Deepak Chandani has spent three decades turning data into impact, from engineering at Infosys to leading planet-scale platforms at Apple, to driving transformation at UBS and BP. Along the way, he is working to restore 750 acres of rural India through a conservation NGO, demonstrating how technology and innovation can directly improve lives, strengthen communities, and protect shared resources.
Now, the global technology leader is bringing his expertise to Cyprus, drawn by its Vision 2035 ambition to become a regional hub for AI, digital transformation, and sustainable growth.
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Why Cyprus
Deepak Chandani describes his career as “a world tour—across industries, continents, and challenges.” He began as an engineer at Infosys, then moved to Apple in Cupertino, where he led planet-scale data platforms powering iTunes, the App Store, iAds, and iCloud for millions of users. Senior roles at UBS and BP taught him how to scale innovation across vast, complex organisations, while founding a conservation NGO in rural India showed him that technology and innovation could transform communities as much as markets.
“Whether it’s been Silicon Valley or a village in Madhya Pradesh, my mission has been the same: turn ideas into impact and bring a positive impact in people’s lives using the power of data and technology.”
“Technology is never just about the tech—it’s about people and the environments they live and work in,” Deepak Chandani says. That perspective grew from experiences in diverse fields: real estate taught him how people move and interact in physical spaces; data science showed him how to anticipate needs at scale; and leadership roles gave him the tools to align large, diverse teams around a shared goal.
For Deepak Chandani, innovation is as much about people as it is about scale. In every chapter of his career, he has sought to connect data, human behaviour, and business strategy to create lasting value. Cyprus came into focus after Deepak Chandani began reading about the island’s tech ambitions and saw “a country on the brink of something big.”
Wanting to learn more, he reached out to Demetris Skourides, Chief Scientist of the Republic of Cyprus and Chair of the National AI Taskforce. “He had just one thing in his mind – how to benefit Cyprus and its people,” recalls Deepak Chandani.
Within days, Demetris Skourides had arranged a packed agenda for his visit, introducing him to academic and industry leaders, including UCLan Cyprus. “He is a change agent champion force to head such an important role for the country,” Deepak Chandani adds.
The conversations moved quickly from introductions to concrete opportunities, linking academia with industry, building a pipeline of local AI talent, and exploring data-driven projects in healthcare and sustainability. Above all, there was a shared commitment to delivering innovation that would directly benefit people’s lives. It was, as Deepak Chandani put it, “the start of something significant.”
The strategic logic was equally compelling. Cyprus is pursuing its Vision 2035 strategy with active government backing. Its geographic position makes it a natural bridge between Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. And its compact size allows for agility that larger ecosystems struggle to match. “It’s rare to find a place that’s strategically positioned and genuinely open to change—and I want to be here before the wave crests,” says Deepak Chandani. With deep expertise in data, analytics, and AI-ML, he sees the timing as perfect to build scalable platforms and systems that can deliver tangible benefits to the people of Cyprus.
Building Cyprus’s Next Generation of Digital Leaders
The emphasis on linking academia with industry naturally led to a focus on talent. Deepak Chandani has set a goal to help develop 100 Chief Digital & AI Officers in Cyprus by 2028, roles that, in his view, go far beyond writing code or fine-tuning algorithms.
“These positions are about vision, ethics, governance, and the ability to lead transformation at scale,” he says.
“The best Chief Digital & AI Officers can walk into a boardroom and talk strategy, then walk into a lab and discuss model accuracy.”
To build that calibre of leadership, Deepak Chandani plans to work with both universities and businesses to design programmes that are part classroom and part live project. The intent is to make learning “immediate, applied, and relevant” so graduates are prepared to deliver impact from day one.
It is also a personal commitment. Deepak Chandani has pledged to spend hours in classrooms each semester, in his words, to ensure students are “job and industry ready.” For him, this is not a distant advisory role but a hands-on investment in Cyprus’s talent pipeline.
Applying AI to Healthcare and Sustainability
Healthcare was one of the areas in those early discussions where Deepak Chandani saw data science making measurable improvements to patient care and health outcomes. “The right and clean data, used responsibly, with enhanced GPU compute and processing power, can change outcomes,” he says.
Deepak Chandani envisions a connected health data platform designed to bring together medical records, lab results, and wearable data for real-time analysis. Such a system could help doctors detect cancer earlier, personalise treatment plans, and allocate resources more effectively.
The same methodology, he adds, could support sustainability projects in Cyprus by tracking environmental indicators in real time and guiding targeted conservation or resource-management efforts.
Achieving this vision will require more than technology. Deepak Chandani advocates structured collaboration between hospitals, research institutions, and policymakers, the kind of cross-sector alignment he believes Cyprus can deliver because it is “small enough to be agile but big enough to matter,” with a strong academic base and a willingness to embrace innovation.
Turning Research into Real-World Impact
For Deepak Chandani, one of Cyprus’s greatest opportunities lies in how quickly it can move ideas from the lab to the market. “I’ve seen too many brilliant ideas stay trapped in research papers,” he says.
His vision is to create a “living lab” model where students, professors, and companies work side by side to design, build, and test solutions. The goal is to shorten the cycle from concept to pilot, aiming for months, not years. That speed, he argues, will make Cyprus stand out as a place where innovation is measured by delivery, not just discovery.
Making this vision work will mean breaking down the barriers between academia and industry in Cyprus. Deepak Chandani wants “open hearts and minds to collaborate” and for students to make research and innovation a first priority. That, he says, would allow students to work on real industry problems during their studies, with viable solutions moving from prototype to pilot within months.
Building a Cypriot AI Ecosystem
For Deepak Chandani, Cyprus’s advantage lies in its ability to move quickly on national priorities and coordinate efforts across government, academia, and business. That alignment, he believes, can accelerate the creation of AI talent pipelines, support a new wave of startups, and upgrade the country’s digital infrastructure in line with its Vision 2035 strategy.
Achieving those Vision 2035 goals, he says, will require drawing on lessons from different innovation hubs. From Silicon Valley, Deepak Chandani would bring the “fail fast, learn fast” mindset; from Europe, a focus on responsible AI and strong data governance; and from Asia, the discipline to scale quickly and efficiently. But, he adds, these approaches must be adapted to Cyprus’s context, favouring sustainable growth and quality over chasing hypergrowth at any cost.
He is realistic about the challenges, acknowledging that “we will meet roadblocks” along the way. But his approach is to “mitigate challenges and partner with like-minded people to collaborate and win in the opportunity that looks ahead for all of us.”
Defining Success by 2028
Looking ahead five years, Deepak Chandani sees success for Cyprus as a thriving ecosystem of AI-powered companies, a steady pipeline of homegrown digital leaders, and measurable improvements in sectors such as healthcare, finance, and sustainability.
For himself, it would mean walking into a room and seeing the first generation of Cypriot Chief Digital & AI Officers and CEOs presenting their work on a global stage, knowing he played a role in opening that door. He is already taking his first steps in that direction, assisting real estate companies like Robura and leading telecom providers like Cablenet in adapting to data analytics and AI systems of work.
“There’s a moment in any venture where you know it’s time to stop planning and start building,”
he says.
“For me, that moment is now.”
