Every year, AI Appreciation Day celebrates the technology transforming industries worldwide. But beyond the excitement around generative AI and automation, the real story lies in how organizations are creating measurable business value.
From Google's AI-powered Olympic experience to Netflix's recommendation engine and Nestlé's enterprise-wide data transformation, today's AI leaders aren't replacing people—they're enabling smarter decisions, better customer experiences, and sustainable growth.
Hemant Tiwari, Managing Director and Vice President for India & SAARC, Hitachi Vantara
"Artificial Intelligence has evolved from experimentation to enterprise-scale execution, making AI Appreciation Day an opportunity to recognise the critical role of data foundations in enabling this transformation.
Our 2025 State of Data Infrastructure Report is based on a global survey of 1,244 business and IT leaders across 15 countries, including 104 respondents from India. It found that 89 percent of Indian organisations have either widely adopted AI or consider it essential to their operations, compared with a global average of 69 percent.
This momentum is being matched by strong national ambition, with India's AI ecosystem continuing to gain scale and depth. At Hitachi Vantara, our focus is on helping organisations unify fragmented data estates and build governance into their systems by design, ensuring AI outcomes are consistent, secure, and dependable at scale. India's data infrastructure maturity today will shape how confidently the country scales AI in the years ahead."
Mr. Anjaiah Surgi, CTO, AGI Greenpac (Somany Impresa Group)
"In glass manufacturing, AI Appreciation Day isn't a slogan for us—it's already running on the line in real time.
At AGI Greenpac, AI has moved directly into the production process. Computer vision systems now inspect every bottle for choke bore diameter, height, and colour match against customer samples, catching defects the human eye would miss at line speed.
On the planning side, our AI-driven production scheduling manages demand and capacity constraints across plants with far fewer disruptions. We've also piloted dynamic compressor control solely for energy savings in our eco-plants. Additionally, we've used VR to train operators on IS-machine handling, making training safer, faster, and eliminating production downtime.
The next phase involves extending that same rigor upstream through AI-led receivables automation and multi-agent systems for sourcing and vendor management that can cut procurement cycle time in half while improving compliance.
For a glass and packaging business, the real opportunity over the next few years isn't AI as an add-on—it's AI embedded into every quality checkpoint and every plant decision, enabling continuous improvements in consistency and yield rather than one-off projects."
Dr. Sandeep Kumar, Chief Executive, L&T Semiconductor Technologies (LTSCT)
"World AI Appreciation Day is a reminder that the global AI race is no longer won by algorithms alone—it is won by the strength of a nation's semiconductor and compute ecosystem, along with the depth of its engineering talent.
As AI workloads become increasingly specialised across manufacturing, mobility, healthcare, and critical infrastructure, customised silicon will form the foundation of secure, high-performance, and energy-efficient intelligence.
India generates nearly a fifth of the world's data yet captures only a fraction of its value. Closing that gap is our defining opportunity—to build a sovereign AI stack rooted in indigenous semiconductor design, trusted compute infrastructure, and world-class engineering talent.
The intelligence economy will be led by nations that master the full stack—from silicon to systems to software. That is the stack India is building, and the one LTSCT is proud to help design."
Harjiv Singh, Founder & CEO, CambrianEdge.ai
"What we're celebrating this year is the recognition that human intelligence must remain at the centre.
India produces nearly 1.5 million engineers annually, and a growing cohort is thinking in AI-native terms from the very beginning. They're designing systems where machine capability amplifies human judgment, creativity, and leadership.
Yes, only 16% of IT professionals currently possess AI skills. Yes, AI-related job demand has crossed one million roles this year. But that gap is also our opportunity.
We have the scale, the talent pipeline, and engineers who can build AI the right way from the start—creating systems that make humans better at what only humans can do. That's the future we're building."
Mudit Jain
Founder, Happy & Hungry – The Event Co.
As the founder of an experiential marketing company, Mudit Jain has witnessed AI's growing influence on consumer engagement, campaign planning, audience insights, and personalised brand experiences. He can offer perspectives on how brands are leveraging AI to drive innovation while ensuring creativity, strategic thinking, and authentic human connections remain at the heart of marketing.
