CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Sumeet Arora, Chief Development Officer, ThoughtSpot
- Can you briefly describe what ThoughtSpot does and what differentiates it from other analytics platforms?
ThoughtSpot enables everyone within an organization to limitlessly engage with live data in any popular cloud data platform, making creating and interacting with granular, hyper-personalized, actionable insights easy. The last wave of analytics featured complex tools built for data teams to spoon feed insights to executives, leaving everyone else in the dust. As the experience layer of the modern data stack, ThoughtSpot enables every kind of user – business user, data professional, or product builder – to improve decision-making wherever and whenever decisions are made. Amid economic downturns, layoffs, and budget cuts, this kind of autonomy is more important than ever, as disruption and change push organizations to adapt to a more data-savvy culture to keep pace with digital innovation. ThoughtSpot offers business intelligence capabilities on both web and mobile applications, while ThoughtSpot’s low-code developer-friendly platform, ThoughtSpot Everywhere, enables customers to embed AI-Powered Analytics to their products and services, monetizing their data and enhancing the overall user experience.
2. Can you share the India story? Investments made, current business and growth plans in the region.
India is a hotbed of technological innovation, and our R&D teams in the region have always been critical to our business strategy and success. In 2017, we launched our first R&D center in Bangalore, with a team responsible for product building from design through to development. We quickly saw the impact of this team and two years later expanded the engineering center with a focus on recruiting talent from top universities. Two years after that, we acquired Diyotta, adding 50% more headcount in India, including an expanded footprint in Hyderabad. Then, this past September, we opened a third office in Trivandrum, with a commitment to invest $150 million USD over the next 5 years. Just this month, we acquired the team from Sagas IT Analytics to form our India Customer Center of Excellence, to support ThoughtSpot’s global go to market team. From our ThoughtSpot Sage to our Data Workspace to ThoughtSpot Everywhere to Liveboards, the amount of value our team in India is creating for customers around the world is truly exceptional, and we’ll continue to invest in and grow our teams to support our customers in building their business on data.
3. Can you share more details about the acquisition of employees from Sagas IT? How will it benefit the business in India?
We have built an innovation factory that is delivering more and more transformational technology with each release. Taking advantage of it requires having the right strategy in place, and we’re investing in being a strategic partner in helping our customers not only leverage new technologies, but turn them into business strategy and realize real business outcomes. The SagasIT Analytics team has worked with Global 2000 customers such as Unilever, Mercedes-Benz, GE Healthcare, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Stanford University, and Best Western to implement data engineering, data science, and data visualization solutions. This experienced team will have an immeasurable impact on our ability to meet customers where they are to support their modern data stack journeys.
4. You are launching the Customer Center of Excellence in India. Please share the idea behind it and what it means for the Indian employees.
While ThoughtSpot has made it easy for business people to engage with data, we recognize there’s still work required to set up the business for realizing the full benefits of AI-powered analytics, including attaching analytics programs to business strategy, helping with people change management, and building data fluent cultures
With our Customer Center of Excellence, now expanded with the India CCOE, we’re digging in even deeper with customers to help them solve their challenges, whether they are technology, data, process, people, or culture. The India CCOE will support our global go to market team and be responsible for advancing customer outcomes through implementation, adoption strategies, community response management and overall account management and customer success for global accounts. With this team of strategic and technical advisors sitting in India, we’re bringing our product teams even closer to our customers.
5. What key features or capabilities of the ThoughtSpot platform that you think users would find most useful?
ThoughtSpot’s mission to democratize data for the masses has driven consistent innovation since its inception, and a significant priority for ThoughtSpot is conversational AI becoming a reality. ThoughtSpot pioneered search for data powered by AI, which in turn empowers users to answer the questions they know to ask while unearthing insights users wouldn’t even know to look for based on historical data. This self-serve experience of taking data, turning it into insights, and taking action based on that information has always been our bread and butter. The advancements in AI and foundational large language models is now supercharging our unique ability to deliver a new search experience, which we call ThoughtSpot Sage.
ThoughtSpot Sage, which includes an integration with GPT, delivers a unified search experience by combining large language models like GPT with ThoughtSpot’s patented search technology, bringing natural language search, AI-generated answers, and data modeling capabilities to our existing platform. We have done this in a manner such that users including analysts and power users have a role in ensuring that the system continues to learn and improve its accuracy while the combination of GPT and ThoughtSpot’s relational search technology ensures that the business continues to run on accurate results.
The excitement around Sage from our customers, partners and the general market has been nothing short of ecstatic. As seasoned industry analyst Donald Farmer said, “it’s the first serious enterprise implementation I have seen of these LLM features in a mainstream analytics platform.”
6. How do you see the field of data analytics and business intelligence evolving in the next few years, and what role do you think ThoughtSpot will play in that evolution?
Foundational models like GPT are driving an “innovation race” within businesses that are trying to figure out how to leverage capabilities for competitive advantage. Generative AI, for all its benefits, still has some maturing to do to be effective for enterprise. It gets confused when large numbers of columns are involved or when the schema is fairly complex and there are multiple fact tables. The accuracy of raw GPT is not something to write home about, especially in a data context, but is the essential criteria for success in a business setting.
As the impact of AI continues to surge in business and society, various ethical issues arise from more complex use cases. Proper data governance frameworks, tools to expose bias, and factors in transparency will be needed to stay compliant with legal and social structures. Proper model validation and audit mechanisms with inbuilt explainability and checks for reproducibility will need to become the norm for safeguarding against ethical lapses. Large language models promise to make interacting and conversing with data easier than it has ever been before, but doing so in a way that’s accurate, trustworthy, and actionable will require the kind of self-service analytics platform ThoughtSpot has spent a decade building.
We’re on the precipice of a new relationship between humans and machines. Tools like Sage will help humans speak to machines, while other forms of AI like SpotIQ, our AI engine that helps you ask and answer questions you didn’t even think to ask, will enable machines and systems to alert you to changes you should know about, not after they happen, but as they happen, why they are happening, what is likely to happen, and most importantly, what you can do about them.
This modern data experience powered by AI is the future of analytics.
