Zscaler: Suvabrata Sinha, CISO-in-Residence
“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.
Lenovo ISG: Amit Luthra, Managing Director, Lenovo ISG India
“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.”
F5: Pratik Shah, Managing Director India & SAARC, F5
“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 pipeline 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.”
Cloudera: Mayank Baid, Regional Vice President, India & South Asia
“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”.
Elastic: Karthik Rajaram, Area Vice President & General Manager, Elastic India
“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.”
CrewAI: João Moura, CEO, CrewAI
“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”
Techno Digital: Amit Agrawal, President
“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.”
Intuitive.Cloud: Jay Modh, Founder & CEO of Intuitive.Cloud
“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.” said Jay Modh, Founder & CEO of Intuitive.Cloud. “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.”