Meet “Hey, I'm DG”, the Digital Genie and new conversational AI feature within DocuGenie.AI, designed to make enterprise information easier to access

Positioned as the Digital Genie, the new feature allows enterprise users to interact with documents and connected business information through natural-language questions. Instead of manually searching lengthy records, reviewing multiple files or navigating different systems, users can ask questions and receive relevant answers, summaries and supporting references.

The launch also marks a step towards SecureKloud's vision of an AI-powered digital workforce, where intelligent assistants work alongside people to simplify everyday enterprise operations.

From Document Processing to Conversational Intelligence

Enterprises manage large volumes of information across financial statements, loan files, customer records, operational documents and business applications. Finding specific information often requires teams to review multiple sources, compare details and interpret complex data.

DocuGenie.AI already helps enterprises ingest, classify, extract and validate information from structured and unstructured documents. With "Hey, I'm DG", SecureKloud extends these capabilities to conversational AI, allowing users to explore processed information through simple, everyday questions.

The feature is designed to help users move beyond document search towards contextual understanding. Responses can be traced to underlying source information, supporting more informed review and decision-making.

Making Enterprise Information Easier to Access

"Hey, I'm DG" supports document-intensive business workflows across industries. In banking and financial services, users can ask questions about factors contributing to loan defaults, identify applications awaiting review or examine missing documentation and pending legal checks. These use cases complement DocuGenie.AI capabilities in Bank Statement Analysis and Loan Against Property (LAP) Automation.

When connected to relevant enterprise systems, the feature can help bring together information from documents and lending platforms such as Loan Origination Systems (LOS) and Loan Management Systems (LMS).

In logistics, teams can use conversational queries to investigate shipment exceptions, review supporting documents and understand operational discrepancies without manually searching through multiple records.

By making information easier to retrieve and interpret, the feature aims to reduce repetitive investigation and help teams focus on the decisions that require their attention.

Bringing AI Closer to Everyday Enterprise Work

"Hey, I'm DG" reflects SecureKloud's approach to making enterprise AI more accessible within existing business workflows. Rather than requiring users to learn complex search methods, the feature introduces a conversational interface for working with document intelligence.

It builds on the capabilities of DocuGenie.AI, which supports document automation across lending, onboarding, logistics and manufacturing workflows.

With this addition, SecureKloud continues to expand DocuGenie.AI from intelligent document processing towards more interactive, decision-ready enterprise intelligence.

"Enterprises have invested heavily in digitising information, but accessing the right insights at the right time remains a challenge. With 'Hey, I'm DG', we want to change that. Whether in banking, lending, logistics, legal services or healthcare, teams should spend more time making decisions, not searching for the information behind them. That is the value we aim to deliver with our Digital Genie. It also marks an important step towards our vision of an AI-powered digital workforce, where intelligent assistants work alongside people to simplify operations and improve productivity," said Venkateswaran Krishnamurthy, Chief Revenue Officer and Whole-Time Director, SecureKloud Technologies Limited.

As the Digital Genie evolves, SecureKloud aims to explore new ways for AI-powered assistants to support enterprise workflows, making business information easier to access, understand and act upon.

About SecureKloud Technologies

SecureKloud Technologies Ltd. is a global technology company with over 17 years of expertise in AI-powered digital transformation, cloud-native SaaS enablement, intelligent cloud managed services, and intelligent automation. Its portfolio spans Intelligent Document Automation through DocuGenie.AI, AI and data engineering, cloud transformation, FinOps, SaaS delivery, and 24x7 operational support.

Backed by industry-recognised certifications and compliance frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001:2022, DPDP, GDPR, ISO 9001, ISO 20000, and CMMI Level 3, SecureKloud delivers secure, scalable, and compliant digital operations for modern enterprises.

For more information:

Website: www.securekloud.com.

DocuGenie.AI™: www.docugenieai.com.

Indian Lab Sthanika's Sieve 31B decision model ranks second in the Jev Decision Index

Sieve 31B recorded a Full score of 63.8, combining the public test suite with private tests run by the benchmark's maintainers. It ranked second on the public tests with a full score of 62.5.

Sthanika’s Sieve 31B is a cost-efficient decision model that agents can call as one component in a larger system, and it makes decisions more reliably than general-purpose large language models. Many AI agents today send every task to an LLM, including planning and routine decisions that a decision model can handle more cheaply. That cost grows as agents take on more of the work people used to do. General-purpose LLMs are tuned to converse with people, which makes them the right tool for language and an expensive one for choosing between defined options thousands of times a day. Comparatively, a decision model is extremely inexpensive for those tasks.

