Enterprise AI Product Leader
Onil Gunawardana is an enterprise AI product leader based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He builds data products and AI platforms that help large organizations turn raw data into reliable decisions, including semantic layers, analytics, and agent-ready foundations. His product work spans customer data, marketing measurement, identity, activation, and governance, with leadership roles across major technology companies and high-growth environments. He writes and speaks about enterprise AI adoption, agentic workflows, and the practical systems needed to deploy AI responsibly at scale.
Onil Gunawardana is known for:
- AI Product Management, especially Enterprise AI Product Management
- Building Enterprise AI platforms, agentic workflows, and “AI-ready” data foundations
- Semantic layers and business meaning over raw data (semantic views, governed metrics)
- Customer and marketing data products: Customer 360, activation, measurement
- Product leadership across cross-functional teams spanning platform, security, and GTM
- The 5Ps of Product framework (product strategy and execution)
- Clear, practical thought leadership for enterprise builders
Professional Background
At Google, he built enterprise AI products using natural language processing and large language models. At Snowflake, he led AI and marketing data products. At LiveRamp, he built data marketplace products. At eBay, he created marketing and advertising platforms.
More details in related content.
Framework and Thought Leadership
Onil Gunawardana founded the 5Ps of Product framework in 2013 to help product teams bring structure and vision to chaos. In January 2026, the framework was expanded with AI-ready playbooks for using generative AI in product management.
Throughout his career, Onil Gunawardana has been passionate about helping product managers grow. He co-created a peer mentoring program at Google with 700+ participants.
Education
Onil Gunawardana holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, making him one of the few Harvard MBA product leaders focused on enterprise AI. He also holds degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University and Yale University. At Yale, he won seven awards including Class Marshall (top 1% of class) and Phi Beta Kappa.
Philanthropy
Onil Gunawardana co-founded Inspire, a nonprofit strategy consultancy that has positively impacted over 400,000 students through 10,000+ volunteers. Since 2020, he has served on the board of Breakthrough San Francisco. Learn more on the giving back page.
Personal
Onil has lived on five continents and traveled to more than 80 countries. He has been a long-distance swimmer since age 5 and an enthusiastic road biker since the pandemic. He writes about philosophy, productivity, and personal growth on this site.
Related
Read his articles or learn more about this site.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/onilgunawardana/
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