On AI Appreciation Day 2025, business and technology leaders across industries have come together to celebrate the role of artificial intelligence in reshaping the world as we know it. From accelerating business transformation and healthcare innovation to building intelligent infrastructure and empowering a new generation of talent, AI’s influence is being felt far and wide.
Arun Kumar Parameswaran, EVP & Managing Director – Sales & Distribution (South Asia) at Salesforce, said: ”The future of work will belong to those who can harness AI not just as a tool, but as a transformative partner in progress. At Salesforce, we see AI as a force multiplier, augmenting human intelligence, accelerating productivity, and enabling people to focus on what truly drives business and societal impact: creativity, empathy, and innovation. But AI is only as powerful as the data that fuels it. Trusted, unified, and real-time data is the foundation for effective AI, enabling meaningful insights, smarter decisions, and responsible automation. The ability to connect and contextualize data across systems is what ultimately empowers AI to deliver value at scale. This transformation must also be anchored in trust. The promise of AI can only be realised through transparency, accountability, and ethical use. That’s why we are embedding trusted AI into the fabric of our platform, in the flow of work, with humans at the centre. On AI Appreciation Day, let’s shift the narrative, from fear of obsolescence to confidence in augmentation, from man versus machine to man with machine. Because it’s this partnership that will define the next frontier of work.”
Nataraj Kumar, Head of Software Engineering and Components, Innovation Engineering, Philips Innovation Campus, added: ”At Philips, we embrace AI with a deep sense of responsibility, recognizing its potential to transform lives through healthcare innovation. For us, AI is not just a powerful technological advancement; it is an enabler that helps clinicians address complex challenges, support diagnostic decision-making, and personalize care pathways. While we celebrate the opportunities AI brings, we also remain focused on its thoughtful and ethical integration. Transparency, trust, and human empathy must guide every solution we develop. We believe that the real promise of AI lies in responsibly aligning technology with human values improving care delivery, reducing disparities, and empowering both patients and care providers.”
Renju Zachariah, Principal Software Engineer, Sabre India, stated: “AI is quietly transforming the digital landscape and is fundamentally reshaping the airline industry. Human travel agents are now better equipped with Agentic AI workflows, enabling them to implement more effective marketing and sales strategies. On the customer front, intelligent virtual agents are assisting travelers in planning their itineraries and trips with greater efficiency and personalization. Behind the scenes, AI-driven technological advancements have significantly accelerated time-to-market, empowering development teams to adapt swiftly and capitalize on the rapid pace of innovation. With AI at the core, organizations are becoming more agile, responsive, and prepared for the evolving demands of modern travel.”
Arijit Mitra, Managing Director, BEAT, Acuity Knowledge Partners, commented: ”AI Appreciation Day 2025 comes at a pivotal moment in AI. Cutting-edge models with reasoning abilities of PhDs, coding agents will make developers 50% more efficient powered by Nvidia’s $4 trillion valuation underscores drastic transformation undergoing in our society. Across sectors, generative copilots are moving from chatbots to workflow orchestrators in finance and logistics, the FDA now lists more than 850 authorised AI-enabled medical devices in healthcare, and AI-driven climate tools like DeepMind’s cyclone predictor outpace traditional physics models. These advances reveal that AI’s real strength lies not in replacing people but in amplifying expert judgment—turning regulators, clinicians, analysts, and engineers into co-designers of safer, smarter systems that tackle high-stakes problems at unprecedented scale.”
Chaitali Moitra, Regional Director, South Asia, Turnitin, added her views stating: “Artificial intelligence is transforming how we learn, create, and solve problems. It is important to recognize AI as a collaborative ally rather than just a tool. When integrated thoughtfully, AI can support educators and students by offering new ways to explore ideas, provide feedback, and foster originality. The challenge and opportunity lie in using AI responsibly balancing innovation with transparency. By embracing AI as a partner, we encourage a future where technology enhances human creativity and integrity, helping learners develop skills that will be essential in tomorrow’s world.”
Vasanthi Ramesh, VP- Engineering and Managing Director, NetApp India, said: “On AI Appreciation Day, it’s essential to reflect on the transformative role AI continues to play across industries worldwide. With data volumes now far outpacing our human ability to process and respond, AI isn’t just valuable, it’s essential. With the rise of open large language models (LLMs), businesses are navigating an increasingly competitive global landscape for AI leadership. NetApp’s AI Space Race report reveals that this momentum is shared across geographies: 81% of CEO’s and IT executives surveyed highlighted that they are currently piloting or scaling AI initiatives, and 88% believe their organizations are mostly or fully prepared to sustain long-term AI transformation. That said, winning the AI race will require intelligent data strategies and robust infrastructures – supported by agile, secure, and scalable cloud solutions. Regardless of industry, size, or geography, organizations must invest in resilient infrastructure that enables real innovation. Because in the AI Space Race, success will be defined by the ability to turn data into lasting competitive advantage.”
