Chirantan Desai

President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Mongodb

Search every verified Chirantan Desai interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. CJ Desai, President and CEO of MongoDB, has been active in public appearances discussing the role of data platforms in the AI era. At the RAISE Summit in Paris in July 2026, he stated that "data is the unsung hero and data is back," adding that "you cannot create an AI application without a great data layer." Desai also noted that some hyperscalers are running out of capacity, citing an example of a large customer in Texas being told by a hyperscaler that it lacked capacity for additional workloads, leading the customer to consider running workloads on-premises. In a separate appearance at the Interrupt conference by LangChain, Desai said that large enterprises' expectations for 2025 as "the year of agents" did not pan out, but that technologies around observability and harness are maturing in 2026. He also commented that MongoDB is only signing one-year contracts, citing uncertainty around AI-driven productivity gains and their impact on hiring needs. On the company's Q1 fiscal 2027 earnings call in May 2026, Desai reported total revenue of $688 million, up 25% year-over-year, with Atlas revenue growing 29.4%. He stated that results are driven primarily by core workloads but that the company is seeing "real and growing momentum from AI and agentic workloads." Desai described MongoDB as "on its way to becoming the generational data platform of choice for the AI era." At MongoDB.local in Bengaluru in June 2026, he announced a goal to upskill two million builders in India by 2030 and said that "in the AI era, your data platform is the foundation of your AI strategy."