ThoughtSpot taps Salesforce exec Karkhanis to be new CEO

A new leader

ThoughtSpot, based in Mountain View, Calif., is an analytics vendor that from its inception in 2012 made natural language processing (NLP) the focal point of its platform. Its stated goal has been to help foster a "fact-driven world," enabling not only technical experts to work with data but also non-technical workers.

To date, ThoughtSpot has raised more than $600 million in funding, including $248 million in 2019 and $100 million in 2021.

Ketan Karkhanis

Karkhanis becomes the third CEO of ThoughtSpot.

Ajeet Singh, one of the vendor's co-founders and its current executive chairman, was its first CEO, guiding ThoughtSpot through its early startup stage. He also served as its interim CEO following Nair's resignation.

Nair joined ThoughtSpot after serving as president of Nutanix for seven years, where he helped guide the vendor through an IPO in 2016. He succeeded Singh in 2018. During his tenure, ThoughtSpot overhauled its platform and seemed to be positioning for an IPO by focusing on financial milestones such as annual recurring revenue, according to the vendor.

However, market conditions for IPOs have not been favorable over the past few years. As a result, ThoughtSpot, Pyramid Analytics, Qlik and SAS -- all of which expressed plans to go public -- have remained private.

Now, Karkhanis takes over.

ThoughtSpot had a long list of criteria its new CEO had to meet, according to Singh. Key among those was a leader who had worked at a large enterprise and seen what it takes to operate at scale. Also important was someone who had been part of growth, helping not only lead scale but also reaching that scale.

"What I found the most exciting about [Karkhanis] was that he had known ThoughtSpot from our very early days, being on the other side of the table, and he had a healthy respect for what we've built and the way we've approached [analytics]," Singh said. "He has bought into the vision of the company and thinks we can become even more exciting."

As Karkhanis takes over, one of ThoughtSpot's main goals is to continue its growth to eventually reach $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.

"The market has shown that we can build and sustain that kind of a business," Singh said. "We're very ambitious. Our tangible goal is to build a very large company."

While Karkhanis fit what ThoughtSpot was looking for in a new CEO, ThoughtSpot likewise appealed to Karkhanis.

The vendor's goal of a fact-driven world enabled by AI appealed to him from afar when he first became aware of ThoughtSpot, he said. Now, as generative AI becomes the main focus of analytics and AI represents the future of BI, ThoughtSpot is positioned to take advantage.

"It's safe to say that AI is the new BI," Karkhanis said. "And Ajeet and his team were on that journey before everyone else."

As a result, there is now opportunity for ThoughtSpot to experience a surge in growth, he continued.

"Just as the cloud changed everything, AI is changing everything," Karkhanis said. "It's making every CEO, CIO and COO think about their enterprise stack and how to get actionable intelligence. ThoughtSpot has an articulation of what the experience needs to be. Humans don't speak data, data doesn't speak human, and ThoughtSpot bridges the gap."

To help ThoughtSpot reach its goal of $1 billion in annual recurring revenue, Karkhanis' primary focus will be on building ThoughtSpot into a vendor that helps define the next era of analytics providing customers a platform they can trust, he added.

Entering an era of AI

Guiding ThoughtSpot through these initial years of a new paradigm will be critical for Karkhanis as he takes over as the vendor's CEO. And it will be a challenge, according to Menninger.

Although ThoughtSpot has always focused on AI, it was never able to develop a platform that enabled true NLP, that let users query and analyze data using freeform language. Its platform had a limited vocabulary which, like the platforms of competing self-service analytics vendors, still required users to have some technical skills including data literacy training.

As a result, OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 in a sense cost ThoughtSpot its advantage. ChatGPT represented a significant improvement in generative AI capabilities, including enabling true NLP that when combined with an enterprise's proprietary data reduces the technical requirements previously required to use an analytics platform.

ThoughtSpot may have more experience with AI than some of its peers. But with generative AI now the foundation for the future of analytics, it no longer has the same technological differentiation it had before the new era of generative AI.

"As CEO, Karkhanis will need to chart the path forward for ThoughtSpot," Menninger said. "To some extent, you could say their initial claim to fame and differentiation -- natural language processing -- has been reduced or eliminated. Beyond its NLP capabilities, ThoughtSpot had been investing in catching up with the leaders in the analytics market, but our analysis suggests they still have more to do."

Catching up included the re-architecting of its platform in 2020 to make it cloud-native after making on-premises deployments its initial focus. It also included introducing embedded analytics capabilities that same year.

