Every year, AI Appreciation Day, observed on July 16, offers an opportunity to recognize the remarkable progress artificial intelligence has made and to reflect on its growing influence across industries and everyday life. Once considered a futuristic concept, AI has become an essential driver of innovation, productivity, and economic growth.
From healthcare and education to finance, manufacturing, retail, agriculture, and media, AI is helping organizations solve complex problems, automate routine tasks, improve decision-making, and unlock new opportunities. As businesses embrace digital transformation, AI is increasingly becoming a strategic necessity rather than a competitive advantage.
This AI Appreciation Day, organizations, policymakers, educators, and technology leaders are not only celebrating technological achievements but also discussing how AI can be developed responsibly, ethically, and inclusively for the benefit of society.
Industry Perspectives
Shibu Zacharia, Vice President & Managing Director, Allstate India
“At Allstate India, we believe AI delivers its greatest value when it is applied with purpose and keeps people at the center of innovation. As we mark AI Appreciation Day and this year’s theme, ‘Responsible AI for a Human-first Future,’ we remain committed to harnessing AI to solve real business challenges, remove friction, and create better customer experiences.
Our teams in India are using advanced AI to improve the customer experience, helping us reimagine how work gets done. As AI takes on more operational work, leadership’s role is shifting too, from managing people to managing systems where humans and AI co-create outcomes. The human role assumes an even greater importance in that picture. It moves to where it matters most, setting direction, mitigating bias, and ensuring these systems meet business standards to build solutions that create lasting value.”
By embracing AI responsibly and with purpose, we are helping shape a future where technology empowers our teams to deliver better outcomes.”
Deepak Dhanak, Co-Founder & COO, Rocket
“In five years, AI has gone from a lab curiosity to something a billion people use before breakfast. It’s designing drugs, decoding proteins, tutoring kids in their own language, and turning ideas into working software. And yet, I think we’ve only seen the trailer. The real story is a world where expertise itself stops being scarce: where a great doctor’s judgment, a great engineer’s skill, and a great teacher’s patience are available to anyone who needs them. History has run this experiment before: the camera didn’t kill painting, it set it free, and art got bigger, not smaller. That’s what AI will do to human talent. We’ll be remembered as the generation that watched intelligence become abundant, and days like this are for pausing long enough to notice.”
Rahul Goyal, Managing Director of ADP India and Southeast Asia.
“India’s leadership in workplace AI adoption shows that employees are eager to embrace technologies that can help them work smarter and create greater value. But our research also highlights an important reality: adoption alone does not automatically translate into confidence in productivity.
As organisations mark AI Appreciation Day, the focus should shift from simply deploying AI to helping people use it effectively. Businesses that invest in skills, transparency and continuous learning will be best positioned to unlock the full potential of AI while creating a more engaged and resilient workforce.”
Swapna Bapat, MD and VP, India & SAARC, Palo Alto Networks
“AI has given cybersecurity something it has needed for a long time: leverage. Security teams have spent years contending with rising alert volumes, growing tool sprawl, increasingly complex environments, and constant pressure to respond faster. The challenge is not a lack of skill or commitment; it is that the problem has outgrown manual scale.
That is why AI deserves genuine appreciation from the cybersecurity industry. It is helping defenders identify patterns faster, reduce noise, automate repetitive work, and respond with greater speed and context.
At the same time, attackers are using AI to move faster too. That means the industry cannot afford to be tentative. We have to use AI to fight AI, secure machine identities and AI agents as seriously as human users, and move away from fragmented security architectures that make it harder to see, decide, and act quickly.
Cybersecurity has always been a race against time. AI gives defenders a better chance of keeping pace, and that is something the industry should genuinely appreciate.”
Amruta Moktali, Chief Product Officer at Skyflow
“AI is having its moment, and deservedly so. But behind every great AI experience is something far less visible: the data, context, and trust that make it possible. The models may be the engine, but trusted data is the fuel.
As AI becomes embedded in the way businesses operate, success will depend not just on building more capable models, but on ensuring they have access to the right information in the right way. That means giving AI the context it needs while protecting sensitive data and earning the trust of customers along the way.