PurpleTalk

The wider Sieve family includes Sieve 2B Plus, Sieve 4B and Sieve 9B Plus each placed among the top in their size classes on the same leaderboard. Developers can run smaller models on their own on-premise GPUs for everyday tasks that need privacy and handle large volumes of work, and switch to bigger, more powerful models when tasks require more advanced capabilities.

Most AI conversations are about models that write, summarise and converse. Much of the AI inside real software does something less visible: it makes small decisions, thousands of times a day. Sieve is built for that decision-making. It reads the question and the available choices as they are presented, then returns a defined answer with a confidence score that software can inspect and act on. That suits applications where consistency, speed and the ability to audit each decision matter as much as accuracy.

"Sieve 31B shows that a focused model fine-tuned in India can perform among the best in the world at this work. The private tests matter most to us. They come from domains outside the public suite, and Sieve generalised better than most of the field. It learned the task, not the test.” said Sridhar Muppidi, Co-founder of PurpleTalk.

Sieve builds on Sthanika's earlier work on compact, confidence-aware decision models, which already run inside PurpleTalk products including Ello and Mina. There they handle routine judgements faster and more economically than general-purpose generative models. The lab also expects to create a new category of agentic systems which have higher reliability, more granular control, as well as low latency in areas like voice, customer experience, and robotics.

"We believe decision models will open up a new category of agentic systems: more reliable, more controllable and fast enough for voice, customer experience and robotics. We are publishing everything needed to reproduce our results, and we invite the research community to test it, challenge it and build on it,” said Bharat Lingam, CEO & Co-founder, PurpleTalk.

Models and evaluation artifacts: link.

Full results: Jev Decision Index.

About Sthanika
Sthanika is a Hyderabad-based AI research lab that builds open-weight models for problems the general-purpose models were never built to solve. Its name is Sanskrit for “local.” Sthanika is part of the PurpleTalk group. Learn more at sthanika.ai.

About PurpleTalk

Founded in 2008, PurpleTalk builds AI companies and services. The group has worked across sectors like healthcare, agriculture, financial services and retail. Its portfolio includes (x)cube LABS, Sthanika, Ello and Mina.

Akkodis Brings Multilingual Intelligence to Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team Races

The deployment highlights a growing shift in how organizations operate, bringing intelligence closer to where information is generated and decisions are made. Debuting at the Formula 1 Italian Grand Prix in Monza, the solution demonstrates how such systems can enhance real-world experiences in demanding, fast-paced and information-rich environments.

For international guests in the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team Viewing Gallery, following race commentary, radio communications, technical terminology and rapidly evolving track activity can be challenging when much of the information is communicated in English. To address this challenge, Akkodis engineered an end-to-end solution that processes real-time audio locally at the circuit. Dedicated AI-Core speech-to-text models transcribe communications in real time with end-to-end latency of less than 50 milliseconds, while domain-specific models recognize F1 terminology, driver names, team personnel, locations and event-specific vocabulary during the transcription process. The information is then translated simultaneously into multiple selected languages through the AI-Core dedicated Expert Language Model for translation.

The solution currently supports more than 50 languages and is designed to continuously evolve through a dedicated Terminology Manager, enabling race-specific terminology to be updated, validated and incorporated into future model enhancements as terminology changes throughout the season.

Beyond software and models, Akkodis engineers designed and built the custom physical hardware that powers the solution directly at the circuit. The compact compute platform delivers more than 4,000 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of advanced AI processing performance within a sub-600W power target. The enclosure, mounting architecture, ventilation and cooling systems were engineered to operate reliably in the demanding F1 garage environment, where high temperatures and limited airflow can challenge performance.

Akkodis teams developed prototypes, validated continuous-operation performance and integrated the solution into the live race environment, demonstrating Akkodis' ability to engineer and deploy complete solutions from model development to physical infrastructure and real-world operations. Throughout race week, the platform operated continuously and reliably without interruption.

The project brought together expertise across AI, software engineering, hardware development, integration, systems engineering, mechanical design and deployment operations, demonstrating Akkodis Intelligence in action.

