As enterprises in India accelerate AI adoption, one of the biggest challenges they face is ensuring reliable, high-quality data. Without trusted data, AI projects risk failure, lower RoI, and compliance issues. Informatica, an American enterprise software company, is addressing these challenges through its cloud-native, AI-powered data management platform. In this interview, Amit Walia, CEO of Informatica, speaks to Sudhir Chowdhary on their India expansion plan. Excerpts:
How does India fit into your global growth strategy?
India is central to Informatica’s global growth strategy, not just as a high-potential market but as a core pillar of our innovation engine. We have been present in India for over 22 years, with our largest footprint in Bengaluru and additional centres in Hyderabad and Chennai, including teams that joined us through acquisitions.
Today, India represents more than half of Informatica’s global workforce, with roughly 2,700 employees out of our approx 5,500 employees worldwide. Around 60-65% of our India team is focused on engineering, supported by strong customer experience functions such as support and professional services.
As Indian enterprises accelerate their digital transformation, data has moved from being a back-end IT concern to a board-level priority. We are seeing strong demand as organisations modernise their data estates to support cloud adoption, analytics and, increasingly, AI-driven use cases.
What are your key focus areas for the next phase of expansion?
India presents strong opportunities across cloud modernisation, data governance and enterprise AI adoption. Organisations across sectors such as banking, manufacturing, healthcare, public sector and retail are dealing with increasingly complex data environments that span on-premises systems, multiple clouds and SaaS platforms. At the same time, regulatory expectations around data security, privacy and compliance are rising.
Informatica is well positioned to address these needs through its AI-powered Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform. IDMC brings together data integration, quality, governance, cataloguing and master data management on a single cloud-native platform. This allows Indian enterprises to simplify complexity, improve data trust and scale digital and AI initiatives with confidence.
Informatica’s platform strategy
How is Informatica integrating AI into its platform?
AI has been integral to Informatica’s platform strategy well before the recent surge in generative AI. At the core of our IDMC platform is CLAIRE, our AI engine, which automates data discovery, data quality, metadata management and governance. This can help enterprises significantly reduce manual effort while improving trust and reliability across their data estates.
Over the past year, we have taken this further with major platform enhancements, including our recent release, which introduced AI-driven data management agents.
These include agents for data ingestion, data quality and data discovery, designed to support emerging agent-based architectures. As enterprises experiment with AI agents across their organisations, one of the biggest challenges they face is ensuring that data passed between agents is accurate, governed and fit for use.
What we are seeing today is that most large enterprises are still in the early stages of this journey, running pilots and proof-of-concepts to understand how agentic architectures fit into their existing environments. As customers move pilots into production, Informatica’s role is to provide a trusted data foundation that allows organisations to scale AI responsibly, with strong governance, quality and compliance built in from
the start.
Challenges faced
What challenges are Indian organisations facing in their AI journeys?
While interest in AI-driven data management is growing rapidly, many organisations face practical challenges when moving from experimentation to execution. One of the biggest hurdles is integrating new AI and agent-based architectures without disrupting existing systems that continue to run core business operations. Enterprises need to modernise while keeping their current environments stable, which requires careful planning and phased execution.
Skill gaps and change management are another major challenge. AI and agent-based technologies are still relatively new and organisations often struggle to find or develop the right skills internally. Underlying all of this is the data challenge itself. Data remains fragmented, inconsistent and difficult to govern across complex environments.
What are Informatica’s upcoming priorities?
India is central to Informatica’s innovation and growth strategy. Our iLabs serve as the company’s largest global centre and its primary innovation hub. Over the years, India has evolved well beyond an R&D base to host nearly every function, including engineering, customer success, sales enablement and operations.
Importantly, our core AI engineering leadership is based in India. Key innovations such as CLAIRE, CLAIRE GPT and our data management agents have been developed out of iLabs. This reflects our long-term commitment to building advanced data and AI capabilities in the region.
We continue to place strong emphasis on continuous reskilling, including structured AI training programs for our teams, alongside campus and experienced hiring. We will continue to work with the broader ecosystem to foster innovation and help customers scale their data and AI initiatives. These efforts reinforce India’s role not just as a growth market, but as a global centre of innovation.