As artificial intelligence moves from pilot projects to enterprise production, India’s technology leaders are sounding a unified call: the race is no longer about speed — it’s about trust, governance, and sovereign ambition.
Every year on May 11, India pauses to mark National Technology Day commemorating the Pokhran nuclear tests of 1998 that announced the country’s arrival as a serious technological power. Twenty-eight years on, the tests of nerve are of a different kind. The battleground is artificial intelligence, and the stakes economic, strategic, and ethical have never been higher.
This year’s conversations across India’s technology sector carry a notably different tone from the breathless optimism of prior years. The dominant mood is one of sober reckoning. AI has scaled from boardroom conversation to enterprise backbone with startling speed — and that speed, many leaders warn, has outrun the thinking behind it.
“AI has moved from pilots to production across enterprises at a pace that has outrun the thinking behind it, and that gap is showing up in ways that are genuinely difficult to course correct.”
— Kumar Vikas, EVP, Data & AI, Bounteous x Accolite
Vikas’s observation cuts to the core of what ails the current wave of enterprise AI deployment. Organizations across industries are retrofitting governance onto systems that were never designed with it in mind — and paying the price in eroded trust, regulatory scrutiny, and, ultimately, slower adoption. The enterprises getting it right, he argues, are those asking harder questions at the start: whose experience does the data capture? What is the system actually being optimized for? “The most consequential decisions in any AI program are made early and quietly,” Vikas notes.
The Identity Crisis at the Heart of AI
If governance is the watchword for AI deployment, identity has emerged as its most urgent operational challenge. Nitin Varma, SVP and Managing Director for India and SAARC at Saviynt, frames the problem in terms that are quietly staggering in their scale.
“For every one human identity today, there are already dozens of non-human identities — machines, applications, and AI agents — interacting across systems.”
— Nitin Varma, SVP & Managing Director – India & SAARC, Saviynt
That ratio is only set to widen as autonomous agents proliferate across enterprise workflows. The implications for access control, accountability, and data governance are profound. “AI has not introduced entirely new risks,” Varma says. “It has amplified existing ones around identity and data.” The question he puts to every enterprise is deceptively simple: if an AI system initiates a decision, can you say clearly who took that action, what data was used, and who is ultimately responsible?
Trust as a Competitive Advantage
The link between governance and commercial velocity is one that Manish Bafna, SVP of Engineering at Responsive, is making with increasing urgency. The intuition that speed and oversight are in tension, he argues, is flatly wrong.
“The organizations that will lead are not those with the most AI — they are those with the most governed, most trusted, most actionable knowledge.”
— Manish Bafna, SVP of Engineering, Responsive
This philosophy is echoed in the infrastructure domain. Nalin Agrawal, Director of Solutions Engineering at Dynatrace, describes a fundamental bifurcation in how enterprise technology operations are run — a “bi-modal world” in which traditional human-led models coexist with emerging AI-first systems that handle the vast majority of operations autonomously. India’s digital scale, he argues — driven by UPI transaction volumes, digital public infrastructure, and cloud-first strategy — makes this transition not a luxury but a necessity. “Manual approaches can no longer keep pace,” he says. “Organizations must move towards AI-driven, self-healing systems that detect, diagnose, and resolve issues in real time.”
Security in the Age of Intelligent Adversaries
The security dimension of this transformation is one that Diwakar Dayal, Managing Director and AVP for India and SAARC at SentinelOne, frames in striking historical terms. From Pokhran to a digital-first economy, India’s posture has always been shaped by the threats it faces — and today’s threat landscape is evolving faster than ever before.
“Cybersecurity can no longer be treated as an afterthought; it must be embedded into digital transformation from the outset.”
— Diwakar Dayal, MD & AVP – India & SAARC, SentinelOne
Piyush Jha, Group Vice President and Head of APAC at GlobalLogic, goes further, pointing to vulnerability-discovery models and the convergence of physical and agentic AI as introducing entirely new risk dimensions. “Governance must be engineered into the core,” he insists, “through secure architectures, real-time observability, and accountable AI frameworks.” GlobalLogic, he notes, has built over 75 AI-powered solutions across more than 200 client engagements — and it has learned that scale without governance is a liability, not an asset.
The Human Dimension: Amplification, Not Replacement
For all the structural urgency of governance and security, several leaders struck a more humanistic note. Swagat Sarangi, Co-Founder of Smytten and PulseAI Research, offered the clearest articulation of what responsible AI should look and feel like in practice.
“The real opportunity is not to use AI merely as a tool for profitability through headcount reduction, but as a force multiplier that enables people to think bigger, move faster, innovate deeper, and solve problems that were previously impossible.”
— Swagat Sarangi, Co-Founder, Smytten & PulseAI Research
Deepak Gupta, Co-founder of Style Lounge, frames inclusive growth as a design imperative, not an afterthought: “Technology should empower businesses, improve access, and make everyday experiences simpler, fairer, and more transparent.” It is a sentiment that Srinivas Shekar, CEO of Pantherun Technologies, anchors to infrastructure — without resilient, interoperable, and secure foundations built for real-world conditions, the democratising promise of technology remains theoretical.
The Sovereignty Question
The most pointed contribution to this year’s National Technology Day conversation comes from Rahul Garg, CEO and Founder of Moglix, who identifies a risk that many in the industry have been reluctant to voice.
“India is the world’s largest consumer of artificial intelligence tools it did not build, running on infrastructure it does not own, governed by terms set in cities far from Delhi or Bengaluru.”
— Rahul Garg, CEO & Founder, Moglix
Garg draws an uncomfortable parallel with the IT services era — a revolution India participated in, but did not own. “Sovereign AI is not a policy slogan,” he says. “It is the difference between being an economy that shapes the future and one that simply runs on it.” The talent, the market, and the capital exist, he argues. What remains is conviction.
That conviction — to build trustworthy, sovereign, and inclusive AI — is the thread running through every voice on this National Technology Day. The hype cycle is over. India’s next technology chapter will be written not by the fastest movers, but by the most deliberate ones.
