India does not have an AI capability problem. It has an AI clarity problem.

This message came up repeatedly as the SpeakIn Asia Dialogues Forum 2026 travelled from the Taj Falaknuma Palace in Hyderabad to boardrooms in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad and New Delhi.

Chief executives, CISOs, founders, investors, civil servants and academics came together for open conversations around Talent, Technology and Transformation.

The cities were different. The industries were different. But the concerns were remarkably similar.

An Uncomfortable Truth, Told in Six Cities

Hyderabad set the tone in January with a statistic that made leaders pause. India is among the top three countries on Stanford’s 2025 Global AI Vibrancy Index and has the world’s second-largest AI talent pool.

Yet having talent and investing in AI does not automatically create value.

“Every model we were building had one significant gap: context. Technology without context creates no value. Nearly 90% of global AI investments are write-offs because of FOMO. Boards demand AI, investors expect it, customers ask for it, even when simpler solutions would work better.”
— Ritesh Dogra, Gen AI Innovation Head

Two days later, in Bengaluru, a multi-city study shared at the forum highlighted the same issue from another angle. Almost every organisation is talking about AI, but only around 3% are seeing measurable value from it.

The same concern came up across the other cities.

In Ahmedabad, Kishore Upadhyay of Otsuka Pharmaceutical said that Talent, Technology and Transformation often work separately instead of coming together to create a fourth T: Turnaround.

In New Delhi, Anurag Jain of KFC India explained that business, technology and talent strategies cannot succeed when they are planned as separate efforts.

In Mumbai, Sunil Gupta, Co-founder, Managing Director and CEO of Yotta Data Services, put it simply:

“Transformation fails not because of technology, but because of the absence of clarity. If you don’t know the problem you are solving, speed only amplifies confusion.”

Different cities. Different examples. The same basic problem: organisations need to be clear about what problem they are trying to solve before they bring in AI.

Adding a Tool Is Not the Same as Integration

The second major issue was integration.

Pune’s leaders made the difference clear:

“Simply adding a tool is not integration. It’s more like an installation.”
— Roshni Parkhi, Head of Human Resources, India, Allvue Systems

The best use of technology is often the kind that people hardly notice.

For example, a CRM that gives a service advisor the right information before a customer call, or a kitchen system that automatically changes the order sequence, is truly part of the work.

But if AI is simply added on top of old processes, without changing how the work is done, organisations are only installing technology — not integrating it.

Another major issue is data.

Tarun Anand of Jakson Group spoke about organisations buying generative AI tools and then discovering that their data was spread across old systems.

His organisation first worked on creating a centralised data strategy.

Across the different cities, the lesson was similar: organisations with better data systems were able to get more value from AI. Those without them struggled with pilots that never became large-scale solutions.

Hyderabad offered another way to measure the value of AI.

“A lot of AI and ML conversations happen to reduce cost. But that is the problem. It should be about decision velocity: how many decision points have you been able to reduce?”
— Rupessh Goel, Managing Director, First Citizens India

The point was simple: AI should not only help companies save money. It should help them make better and faster decisions.

Culture Is at the Heart of Transformation

One message came through strongly across all the forums: technology alone cannot transform an organisation. People have to be part of the change.

No forum suggested that AI would simply replace the workforce. Instead, leaders spoke about how AI would change jobs and how organisations need to help their people adapt.

In Pune, Denu Thomas of Grant Medical Foundation said that technology has little value without cultural change.

Manisha Prasad of CRIF India explained that her team avoids words such as “change” and “transformation”. Instead, they use words such as “optimise” and “efficient”. They also run innovation contests so employees can help shape the technology rather than feel threatened by it.

Ahmedabad offered one of the clearest ways to think about AI:

“Think of AI as a scaffold versus a cage. It will help employees do better and generate better outcomes.”
— Saurabh Singhvi, Managing Director, Litera

Arth Patel of Tirex Transmission put this approach into practice by running AI programmes for more than 300 frontline service technicians before introducing them to managers.

The technology was presented as a helping tool, not something employees had to fear. Adoption followed.

In New Delhi, Khaitan & Co used weekend hackathons where lawyers worked with technologists to build practical AI tools.

Sudesh Jain of Adani Group’s GCC reflected on 25 years of ERP, RPA and now agentic AI. His experience showed that these technologies did not simply remove careers. They changed the way people worked.

The future of work, however, will require serious preparation.

In Pune, Sajith Chakkingal of Anthesis Group warned that AI could take over some of the entry-level corporate work, meaning universities may need to prepare graduates to take on more advanced responsibilities earlier in their careers.

In Bengaluru, leaders discussed how skill lifecycles could reduce from around 20 years to just two.

But young professionals are not the only group that needs support.

Anshuman Tiwari of GSK highlighted mid-career managers as a group that needs significant reskilling but often receives the least support. He compared enterprise AI transformation to performing heart surgery while the patient is still swimming.

Ahmedabad also offered an important message about hiring.