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Aveekshith Bushan, Vice President & General Manager, APJ – Aerospike: ”As artificial intelligence evolves from static models to dynamic agents, the infrastructure that powers it must evolve too. Today’s AI doesn’t just analyze—it acts. This shift toward agentic AI requires real-time data flows, ultra-low latency systems, and architectures that can support autonomous decision-making at scale. AI agents are no longer confined to responding to queries; they are beginning to execute complex, multi-step tasks—self-correcting, learning, and adapting in real time. This new frontier demands a foundational rethink of data infrastructure. Real-time systems are becoming the backbone of this transformation, enabling AI to interact with constantly changing environments, deliver personalized outcomes, and orchestrate intelligent workflows with precision. AI Appreciation Day 2025 isn’t just a celebration of algorithms—it’s a recognition of the silent enablers behind the scenes. From edge computing to hybrid transactional-analytical platforms, the future belongs to AI built on real-time, resilient, and scalable data systems. As we move forward, the synergy between AI intelligence and infrastructural agility will define what’s possible for industries, societies, and individuals alike.”
Kumar Vikas, EVP, AI Delivery at Bounteous x Accolite, emphasized collaboration and leadership in AI transformation: “On AI Appreciation Day, we celebrate not just technology, but the human ingenuity and collaboration that bring AI’s true potential to life. Success with AI depends on combining innovative tools with cross-functional collaboration, clear strategy, and a commitment to responsible innovation. The future of digital transformation lies at the intersection of AI and leadership, as highlighted in our recent Bounteous x Accolite and Forrester study, which found that 84% of companies will increase spending on AI and data initiatives in 2025, with up to 73% planning to invest over $1 million in generative AI. Across industries, businesses that invest in tailored AI solutions, focus on security and compliance, and embrace change management are better positioned to unlock new value, enhance customer and employee experiences, and accelerate innovation at scale. The future belongs to those who innovate together.”
Srinath Venkatesh Nadkarni, SVP – Data & Analytics, Indium, reflected on AI’s strategic evolution: “AI has transitioned from a futuristic vision to a powerful force multiplier for change across every industry. Its evolution, from rule-based systems to deep learning, and now to Generative and Agentic AI, reflects its expanding impact. Today, AI is more than a tool; it is a strategic enabler, reshaping how organizations operate and innovate. At Indium, AI drives next-generation digital transformation. Our “AI-first” approach embeds AI across our solutions and services, enabling us to deliver strong business outcomes for clients, accelerate engineering, and enhance internal operations. AI-powered accelerators and platforms, such as LIFTR.ai – a GenAI-based legacy modernization platform featuring an Agentic AI Architect, help enterprises unlock value faster and at scale. We support digital-first enterprises in building and scaling for an AI-driven future. On this World AI Day, we reaffirm our commitment to advancing responsible, impactful AI that delivers real-world transformation.”
Rajesh Kapese, CEO, TRACKON, highlighted AI’s role in revolutionizing logistics:
“AI is redefining the logistics industry—turning static networks into intelligent, responsive ecosystems. From demand forecasting to dynamic route optimization, AI is helping logistics providers meet rising customer expectations with speed and precision. It’s not the future of logistics—it’s the foundation of its present.”
Sanket Atal, Managing Director – Operations & Technology at Salesforce India, focused on AI and youth empowerment in India: “India’s youth stand at the forefront of a global transformation. With one of the world’s youngest populations and a vast talent pool accounting for 28% of the global STEM workforce, they represent a powerful engine of innovation. As the country’s AI market continues its rapid growth, projected to grow at 25–35% CAGR through 2027, this generation has a unique opportunity not just to participate in the future, but to define it. Yet potential alone isn’t enough. Real impact requires access to platforms, mentors, and real-world opportunities that turn knowledge into action. The rise of AI and agentic technology is the biggest shift of our generation, and while it will change the nature of work, it will also unlock more opportunities — economic, career, and creative — than ever before. Our responsibility now is to equip the next generation with the skills to lead in this new world. At Salesforce, we’re committed to enabling this future through initiatives like Trailhead, our free training platform, helping equip individuals with the skills essential for thriving careers in the digital economy. We also collaborate with education institutions, nonprofits, and government bodies to expand access to industry-ready skills across India.”
