Sonata Software has created a new C suite position dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence, naming Hariprasad “Hari” Rebala as Chief AI Officer this week. The move puts a single executive in charge of steering AI strategy across the company’s full portfolio of services, at a moment when Sonata says enterprise clients are done experimenting with AI and ready to run their businesses on it.
Rebala arrives with a résumé that spans both ends of the tech spectrum: three decades split between fast moving AI startups and large scale IT services delivery. Most recently, he led AI Solutions and Growth at a deep tech AI startup. Before that, he co founded Forfend, working on IoT and conversational AI platforms. On the enterprise side, he held senior leadership roles at Mindtree, Capgemini and Wipro, where he ran major transformation programs, particularly within financial services.
Sonata’s CEO, Rajsekhar Datta Roy, described the appointment as a cornerstone of the company’s growth plans. “Transforming Sonata Software into an AI native organization is foundational to our growth trajectory,” he said, pointing to Rebala’s unique combination of AI startup and IT services expertise as the reason for the hire.
From proof of concept to production: the real bottleneck
The appointment lands amid a broader scramble among consulting and IT services firms to rebrand around AI. But according to Sonata, the harder problem for enterprises isn’t access to AI models anymore. It’s what comes after. Companies need to fold AI into infrastructure that predates it, satisfy security requirements, and manage a patchwork of technology vendors, all while trying to push pilot projects into actual production systems.
That gap between experimentation and execution is exactly where Sonata wants Rebala to operate. The company is betting that whoever can pair AI engineering capability with real enterprise modernization experience, not just model access, will come out ahead as the market matures.
“AI is rapidly moving from experimentation to becoming fundamental to how enterprises compete, operate and create value,” Rebala said in the announcement. “AI alone will not define the winners. The ability to translate AI into enterprise velocity will.”
Partnerships are a core piece of that plan. Sonata works with Microsoft, AWS, Salesforce and Snowflake, giving it a direct line into the cloud, data and software ecosystems where most enterprise AI work is currently concentrated. The company’s proprietary Platformation framework, meanwhile, is built specifically to support modernization projects, and its AI engineering group operates across retail, manufacturing, technology, telecom, healthcare and financial services.
Sonata, headquartered in Bengaluru, positions itself as an AI first modernization engineering company with close to 40 years in business and more than 6,400 AI engineers on staff, serving clients in the U.S., U.K., India, Malaysia, Mexico, Australia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Nordic region.
With Rebala now overseeing AI strategy company wide, Sonata is signaling a shift in its own identity. It’s moving from a firm that helps enterprises modernize existing technology to one that helps them redesign how AI driven businesses operate from the ground up.