On the sidelines of Web Summit Qatar 2026, Informatica CEO Amit Walia and SVP Sales International Emilio Valdés sat down with Gulf Business to discuss Qatar’s fast-moving digital agenda, the country’s new partnership with Informatica, and what it signals for enterprise data and AI readiness. They also unpacked the implications of Informatica’s integration into Salesforce, the challenges enterprises face in scaling AI beyond pilots, and why robust data foundations are becoming the defining factor in successful AI adoption.
You’ve just attended Web Summit Qatar 2026. Looking back, what are your impressions of the country’s digital ambitions?
Amit Walia: I’ve been to Dubai and Riyadh before, but this was my first trip to Qatar. I was positively impressed by the scale, scope, and the ambition of what the country wants to do, especially with Qatar Digital Agenda 2030. Having met some government officials, and a minister, what really jumped out for me is the energy with which they want to pursue the digital and AI agenda.
In my experience, governments typically are not as aggressive and risk-taking as a private enterprise. But here I found it to the contrary. The conversation was, “We want to move fast, we want to move not in the context of years, but in the context of quarters, and we are totally comfortable in trying 10 things, and if three of them fail, that’s okay, we’ll learn from it.” That’s usually not what I expect to hear from government. The other conversation was that it’s not just about the technology, you also need to upskill people, particularly local talent, which we will help with.
Tell us about the partnership you’ve just signed with Qatar.
Emilio Valdés: Qatar’s approach to this undertaking has been unique and commendable. Not only are they using Informatica to dictate the data governance practices, but they also decided to host the environment for all the public administrations to use. It goes beyond governance, it’s actually the hosting and the service that they will provide to all public administrations in Qatar.
Amit Walia: The NPC (National Planning Council) and the MCIT (Ministry of Communications and Information Technology) began with this initiative, but the philosophy is that ultimately they want to serve the citizens and build initiatives for the growth of the country. They realise that even as AI is coming on board, what is very critical is to have data readiness. To get data ready, you need multiple capabilities. We have a platform that has all of those capabilities on one platform. They wanted to bet on somebody that has those capabilities at scale.
They were very smart here. They said, “Look, we’re not a big country. We want to make sure that everybody’s leveraging the same data platform,” because ultimately the initiatives are interlinked. They also wanted a partner that can do three things. First, scaling of their talent, it’s not just technology. Second, technology that can do both digital and AI (Artificial Intelligence) initiatives, because not every initiative is an AI initiative, but as they’re doing their digital initiatives, they can experiment and begin their AI initiatives. Third, a platform that is both hybrid and sovereign cloud, which gives them flexibility for mission-critical things.
What does the recent acquisition of Informatica by Salesforce mean for the industry? What will the joint offering bring?
Emilio Valdés: We will be part of the data foundations team. Salesforce will consolidate all the data solutions that they have, and we are going to be at the core of that data foundations strategy. As Salesforce ultimately is looking to help companies become the agentic enterprise, the data foundation is critical to make that happen.
You work with more than 80 of the Fortune 100. What challenges are these enterprises facing with data and AI?
Amit Walia: AI is a tale of two different segments. We all get confused about AI going gangbusters, but that’s the consumer side of AI. You’re using ChatGPT, you’re using all kinds of AI in your daily life. And there, it’s much easier because the data is all available on the internet. When you ask Gemini or ChatGPT something, it just goes, takes any data available, and gives you an answer. There’s no governance, compliance. If the answer is not correct, your world won’t fall apart. You just live with it, just like any consumer software.
On the enterprise side, there is lot more governance, compliance, process, security of data and privacy of data. They’re not going to take their mission-critical data and put it in an open AI cloud. They want to keep it themselves. There is a lot that has to happen for enterprise AI to actually come to scale.
Enterprises have been doing a lot of POCs (proof of concepts) and small experiments, but when they have to convert that to scale, it takes time. There is no AI without data. You need to make sure the model you are using has holistic data, the data is of good quality, and when the answer comes out, you have proper governance. For example, if you’re a retail company trying to delight a customer, the access that their marketing teams have to information on you, or the customer support team, or the finance team, they’re all different. You’ve got to have the right governance. In an enterprise, there are hundreds and hundreds of applications, hundreds and hundreds of databases. It takes a lot of work to get their foundation right, and that’s what they’re doing right now.
How do you stay relevant when hyperscalers such as AWS and Azure are building their own data management capabilities?
Amit Walia: That is a misnomer. Data management is a very broad word, unfortunately. We are actually very close partners with AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure, GCP (Google Cloud Platform), and Oracle. We are the Switzerland of data.
Data management, what we do, is things they don’t do. In some of the areas, they do have overlapping capabilities, but they are good enough just for their cloud, just to check the box. But if I’m a large enterprise, I need to make sure I’m acquiring a technology that is multi-cloud, and it really scales for the use case. That’s why we actually partner with them. Their reps actively position us. In fact, the partnership in this region that we were just talking about is a joint partnership with us, Microsoft, and many others. It’s a collaborative partnership. It’s not competitive. It’s very complementary.
How do you keep the human element going in a tech company? What drives Informatica to keep innovating?
Amit Walia: We are a very mission-driven, values-driven company. In fact, our values are D-A-T-A. D stands for “do good,” A stands for “act as one team,” T stands for “think customer first,” and the last A stands for “act to innovate.” Innovation is part of our values.
Emilio lives in the field, we bend our back to make our customers successful. That has been the secret sauce for the company. We want our customers to be successful from step zero with our offering, but if things go wrong, and they do go wrong, we absolutely bring the whole company to help our customers. The pride of developing the best products, the pride of making sure our customers are successful and their stories are told, has kept us going. That’s our DNA.
Looking back on six years as CEO, what decision made the biggest impact and what would you have done sooner?
Amit Walia: They’re both the same. When I took over the CEO role in January 2020, exactly six years ago, we had a very small cloud business and it was not necessarily a prime focus. The world had become cloud, and we were doing okay. I told the board, “Look, we want to be a cloud company.”
We got into the strategy of being a cloud-first company, and then in January 2023, we became cloud-only. That was massively transformational for the company, and it paid off for us. At the same time, I would have liked to move even faster.
Emilio Valdés: I’m going to give you the perspective of the one who was implementing the vision that Amit had. It was so transformational, so impactful for us and for our business, and we never compromised customer success. That is the beauty that Amit brought to the company as a CEO.
Finally, what does 2026 hold for both of you?
Amit Walia: I will be transitioning out of Salesforce at the end of this month. My job is complete, moving the company within Salesforce. We closed the fiscal year with Salesforce on January 31. I’m now pretty excited about what the company is going to do from here.
Emilio Valdés: I’ll stay as one of the most senior Informatica employees. My top priority is to make sure that this acquisition is successful, that this integration goes smoothly, and that we really play the role that many want us to play, to become the bedrock of the data foundations group at Salesforce. We are the ‘Switzerland of data’. We are going to be the ‘Switzerland of Salesforce’ as well. The future is going to be amazing for us. I’m super excited about the next journey.
