Sid Bhatia, general manager and area VP for Middle East, Turkey, and Africa at Dataiku: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Sid Bhatia (LinkedIn), general manager and area VP for Middle East, Turkey, and Africa at Dataiku . Edited excerpts from our conversation:

My name is Sid, or Siddhartha, which actually means having clarity when it comes to goals and objectives. It’s interesting because I've always had a lot of clarity in terms of what I want to do and achieve. I've led some large startups in the region; I was the first person on ground for Cloudera back in 2016, and the first person on ground for Dataiku almost six years back. I've always been somebody who's good at building — whether it’s a business, a team, or company culture.

Having spent the last 20 years in the data and AI space and dealing with a lot of customers, you tend to know what's coming up next. I worked for IBM and SAP back in the day, and I saw this whole big data wave back in 2016, so I latched onto that wave before anybody else could.

Dataiku is a market leader when it comes to data science and machine learning, as well as AI agents. We have the ability today to do anything and everything related to AI, but our platform targets not just coders, but everyone across an organization. Given the advancements in the last 12-24 months in the LLM space, we developed the LLM Mesh, a gateway that allows access to features across LLMs from some of the largest generative AI firms in the world.

Dataiku today has about 75 large customers cutting across all industries, be it public sector, retail, banking, ins., telecoms, manufacturing, or oil and gas. Every business would have their own unique use cases — they could be around customer analytics, risk mitigation, or operational efficiency. We have our own roster of solutions but everything gets customized to the customer.

Sales is in my blood, but as you go up the ladder, I think, you have to strike the right balance in terms of how hands-on you can be while ensuring that, from a strategy perspective, the organization is heading the right direction. My responsibilities do involve me being heavily involved in the selling side of things, but I also have to make sure that all the cross-functional teams are aligned.

Everyone over the past six to 12 months has been interested in AI agents — it probably makes up around 95% of conversations around AI. That is where the industry is headed, because there are huge gains that you can get if you get it right. The problem with that is that every company, AI or not, is selling AI these days. It’s getting very competitive and is moving very fast, so it’s easy to build AI agents through smaller firms or with larger platforms. But the issue is not building the agents — it’s controlling them, governing them, making sure they are aligned with your organizational policy, putting in place the right guardrails and security policies, and preventing hallucinations.

There’s also still a lot of value to be gained from traditional AI use cases, and I would say that 90% of the customers are still implementing those traditional AI use cases as opposed to just generative AI and agents.

The past five years have been a huge success story, so now we want to focus on growing while staying grounded. We want to make sure we maintain our daily discipline in terms of staying close to our customer, but also ensure we really capture the market and scale the business.

At our weekly meetings, we look at our numbers and what we’re doing on a daily basis, but I always have a slide focusing on what I call “10x” — just to look at what we can do that takes us at least 10 years forward or grows the business by 10x. I use this to try to push people around me to think out of the box and come up with crazy ideas that people laugh at, and then see how we can actually make it happen.

The company is investing big into the Middle East, which is one of the fastest growing markets for Daiku worldwide. We have a large team here in Dubai, and one in Saudi Arabia as well, and we’re hiring across functions right now, with a big focus on post-sales roles to ensure that once customers buy our software, they’re actually seeing the value of it. We’re also growing our partner ecosystem, and want to expand it further into other territories like Turkey, Egypt, Bahrain, and Qatar.

I sleep late and get up early. The first thing I do in the morning is have coffee, and do some reading. I love reading, and I love following influential leaders on LinkedIn, so I really spend a lot of time looking at the latest AI trends, reading books on leadership, and writing articles.

At 8am, I’m ready for my first calls with customers. I love calling them early in the morning because they tend to get very busy after that. I also like to get my emails out of my inbox in 30 minutes, and then I'm in the office, with the team, trying to solve the biggest problems of the day, delegate and make sure I'm as involved as I can be. I tend to meet as many customers as I can, and then I’m out of the office usually by 7pm to spend some time with my family.

Whenever I get time, I go for a quick game of golf. I also love camping over the weekends.

Regardless of what the weather pattern looks like, eight times out of 10 I'll be camping on the weekends with my friends or family, getting people together. I find it to be a great way to disconnect before getting ready for another Monday morning.

One book I love is Never Split the Difference. It has helped me with negotiations with partners, customers, and in my personal life as well. It really emphasizes the importance of active listening and being empathetic in negotiations, and not just focusing on the financial aspects of things. I’ve asked my team to read that book as well.

One important piece of advice that somebody gave me, and I wish I got it earlier, is to think big. A lot of people think they’re not ready to take risks or that this is something for a person at a different level or stage in their lives, but the advice I got was to have no fear and take the bigger risks in life. The bigger risk would mean a bigger reward as well.

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