Exclusive: Abhas Ricky on how Cloudera is powering the AI revolution

Artificial intelligence is moving out of the lab and into the engine rooms of business, according to Cloudera's Chief Strategy Officer, Abhas Ricky.

Despite last month's NVIDIA GTC conference already in the rear-view mirror, he believes the momentum behind AI technologies and infrastructure "continues to evolve".

"The NVIDIA GTC conference was packed with exciting announcements and insights," Ricky told TechDay during a recent interview.

He said the number one thing that stood out to him was "how AI is transitioning from experimentation to enterprise-scale execution - and fast."

For Cloudera, another key highlight was NVIDIA's AI Agents Blueprint – a framework that Ricky believes will help businesses integrate intelligent agents into everyday operations.

"This blueprint provides a structured approach to building and deploying AI agents that can automate complex tasks, enhance decision-making, and improve operational efficiency," he explained.

Cloudera sees agentic AI – systems that can act autonomously based on data and models – as a cornerstone of future enterprise tech.

"By integrating such AI agents into Cloudera's platform, businesses can automate workflows, improve customer service, and orchestrate complex processes more effectively," Ricky said.

Equally significant, he explained, was the return of focus to on-premises AI infrastructure.

"Nearly every enterprise is reevaluating how to bring AI closer to their data," Ricky said. He noted that governance, performance, cost, and data sovereignty are the main drivers.

Ricky also pointed to a recent Barclays survey which found 83% of enterprise CIOs plan to repatriate at least some workloads from the cloud to on-premises environments.

In response, Cloudera is doubling down on its hybrid strategy. Its new offering, 'AI in a Box', is designed to give enterprises flexibility and control.

"We're making it easier to build AI applications and AI agents from edge to AI using our partner ecosystem," Ricky said. "As an NVIDIA partner supporting our AI Inference Service, we believe we're uniquely positioned to help enterprises turn on-prem AI into a lasting competitive advantage."

Cloudera is also optimistic about how these AI innovations will play out across sectors like healthcare, telco, finance, public services and retail. "These technologies are set to revolutionise diagnostics, efficiency, security and customer experience," he added.

One striking example Ricky highlighted is NVIDIA's partnership with telco players to develop AI-RAN – an AI-powered approach to optimising radio access networks. "It enables AI applications to run on the RAN infrastructure itself, delivering new revenue streams and improving network performance," he said. "To unlock these outcomes, organisations need robust data flow governance and orchestration from edge to cloud – something Cloudera is ready to provide."

But while opportunities are vast, Ricky is also clear about the challenges enterprises face when adopting agentic AI.

"Security and compliance are critical," he said. "One of the biggest hurdles is ensuring proprietary data remains within the organisation's control.

Our Private AI approach keeps all training data, configurations and models inside the security perimeter."

Cloudera's solutions are built to meet regulatory frameworks like GDPR and HIPAA, Ricky added, ensuring businesses stay compliant while pushing the boundaries of AI innovation.

Then there's infrastructure. "AI agents come with high computational demands," he noted.

"Our unified data and AI lifecycle helps eliminate delays and keeps models current. Our hybrid platform allows AI workloads to run on any cloud or data centre, offering the flexibility needed for enterprise-scale deployments."

Cloudera's response to these trends is rooted in its end-to-end platform, which enables inference at scale, low-code development through its AI Studios, and seamless integration of NVIDIA's accelerated computing technology. Ricky said users can deploy AI agents in under ten minutes, thanks to unified tools that span ingestion, transformation, model deployment and visualisation.

Importantly, Cloudera's AI Inference service offers secure, production-grade deployment capabilities.

"Powered by the full-stack NVIDIA accelerated computing platform, it ensures scalable, optimised and secure model deployments powering real-time AI," Ricky said.

"Organisations can experience 36 times faster inference on NVIDIA GPUs."

Among those seeing results already is Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI), which is using Cloudera's AI Inference within its own virtual private cloud.

"BNI can now rapidly scale GenAI operations while maintaining full control over its data," Ricky said.

"It's a major step forward in transforming customer service and operational efficiency."

Cloudera's strategic direction is anchored in three core pillars: delivering true hybrid cloud capabilities, enabling modern data architectures, and accelerating private enterprise AI. Ricky believes these are the keys to helping organisations turn their data into competitive advantage.

"With an open data lakehouse powered by Apache Iceberg, there's no need to copy or move data," he explained.

"Our unified data fabric provides consistent security, governance and observability – all essential foundations for successful AI initiatives."

Strategic partnerships are central to this vision. Cloudera's collaboration with NVIDIA is just one example, alongside alliances with AWS, Pinecone, Google Cloud, CrewAI and Anthropic. Together, these partners form Cloudera's Enterprise AI Ecosystem – launched last year and expanded in 2024.

"We created this ecosystem because we recognise that AI is a team sport," Ricky said. "Joint solution architectures and project accelerators make AI adoption easier, more economical, and safer."

More than 20 AI project accelerators have already been deployed over 1,000 times in the past year.

One notable success came from a contract procurement use case in a large oil and gas company, which saved around $2 million annually by reducing research time from weeks to days.

Beyond AI, Cloudera is also focused on breaking down data silos through its interoperability initiatives. Ricky pointed to Cloudera's REST-Catalog, which enables seamless querying of data across platforms like Snowflake and AWS – reducing data movement costs by as much as 75%.

System integrators also play a crucial role in extending Cloudera's reach. "Kolon Benit, for example, has led digital transformations for manufacturing and financial services clients in Korea," Ricky said.

Asked how Cloudera plans to keep pushing forward, Ricky was unequivocal.

"At Cloudera, we're all about driving business value through innovation," he said. "To truly capture the AI opportunity, organisations need flexibility, privacy, and the right tools. That's what we're building."