Harshil Patel

About Harshil Patel

Harshil is a Digital & Data executive with an aptitude in Business innovation, data & analytics strategy and execution. He has 20+ years of IT expertise leading global and cross-functional teams in Technology, Healthcare and Retail industries through periods of rapid growth and change. A champion for driving digital transformations at scale through strategic management, emerging technologies, and relationship building, he aims to drive Business value and ROI by bringing renewed perspective to digital leadership while lowering the TCO (Total cost of Operations).AREAS OF EXPERTISE:Strategic Leadership | Technology commercialization | Entrepreneurial Innovation | Setting & executing multiyear Business Vision | Emerging technologies (Blockchain & ML)| Cloud Product Development | Data & Analytics engineering | IT Financial optimization | Team-building and people mgmt

Experience

1. Vice President - Data & Ai

   Walmart

   May 2025 — Present

   As a Global data and AI executive for Walmart International, Harshil enables Market growth, improves customer outcomes, and strengthens governance across International Markets. He spearheads enterprise scale data platforms, AI Transformation and governance across 18 countries and ~700 Software, Data & AI professionals. He leads all aspects of long- and short-range planning for Walmart International Data & AI, Engineering & Operational Excellence and democratizing AI tools for productivity, automation and growth. Partners with Chief Growth & Customer officers across markets to implement strategic vision in transforming, enhancing, and strengthening the Omnichannel retail tech strategy driven through Data Insights and Intelligence. Connects segment strategies with their data needs, evaluates build versus leverage alternatives to enable all aspects of IT, Data and Analytics across ~21PB data and ~$100M Cloud & Data TCO. Works closely with Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Legal and Business Executives, to manage the Risk in a clear and quantitative format for Country specific regulations and SOX audits. Leads cross-functional Business, Product and Engineering organizations to simplify and break data silos, creating single source of truth (SSOT) for key enterprise data products, and enabling near real-time data access for Domains ML/AI initiatives. Influences and collaborates to foster successful internal and external partnerships with the industry leaders and cutting-edge Vendor-partners to build and scale a GenAI/agentic ecosystem to enable domain-specific agents across ecommerce, marketing, operations, sourcing and merchandizing.

Education

• Rochester Institute of Technology

  MS Computer Science, Computer Science

  2001 — 2002

• Cornell University

  Organizational Leadership

• Stanford University Graduate School of Business

  Executive Leadership

  2018 — 2018

• Blockchain Training Aliance

  BTA Certified Blockchain Business Foundations

  2020 — 2020

• Cornell University

  Executive Leadership, Organizational Leadership

  2015 — 2016

• MS University, India

  BS Computer Science & Engineering

  1997 — 2001

Skills

• Integration
• Sdlc
• Enterprise Architecture
• Soa
• Web Services
• Solution Architecture
• Enterprise Software
• Unified Communications
• Agile Methodologies
• Requirements Analysis
• Software Project Management
• Java Enterprise Edition
• Cisco Technologies
• Software Development
• Speech Recognition
• Business Analysis
• Technology Leadership
• Large Systems Integration
• Performance Testing & Analysis
• Cloud Security Architecture
• Application Performance Management
• Master Data Management
• Restful Architecture
• University Teaching