“We are focusing too much on getting than building. The question is whether we are introducing a format that builds talent from the inside.”
— Dr. Ankita Singh, Chief People Officer and Board Member, Relevance Lab

The message was clear: organisations should not only look outside for talent. They also need to build the skills they need internally.

From Building for Others to Building for India

When the forum returned to Bengaluru and Hyderabad in April under the theme Capability Building in India’s DeepTech Era, the conversation moved beyond individual companies to India’s larger technology ambitions.

The numbers were striking.

Saurabh Jha of Tech Mahindra noted that India saw USD 2.3 billion in deep-tech startup investment in 2025, while the United States invested more than USD 147 billion.

Vinod Shankar of Java Capital pointed to another challenge: the USD 20–40 million stage, where Indian companies often struggle to find the funding needed to grow.

Hyderabad also faced an interesting contradiction.

Indians lead some of the world’s biggest technology companies, but India has created relatively few global technology product brands of its own.

Chari TVT described the need to move from polishing diamonds to creating them.

“India has become rich through software exports. But we are not yet powerful.”
— Nagasai Pallapotu, Senior Director of Engineering, Kore.ai

The solutions discussed included using government procurement to create demand for Indian deep-tech companies, measuring research through commercial licences and not just patents, bringing defence technology into engineering education, and preparing for post-quantum cryptography.

The larger message was simple: India needs to move from being a major technology services provider to becoming a stronger creator and owner of technology.

Trust Is the New Infrastructure

Mumbai took the discussion from capability to trust.

At Digital Trust at Scale, BFSI leaders and CISOs discussed how cybersecurity has moved from being a compliance issue to becoming a board-level priority.

Giles Castelino of LSEG explained why. A five-minute outage on infrastructure that handles a large part of India’s dollar-rupee trading can create serious risks for the country.

Ranjan Bhattacharya of HSBC India spoke about the growing threat of deepfakes, including attacks that can recreate a CEO’s face and voice during a live call.

Hina Kamra of Neo Wealth and Asset Management shared a sobering thought: organisations today are increasingly divided into those that have already been breached and those that are yet to be breached.

In June, marketing and brand leaders met under the theme Rewriting the Rules of Attention and reached a similar conclusion.

AI can create endless amounts of content. But it cannot create trust.

Richard Rekhy of Grant Thornton Bharat recalled how Arthur Andersen, a company built over decades, disappeared in roughly 45 days. The lesson was clear: reputation takes years to build but can be lost very quickly.

The January Mumbai forum had already highlighted another important challenge. With 40 million new investors entering India’s capital markets in five years, the next 300 million investors will need products that are simpler, more accessible and available in local languages.

“If technology does not reduce inequality and bring empathy into decision-making, we risk building systems that scale efficiency but not equity.”
 — Bhupen Chaubey, Founder Editor, TheSquirrels.in

Education Needs to Change Too

One message appeared throughout the forum: education needs to prepare people for a world that is changing faster than ever.

Dr. Padmakumar Nair, Vice Chancellor of Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, argued that education should stop preparing students only for jobs that may no longer exist.

Instead, it should prepare them to deal with complexity and uncertainty.

“The fundamental starting point of critical thinking is intellectual humility.”
— Dr. Padmakumar Nair, Vice Chancellor, Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology

He identified three important qualities for the AI era: self-awareness, intellectual humility and empathy-driven excellence.

Thapar is already responding through an NVIDIA-partnered on-campus data centre, an in-house large language model and capstone projects based on real business problems.

The next question is whether organisations will work closely with universities to build the talent they will need in the future.

What Organisations Need to Do Next

Across more than 250 leaders and ten dialogues, eight clear priorities emerged:

1. Start with the problem, not the technology.
   Before adopting AI, ask: Would a simpler solution work better?
2. Bring business, technology and talent together.
   These three areas should be planned as one strategy, not as separate efforts.
3. Fix data first.
   Good data is the foundation for successful AI.
4. Present AI as a helping tool.
   Employees are more likely to adopt AI when they see it as something that helps them do their jobs better.
5. Build talent from within.
   Reskilling existing employees can be as important as hiring new talent.
6. Give GCC leaders a bigger role.
   India’s capability centres can take greater ownership of products, revenue and intellectual property.
7. Treat trust and security as business priorities.
   Cybersecurity should be discussed at the board level. Compliance should be the starting point, not the end goal.
8. Work more closely with universities.
   Companies should share real business problems with academic institutions and help build the talent pipeline.

The Greatest Risk

In New Delhi, chief guest Gaurav Dalmia of Dalmia Group recalled a Bankers Trust advertisement that has stayed with him for four decades:

“The greatest risk of all is taking no risk at all.”

The Asia Dialogues Forum 2026 did not find an India lacking ambition, talent or infrastructure.

Instead, it found an India that needs to make sure activity does not get mistaken for progress.

The organisations that will look back on 2026 as a turning point will not necessarily be those that adopted the most AI tools.

They will be the ones that chose the right problems, measured real value, invested in their people, built technology with purpose and earned trust.

As Akhilesh Ayer of Cactus Communications put it in Mumbai:

“Adoption without integration is vanity.”