AI Appreciation Day 2026: Here’s what industry experts have to say:
Ranga Jagannath, Senior Director – Growth, Agora
“Artificial intelligence is reaching a point where people will judge it less by how powerful it is and more by how natural it feels to use. The real shift we are seeing is from AI that simply generates outputs to AI that can hold conversations, understand context and respond in real time. As AI becomes more embedded in everyday experiences, the focus will move from technology itself to the quality of the interaction it enables.
This is creating opportunities for businesses to engage customers, employees and communities in entirely new ways. But great AI experiences are not built on intelligence alone. They depend on responsiveness, trust and the ability to communicate naturally.
At Agora, we believe the next wave of innovation will come from AI that feels less like a tool and more like a collaborator that helps people access information, solve problems and connect with others in ways that are seamless, intuitive and genuinely useful. This AI Appreciation Day, it is worth recognising how far artificial intelligence has come in changing the way people interact with technology.”
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.”
Sandip Weling, Whole-time Director & Chief Business Officer – Global Retail Business, Aptech Limited
As Aptech marks 40 years of empowering learners through education and skilling, we believe the future of AI is not about replacing human potential but augmenting it responsibly. As AI reshapes the world of work across technology, business, AVGC-XR, beauty and wellness, hospitality, and the creator economy, Aptech’s priority is to build future-ready talent capable of applying AI with skill, creativity, judgement, and responsibility. A human-first approach will ensure AI becomes a catalyst for innovation, enabling the next generation of creators to lead India’s digital and creative economy with confidence.
Raj Vattikuti, Founder & Executive Chairman at Calibo
“Artificial Intelligence is creating more opportunities for business innovation than any technology shift we’ve seen in recent years. But realizing that potential isn’t about having access to the latest models—it’s about developing people who know how to apply AI responsibly to solve real business challenges and create measurable value.
Having been part of multiple technology waves throughout my career, I’ve learned that lasting transformation never comes from technology alone. It comes from combining innovation with disciplined thinking, practical problem-solving, and a clear focus on business outcomes.
As AI becomes more accessible, the real differentiator for organizations will be talent—people who understand both the technology and the business context, and who can apply AI responsibly with confidence. At Calibo AI Academy, our mission is to develop enterprise-ready practitioners equipped with the technical expertise, business understanding, and ethical mindset needed to help organizations move beyond experimentation and deliver meaningful, lasting impact.”
Pratap Mane, President & Country Head – India, Colt Data Centre Services (Colt DCS)
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming how organisations operate. It is reshaping investment priorities, redefining digital infrastructure and influencing the future competitiveness of industries ranging from manufacturing and healthcare to financial services and logistics. As AI moves from pilots to production, the conversation is shifting from what AI can do to whether the underlying infrastructure is ready to support it at scale.
The next chapter of AI will depend as much on resilient power, scalable compute, high-performance connectivity and sustainable infrastructure as it does on advances in models and applications. Organisations that invest in robust, future-ready digital infrastructure today will be better positioned to accelerate innovation, adapt to changing business needs and scale AI with confidence. At Colt Data Centre Services (Colt DCS), we see this evolution as an opportunity to innovate continuously by developing AI-ready data centres that deliver the performance, sustainability and operational excellence required for the next generation of AI workloads.
AI Appreciation Day is an opportunity to recognise that every advance in AI depends on the infrastructure that powers it, providing the compute, connectivity, resilience and sustainability needed to support AI at scale. The organisations that will achieve the greatest long-term advantage will be those that invest not only in smarter AI, but in the resilient, scalable foundations required to support its continued growth.”
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.
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.
Sachin Panicker, Chief AI Officer, Fulcrum Digital
“Most enterprises are no longer asking whether AI works. They’ve seen it work in a pilot. The harder question, and the one that actually determines value, is whether it works reliably across a live business process, month after month, with the same data mess, the same edge cases, and the same regulatory scrutiny that every other system in the enterprise has to survive. That’s a far higher bar than a proof of concept clearing a demo.
Three things separate organisations that get past the pilot stage from those stuck there.
– First, data readiness. AI is only as trustworthy as the data feeding it, and most enterprises underestimate how much foundational work—cleaning, structuring, and governing that data—has to happen before a model can be trusted with a real decision.
– Second, governance that is built in from day one rather than retrofitted after something goes wrong. Governance shouldn’t be the function that slows AI down. Done well, it’s what gives leadership the confidence to deploy at scale, because they know where humans stay in the loop, how decisions are audited, and what happens when the system makes a mistake.
