CData Software, leading data layer for AI, has named Indian American engineering leader Amit Naik as Vice President of AI Architecture amid accelerating enterprise demand for agentic data access.
Along with Naik, CData appointed Raviv Levi as Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) and Craig Sanchez as Senior Vice President of Embedded Sales to power the AI Data Layer.
The executive appointments support CData’s continued momentum as organizations rethink how enterprise data is accessed, governed, and acted on, whether by people working through conversational AI or by autonomous agents operating across enterprise systems, Chapel Hill, North Carolina based company announced.
“For years, enterprises focused on moving data for analytics,” said Amit Sharma, Founder and CEO of CData. “AI changes the equation. People are already using conversational AI to ask questions of their enterprise data, and autonomous agents are starting to take action on it. Both need live, governed, context-aware access to data wherever it lives.”
Read: Indian American scientist Sanjayan to lead New York Climate Exchange (May 19, 2026)
CData provides live access and data replication to virtually any enterprise data source spanning SaaS applications, cloud platforms, and on-premises systems. Its Connect AI platform is the industry’s first fully managed Model Context Protocol (MCP) platform and integrates with Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, and Agent 365.
As Vice President of AI Architecture, Naik will lead the design and evolution of CData’s AI architecture, working across product and engineering to ensure the platform meets the technical demands of enterprise AI deployments. He joins CData from Calix and previously held senior leadership roles in AI/ML solutions and infrastructure at PayPal, Financial Engines and Oracle.
“The AI architecture challenge for enterprises is clear: people need to ask questions of their data through conversational AI, and agents need to act on that data across dozens of systems, all in real time and with governance at every layer,” said Naik. “I’m here to work with our customers and product teams to establish CData as the substrate that makes agentic AI safe, grounded, and operational at enterprise scale.”
Naik earned an MS inComputer Engineering from Purdue University after getting a BE in Computer and Electrical Engineering from COEP Technological University, Pune, India and a BE Electrical Engineering from Savitribai Phule Pune University, India.