"F1 is an environment where speed, precision and performance matter in every moment. The greatest value from AI comes when intelligence is available where information is generated and decisions are made," said Jo Debecker, President & CEO of Akkodis. "This deployment demonstrates how Akkodis Intelligence brings together advanced technology, engineering expertise and human insight to deliver the right information, at the right time and in the right context. By combining AI-Core with purpose-built infrastructure, we're helping create a more engaging and accessible experience for international guests in one of the world's most demanding environments."

Victoria Johnson, Chief Marketing Operations Officer, Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team said, "We always strive to deliver the best experience for our race guests - and bringing leading technology to the fore is a key component. The garage is not only a demanding environment; it also offers an enthralling insight into how our team operates at the leading edge of sport and technology. By working with Akkodis, combining leading language models with bespoke hardware. we've brought our guests closer to the action than ever before. Speed, accuracy and consistency are crucial in this deployment, and we've been delighted with our guest response.”

While first deployed in Formula 1, the architecture demonstrates a broader shift toward intelligent edge environments. The solution shows how advanced AI, local processing, Physical AI infrastructure and engineering expertise can come together to deliver real-time intelligence where speed, reliability and contextual understanding are critical.

About AI-Core

AI-Core is Akkodis' modular AI ecosystem for deploying intelligent applications & solutions across a range of cloud, hybrid and edge environments. Powered by Akkodis Intelligence and already validated on leading platforms such as Microsoft Azure, AI-Core combines domain expertise alongside advanced AI models, agentic systems, automation capabilities and multilingual intelligence to accelerate intelligent automation, decision support, testing, validation and real-time data processing.

About Akkodis

Akkodis is a global digital engineering consulting company that enables organizations to innovate and accelerate by applying technology to redefine how processes and products are developed, powered and optimized. With deep expertise across AI, data, cloud, edge and software engineering, we offer best-in-class technology consultancy. Through our strong, scalable delivery models and specialized talent, we provide end-to-end solutions, from strategy and consulting through implementation. Our commitment to Akkodis Intelligence helps businesses connect the exponential power of technology with the irreplaceable strengths of human thinking and collaboration. Part of the Adecco Group and headquartered in Switzerland, Akkodis brings together 40,000 engineers and digital experts in over 30 countries, with services that span Consulting, Solutions and Academy. With deep experience across the world's major industries, Akkodis empowers businesses to solve complex challenges and achieve sustainable impact. akkodis.com | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | X.

About the Adecco Group

The Adecco Group is the world's leading talent company. Our purpose is making the future work for everyone. Through our three global business units - Adecco, Akkodis and LHH - across 60 countries, we enable sustainable and lifelong employability for individuals, deliver digital and engineering solutions to power transformation and empower organisations to optimise their workforces. The Adecco Group leads by example and is committed to an inclusive culture, fostering sustainable employability, and supporting resilient economies and communities. The Adecco Group AG is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland (ISIN: CH0012138605) and listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange (ADEN). www.adeccogroup.com.

Two Pitch Point winners will win attractive rewards and the opportunity for discussions with LTF or any L&T Group company for a Proof of Concept (PoC) and the L&T Innovation Fund

LTF is offering an opportunity to AI startups that are in their early to growth stage to present their solutions, applicable for BFSI or Non-BFSI domains, to a panel of Venture Capitalist, LTF’s senior management, and industry experts at RAISE’ 26. Two winners will be eligible for attractive rewards. In addition, winners will get an opportunity to engage in discussion with LTF, or with any of the L&T Group companies identified by LTF, to explore a Proof of Concept (PoC), as well as to engage in a discussion with L&T Innovation Fund, the venture capital arm of Larsen & Toubro, regarding potential equity funding. 

Mr. Sudipta Roy, Managing Director & CEO at L&T Finance Ltd., said, “Given L&T Finance is doubling down on next-gen AI to reshape the lending landscape, making this competition a vital launchpad for identifying, supporting, and investing in visionary startups. The second edition of Pitch Point reinforces our commitment to fueling innovation and unlocking AI capabilities that bring tangible impact to financial services and beyond.”

The product offering that will be evaluated at ‘Pitch Point’ must align with one of the domains that synergises with any of the LTF’s or L&T Group Company’s current and future offerings, namely, Cyber Security & Fraud Prevention, Rural & Agri Fintech, Gen AI Application, Embedded Finance Solutions, Smart Contract & Blockchain Solutions, Alternate Data Based Lending Solutions, AI-Driven Credit Scoring & Risk Assessment, Regulatory Technology & Compliance Tools, Digital Financial & Robo-Advisors, AI-Powered Collections & Recovery Solutions, Agentic AI for Enterprise, Image Processing and Recognition, and AI Geospatial and Remote Sensing.

