The New Stack Makers

Rahul Auradkar, executive VP and GM at Salesforce, grew up in India with a deep passion for cricket, where his love for the game sparked an early interest in data. This fascination with statistics laid the foundation for his current work leading Salesforce’s Data Cloud and Einstein (Unified Data Services) team. Auradkar reflects on how structured data has evolved—from relational databases in enterprise applications to data warehouses, data lakes, and lakehouses. He explains how initial efforts focused on analyzing structured data, which later fed back into business processes. Eventually, businesses realized that the byproducts of data—what he calls "data exhaust"—were themselves valuable. The rise of "old AI," or predictive AI, shifted perceptions, showing that data exhaust could define the application itself. As varied systems emerged with distinct protocols and SQL variants, data silos formed, trapping valuable insights. Auradkar emphasizes that the ongoing challenge is unifying these silos to enable seamle