– Third, and this is the mindset shift that matters most, AI has to be treated as a business enabler with an owner and a P&L outcome, not a technology initiative owned by IT in isolation. The enterprises seeing real transformation are the ones where business leaders, not just technologists, are accountable for AI outcomes.
On AI Appreciation Day, the most useful thing we can appreciate about AI isn’t the technology itself. It’s the discipline it’s forcing on enterprises to finally fix the data and governance foundations they should have fixed years ago.”
Subhash Kalluri, Founder, FreJun
“Voice AI now sits inside some of the most sensitive conversations a business has: a candidate discussing a job change, a patient booking a medical appointment, and a customer disputing a loan repayment. As adoption accelerates, it is worth pausing on what is actually being automated. It is not just a task; it is a moment of trust between a person and an institution, and AI is now a participant in that exchange.
An AI agent that qualifies a lead or screens a candidate is making judgements that affect real outcomes for real people, and that responsibility cannot be an afterthought bolted onto a model. It has to be built into the infrastructure itself: how data is stored, how consent is handled, how calls are recorded and audited, and how a system behaves when it does not know the answer.
For FreJun, this has meant treating compliance and data governance as a design principle rather than a checklist. The goal was never automation for its own sake. It is to give people, recruiters, support agents, and sales teams more time for the parts of their work that genuinely need human judgement by handling the repetitive parts responsibly and transparently. A human-first future is not one where AI does less. It is one where AI is trusted enough to do more, because it was built with people’s interests at the centre from the start.”
Siva Ekambaram, India Site Leader, GoTo
The conversation around AI is rapidly shifting from adoption to effectiveness. Today, the real opportunity lies in how organizations embed AI into everyday workflows, empower employees to make better decisions, and deliver measurable business outcomes. AI’s success is no longer defined by the sophistication of the technology alone, but by how seamlessly, responsibly, and securely it integrates into the way people work.
As AI capabilities continue to evolve, organizations must balance innovation with trust, governance, and human oversight. At GoTo, we believe AI should empower people to focus on higher value work and outcomes. Our vision of practical AI is centered on creating intuitive, trustworthy, and responsible technology that helps businesses solve real business challenges while keeping people at the heart of every decision. The future of AI will belong to organizations that build with responsibility first, ensuring AI creates lasting value for employees, customers, and businesses alike.”
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.”
Hemant Tiwari, Managing Director and Vice President for India and 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.
Hariprasad PS, Head of AI, HyperVerge
“AI Appreciation Day asks a harder question than most calendar observances. While the world is focused on how AI improves productivity, is it really bias-free? Every day, AI systems decide in milliseconds whether a face matches an ID, whether a document is genuine, or whether a person gets to open a bank account or receive a loan. AI is making decisions that touch people who look nothing alike. A model that performs well in a lab won’t automatically perform well in a village in India or on a busy street in Vietnam. Lighting varies, paper stock varies, camera quality varies, and network speed varies. No one sets out to build a biased system. But any AI company that ignores this reality ends up being one.
The pattern is well documented across the industry: when training data doesn’t reflect the full diversity of faces, documents, and conditions a system will encounter in the real world, accuracy tends to be uneven, and some legitimate users get rejected more often than others. Closing that gap takes deliberate work. It means sourcing training data that spans demographics, document formats, and markets, and then auditing outcomes across those segments rather than trusting a single aggregate accuracy score.
Device and bandwidth constraints deserve equal attention. A verification flow built for flagship phones and fast broadband excludes huge segments of users in emerging markets. Single-image checks that avoid heavy video processing, and models that run reliably on low-end devices and patchy connections matter as much to fairness as the underlying face-matching algorithm does.
This AI Appreciation Day, it’s worth celebrating what AI makes possible while being honest about what it demands. Bias-free AI is an ongoing discipline of testing across geography, document type, age, and network condition, because the moment that testing stops, the system starts failing someone worthy.”
Chetan Jain, Managing Director, Inspira Enterprise
AI is getting embedded in our digital infrastructure across sectors, contributing to increased production, accelerated innovation, maximized operational efficiency, and enhanced cybersecurity, among other capabilities. While AI Appreciation Day allows us to recognize the benefits and progress made by businesses with artificial intelligence, we also have a collective responsibility to leverage it wisely. In the cybersecurity domain, AI-driven security operations represent a strategic transformation in how organizations safeguard their digital ecosystems. At Inspira Enterprise, we use AI as a growth accelerator that enhances human capabilities, driving organizations to make quicker, faster, and more secure decisions. From automated threat detection, mitigation, response, and resilience, AI is the future of enterprise operations. It is all the more critical for government and enterprises to promote AI-driven innovations that are built on ethical principles, optimized for operational excellence, and socially conscious. As AI continues to evolve, Inspira’s commitment stays focused on building intelligent solutions that empower organizations, safeguard digital ecosystems, and create lasting value for society.
