Deepak Kothule

CTO, AI Strategy Advisor at Independent

San Francisco Bay Area, United States

About Deepak Kothule

Deepak Kothule is CTO, AI Strategy Advisor at Independent. Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States.

I built an agentic AI platform for a contact center. Three months from concept to production. The voice and chat agents now carry about 90% of call volume, with 70% containment and 54% margin, and they close retention saves and upsells while humans take the complex cases. As CTO for AI at a PE-backed cybersecurity business with $100M+ partner revenue, I run an AI-first SDLC with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. Before that, I led the team that built the AI/ML platform at FICO used by the world's top 100 banks for fraud prevention and decision intelligence, contributing to $6B in valuation growth. I operated as VP and Head of Engineering for about six years, building healthcare products including conversational AI that drove 16x patient engagement and reduced cost of care by 20%. At Symantec, I led engineering for six cybersecurity product lines spanning Norton consumer and enterprise, integrating an AI-based behavioral detection engine, contributing to $3B ARR. Earlier, I created Salesforce Mobile from concept to production as a founding engineer at Sendia, which became Salesforce's first acquisition and established their mobile-first enterprise strategy. Across my career, I have built engineering teams from the ground up, scaled organizations by over 400%, and developed leaders who now serve as VPs and CTOs at major tech companies. I do my best work at the intersection of AI innovation, identity and access control for autonomous agents, and operational discipline in regulated industries. If your company is scaling an AI platform in fintech, healthcare, or cybersecurity and needs a CTO who has done it before, let's talk.

Skills

  • Amazon Bedrock
  • Product Engineering
  • Generative AI

Additional experience

  • Perplexity AI Business Fellow

    Perplexity

    Started March 2025

Education

  • Machine Learning, Stanford University
  • Bachelor In Computer Science, Savitribai Phule Pune University