HumanX 2026: Informatica Founder Diaz Nesamoney on Why the Cloud Matters

I was telling someone the other day that you know humans we have eyes, we have ears, we have a lot of tactile senses. So I think humans respond better when AI caters to all those tactile senses. So I think experience is going to be very important in the future because just giving a text response when somebody wants to buy a product doesn’t seem to convince them to buy it. AI is clearly a hot topic at the 2026 Human X conference in San Francisco. And joining me now to talk everything AI is DAS Nessa Money. He is the founder of Informatica. Diaz, welcome. Thank you. Great a pleasure to be here. So you founded Informatica. This is a company that was recently acquired by Salesforce. It’s a cloud-based enterprise platform.

What was it like founding that company? Uh it was exciting. I was young and uh you know got enamored with the idea of data. I I I feel like I’m a data geek. I seem to follow data everywhere. And you know I looking back at you know when Salesforce bought Informatica they bought them for the enterprise data they have which is now powering enterprise AI right and Aentic AI. So I think the idea of uh using data is something I learned along the way. I didn’t realize how valuable data is even back then even before AI and now with AI it’s it’s all about data. So it’s very exciting to see Informatica get to that point at Salesforce. That’s what I keep hearing from AI leaders that data is power.

Um how have you seen the data landscape change since we’ve seen a greater adoption of AI? Yeah. So you know uh I think what AI really brought about is that you know in the early days of Informatica uh it was about structured data right it was about numbers and so on that that was easy to digest and turn into insights and so on which large enterprises were using but the hard problem was dealing with unstructured data and unstructured content right there was no easy way to organize it and make any sense of it so the LMS essentially when they came on the scene. They had figured out a way to turn all of that unstructured data. So if you look at a big enterprise, only a small portion of their data is actually structured.

The rest of it’s kind of all over the place, documents and all kinds of data that we generate every day. So AI platforms learned how to take all that unstructured data and turn it into something valuable. So I think that’s the big change that AI brought about. What are some use cases? What are valuable things that people can measure with data? Yeah.

So I think the early innings of AI was about uh you know it was generative AI right like can I take unstructured data and content and recreate something new right so for example uh you could ask AI to write an essay for you right so it’s got a whole wealth of knowledge about a particular topic it’s going to scour the web find all that and write it for you or you say I want a uh a picture of somebody climbing a mountain or whatever, it knows it’s pulled in all that content. It’s generating. So, so that first phase was generative AI about collecting content and data and producing something for you. That was extraordinarily successful and people started using it.

The next phase which is even more exciting is agentic AI where it’s AI actually doing stuff for you. So, generative AI is like a a consultant or someone where you say, “Hey, can you help me with this?” It’ll just give you the answers but you have to actually go do the work. Now think of having someone who actually like an employee who you give a task and they will go and get the job done for you. And that’s what agentic AI became and it it used a lot of the ability of uh the LMS to process unstructured data to inform the agent on how to perform the task. Right?

So if I want to process a purchase order or something like that, the agent needs to know what the rules are about purchase orders, if there any limits on what amount should be automatically approved or should require human approval. I think that’s the next big breakthrough and we’re in the very early innings of that. You’ve had a storyried career that spanned decades. When did you first start hearing about AI? It was a funny story because I actually read an article in I think the New York Times or whatever about this interesting technology called Dolly. I don’t know if anyone remembers it now. So I was like Dolly what is that? And it says it has the ability to generate images for you and so on.

So I actually signed up for the beta at that time and then uh I got accepted. I was like yes let me try it out and I asked it to create an image for me and it did. It wasn’t great based on what we can do today. So I showed it to our management team and I said where did can you tell me where this image came from and I got various answers and I said this was generated by AI and nobody believed me then and I also said I think this is going to completely change the world of content. Uh and you know at that time it was so early like it was and it was just Dali then and fast forward now we see the power that was underneath that model.

So it’s it’s been fascinating just to see how it developed from that early days of generating a pretty grainy looking not so nice image to what we can do today with video and all kinds of content. And AI is now outperforming humans in some cases. Do you think there’s any ceiling to its capabilities? Uh yes it is. Now um I think in in the enterprise we’re finding an interesting challenge right because a lot of enterprise process I I like to say in enterprise there is no almost like it was almost right it balanced the it almost balanced the books it almost processed the PO correctly it almost gave the right refund there’s no almost in the enterprise it is it has to be exact right and AI we all know isn’t precise.

It’s close enough, but often isn’t precise. So, we’re finding that we need compliance. We need guard rails. We need humans in the loop to check on the work. So, AI can do 80 90 sometimes even 100% of the job. But, uh it hasn’t got to the place where you can just tell it blindly just go do it. I don’t care. Not in the enterprise because the stakes are too high, right? If you know we work with uh very large global brands, right? and they’re worried about if the AI says something inadvertently, just even a using a word that might be offensive to their consumers, it it could destroy the brand, right? It doesn’t take much these days for one wrong word. Uh so so they’re being cautious, but AI uh can also help check that.

So we actually use AI to check AI. We have a compliance checker that checks against rules. So, so there are other complexities in the enterprise that you know we need to watch out for. What’s your position in the AI ecosystem now and what do you hope to do moving forward as it expands? Yeah. So, what we’re doing with AI is um a lot of people are now shopping on uh chat GPT and other platforms, right? And and so and the reason is because they can very quickly find stuff by just asking a question like I’m going camping this weekend. and I’m looking for a pair of hiking boots. You know, where can I find it? AI is very good at getting that to you. But today, mostly AI just gives you a whole bunch of text and it’s not that exciting or appealing.

So, what uh Da Vinci Commerce focuses on is creating experiences much like you would see when you if you walk into an actual store or went to the brand’s website. So, we create kind of rich um contentrich experiences for consumers. So when you ask that same question of a brand, you will now see product images, you’ll see reviews, you’ll you can ask questions about what’s the best product for wet weather versus, you know, a sunny day and so on and it answers that for you. So we’re focusing on the experience part of Agentic Commerce. Do you think we’re seeing an appetite for more experiential um opportunities in the marketplace? I think so.

I mean I I was telling someone the other day that you know humans we have eyes we have ears we have a lot of tactile senses. So I think humans respond better when AI caters to all those tactile senses. So I think experience is going to be very important in the future because just giving a text response when somebody wants to buy a product doesn’t seem to convince them to buy it but when you can give them rich and a rich experience they’re like oh that’s super exciting. It’s like think of going on a vacation. You want to see the beach. You want to see the property. Where you going to stay? What’s it going to look like from the room you’re going to be in? That’s experience. Uh AI by itself often doesn’t give you that kind of experience.

So that’s what we’re focusing on. DZ Nessamoney, founder of Informatica, thank you for joining us at Human X. Great, great to be with you. Thank you.