LTF encourages eligible startups to apply online by submitting the registration form along with their pitch deck. Shortlisted applicants will be invited for a virtual interaction round, and five finalists will then be selected to present live at RAISE’ 26.

The application period for this program is open till October 31, 2026. The final shortlist is set to be announced on December 1, 2026. The program culminates in a final event at RAISE' 26 on December 16, 2026, which will be held at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai.

Link to the ‘Pitch Point’ page: www.ltfraise.com/event/Raise/pitch-point

For any questions pertaining to the application process, eligible companies can contact the organising team at: raise.pitchpoint@ltfs.com

About L&T Finance RAISE
LTF’s RAISE’ 26 is an AI-focused event centered on the theme, ‘Transforming Financial Services with AI’ and offers a unique opportunity to explore the latest Enterprise Agentic AI solutions reshaping the BFSI landscape. RAISE was launched in the year 2024, with resounding success, convening over 4,500 participants including regulatory leaders, unicorn founders, deep tech innovators, and media representatives. It has since emerged as the largest AI-themed gathering in the BFSI domain, underscoring the sector's growing reliance on AI and ML.

Find more information at: www.ltfraise.com
 

About L&T Finance Ltd. (LTF)
L&T Finance Ltd. (LTF) (www.LTFINANCE.com), is a leading Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC), offering a range of financial products and services. Headquartered in Mumbai, the Company has been rated ‘AAA’ — the highest credit rating — by four leading domestic rating agencies. In August 2025, S&P Global Ratings upgraded LTF long-term Issuer Credit Rating to “BBB/Stable” from “BBB-/Positive” and short-term issuer credit rating to “A-2” from “A-3”. Fitch Ratings has affirmed LTF Long-Term Foreign and Local-Currency Issuer Default Ratings of “BBB-” with a Stable outlook. It has also received leadership scores and ratings by global and national Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) rating providers for its sustainability performance. The Company has been certified as a Great Place To Work® and has also won many prestigious awards for its flagship CSR project – “Digital Sakhi”- which focuses on women's empowerment and digital and financial inclusion. Under Right to Win, being in the ‘right businesses’ has helped the Company become one of the leading financiers in key Retail products. The Company is focused on transforming into a Risk-first, Technology-first, AI-native Retail financial services institution as part of the Lakshya 2031 plan. The Company has over 2.9 Crore customer database, which is being leveraged to cross-sell, up-sell, and identify new customers.

Xoriant's transformation into a human-centric AI company under its new brand identity, New Horizons, driven by Human Ingenuity (HI/AI)

"AI asks more of us humans, not less," said Rohit Kedia, CEO, Xoriant. "Across client engagements, we have seen how Human Ingenuity does the real work alongside Artificial Intelligence. AI brings speed, scale, and pattern recognition, while HI brings judgment, creativity, and accountability, creating an HI/AI flywheel that compounds and moves forward. The implications are as pronounced for customers as they are for our talent."

Since internalizing the HI/AI philosophy, Xoriant has consistently grown its AI revenues and customer base, with 25 new customers benefiting from AI innovation paired with Human Ingenuity. The transformation also comes with the company’s commitment to its 5000+ creator engineers and future talent: building a workforce that is not just 100% AI-fluent, but whole-brain thinkers who consciously apply Human Ingenuity.

To support its growth and HI/AI philosophy, the company continues to strengthen its partnership ecosystem, holding premier partner status with Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI and Salesforce.

Xoriant’s "New Horizons" brand identity includes a refreshed visual system built around the company’s signature green, reflecting its 'resist the usual' mindset and its ambition to stand apart from the sameness in technology services. The rebrand extends across Xoriant's digital presence and client-facing touchpoints globally.

About Xoriant
Xoriant is an applied AI partner for ambitious enterprises, backed by ChrysCapital. Founded in 1990 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, Xoriant's 5,000+ XFactors serve 75+ Fortune 500 and 150+ Global 2000 clients across BFSI, Healthcare, Hi-tech, Retail, and Manufacturing through six practice Houses. It combines Human Ingenuity (HI) with AI to turn platforms, data, and intelligence into meaningful outcomes for its customers.

Learn more at www.xoriant.com.

