How India Inc can turn AI investment into productivity

This article is authored by Sunil Jose, president, India, Workday.

India's most ambitious enterprises have moved past automating single tasks. The bigger opportunity now is building an operating model where people and AI agents solve problems in the same moment, side by side, instead of one handing work off to the other. Get this right, and it dissolves the walls between departments that have quietly drained time and momentum for years.

Artificial intelligence (Representative)

Here is the gap most organisations are still living with. HR has one view of the workforce. Finance has another, built around budgets. Operations work from a third set of numbers entirely. It is a bit like three doctors examining the same patient, each reading a different scan, each arriving at a different diagnosis because no one has the full picture.

This is not a hunch. In a recent Workday study of professionals across HR, finance, IT, and operations in India, more than eight in ten said they spend real time every day coordinating across teams, shuttling information between systems, and reconciling numbers that quietly disagree with each other. Call it the copy/paste economy: People doing the work of holding disconnected systems together, one export and import at a time.

Even the most advanced AI tools do not fix this on their own. Layer smart software onto a fragmented structure and it just moves faster within the same broken lines, adding a silent friction that compounds every day, invisible until someone tries to add it all up. Yet where AI is actually working, employees feel it: 89% say it has already improved their day-to-day experience, and 69% say it has cut the time a task takes. Indian employees are not the bottleneck. The wiring underneath them is.

The hybrid workforce is not a forecast. It is already running quietly inside India's technology, banking, financial services, and insurance sectors. Picture a contracts agent that reads every incoming agreement the moment it lands, flags the clause that does not match standard terms, and clears the routine ones before a lawyer even opens the file. Or a recruiting agent handling high volume hiring across India's tech hubs, screening candidates, booking interviews, and keeping every applicant in the loop so no one disappears into a black hole.

These are not simply faster versions of the automation we already had. Their value shows up in what they free people to do. A call centre agent finally has room to turn a frustrated caller into a loyal customer instead of rushing to the next ticket. A finance professional gets to spend the afternoon shaping a decision instead of trying to work out whose numbers are right. A people manager gets time back for coaching a struggling team member, rather than squeezing it between two meetings. An HR leader sits down with the CEO to help shape workforce strategy, not just report last quarter's attrition numbers. And an executive finally gets space to think, instead of reacting to whatever landed in the inbox that morning.

None of this works unless the AI understands the business it operates inside. Think of the difference between a brilliant new hire who does not yet know the org chart, the approval chain, or company policy, and a seasoned colleague who does. The first can cause real damage even while trying to help. AI embedded directly inside HR and finance platforms already knows the reporting lines, pay policies, budgets, and approval hierarchies that run the business. That context is what lets it move from suggesting an answer to acting on one, safely and within the rules that already govern the company.

This changes the job for leadership too. AI is starting to touch how companies hire, develop talent, allocate capital, manage performance, govern risk, and set strategy. None of those decisions belong to a single department anymore. Leaders who have connected workforce and financial data inside one system describe a similar shift: Decisions that once took weeks of back and forth now take days, sometimes hours, because everyone is finally looking at the same set of facts instead of reconciling five versions of the truth.

Sanofi offers a preview of what this looks like in practice. Using an AI-guided career platform built on Workday, the company invited its entire 100,000-person workforce to share their background, skills, and career ambitions. Agents work through this information, sometimes asking employees direct follow-up questions to fill gaps, before handing each person a personalised roadmap of the skills worth building next. In the first 12 months alone, this surfaced more than 350,000 hours of internal work that used to go to outside contractors, work that Sanofi's own people can now take on instead.

India is well positioned to lead this shift. Few countries can match its depth of technology talent, its appetite for digital adoption, or a workforce that has repeatedly proven it can learn new ways of working faster than expected. But the next chapter of growth will not go to the companies that simply buy the most AI. It will go to the ones willing to redesign work itself around it.

That starts with a hard question most organisations have not yet assigned to anyone: who is accountable for how people and AI agents work together, what they can decide on their own, and how you will know it is working. Call it a chief work officer mandate if that helps make it concrete. What matters is that someone owns the answer, rather than leaving it to whichever department got there first.

Those who act on this now will gain the operational edge required to compete globally. India's next market leaders won't simply acquire the most technology; they will build the operating models that unlock its full value.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Sunil Jose, president, India, Workday.