The future of AI will be about making it more useful, more responsible, and ultimately more worthy of the trust we place in it.”
Naresh Agarwal, SVP, Engineering, India, Harness
“AI is one of the most consequential shifts we’re seeing across industries today, not just in what it can do, but in how it is fundamentally changing how work gets done. From healthcare to finance to manufacturing, the ability to generate, analyse, and act on information at scale is redefining productivity, decision-making, and the pace at which ideas turn into real outcomes.
In technology, that shift is even more pronounced. The role is moving beyond building features to shaping intelligent systems that can learn, adapt, and operate in real-world environments. As a result, value itself is being redefined. What begins to matter more is judgment, understanding context, navigating trade-offs, and making decisions that hold up in production. In that sense, AI is not a shortcut, but a multiplier. It amplifies those who can think beyond execution, guide systems, shape outcomes, and operate with a deeper understanding of how everything comes together.
The real shift is not in access to AI, but in the ability to integrate it meaningfully into how we build and operate.
What makes this moment worth appreciating is not just the technology itself, but the expansion of what’s possible. We are moving toward a world where systems are not just automated, but increasingly autonomous—capable of acting, learning, and improving continuously.”
Nikhil Vijay Bagalkotkar, Director, AEC India & SAARC Autodesk
“The most meaningful contribution AI has made to the design and make industries has been its ability to help people make better decisions when they matter most. In architecture, engineering, construction, and manufacturing, the biggest decisions are often made early in a project, when teams have the least information but the greatest opportunity to influence cost, quality, and sustainability. AI is helping change that by bringing together data, context, and predictive insights that enable professionals to explore more options, identify risks earlier, and move forward with greater confidence.
What we’re seeing today goes well beyond automating repetitive tasks. AI is becoming an intelligent collaborator that understands design and make workflows, helping teams surface the right information, evaluate alternatives faster, and remove friction from complex processes. At Autodesk, we’re combining frontier AI models with our deep industry expertise to deliver capabilities that fit naturally into the way designers, engineers, and manufacturers work, enabling them to focus more of their time on creativity, problem-solving, and innovation.
For project teams in India, where infrastructure ambitions continue to outpace available capacity and skilled resources, these capabilities have real-world impact. By helping teams coordinate across disciplines, detect issues earlier, and make informed decisions throughout the project lifecycle, AI can improve productivity, reduce rework, and contribute to better project outcomes.
Ultimately, AI’s value won’t be measured by how many tasks it automates, but by the better decisions and better outcomes it enables. That’s where we see AI earning its place—not as a technology story, but as a catalyst for helping the design and make industries deliver more resilient, sustainable, and efficient projects.”
Varun Satia, Founder & CEO, Kraftshala School of Business
“AI represents one of the most powerful technological shifts of our time, an opportunity to expand human capability, accelerate innovation and help businesses solve problems that once seemed beyond reach. At its best, AI is a force multiplier for human potential, automating repetitive tasks and enabling people to focus on creativity, judgement, relationships and higher-value decision-making. One of the biggest misconceptions about AI is that it will simply eliminate jobs. However, history suggests otherwise. Every major technological shift, from industrial automation to the internet has changed the nature of work, displaced certain tasks, and ultimately created entirely new industries, roles and opportunities. AI will follow a similar trajectory, though at unprecedented speed and scale.
The disruption we are seeing today is real and calls for thoughtful adaptation, but the opportunity it unlocks will be far greater than the jobs it transforms. We are already seeing this in marketing and sales, where AI is taking on repetitive, execution-heavy work. This does not reduce the need for talent, it elevates it. The professionals who will lead in this environment are those who can think strategically, understand customers, solve complex business problems and use AI to turn insight into action faster and more effectively.