Vishal Sirohi, CEO & Co-Founder, Island Computing
The most significant shift is from experimentation to discipline. Through 2024, enterprises measured AI success by the number of pilots launched. In 2026, MIT research shows only 5% of AI pilots produce measurable P&L impact, and RAND puts the enterprise AI failure rate at 80%. Enterprises are now treating compute, data, and intelligence as three portfolio assets that require unit economics per workload, bounded budgets, sovereign control planes for regulated data, and audit surfaces designed for autonomous agents. The FinOps Foundation’s State of FinOps 2026 finds 98% of FinOps teams now manage AI spend, up from 31% two years ago, though only 22% produce per-workload unit economics monthly. Alongside the discipline shift, the dominant AI workload itself is moving from short, stateless model inference to long-running, stateful, tool-calling agentic execution, and the infrastructure built for one does not run the other at production scale. The shift underneath is from AI-as-feature to AI-as-asset. The enterprises that install the safety and cost mechanisms today set the operating baseline for the next decade of production AI.
Praveer Kochhar, CPO & Co-founder, KOGO AI
AI Appreciation Day must celebrate what private AI delivers, not just what public AI demonstrates. The rollercoaster of AI innovations has demonstrated that when it gets down to brass tacks, businesses need AI platforms that run real operations without exposing proprietary data to third party vendors. Private AI changes this equation, which deserves appreciation. When AI is private, it lets a company keep its models, data, and institutional knowledge inside its own infrastructure while agents execute actual work.
This shift is already visible across the industry. Enterprises now deploy agentic systems that read contracts, generate dashboards, and manage cross-team workflows inside infrastructure they control. Analyst work that once took days now finishes in minutes. And all of this can be done privately, which Indian startups have clearly demonstrated.
The industry has to recognize what that shift means. Public AI proved that large models can reason and generate. Private AI proves that enterprises can trust AI enough to hand it real authority over real processes. That trust depends on control over which models run, how data moves, and the audit trail behind every decision an agent makes.
This AI Appreciation Day, it’s important to celebrate the engineers who build guardrails, the governance layers that let a CFO sleep at night while agents touch financial systems, and the shift from AI as a feature to AI as infrastructure that enterprises actually own.
That’s what deserves recognition this year—AI that works for the enterprise, inside the enterprise, on the enterprise’s own terms.
Vimal Nair, Chief Growth Officer, Krisp
“Artificial intelligence has rapidly evolved from a breakthrough technology to core enterprise infrastructure, reshaping how businesses communicate, collaborate, and operate. On World AI Appreciation Day, it’s worth recognizing that AI’s biggest impact is no longer in standalone applications, but in technologies that integrate naturally into everyday work. Voice AI is one of the clearest examples of this shift. As hybrid work, global customer support, and distributed teams make real-time communication a business imperative, voice AI has evolved from a nice-to-have to an essential part of enterprise operations.
At Krisp, we’re seeing this firsthand. Our AI processes over a billion minutes of voice conversations every month-removing background noise for clearer calls, capturing meeting notes without interrupting conversations, and enabling real-time accent conversion so global support teams can communicate more effectively across markets. As enterprises move from experimenting with AI to relying on it for everyday operations, the next phase will be defined by AI that enhances communication, strengthens security, and integrates seamlessly into the workflows teams already use.”
Amit Sharma, Founder and Whole Time Director, Matrix Geo Solutions
“On National AI Appreciation Day, Matrix Geo Solutions celebrates artificial intelligence as a practical force reshaping geospatial intelligence. AI is helping us read the Earth with greater precision by accelerating survey workflows, extracting meaning from drone and satellite imagery, and uncovering patterns that would otherwise remain hidden in complex datasets. It enables faster decisions with predictive analytics and real time insights, strengthening how infrastructure is planned, cities are designed, ecosystems are monitored, and disasters are responded to. For us, the real value of AI lies not in automation alone but in its ability to convert spatial data into informed action, helping organizations build with more confidence, respond with more speed, and plan with greater responsibility for the world ahead. “
Dan Mountstephen, GM and SVP (APJ), Okta
“AI Appreciation Day is a good reminder of how fast we’ve moved past the “should we adopt AI?” phase. Across APJ, the conversation has entirely shifted to execution. The reality on the ground is that no enterprise is going to rely on a single AI platform, model, or cloud vendor. Teams are selecting diverse tools for specific jobs, creating a complex, multi-environment reality. Because of this, obsessing over the “right” AI tool is a distraction. The real challenge is consistent governance.