Malai Lakshmanan, Senior Director, Head of India Engineering at LinkedIn, highlighted the importance of holistic skill-building: “Young people today are stepping into a world where change is the only constant and their ability to adapt, learn, and lead has never been more critical. At LinkedIn, we see this shift firsthand. Our Skills on the Rise report shows growing demand for capabilities across both hard skills like AI literacy and soft skills such as strategic thinking and communication. With these skills likely to only increasingly be relevant due to the rise of AI technologies, on this Youth Skills Day, let’s champion a holistic vision of skills development: one that unites digital fluency with emotional intelligence, so young people aren’t just job ready, they’re equipped to lead with humanity and creativity.”
Suvabrata Sinha, CISO-in-Residence, Zscaler, reflected on security in an AI-powered world:
“AI Appreciation Day is a timely reminder that we’re witnessing a dual transformation—one of innovation and one of responsibility. Our ThreatLabz 2025 AI Security Report analysed over 536 billion AI transactions and revealed both the enormous potential of AI and the growing complexity of its misuse. From agentic AI to deepfake platforms and AI-enhanced phishing, the risks are evolving as fast as the technology itself. India is leading AI/ML transaction volumes in APAC, highlighting the region’s accelerated digital transformation. But this rapid adoption also brings real-world challenges—navigating compliance, managing costs, and bridging talent gaps in securing AI at scale. As we celebrate how far AI has come, it’s also an opportunity to reflect on how we’re safeguarding its future. Embedding AI into enterprise strategy is no longer a choice—but ensuring trust, governance, and resilience around it must be a shared priority across industries. The balance between innovation, precision, and protection will define the next era of intelligent transformation.”
Amit Luthra, Managing Director, Lenovo ISG India, emphasized infrastructure readiness:
“AI Appreciation Day is a timely reminder that AI is no longer a futuristic concept — it’s a business-critical imperative today. Yet, many organizations are limited not by vision, but by the realities of their infrastructure and readiness. Lenovo’s CIO Playbook 2025 reveals that 63% of enterprises in India favor hybrid or on-premises environments for AI workloads, underscoring the urgent need for secure, scalable, and low-latency infrastructure. As AI advances, it is transforming how data is analyzed, decisions are made, and business outcomes are achieved. At Lenovo, we see the future in Hybrid AI — a secure, flexible, and distributed model that empowers AI to operate wherever it delivers the greatest impact: in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge. India’s AI journey is still emerging, with 49% of organizations currently evaluating or planning adoption. This signals a meaningful shift from hype to tangible impact, as enterprises focus on building a strong foundation for sustainable growth. On this AI Appreciation Day, it is time for organizations to move beyond experiments and embrace AI as a core driver of growth, inclusion, and real-world value.”
Pratik Shah, Managing Director India & SAARC, F5, spotlighted trust, orchestration, and application security: “On AI Appreciation Day, it is important to reflect not just on the significant advancements in artificial intelligence, but also on our shared responsibility to deploy it with purpose, trust, and long-term value. For Indian enterprises, the adoption has shifted from pilot project to platform readiness. Going forward, AI is expected to orchestrate end-to-end processes, replacing traditional management consoles with natural language interfaces and programmable platforms. While every app we interact today leverages AI to some extent, this widespread adoption underscores the critical importance to secure these AI-powered applications, ensuring organizations can safely continue to harness their full benefits. Even our 2025 State of Application Strategy Report revealed that 96% of organisations are deploying AI models. As AI becomes core to business operations and competitiveness, platforms must offer flexibility without compromising security. We need to focus on making AI practical, secure and scalable—from optimizing interference performance to securing data pipelines—for enterprises to move with promptness, assurance, and control. Our mission is to help enterprises build the infrastructure they need to move forward with confidence, control, and resilience to support growing demands.”