Amit Goyal, Managing Director, Project Management Institute - South Asia, in conversation with Chetan Bhagat, Bestselling Author, Columnist and Motivational Speaker

Attendees engaged in high-value discussions around how AI is reshaping the way project success and projects are viewed, with conversations highlighting the growing importance of combining technology with strategic thinking, human judgment, adaptability, leadership and strong execution capabilities. Across keynote sessions, panel discussions and interactive conversations, speakers also explored the need for greater collaboration and for organisations to continuously reassess how projects are planned, executed and measured.

Amit Goyal, Managing Director, South Asia, Project Management Institute, said, “PMSAC26 comes at an important moment for South Asia. As AI reshapes jobs, business models and technology delivery, India’s strong technology ecosystem and ability to adopt and scale new technologies position it well for the next phase of growth. Yet, as McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report highlights, only 39% of organisations report an enterprise-level EBIT impact from AI, underscoring the challenge of translating adoption into measurable business outcomes. Project success in the AI era will increasingly depend on how effectively organisations combine technology with human judgment, leadership and execution. PMSAC26 brought together industry experts and project leaders to explore these questions, share practical perspectives and examine what it will take to turn AI ambition into meaningful outcomes. I look forward to carrying forward the spirit of MORE, Together: Future-Ready in the Age of AI as we continue to learn, collaborate and shape the future of the project profession.”

The conference brought together senior leaders including Ajit Chauhan, Chairman, Amity University Online, Ravi Kumar Dikshit, Global Consult Delivery Lead, Kyndryl; Dr. Geetha Manjunath, Founder, CEO and CTO, NIRAMAI Health Analytix; John Dawber, Vice President & Managing Director, Global Business Services, Novo Nordisk; Usha Srikanth, Managing Partner – FutureNow Centre Leader (India), IBM Consulting; and Sumit Taneja, Senior Vice President & Global Head of AI Consulting & Implementation, EXL, among others. Discussions explored leading transformation at scale, organisational readiness for AI, technology’s role in creating human impact, leadership and the choices shaping the AI era. The conference also featured a keynote by Chetan Bhagat, Bestselling Author, Columnist and Motivational Speaker, who spoke on navigating change, leadership and the evolving demands of the professional world.

The conference also featured perspectives from leaders across Technology, Edtech, Consulting Enterprise Solutions and Thought Leadership, offering delegates practical insights into how organisations are responding to rapid technological change, increasing project complexity and evolving workforce expectations. PMSAC26, in its 18^th edition, brought together professionals across career stages to exchange experiences and learn from real-world project leadership. Discussions highlighted judgment, collaboration, adaptability and strategy-to-execution capabilities, reinforcing the commitment PMI has made to building future-ready professionals and advancing project management practice across South Asia.

About Project Management Institute (PMI)

PMI is the leading authority in project success. Since 1969, PMI has shone a light on the people and advanced practices behind successful projects. Supported by a global community of millions of project professionals and by thousands of corporations, government agencies and academic institutions, PMI provides the knowledge, resources and certifications to lead projects and transformations effectively and responsibly. Join PMI in elevating our world – one project at a time. Connect with us at www.pmi.org, linkedin.com/company/projectmanagementinstitute, on Instagram @pmi_org, and on TikTok @PMInstitute.

PMI Trademarks 
Project Management Institute, PMI, and the PMI logo are trademarks and/or registered marks of Project Management Institute, Inc., in the U.S., in India and/or in other countries. 

Third Party Trademarks 
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Winners of Millennium AI Creators Championship 2026 organised by Millennium Group of Schools

Held around the theme ‘Sustainable Cities. Intelligent Futures.’, the championship encouraged students to imagine how AI and human creativity can come together to address real-world challenges and contribute to cleaner, greener, kinder and more inclusive cities. The initiative was open to students from Grades 5 to 12 across India and was organised with Times Now, the leading English news channel from The Times Network, as the Official Broadcast Partner.

The championship featured three age-specific creative challenges:

• Grades 5–7: Storytelling Challenge
  • Winner: 
  1. Vishuddhi Jain
  2. Angad Mehta
  3. Aarav Mahajan
• Grades 8–9: Song Creation Challenge
  • Winner: 
  1. Ibrahim Siddiqui
  2. Hadiya Noor
  3. Rehan
• Grades 10–12: Short Film Challenge
  • Winner: 
  1. Karanjot Singh
  2. Krishna Chaudhary
  3. Abhiraj Sanjay Mokashi

The championship brought together students from across India, with entries evaluated on originality, creativity, storytelling, relevance to the theme, responsible use of AI and overall impact. 

