ET Awards: Those who dare today will lead India in 2047, says Deloitte's Romal Shetty

India's individual adoption of artificial intelligence is outpacing many developed nations, but corporate deployment is struggling to keep up, Romal Shetty, CEO, Deloitte South Asia, said at the Economic Times Awards for Corporate Excellence.

"There is a visible gap between how Indians use AI personally and how companies deploy strategically - that gap is both a competitive risk and a leadership responsibility," he said.

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Shetty also said India is democratising technology at a scale no country has attempted.

"The companies that will define Indian businesses in 2047 are making a fundamental choice right now," he added. "The first is the audacity, the willingness to bet on the future before it's obvious. Build capabilities that your current business models don't require, and move not when the market forces you to, but before it does. The second is resilience: embedding technology so deeply that every disruption becomes a door, not a wall."

Shetty commended India for navigating a world that has lurched from one crisis to the next-from the Covid pandemic to the Russia-Ukraine conflict to the war in West Asia. Through each episode, he said, India has demonstrated resilience anchored in a strong macroeconomic foundation and an increasingly anti-fragile economic structure.

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But the operating environment, he warned, is growing more demanding by the day. Risks have multiplied - single-source dependencies, opaque data infrastructure, and cyber threats now sit alongside institutions that were built for a stable world that no longer exists. "The disruption is structural," he said. "It will not reverse."

Shetty closed with a pointed reminder about the stakes of the evening. "Disruption tests character. What we are celebrating tonight is not just performance - it is the character of Indian enterprise." On the country's larger ambition, he was equally direct: the journey toward Viksit Bharat 2047, he said, is not a government promise. It is a private sector assignment.