Rohit Khetarpal joins Salesforce as director after 16 years at Deloitte

BENGALURU: Sixteen years is a long stretch by any measure, long enough to build a career, a reputation and a comfortable ceiling. Rohit Khetarpal has just walked away from all three at Deloitte to take on something considerably less certain: director of the strategic new and emerging technology practice within Salesforce’s Global Delivery Centre, a role built to turn a large offshore operation into what he calls a premier innovation hub and centre of excellence.

The move is a genuine change of register rather than a lateral shuffle. Khetarpal spent close to 21 years in consulting, the bulk of it at Deloitte where he rose to senior manager and worked across India, the UK, the US and France leading large, globally distributed teams through cloud native and package technology transformations. His stated specialism sits at the sharper end of enterprise technology, front office transformation across sales, service, marketing, commerce, enterprise search, loyalty, content and CPQ, delivered through digital native solutions built for omnichannel reach across web, mobile and point of sale. That is precisely the terrain Salesforce needs someone fluent in as it pushes its GDC beyond delivery execution and into genuine product and strategy territory.

What makes the move worth watching is the direction of travel. Consulting veterans moving in-house is nothing new, but Khetarpal is doing it at a moment when Salesforce is explicitly repositioning its GDC as an innovation engine rather than a cost centre, and his own philosophy, an engineering-first culture, a strategy that welcomes diverse ideas and an execution mindset built to separate signal from noise, reads like a direct match for that brief. He is also candid about wanting to build an AI-first culture at the workplace and blend product thinking with consulting rigour, which is a fair description of what most large technology GDCs in India are currently trying, and mostly failing, to become.

His account of week one is unusually specific for a LinkedIn post, and more useful for it. He singles out agentic onboarding conducted directly within Slack as setting the tone from day one, describes getting direct visibility into Salesforce’s strategic roadmap through the company kickoff and its Laulima sessions, and credits Riyaz R and Chethana I from the enterprise onboarding team for a smooth transition. Read together, that is a small but telling data point about how seriously Salesforce is applying its own agentic technology internally, using it to onboard the very people hired to build more of it.

Khetarpal also thanked a list of people who guided him through the selection process, Sanket Deshpande, Ajay Sharma, Nilotpal Choudhury, Sujatha Devaraya, Shabana Raja and Karthik Purushotham, a roster that suggests this was a considered, multi-stage hire rather than an opportunistic poach. For Deloitte, losing a 16-year veteran with genuinely deep front office transformation experience is a loss worth noting. For Salesforce, betting a senior consulting hand can translate that experience into building an innovation hub from inside a delivery centre is precisely the kind of experiment worth watching over the next year, not least because it says something about how seriously large technology firms now take their India centres as sources of strategy rather than just headcount.