Commenting on the conclusion of the championship, Neha Vaz, Head of Events & Strategic Alliances, The Millennium Group of Schools, said, “The response to the Millennium AI Creators Championship has demonstrated the curiosity and creative potential that young learners bring to conversations around Artificial Intelligence. What stood out was the way students used AI not simply to create, but to explore ideas, tell stories and engage with real-world challenges. Through this championship, we wanted to reinforce that responsible AI use begins with human imagination, critical thinking and intent. The winning entries reflect that spirit and serve as an encouraging reminder of what is possible when technology becomes a tool for young minds to express and build their ideas.”

As part of the championship, registered participants also received access to expert-led sessions covering prompt engineering, AI ethics and digital citizenship, helping students understand the responsible use of AI while strengthening critical thinking, creativity and innovation.

The Top 15 National Winners will receive an exclusive, fully sponsored AI Fellowship powered by TechnoKids in association with Knowledge Hub, providing advanced learning and coding opportunities to further develop their AI capabilities and future-ready skills. Winners will also receive robotics kits from E-BOT Plus, a solution designed around Computer Science, Coding, AI and Robotics, with a focus on practical and intuitive learning.

Speaking on the educational significance of the championship, Dr. Priyanka Jain, Head of Academics, The Millennium Group of Schools, said, “The Millennium AI Creators Championship has given students an opportunity to engage with Artificial Intelligence through creativity, inquiry and real-world problem-solving. The quality and diversity of the submissions demonstrate that when learners are given the right guidance, AI can become a powerful medium for expressing ideas and exploring solutions. Our focus has been to help students understand that responsible use of technology is as important as technical capability, and we hope this experience encourages them to continue questioning, creating and learning with purpose.”

The championship forms part of The Millennium Group of Schools’ broader focus on preparing students for a technology-led future while keeping creativity, critical thinking, ethical awareness and human imagination at the centre of learning. By bringing AI into a structured, creative and age-appropriate learning environment, the initiative sought to encourage students to build with AI rather than simply depend on it.

About The Millennium Group of Schools

The Millennium Group of Schools is a prominent chain of K-12 schools across India that follows the CBSE curriculum. Known for its holistic, child-centric approach, the institution follows the award-winning, research-backed Millennium Learning System™ (MLS™), developed through 10+ years of action research, to create personalised, experiential learning experiences that nurture curiosity, creativity, conceptual understanding and real-world application, while integrating global learning theories with the Indian education and value system.

Launched in India in February 2026, the Accelerator brought together four nonprofits - Teach For India, Antarang Foundation, Foundation For Excellence, and Latika - to develop and customize AI agents addressing specific needs within their missions. Over the six-month program, the organizations received one-on-one and group coaching from Salesforce experts, technical consulting from employee volunteers, and access to Salesforce technology. Through the program, each organization turned its deep domain expertise into an agentic AI solution, built around the people it serves and the processes that support them.
 

India Cohort Pioneering Agentic AI Solutions
The four nonprofits are leveraging agentic AI to simplify time-intensive work, expand access to critical support, and help frontline teams serve more people effectively. The solutions span teacher support, career guidance, scholarship processing, and disability entitlements, with human expertise remaining central to each use case.

• Teach For India developed an AI-enabled Teaching Assistant and Coach that gives teachers on-demand access to contextual guidance, mentorship and personalized resources. It plans to pilot the solution with 100 Teach For India Fellows and 100 teachers using Firki, Teach For India’s dedicated online teacher education platform. The pilot aims to reduce the time teachers spend finding support by 70% and achieve 90% teacher-rated accuracy and relevance, with plans to subsequently expand the solution to 2,500 teachers using Firki.

• Antarang Foundation has developed a conversational AI copilot to support career facilitators in delivering more personalized and effective guidance to young people. Grounded in live student data from Salesforce and Antarang’s certified resources, the copilot provides classroom-specific insights, relevant career pathways, facilitation tips, and suggested follow-up actions. By reducing preparation time and helping facilitators better understand and respond to individual student needs, the solution aims to make high-quality career guidance more consistent and scalable. Antarang aims to train 200+ facilitators and reach 150,000 students through this initiative by 2027.

• Foundation For Excellence built an intelligent scholarship Agent that reads, extracts and validates application documents of student records in Salesforce. By enabling teams to review exceptions instead of every document, FFE estimates it could reduce screening time by 60%, return approximately 1,400 working days each cycle and double processing capacity.

