Chirantan "CJ" Desai (MBA '95) is joining Meta as chief enterprise platform officer, a newly created role in which he will lead Meta Enterprise Platform and report directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Meta announced the appointment Sept. 28.
The new business will turn Meta's AI technology into products and services that companies can deploy for their own businesses. It will start with the Muse agent, Meta Business Agent, Muse API and Muse Code. Muse, a personal AI agent designed to shop, book travel, send emails and make payments on a user's behalf, launched earlier this month.
Zuckerberg called Meta Enterprise Platform the next major pillar of the company's business and said Desai has a track record of building full-stack software and delivering results in AI, infrastructure, business applications and security.
"Our goal is to make Meta the place enterprises come to scale their businesses," Desai said in a statement.
Desai comes to Meta from MongoDB, where he became president and CEO in November 2025, succeeding Dev Ittycheria, who had led the company for 11 years.
Before MongoDB, Desai spent a year leading product and engineering at Cloudflare. He spent nearly eight years at ServiceNow, where his roles included chief product officer and president and chief operating officer. He has also held senior roles at Oracle, Symantec and EMC.
Roots at Gies Business
Desai arrived at the University of Illinois in 1993 planning to earn master's degrees in computer science and an MBA in two years. Both programs were expensive, and he found a solution when physics professor Paul Handler hired him to help refine a long-range climate forecasting model. The research assistantship came with a scholarship that covered his education.
He says the flexibility of Illinois' programs made the dual degrees possible. "I am super appreciative that I got an opportunity to pursue two masters degrees at the same time. That was very unique about Illinois at that point in time," Desai said in a 2019 story.
Paul Magelli, a longtime administrator, professor, and mentor at Gies Business, also shaped that path. He allowed Desai to take extra courses so he could start at Oracle sooner, and he helped make sure Desai completed both programs. "Dr. Magelli was very helpful in making sure that I finished both of my curriculums and got both of my degrees, and that put me on the right career path," Desai said.
Desai has supported both of his colleges. In 2015 he established a computer science fellowship at Illinois to support women who are underrepresented in the field. With his wife, he also created the Chirantan J. and Hina Desai Undergraduate Scholarship at Gies Business.
He credits Gies with shaping how he sees business. "It really helped me see the world picture. How businesses make decisions, how to do capital investment – all of that came from Gies College of Business."
Of the scholarship, he said, "If I can make life easier for somebody else who's starting college at Gies, that would be great."