Kamal Ghorui
A long-time enterprise software executive, Indian-origin technologist Jigar Thakkar has now been appointed Vice President of Amazon Quick Suite, taking charge of Amazon’s agentic AI workspace under Amazon Web Services.
Amazon Quick Suite, launched in October 2025, is an agentic AI-powered digital workspace designed for business users. It works as an AI teammate, helping with research, generating insights from enterprise and external data, enabling natural language-based analysis and visualisation, and automating complex workflows across tools such as Slack, Salesforce and Snowflake.
A career spanning global tech platforms
Before joining Amazon, Thakkar served as Chief Technology Officer and Head of Engineering at MSCI Inc. from July 2018 until 2025. Based in New York, he led the company’s technology and data strategy, overseeing a global team of around 4,000 technologists. During this period, he drove the modernisation of MSCI’s technology stack, launched its Investment Solutions as a Service vision in 2021, rolled out the MSCI One investment platform, and built strategic partnerships with Microsoft for cloud services and Google for data and AI.Thakkar previously spent nearly 19 years at Microsoft, where he rose to the role of Corporate Vice President. He was the founding engineering leader of Microsoft Teams, starting the product around 2015 and taking it to beta within 18 months. He built the Teams engineering organisation from scratch, scaling it to more than 400 engineers across multiple global locations and helping grow the platform to hundreds of millions of users. His earlier Microsoft roles spanned Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Bing, Windows, Windows Mobile Devices, MSN and Skype for Business. He began his career at the company as a software developer on Microsoft Money.Earlier in his professional journey, Thakkar also worked at Intel Corporation and Silicon Graphics Inc, contributing to large-scale enterprise platforms.Thakkar holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Science in Electronics Engineering from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in India.With more than 25 years in the technology sector, Thakkar’s move to Amazon is being closely watched, particularly as Amazon Web Services positions Quick Suite as a serious contender in the rapidly evolving AI-driven enterprise productivity space. For many in India’s tech community, his rise carries a familiar sense of pride. Much like Sundar Pichai leading Google and Satya Nadella at the helm of Microsoft, Thakkar’s appointment reflects how Indian-origin engineers continue to shape the direction of the world’s biggest technology companies, adding another chapter to that ongoing story.