Mayank Baid, Regional Vice President, India & South Asia, Cloudera, underscored the power of secure, hybrid AI: “On AI Appreciation Day, we honor the extraordinary advances in Artificial Intelligence and its power to redefine our world. Over the years, AI has become a key enabler of digital transformation. In fact, our recent survey, titled The Future of Enterprise AI Agents, revealed that 84% of Indian respondents said they have implemented AI agents in the past two years, and 98% plan to expand their use in the coming years. At Cloudera, we are committed to the rapid deployment of trusted AI by enabling organizations to integrate any AI model with secure and governed data across hybrid environments. By empowering Indian businesses to derive AI-driven insights securely while retaining full control over their infrastructure, we are supporting greater agility, compliance, and insight-driven innovation. This aligns seamlessly with Digital India’s goals and the nation’s digital upskilling efforts.”
Karthik Rajaram, Area Vice President & General Manager, Elastic India, focused on the critical role of search in powering AI: “AI has rapidly evolved over the last few years — it is now able to learn and create a wide range of creative responses far quicker than humans. Fueling this evolution is search, which enables AI applications not only to learn but also to extract value from data. Search underpins effective AI applications by providing fast and accurate access to data. While not immediately apparent, search drives many of the applications and services that we use frequently. For example, India’s largest jobs and professional networking platform, Apna, uses AI and search to connect 50 million registered users and 600,000 employers. The service provides users with highly relevant and personalised job notifications while connecting employers with candidates that match their hiring criteria. AI and search also play a massive role in providing real-time visibility into business-critical systems and ensuring that they run at peak performance. This visibility across multiple data sources enables companies to unify their security operations into a single platform, improving threat detection, reducing false positives, and strengthening their security posture. By fusing search with AI, companies can unlock the full potential of their structured and unstructured data to make better decisions, maximise efficiency and elevate customer experiences. As India seeks to establish itself as a leader in AI through the IndiaAI Mission, Elastic is proud to support the country’s AI vision with technologies that are open, adaptive, and capable of providing a real-time, complete view of all data.”
João Moura, CEO, CrewAI, presented a vision for agentic workflows: “AI Appreciation Day is more than a celebration of technology — it’s a reflection on how AI is reshaping the way we work, where human and AI collaboration drives lasting value. At CrewAI, we believe the future lies in multi-agentic driven workflows: intelligent agents that operate with autonomy, align with business goals, and collaborate with people as capable teammates. These agents aren’t just responding to prompts — they’re reasoning, coordinating, and driving complex workflows end-to-end. Through our partnership with Cloudera, we help organizations operationalize these agents securely across hybrid environments, ensuring performance at scale without compromising compliance or control. As AI adoption accelerates, enterprises need more than models — they need orchestration, oversight, and alignment with real-world business outcomes. The move from experimentation to integration hinges on trust, and we’re proud to help build that foundation.”
Amit Agrawal, President, Techno Digital, spoke about decentralized AI infrastructure:
“Artificial intelligence is only as powerful as the infrastructure that fuels it. At Techno Digital, we recognize that AI innovation begins with robust, sustainable and scalable digital infrastructure. From GPU-optimized clusters and liquid-cooled high-density compute to latency-sensitive AI workloads at the edge, our infrastructure is built to meet the speed, scale, and diversity AI demands. We are accelerating the decentralization of AI by building India’s largest network of interconnected network of data centers, bringing compute closer to communities, devices, and users. Our mission is to enable AI innovation by focusing on localised AI model training and inferences using GPUs and diverse regional data, ensuring that AI solutions are sustainable, efficient, and accessible for everyone. We are committed to building a digital framework that is sustainable, efficient, and accessible for everyone. Our core focus is to ensure that AI serves every citizen — not just those in metro cities, but across the length and breadth of the country. On this day, we reaffirm our commitment to building a digital backbone that supports ethical AI, fosters collaboration, and transforms lives — one intelligent node at a time.”
Jay Modh, Founder & CEO, Intuitive.Cloud, summed up the mission for AI-led modernization: “AI is fast becoming the backbone of intelligent enterprise across industry verticals. At Intuitive.Cloud, we are co-building the Data Intelligence and AI-led future with scale, agility, security and governance where enterprises can accelerate the context-aware intelligence and transformation with trust and confidence. India is not just a talent hub; it’s emerging as a global engine of applied AI innovation. It’s estimated that AI could contribute over $500 billion to the Indian economy and $4 Trillion to the world economy in the near term, underscoring the scale of transformation already underway. The priority now isn’t adoption but orchestration, for high-quality data, responsible AI, security, and governance delivering measurable business outcomes. It is about value over volume, about impact over noise, delivering continuous modernization at the speed of business. At its best, AI augments, not replaces, human potential, reducing the inefficiencies and chaos in the system. The real opportunity is to build intelligently, scale responsibly, and lead with clarity.”