As Agentic AI becomes deeply embedded in everyday operations, you cannot rely on a legacy grab bag of fragmented tools to secure it. Identity is the control plane.
C-suites and boards are realising that non-human identities—AI agents, APIs, and service accounts—need the exact same visibility, lifecycle management, and strict access controls we’ve spent years building for human users. You need to know exactly what an AI agent can access, what it’s authorised to do, and how to shut it down instantly if needed. The pace of innovation isn’t slowing down. Building a neutral, independent identity foundation today is the only way to give your business the flexibility to adopt tomorrow’s AI safely.”
Umesh Shah, Director, Orient Technologies Limited
AI Appreciation Day is a moment to recognise AI’s potential, acknowledge the responsibility that comes with its adoption, and strengthen the relationship between people and technology. At Orient Technologies, we are bringing these principles to life by combining AI-powered ITSM, automated support processes and robust governance to transform service desks into strategic centres of innovation that deliver faster resolutions, better user experiences and greater business value.” Umesh Shah, Director, Orient Technologies Limited
Hariharashudhan V K, Chief Operating Officer, Neokred Technologies
“AI Appreciation Day must prompt Indian fintech to reckon with digital financial fraud. This alone has cost Indian consumers and institutions roughly ₹1.25 lakh crore over the past three years. Fraud moves at machine speed now and only AI matches that speed on defense. That reality must shape how the industry talks about AI.
AI can certainly write great marketing copy but fintech businesses need AI that reads a transaction in milliseconds and decides whether it’s real. Identity verification, KYC onboarding, and fraud monitoring depend on models that process signals like fingerprints, behavioural patterns, transaction velocity and network anomalies because a human analyst would take longer to catch these inconsistencies. When these systems work, they stop fraud before it settles.
It’s important to celebrate AI that prevents fraud and protects privacy. Consent management, data minimization and audit trails matter just as much as businesses are bound by the DPDP Act and other data protection frameworks. AI that respects a user’s consent choices while still delivering real-time risk decisions represents the harder engineering problem and it deserves more attention.
This AI Appreciation Day, the fintech industry should the teams building infrastructure that regulators trust, banks rely on, and users never notice because it simply works. That invisibility is the real achievement because it is fast, private and built for the moment it matters.”
Tushar Agnihotri, CEO, Route Mobile
“Artificial Intelligence is no longer a technology conversation; it has become a boardroom imperative. Business leaders today are looking beyond experimentation and focusing on how AI can fundamentally improve decision making, customer engagement and long-term competitiveness. The next phase of AI adoption will be defined by organisations that seamlessly embed intelligence into everyday business interactions, enabling faster decisions, more meaningful customer experiences and greater operational agility.
In communications, AI has the potential to transform every interaction into one that is contextual, proactive and personalised, allowing enterprises to build stronger relationships at scale while maintaining trust and authenticity. However, sustainable value will come not from adopting AI for its own sake, but from deploying it responsibly with robust governance, transparency and human oversight.
As AI continues to reshape industries, leadership will be defined by those who can translate technological innovation into measurable business outcomes while keeping customer trust at the centre of every decision. AI Appreciation Day is a reminder that the greatest impact of AI will not be the intelligence of the technology itself, but the intelligence with which organisations choose to apply it.”
Vishal Rajani, CEO, Synergos
AI earned its place in marketing the hard way, by taking over the parts of the job nobody really enjoyed. Five years ago, a junior strategist spent two days pulling competitor data before a pitch even began. Today, that groundwork takes an afternoon, and the strategist spends the rest of the week on things that the human mind is exceptional at doing—reading a client’s real problem underneath the brief, asking the right questions and solving the right problems.
That shift is worth acknowledging today. AI is clearing the runway for marketers to exercise better judgement. Media buyers who used to babysit spreadsheets now spend time asking why a campaign underperformed, how to make it better and all sorts of right questions. Copywriters who burn a whole day on ten headline variants generate fifty in an hour and spend their energy on the one line that actually says something meaningful.
