Interview #83 Shiva Pillay, General Manager & SVP, Americas at Veeam

Join Shiva Pillay, SVP and General Manager of Veeam Americas, as he discusses why 80-90% of AI projects fail due to fundamental data issues, revealing that enterprises are attempting to feed AI models with fragmented, poorly governed, and inconsistently labeled data that was never designed for AI consumption in the first place. Pillay explains the dangerous disconnect between C-suite executives confident in their AI-ready initiatives and SMEs still struggling in pilot mode, warning that without proper guardrails, AI errors propagate exponentially faster than human errors with potentially catastrophic consequences from faulty manufacturing parts to compliance violations in regulated industries. Drawing from Veeam's acquisition of Securiti AI, he introduces the concept of data command graph as critical infrastructure for AI resilience, arguing that data protection, recoverability, and visibility must be embedded directly into the AI stack rather than treated as underlying infrastructure, while emphasizing that as agentic AI systems gain autonomy, the existential question shifts from what can AI do to what is it allowed to do.