Inderpal Bhandari

Founder and CEO Inderpal Bhandari is a Member of the Board of Directors at Walgreens Boots Alliance, as well as The AES Corporation. Along with these board member roles, he is also a Distinguished Executive in Residence at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Previously, he served as the Global Chief Data Officer at IBM where he leveraged his extensive experience to lead IBM’s data strategy to ensure IBM remained the number one AI and hybrid cloud provider for the enterprise. Under his leadership at IBM, the Cognitive Enterprise Blueprint was created, a roadmap for IBM’s clients on their own transformation journeys.

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With a career spanning over 25 years, he has demonstrated his expertise in leadership roles within renowned companies such as Cambia Health Solutions and Express Scripts/Medco Health Solutions. Before IBM, Inderpal served as Senior Vice President and Chief Data Officer of Cambia Health Solutions where he led the development of Cambia’s data strategy and drove the transformation of the company’s consumer experience strategies.

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Prior to that, Inderpal served as Vice President of Knowledge Solutions and Chief Data Officer at Express Scripts/Medco Health Solutions, where he was responsible for maximizing the utility of the company’s data and its readiness to respond to emerging market trends. Before that, he founded Virtual Gold in 1997, serving as its Chairman and CEO. Virtual Gold specialized in data mining and analytics, focusing on call centers and professional sports, and grew into an international market leader in these domains. The company pioneered sports analytics through projects like IBM Advanced Scout, a data mining application used by 25 NBA teams to analyze play-by-play data for real-time game planning. Virtual Gold also introduced the plus-minus statistic to the NBA in 1996, a metric that became standard in box scores by the 2007–08 season. Bhandari’s work with Virtual Gold, including significant access to NBA stakeholders, established him as a pioneer in sports analytics and informed his approach to treating data as a strategic asset. He achieved a modest exit from Virtual Gold before transitioning to consulting and leadership roles in enterprise data strategy.

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Inderpal is an expert in transforming data into business value and improved customer experiences by delivering strategic, innovative capabilities that use analytic insights to enable growth and productivity. In 2017, he was named U.S. Chief Data Officer of the Year by the CDO Club, and has been featured as an industry expert by Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, US News & World Report, CNN, and FOX.

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Inderpal earned his Master of Science Degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and holds a PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.