Some marketers are getting it wrong by treating AI as a shortcut to skip thinking altogether. The ones getting it right are treating AI as a way to do more thinking faster on questions that actually decide outcomes. Before AI became mainstream, a lot of people in the industry spent time honing skills needed for menial tasks. AI is pushing people to excel at exercising judgement because a tool that drafts a report is only useful if someone still asks whether the report says anything true.
Over two decades of being a marketer, I’ve learned that the scarce resource was always attention, the kind that notices when a strategy is technically correct but for the wrong client. AI has bought us more time to think strategically. To everyone building tools that free people up to do their best thinking, on this AI Appreciation Day, I’d like to say thank you.
Rajnish Gupta, MD & Country Manager, Tenable India
“AI Appreciation Day shouldn’t just be a celebration of productivity, it needs to be a reality check for how we manage risk.
The defining feature of this era is the sheer velocity of AI adoption, and India sits at the front of that curve. Recent industry data puts weekly generative AI usage among Indian employees at 92%—among the highest anywhere in the world. It’s created a corporate culture driven by instant gratification, where timelines that used to take days are collapsed into seconds. This is unlocking undeniable innovation, but convenience always wins until the consequences catch up.
Right now, speed has become the only priority. Anything that introduces a moment of friction, whether it’s governance, compliance, or essential security checks, is being viewed as an obstacle rather than a necessity.
Employees are eagerly feeding sensitive corporate data into unvetted large language models, and in India this shows up starkly. Shadow AI usage here runs as high as 58%, the highest of any market tracked. Under the DPDP Act, 2023, that represents a governance and compliance exposure, since unauthorised processing or disclosure of personal data can itself constitute a reportable breach. We’ve seen this exact movie before with rushed cloud migrations, only this time it’s happening faster and at a much greater scale. This isn’t an argument against AI; its benefits are real and irreversible. But we are building an exponential future on a fragile foundation.
The way forward is shoring up defences at the speed of adoption. That means enterprise-grade exposure management platforms with proper data controls and clear policy on what can and cannot be shared with public models, and training that treats AI security and literacy as seriously as data privacy. Boards and CXOs must stop treating governance and cybersecurity as a compliance checkbox and start treating it as a necessary part of infrastructure itself. The fastest to adopt won’t win as big as the ones that adopt it safely.”– Rajnish Gupta, MD & Country Manager, Tenable India.
Anand Sampath, EVP and Head of AI Innovation Centre, India, Visionet Systems
“This AI Appreciation Day, enterprises need to ask an uncomfortable question: are we getting smarter with AI, or simply getting faster?
Every prompt, correction, and workflow we feed into AI carries institutional knowledge, judgment, and context that form an enterprise’s competitive edge. The critical question is where that learning accumulates and who ultimately benefits from it. Speed alone is no longer enough. The leaders who maximize AI will be those who build a clear trust boundary around their proprietary knowledge, retain control of their learning loop, and keep human judgment in the calls that matter.
At Visionet, we believe enterprises should not invest in AI tools for the sake of adoption; they should invest in measurable AI outcomes, with architectures that compound their intelligence and competitive advantage within the business.
The winners in AI won’t be the fastest adopters. They’ll be the ones who keep their learning loop intact.”
Aaron Bugal, Field CISO, APJ, Sophos
While AI Appreciation Day is ‘celebration’ of the benefits of AI, it also serves as a timely reminder about the responsibility that comes with using it securely and safely.
There is no question that AI is changing cybersecurity. It helps defenders analyse threats faster and respond more efficiently, but also gives cybercriminals new ways to scale familiar attacks. The technology is evolving rapidly, yet the fundamentals of good cybersecurity remain remarkably consistent.
Even in an era of highly sophisticated technologies available to attackers, 79% of ransomware attacks in the APJ region still begin with identity-based techniques such as phishing, malicious emails and compromised credentials – according to the finding of the Sophos Ransomware Report released today. This shows that AI isn’t replacing the tactics attackers rely on but it is making them faster, more convincing and easier to execute at scale.
Therefore, there is an imminent need to solidify the foundations of a robust defence system against these attacks which not just focuses on speed and scale but is also sustainable in the long run. That comes with embedding governance, visibility and security into AI initiatives from the outset, rather than treating them as an afterthought.
AI is an incredibly powerful tool, but like any tool, its value depends on how it’s used. The organisations that will benefit most are those using AI to strengthen human expertise, accelerate response and build resilience, rather than assuming technology alone will solve their cybersecurity challenges.”