This has profound implications for business education as well. AI cannot remain a standalone module, an elective or an occasional workshop. It must be embedded in how students learn, analyse, build, collaborate and prepare for the workplace. Business schools need to create AI-enabled learning environments, evolve curricula in close partnership with industry, and assess students not only on academic knowledge, but on their ability to apply AI responsibly to create measurable business outcomes. The institutions that act decisively today will not merely prepare students for the future of work, they will help shape the talent, businesses and ideas that define the next decade.”
Gautam Goenka, Senior Vice President, Head of Engineering & Site Head - India, UiPath
“AI Appreciation Day is a chance to reflect on how far enterprise AI has come – not in terms of what models can do, but in terms of what organisations can now responsibly run. The lesson of the past year has been consistent: AI creates real value only when it’s connected, governed, and orchestrated alongside the people and systems that run the business end-to-end. Strip out any one of those, and the work that matters most — the approvals, the exceptions, the judgment calls — falls through the gaps.
We’ve seen this play out most clearly in dynamic, exception-heavy processes such as disputes, investigations, and approvals that rarely follow a straight line. Bringing AI agents, robots, and people into a single governed workflow is what allows enterprises to manage this complexity without losing visibility or control — regardless of which systems or models sit underneath.
The shift we’re seeing is in what enterprises value. It’s no longer just about how intelligent a system is, but how well it can be trusted, observed, and held accountable in production. That’s the outcome AI delivers when it’s backed by orchestration — not bolted on top of it.
As AI takes on more of the repetitive and dynamic work, our focus stays on the people making the judgment calls that matter. That’s the balance worth recognising this AI Appreciation Day.”
Deepak Dastrala, CEO, Purple Fabric AI (A Business Unit of Intellect Design Arena)
“The next phase of AI will not be defined by bigger models alone, but by how effectively enterprises translate intelligence into trusted action. In India, where digital adoption is advancing at an unprecedented scale, organisations need AI that understands enterprise context, operates within clear guardrails and remains accountable to measurable business outcomes.
The shift now is from isolated copilots to orchestrated Digital Experts that can work across enterprise workflows, augment human judgement and execute responsibly. At Purple Fabric, this is the idea behind our Enterprise AI on Tap vision: making trusted intelligence available wherever work happens, while strengthening accountability, resilience and human oversight.
On AI Appreciation Day, we should celebrate not only what AI can generate but also what it can help people and organisations achieve responsibly. Its greatest value will lie in enabling enterprises to make better decisions, act with greater confidence and build a genuinely human-first future.”
Niraj Nagrani, Chief Data and AI Officer, Altimertik
“The race to build more capable AI is giving way to the challenge of building AI that is trusted, resilient, and economically sustainable. Enterprises are shifting their focus from experimentation to large-scale adoption, where success will be defined not by the sophistication of models alone, but by the ability to operationalise AI responsibly and deliver measurable business outcomes. As organisations scale AI, the conversation is shifting towards trusted context, intelligent orchestration, token optimisation, governance, and cyber resilience. These are no longer technical considerations. They are the building blocks of production-ready enterprise AI.
As AI becomes deeply embedded across business operations, organisations need trusted context, secure architectures, transparent decision-making, and meaningful human oversight to ensure AI augments human judgment, creates value responsibly, and earns lasting trust. The next phase of AI will belong to enterprises that treat AI not as a standalone technology initiative, but as a strategic business capability that is continuously engineered, governed, and optimised.
Altimetrik’s AI-first strategy is designed to help enterprises make this transition with confidence. Our initiatives, such as ALTi AIOS™, abstract technical complexity and provide the foundation to build, govern, and deploy enterprise-grade AI solutions across complex, real-world environments. Our partner ecosystem, spanning the major hyperscalers and data platforms alongside frontier model providers such as OpenAI, reinforces that neutrality rather than constraining it, so enterprises can move from experimentation to scalable, production-ready agentic systems on their own terms.
AI Appreciation Day is a moment to recognise how far the technology has come — and how much the discipline around it has matured. The enterprises that win the next phase will be the ones that continuously engineer, govern, and optimise AI until it becomes something far more durable than a tool.”
