ray Rike** (0:08)
Welcome to the AI to ROI Podcast. On today's episode, I am joined by Ketan Karkhanis, the CEO at ThoughtSpot. Today we will be covering three primary topics with Ketan. First, why every AI investment conversation needs to be an ROI conversation.
Second, how enterprises can use 30-day pilots and proof-of-concepts to truly evaluate AI program cost and the value delivered. Third, the correlation of customer satisfaction in AI to ROI. With that, Ketan, would you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the AI to ROI Podcast.

**Ketan Karkhanis** (0:55)
Thank you. Thank you for having me and a big hello to everybody.
I mean, it's the name, AI to ROI Podcast. The minute I heard it, I'm like, I want to be here. I want to come here and talk to all of you because you summarize the essence of what the world needs right now, is AI to ROI. It's a question everybody has on their mind. I'm glad to be here.

**Ray Rike** (1:18)
With your background, I mean, you've been looking at how to, I basically evaluate and expose the value of analytics. In fact, you were the head of product at Salesforce for many years on the analytics side, and then you were the general manager of the Sales Cloud, right?

**Ketan Karkhanis** (1:35)
Yeah, I built Einstein Analytics, I built Sales Cloud, and then I came over to ThoughtSpot to build the world's number one data and AI platform. I'll tell you ThoughtSpot, we are having a lot of fun. We are a data and AI platform, and our sole mission is to help every company turn data into an enterprise advantage, and that's critical. It's not about more dashboards, it's about better outcomes. It's not about more applications, it's more about intelligent customer experiences. It's not about agents, it is about autonomous workflows that help you go faster.
And that's what we focus on, so I'm very excited to talk to all of you today about that.

**Ray Rike** (2:14)
Well, you had a post on LinkedIn that really just jumped out at me because it's the whole reason we're doing this podcast. You said every AI conversation should be an ROI conversation. Can you tell me a little bit more about the catalyst for that post and why you think that way?
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**Ketan Karkhanis** (3:51)
Because, I mean, it's an important topic and it's close to my heart. And I've talked to hundreds of customers. And every customer I talk to, I mean, have you heard of any customer that does not have an AI pilot going on anywhere right now?

**Ray Rike** (4:04)
No, but I don't talk to you enough that actually go into production and impact their income statement.

**Ketan Karkhanis** (4:08)
There you go. There you go. You hit it on the nail, you know, just to have fun a little bit, you know, most people have these AI aspirations and dreams. And those dreams are like, you know, a soaring eagle. Like, you know, it's like a big, great, great dream. And in reality, they're doing these pilots, which are like more chickens stumbling across the barn and they don't take off. Why? Why is that happening? Because we have, the fundamentals don't change. And the fundamentals are how does technology drive a better customer experience? How does technology drive a better employee experience? And for us to translate, today, every AI conversation, you hear words like model and LLMs, and you hear like, how many, what was the size of the model? And which model is better than which model? And then you hear things like hardware and data centers. And it's like, you hear all these things. What you don't hear is, how are we going to improve customer satisfaction? How are we going to increase NPS by two points? And that was a big observation I had as I was meeting with my customers.