Sudhanshu Rai
Creator of Detective Boomrah, Author & Filmmaker
As the creator of India's first sci-fi detective franchise, Detective Boomrah, Sudhanshu Rai brings a unique perspective on the intersection of technology, imagination, and storytelling. Through his work blending science, mystery, and futuristic concepts, he can discuss how AI is influencing the creative process while underscoring the enduring value of human intuition, originality, and emotional depth in crafting compelling narratives.
Agam Chaudhary, CEO, Founder - Markgrid, "AI Appreciation Day shouldn't celebrate the tools, it should celebrate the shift. AI didn't just make marketers faster; it made market intelligence itself programmable. The winners aren't the ones generating more content. They're the ones building better decision systems."
Edgistify (By, Kamal Kumawat, Co-founder & CTO of Edgistify)
"Every creative tool in history faced this exact accusation: photography was supposed to kill painting; synthesizers were supposed to kill music.What actually happened is that the definition of creativity expanded, and those who adopted the tools early discovered forms of expression no one had ever imagined. AI is following the same script, just faster. Yes, it can produce a competent poem or a decent design in seconds. But competence was never the point of creativity. The point is a specific human seeing something others missed. AI cannot want to say something. It has no stake, no lived experience, no reason to create at all until a person gives it one. So no, I do not see a threat. I see the cost of expressing an idea collapsing toward zero. When expression gets cheap, original thinking becomes the only scarce thing left. That favours humans."
Optiflux (Vivek Prakash, COO & Co-Founder, OptiFlux)
"I don't see AI as a threat to human expertise; I see it as a threat to guesswork. In production planning, the old approach relied heavily on experience and manual trade-offs between demand, capacity, and inventory. AI and mathematical optimization don't replace that expertise; they let it scale across constraints too complex for any person to balance by hand, like sequence-dependent changeovers or multi-facility scheduling. The system doesn't decide what "on-time" or "cost-efficient" means for a specific plant; that judgment stays human. What AI unlocks is the ability to test thousands of scheduling scenarios instantly, something simply impossible manually. Used carelessly, it's just faster spreadsheets. Used well, it turns planning expertise into something that scales."
AirBrick, (Sanjeev Bhandari, Founder & CEO of AirBrick Infra)
"I don't think AI threatens creativity; it threatens complacency. In our world of designing and building commercial spaces, AI can generate a hundred layout variations or material palettes in minutes, but it can't decide which one actually serves the people who'll work, shop, or gather in that space. That judgment, reading how light, flow, and material choices affect how a space feels, is still entirely human. What AI does give us is the speed to explore more directions before committing to one. The risk isn't the tool; it's settling for the first output instead of pushing for the right one. Used well, it's a faster way to test ideas, not a substitute for design instinct."
Mr. Sandeep Kumar Jain, Managing Director, CDK India-
Artificial intelligence is creating new possibilities for how organisations solve problems, make decisions and serve their customers. At CDK Global India, we see its greatestvalue emerging when technological capability is combined with human judgement, empathy and a deep understanding of context. In automotive retail, this partnership can help simplify complex processes, generate meaningful insights and create more responsiveexperiences for customers, dealers and employees.
As we observe AI Appreciation Day, it is also important to recognise that the future of AI will be shaped by the choices people make around its design and use. Responsibleinnovation, strong governance and continuous learning must evolve alongside technological advancement. AI should empower people to think more creatively and act with greater confidence, rather than distance them from the decisions that matter. AppreciatingAI, therefore, also means investing in the human skills required to guide it well. The organisations that strike this balance will be best placed to turn AI’s potential into lasting and meaningful progress.
Sini Magon, COO and Global Partner at Grapes Worldwide -
"For years, every new technology has been expected to replace something. In reality, it has usually changed the way we work instead. That's exactly what we're seeing today. The conversations in our industry are becoming less about production and more about strategy, decision-making and solving business problems. Clients aren't looking for more content. They're looking for better outcomes. That's where the real opportunity lies. Clients don't buy technology. They buy outcomes. If we can use new capabilities to solve problems faster, make better decisions and create stronger work, that's progress. Everything else is just noise."