Anand Jain, Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, CleverTap “Brands have always aspired to give every customer the individual attention they deserve; to understand their interests, recommend what they may genuinely value, and build relationships that last. In many ways, that was easier for the corner shop, where the owner knew every customer personally. But as businesses moved online, hundreds of customers became millions, and that intimacy was replaced by segments, cohorts, and broad assumptions.
AI gives brands a real chance to bring that individual attention back, but at digital scale. It can notice patterns across millions of customer moments, understand intent faster, and help brands engage people with far more relevance and timeliness. That is what deserves appreciation.
So, on a day meant to celebrate AI, I think the most honest thing to celebrate is what it frees us up to do as humans: think harder, connect deeper, and build relationships that last.”
Bhavyan Mehta, Vice President – Engineering, Commvault
AI Appreciation Day arrives at a defining moment for India and the world. Artificial intelligence has moved from being a competitive advantage to becoming the infrastructure of modern enterprise. Cloud changed where applications lived, mobile changed where work happened, and AI is now accelerating the pace at which business, public services and innovation move.
India’s digital public infrastructure has shown that scale must be built on trust, inclusion and resilience. AI now demands the same discipline. Recent demonstrations such as Anthropic’s Mythos show how the window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation can shrink from weeks to minutes, changing the economics of existing cyber risk.
Responsible AI must therefore be transparent, accountable, secure and supported by data, identities and systems that organizations can trust and recover. The next chapter of work will be defined by purposeful collaboration between humans and AI agents. People will bring judgement, empathy, context and accountability, while machines research, reason, automate and act at speed.
Leaders who create resilient ecosystems for this partnership will turn AI from a productivity layer into a trusted engine for growth. In an agentic enterprise, intelligence will create momentum, and resilience will earn trust.
Priti Sawant, Founder & CEO, JoulesToWatts
Everyone today is talking about building an AI strategy. But the more important question is: how many organizations are building the capabilities required to sustain it? That is the difference between adopting AI and truly transforming through it.
Over the last two decades, I have seen GCCs evolve through several phases—from scaling operations and building maturity to driving digital transformation. We are now entering a new phase of AI-led reinvention.
Through each of these transitions, one lesson has remained consistent: technology alone does not create lasting impact. The organization must be ready to use it effectively.The organizations making meaningful progress with AI are not simply asking, “Where can we deploy it?” They are asking deeper questions: How should AI change the way we operate? How can it improve decision-making, strengthen our workforce, and create better outcomes for customers?
At JoulesToWatts, our focus has increasingly been on helping organizations develop AI Charters that go beyond a list of tools, pilots, or technology investments. These charters serve as enterprise transformation frameworks—bringing together leadership alignment, talent readiness, operating models, governance, customer impact, and execution discipline. Our experience with Brownfield GCCs has made this especially clear. Transforming an established organization is very different from building one from the ground up. Existing businesses already have scale, people, processes, cultures, and customer commitments that must continue to perform even as the organization changes.The real challenge, therefore, is not introducing AI. It is embedding AI into an existing organization without disrupting the outcomes it is expected to deliver. That cannot be achieved through isolated use cases or short-term experimentation alone. It requires a long-term partnership focused on business growth, organizational maturity, workforce transformation, and measurable impact.
The organizations that lead the next decade will not necessarily be those running the largest number of AI initiatives. They will be the ones that successfully bring together AI, talent, operating models, and customer outcomes as part of one coherent business strategy. That is when AI moves beyond adoption and becomes genuine transformation. And that is where sustainable competitive advantage will be created.”
Navin Nair, Vice President – Digital Platforms & Engineering at Mindsprint,
“AI doesn’t fail because models aren’t intelligent enough; it fails because organizations struggle to trust them in business-critical decisions. Trust isn’t created by the model itself. It’s engineered through governance, continuous monitoring, clear accountability, and the ability to explain why a system arrived at a particular outcome. The organizations that will lead in the AI era won’t be those building the best and fastest agents, but those building the most trusted ones. Responsible AI, therefore, isn’t a governance exercise after deployment. It’s an engineering discipline that begins on day one.”