• Latika developed Asli Intelligence, an internal AI Legal Guide that creates personalized, district-specific plans for families of children and young adults with disabilities. Asli, meaning “real” in Hindi, draws on more than 30 years of Latika’s experience supporting people with disabilities and their families. Based on factors such as age, disability, income and location, it identifies relevant entitlements, required documentation and next steps, helping social workers guide families while enabling lawyers at Latika to focus on complex cases and advocacy.

Comments on the news:
Arundhati Bhattacharya, President & CEO, Salesforce, South Asia, said, “Six months ago, these organizations brought us ideas grounded in the realities of their missions. Today, they have translated deep domain expertise into practical agents built around trusted data and clear human roles. This cohort shows that AI’s most meaningful role in the social sector is not replacing people, but extending their knowledge, reclaiming their time and helping them serve more communities with relevance and care.”
 

Sunya Norman, SVP of Impact, Salesforce, said, “AI has incredible potential to help nonprofits extend their impact, and this cohort is showing what’s possible. By bringing together AI, funding, and the expertise of Salesforce employees, these organizations are building solutions that can save their teams time and help them reach more teachers, students, job seekers, and families. I’m excited to see how they continue this work and further support the communities they serve.”
 

Elizabeth Samuel, Director of Firki, Teach For India, said, “We are excited to use the whatsapp bot with our teachers. We are hopeful that this will support the educators in their planning and other skills and through this, equip them to provide an excellent education to their students. Through this, we intend to make learning more accessible to educators.”
 

Priyanka Sanghai , Jt. Executive Director  Antarang Foundation, said, “For us at Antarang, AI is not about replacing the career facilitator, but giving them a copilot - one that provides the insights and support they need to understand each student better and help young people expand their aspirations, explore career choices they may never have considered, and find a clear pathway towards the career they choose. Through this project with Salesforce, we have been able to bring this idea to life and explore its potential to strengthen career guidance at scale.”

Jo, Chopra, Executive Director, Latika, said, “Asli Intelligence is so cool we never even thought to dream of it. Now that it exists, our dream is that it will become available to every disabled person in India. Finally, all that they are entitled to: within reach and ripe for the picking!”
 

This marks the next phase of the Accelerator, as the organizations pilot, refine and scale their solutions. Together, the four use cases offer a practical blueprint for human-centered agentic AI—technology that handles complexity while keeping people, trust and accountability at the center of impact.
 

*Salesforce, the #1 CRM, powered by AI technology and capabilities.
 

About Salesforce
Salesforce helps organizations of any size become agentic enterprises -integrating humans, agents, apps, and data on a trusted, unified platform to unlock unprecedented growth and innovation.
 

Visit www.salesforce.com/in/ for more information.

Chartis Disruptor Award presented to Wibmo for Workflow, Agentic AI and Low-Code/No-Code innovation under the Chartis RiskTech100® 2027

The award is part of the new Disruptor categories introduced for the Chartis RiskTech100® 2027. The category recognizes disruptive firms that are transforming business processes across the risk technology landscape. Wibmo was recognized for bringing together intelligent workflows, agentic risk intelligence, and configurable low-code/no-code capabilities to help transform fraud and risk operations.

The recognition reflects Wibmo’s work across its fraud and risk management ecosystem, including Wibmo Agentic Risk Intelligence Assistant (ARIA). ARIA is designed to support fraud, AML, risk analysis and dispute operations through specialized AI agents that gather relevant signals, summarize investigations, identify patterns, draft evidence-backed findings and recommend next actions.

The platform is built around a human-led operating model. Agents support investigation and drafting, while final decisions remain with authorized human teams. Its governance approach includes maker-checker controls, evidence-linked recommendations, audit-ready decision trails and simulation-gated actions for appropriate use cases.

Wibmo’s approach brings together the stages of risk operations in a connected workflow - from gathering transaction, customer and merchant signals to drafting a verdict, recommending action and supporting remediation. This helps risk teams move from fragmented, analyst-intensive processes towards more structured, explainable and scalable case operations.

The recognition also reflects Wibmo’s flexible workflow capabilities. Its fraud and risk management platform supports configurable DIY rules, case and queue management flows, BPMN-based tailored workflows, role-based controls and low-code/no-code configuration. These capabilities enable client partners to adapt business processes, risk strategies and investigation workflows as their requirements evolve, without relying on extensive technical intervention for every change.