But according to Donald Farmer, founder and principal of TreeHive Strategy, key areas in which ThoughtSpot still needs improvement are data integration and preparation, which are critical to making data available for analysis and decision-making.

Without making it easy to get data ready for analysis, ThoughtSpot's growth has suffered despite the ease of use of its analytics layer, Farmer said.

Kharkanis, therefore, is a good choice to take over as CEO of ThoughtSpot, he continued. Farmer noted that Kharkanis has extensive engineering experience that can help from a technological standpoint and sales experience that can help market ThoughtSpot.

"Kharkanis has always struck me as a level-headed leader, sometimes in contrast to exuberant colleagues at Salesforce," Farmer said. "He is not given to exaggeration and has led the Sales Cloud team through important changes that require both vision and engineering. However, I think mostly what he will bring to ThoughtSpot is his passion for sales engineering and sales technology."

Regarding generative AI, ThoughtSpot is essentially in step with its competitors. The vendor quickly introduced Sage, a generative AI-powered interface for analytics, about five months after ChatGPT was released. Since then, like many vendors, ThoughtSpot has been working to ensure the accuracy of generative AI outputs so that customers trust Sage as they use it to inform decisions, according to Singh.

"One of the core principles behind ThoughtSpot is that we will give you the correct answers," Singh said. "Trust is hard to build and easy to lose."

Unlike competitors including Tableau, Qlik and MicroStrategy that have made certain generative AI capabilities generally available, ThoughtSpot has kept Sage in what it calls early access, which is essentially public preview. But that hasn't prevented its customers from developing and deploying generative AI tools.

Meanwhile, shifting market conditions could provide ThoughtSpot with growth opportunities as it works toward its goal of becoming a $1 billion company under Kharkanis, according to Henschen.

As generative AI proliferates, key competitors are changing their focus. Tableau, an independent vendor until being acquired by Salesforce in 2019, is slowly becoming more aligned with other Salesforce platforms such as Salesforce Data Cloud than trying to appeal to new customers. Similarly, Microsoft's Power BI is closely aligning with Microsoft Fabric to create a data ecosystem for Microsoft users.

"There's no doubt that growth and the ultimate end game for ThoughtSpot will continue to be priorities," Henschen said. "The good news is that market dynamics are shifting. This might present an opening for ThoughtSpot to win over customers that prefer to stick with independent vendors."

Farmer likewise noted that the competitive landscape is changing as generative AI becomes the dominant underlying technology for analytics. ThoughtSpot, however, hasn't yet taken full advantage.

"With Tableau disappearing into Salesforce, Qlik aging on the vine and Power BI becoming a commodity, they had the product and the opportunity but [haven't made] it happen," Farmer said.

In the future

While Kharkanis is just now taking over as ThoughtSpot's CEO, the vendor already has a product development roadmap in place for the near term.

Among them is continuing to add and improve generative AI capabilities, according to Singh. Toward that end, the vendor is planning to unveil new generative AI capabilities in October, he said.

Another plan is to add AI to ThoughtSpot's embedded analytics capabilities so users can benefit from AI in their normal workflows without having to switch to ThoughtSpot's analytics environment.

Longer term, a guiding development principle is to provide customers with better outputs while requiring less input from them, improving ThoughtSpot to deliver more value while requiring less work on the part of users, Singh continued.

Eventually, Kharkanis wants ThoughtSpot to be ubiquitous, delivering AI and analytics capabilities to all applications to help customers grow their own businesses.

"New experience paradigms will come in," he said. "It's going to be an exciting world. Data has this fundamental power to transform how we work, how we live. We have big dreams, but we're getting started."

Beyond its product roadmap, Henschen said that ThoughtSpot needs to take advantage of sales opportunities as they arise.

As a newcomer in 2012, ThoughtSpot entered a market with established vendors such as Tableau, MicroStrategy and Qlik. Customers of those vendors had already invested heavily in not only software but also training employees to use the software. As a result, taking customers away from those vendors is difficult.

But platforms age, and as they do, enterprises have an opportunity to look at different technologies.

"When there's a platform already in place, an innovator like ThoughtSpot frequently has to win a net-new, departmental deployment and hope for land-and-expand opportunities," Henschen said. "Nonetheless, long-term contracts do expire, and I suspect sticker shock and packaging of new products along with the platform will lead some buyers to consider new options."

Menninger, meanwhile, suggested that ThoughtSpot continue to focus on adding technologies to catch up to more established vendors as Kharkanis takes over as CEO.

"The product has been greatly improved, but our analysis suggests they still have more to do," he said.

Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.