Is India Inc impatient with AI? ET AI Conclave & Awards 2025: Panel probes return on AI

“India Inc is largely impatient with AI, right? And one of the challenges... is being able to balance quick wins with long-term strategic bets,” this question was posed by Hari Balaji, Partner, Technology Consulting Generative AI and AI-led Transformation at EY India at a panel discussion at the ET AI Conclave & Awards 2025, held on February 26, 2026, in Bengaluru.

If the first half of the inaugural edition was devoted to conversations around decoding the build-borrow-burn model and understanding the ROI of trust in the era of artificial intelligence, the second half decisively turned to the “Return on AI”. The panel featured Ankush Sabharwal, Co-founder and CEO of CoRover.ai; Dr Srinivas Telukunta, Global Director AI Solutions at PepsiCo; and Debdoot Mukherjee, Head of AI & Demand Engineering at Meesho. Moderated by Balaji, the discussion shifted the lens to turning AI promises into profit.

Earlier, the Conclave featured a deep dive into the trust-onimics of the AI universe with Kirthiga Reddy, CEO and Co-founder of OptimizeGEO.ai & Verix.io, who talked about the social and economic ROI of trust in AI, and its monetisation capabilities.


That foundation paved the way for a sharp focus on AI’s bottom-line impact, as panellists dissected transitions from pilots to revenue drivers. Hari Balaji kicked off by spotlighting India Inc’s impatience with AI and the tension between quick wins and strategic bets, drawing from EY’s role in AI transformations, where Dr Srinivas Telukunta of PepsiCo advocated for three pillars encompassing information, innovations, and actions to the way ahead.

AI everywhere
Debdoot Mukherjee outlined Meesho’s embedding of AI across consumer policies, seller tools, and logistics via its Valmo platform, framing the company as a matchmaking marketplace where precise recommendations drive top-line growth. “Our entire top line of the company... boils down to marketing, like it’s a matchmaking marketplace... And the more carefully you can do the matchmaking, your top line is as good as that,” Mukherjee noted. He detailed AI handling geocoding, warehouse placement, route planning, and easing first-time sellers into e-commerce, powering over 100 million users in India’s Tier II and Tier III markets.

Client-led value
Balaji then turned to Ankush Sabharwal, whose CoRover.ai, the company behind BharatGPT and chatbots reaching 500 million users, delivers value through client-identified problems in sectors, such as banking and government. “The organisations which we have worked with... they themselves have identified where the problem is, where they could drive value for themselves using our platform,” Sabharwal said, highlighting plug-and-play successes such as Indian Railways’ ‘Ask Disha’ going live in 30 minutes. Market readiness is accelerating post-events such as this Conclave (ET AI Conclave & Awards 2205), he added, turning leads into a flywheel of scaled deployments that slash service costs by up to 70%.

Long bets, phased execution
The exchange honed in on balancing short-term gains with billion-user visions, as Mukherjee stressed aligning AI with company goals to tackle India’s “typing problem” and trust barriers among rural segments of the population. “You always start with a long-term vision, but then you execute it in parts, you phase it out,” he said, advocating prototypes for real-user feedback. Balaji affirmed the approach, bridging discriminative AI use cases to broader profitability in an era demanding ruthless prioritisation: build scalable solutions, borrow proven tools, burn inertia.

The ET AI Conclave & Awards 2025 has L&T Finance as the NBFC partner, Snowflake as the AI Data Cloud Centre, EY as the Evaluation Partner, and T-Hub as the Ecosystem Partner, and is driven by BYD, with Indri and celebration partner and Zoho as the Technology Partner. Vahdam India, Vaaree, Natch, and Andamen are the event’s gifting partners.