Naveen Zutshi

Peter Baskette

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Naveen Zutshi is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Databricks, where he leads global IT initiatives and drives enterprise-wide AI transformation. Zutshi has been instrumental in scaling Databricks' internal use of generative AI (GenAI), implementing copilots across engineering and R&D teams, automating back-end processes, and streamlining end-user support for greater digital workplace productivity.

Prior to Databricks, Zutshi served as CIO at Palo Alto Networks, where he oversaw IT strategy and operations, contributing to the company's rapid growth and expansion into new security domains. Zutshi's strategic vision and expertise in aligning technology with business objectives have positioned him as a transformative leader in the AI landscape.

Connect with Naveen on: Linkedin

Career highlights

Encover

2022

Chief Information Officer

2015

SVP & CIO

2010

SVP of technology

2007

VP of R&D

2000

Sr. Development Manager

Claim to fame

Driving Gen AI-powered service automation

A major AI success that Zutshi championed is in deploying a Gen AI-powered assistant on Databrick’s primary communication platform – Slack to transform their end-user support. They were able to thus automate ~2500 software requests in 6 months and achieved 73% deflection of employee queries reaching their service desk, reducing repetitive workload, accelerating issue resolution, and enhancing workplace productivity.

Transforming seller experience with AI agents

Another notable initiative that Naveen led at Databricks is augmenting their sales team with conversational AI capabilities to help them retrieve the right information and orchestrate repetitive tasks across platforms. Building their “Field AI Assistant” on the Databricks Mosaic AI agentic framework, their IT team empowered sales professionals to conversationally interact and pull insights for personalized outreach and customized proposals.

Powering AI contract management

Zutshi is also experimenting with a GenAI contract summarization tool that evaluates clauses against Salesforce data to flag risks and indemnities to lighten the load of their legal team. By auto-summarizing non-standard terms, the platform speeds contract review with detailed contextual understanding and validation while maintaining human oversight.

Deploying software development copilots

Naveen also championed using their own assistant copilots and DatabricksIQ to embed AI in their development workflows, justifying the use of copilots on software engineering and data operations. Used across tasks like data ingestion, language migration, and test case generation, deploying copilots support the creation of ML models and dashboards and they’ve noticed productivity gains of up to 30%.

Naveen’s AI Philosophy

Naveen Zutshi

CIO, Databricks

"Often, we want to move quickly into the AI world but then realize our data set is in bad shape. First and foremost, you need a clear data strategy and you need to execute on the strategy." Source

“There used to be a stat 80% of AI projects would fail. In my experience, the failure can be traced back to not having holistic strategy.” Source

“Before [this latest AI wave], you were using NLP and AI, but it was used primarily by data scientists and data engineers. It is now democratizing this whole notion of LLMs to the entire company. I can’t tell you how many business leaders, whether they’re in sales and other groups who want to start using the technology.” Source