Sharda Tickoo, Country Manager – TrendAI, India & SAARC
“AI has become the frontline of enterprise defence, reading through logs at a scale no human team could match. However, the uncomfortable truth is that the same intelligence defending our systems is being weaponized against them and readiness is still lagging.
We celebrate AI’s speed while ignoring the velocity at which threats are evolving. As we move from AI to agentic systems, the attack surface does not just expand but becomes dynamic and increasingly difficult to govern. Complexity compounds risk exponentially. A single compromised agent can orchestrate attacks across your entire infrastructure at machine speed, while defenders still operate in human time.
This is where the conversation shifts from resilience to anti-fragility, which means building systems that learn, adapt, and grow stronger through continuous threat detection and management. It demands governance frameworks embedded from the start, not bolted on afterward. It requires guardrails that constrain agent behaviour at runtime, continuous monitoring of autonomous systems, and critically, human oversight, accountability, and traceability woven through every layer.
The enterprises that will lead the next era are those prepared for this reality. They are building AI-native security architecture, implementing continuous threat exposure management, and treating human judgment as a foundational control. That is the inflection point we must reach, where speed and safeguard move in tandem, where governance enables innovation rather than constrains it.”
Shiva Pillay, SVP and GM, Worldwide Data and AI Trust Solutions at Veeam Software
On AI Appreciation Day, it’s time to address the real heartbeat of enterprise innovation: trust. As businesses race to embed artificial intelligence into every facet of their operations, the imperative has shifted. It’s no longer just about having smarter tools; it’s about uncompromising trust in the data fueling those tools, and in the platforms that protect every decision AI makes.
The reality is sobering: according to Veeam Software, 43% of organizations admit that AI adoption is accelerating faster than their security and governance frameworks can keep up. Even more striking, only 32% of organizations can fully and quickly recover data after an attack. These numbers aren’t just stats. They’re a wake-up call for every organization looking to turn AI-driven potential into real-world value.
If organizations can’t trust the integrity, security, and recoverability of their data, then every AI insight and business decision is built on quicksand. The future belongs to unified, AI-empowered platforms that not only deliver innovation, but embed governance, resilience, and trust at their core.
Today, let’s appreciate AI for what it inspires, but let’s demand more – for business outcomes that are smart, secure, and always trustworthy. This is how we transform risk into resilience and vision into sustainable, confident action.
Rakesh Kumar, Infrastructure Solution Head, Vertiv
“On a day meant to celebrate AI’s progress, it’s worth remembering that none of it works without the infrastructure layer underneath. High-density computing puts real strain on power and cooling systems, and getting that right is what actually lets AI scale reliably. This layer determines whether AI adoption holds up outside a lab environment. That’s the foundation we build at Vertiv.”
Khadim Batti, CEO and Co-Founder at Whatfix
AI Appreciation Day is a reminder that the biggest gains are still ahead, particularly for the organizations willing to build the trust to get there. We’ve seen this pattern before. Every major technology wave, from the internet to the cloud, has unfolded in several acts: infrastructure first, platforms second, and enterprise transformation last. This happens because business-critical workflows demand a level of reliability that takes time to earn.
Building that trust starts with how we deploy AI. Too often, AI fatigue gets blamed on the tools themselves, when it’s really an implementation failure. Employees are left to guess at boundaries, prompt their way through ambiguity, and absorb friction that good design should have removed. The organizations that will lead when AI reaches its next inflection point will be the ones that treat AI as an operating model transformation, rethinking how work gets structured so AI can execute autonomously within clear guardrails, while employees focus their energy on judgment, strategy, and creativity.
That’s the vision behind Whatfix AI. Powered by ScreenSense, our AI engine that understands context and intent, Whatfix AI embeds agentic intelligence directly into enterprise workflows. Rather than expecting employees to navigate an ever-growing collection of AI tools, AI agents operate within enterprise guardrails to deliver contextual guidance, accelerate execution, surface adoption friction, and continuously optimize how work gets done. The real promise of AI is that intelligence becomes an invisible part of the operating model, empowering people with the right support, at the right moment, while organizations retain the governance and control needed to scale AI with confidence.
When organizations get this right, AI starts to feel less like another application employees have to learn and more like a trusted collaborator woven into every workflow. It stops competing for people’s attention and starts compounding their impact, giving them back time to focus on the work that requires unique human judgment, creativity, and strategic thinking.” – Khadim Batti, CEO and Co-Founder at Whatfix