Philip Mackenzie, Research Principal at Chartis, said, "Wibmo continues to expand its position in the payments risk landscape, building on its established strengths in authentication and payment security. Investments in risk-based authentication and agentic AI have reflected its focus on transaction-level intelligence and, together with its increasingly deep portfolio of anti-fraud capabilities, led to its Disruptor Award in the Workflow, Agentic AI and Low-Code/No-Code category and its award for Regional Leadership and Excellence in South Asia."

Commenting on the recognition, Shailesh Paul, CEO, Wibmo, said, “We are delighted to be chosen as the Chartis Disruptor Award winner for Workflow, Agentic AI and Low-Code/No-Code innovation. This recognizes Wibmo’s work in agentic fraud and risk intelligence and our broader FRM capabilities. Risk operations are evolving from static, manual processes to intelligent, configurable, and governed workflows. Through Wibmo’s Agentic Risk Intelligence Assistant (ARIA) solution, we are helping our clients bring together agentic intelligence, explainable recommendations, configurable controls, and human decision-making. This recognition reflects our commitment to helping financial institutions strengthen fraud operations while retaining accountability, transparency and control.”

The award reinforces Wibmo’s focus on helping banks, fintechs, issuers, acquirers and payment aggregators strengthen fraud and risk operations across payment environments. By combining intelligent investigation, configurable workflows and governed automation, Wibmo is supporting the transformation of risk operations across the payments ecosystem.
 

About Wibmo
Wibmo, a PayU company, operates across entities in India, the US, and Indonesia. As a global full-stack PayTech company and industry leader in payment security and digital payments in emerging markets, Wibmo stands out for its innovation and impact.

In addition to being India's largest authentication service provider in one of the leading digital payment markets globally, Wibmo offers comprehensive fraud and risk management solutions, digital financial services, prepaid solutions, and a broad range of merchant-acquiring services.

For more information, visit: wibmo.com

About Chartis Research
Chartis Research is an independent research and advisory firm that provides market intelligence, analysis and benchmarking on risk, compliance, governance and financial technology. Its reports and vendor assessments deliver actionable insights to help institutions evaluate solutions, manage risk, and make strategic technology and vendor selection choices.

For Media queries please write to: press@payu.in

DB Investing launches AI-led transformation with dbinvesting.ai

“We do not believe that adding a chatbot to a website makes a financial company an AI company,” said Gennaro Lanza, Chief Executive Officer at DB Investing. “We have spent a long time developing an infrastructure where AI becomes part of the core of the company, its products and eventually the entire customer experience.”

AI connects to the trader’s account

The technology extends beyond DB Investing through a lightweight connector for compatible MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 accounts, including accounts held with third-party brokers. Traders therefore do not need to change brokers to use the technology.

Eligible users receive monthly AI credits. Advanced users can also connect supported AI services using their own API credentials.

The system is designed to analyse individual trading behaviour, including trading history, instruments, holding periods, frequency, position sizing and performance. It also considers risk behaviour, drawdowns, concentration, discipline and changes in behaviour over time.

Wealth Copilot is planned within weeks

DB Investing plans to release Wealth Copilot within weeks. The 24/7 AI agent will combine trading activity with market intelligence and portfolio context to identify account changes, unusual risk exposure, concentration, risk-management observations and behavioural or performance patterns.

It will also surface events and news relevant to open positions. The aim is to organise information around each investor rather than requiring them to search across terminals, calendars, media outlets and statements.

AI Traders University focuses on trading behaviour

DB Investing’s AI Traders University is built around an AI mentor that analyses how each trader behaves in the market. It is designed to identify patterns such as late entries, increased position sizes after losses, early exits from winning trades and prolonged losing positions.

The system also examines overtrading, activity during volatile periods, disregard for personal risk rules and repeated mistakes, including concentration in correlated markets.

A broader AI ecosystem is planned

dbinvesting.ai is intended as the foundation for a wider ecosystem. DB Investing’s roadmap includes Wealth Copilot, AI Traders University, AI financial assistants, portfolio analytics, account connectivity, personalised education as well as trading behaviour, risk and market intelligence.

The company envisions these services ultimately operating on the same AI Core Engine across customer-facing products and internal operations.

“This is not a feature we are adding to DB Investing,” Lanza said. “It is the beginning of changing what DB Investing is. Our objective is an AI infrastructure capable of sitting beside every trader and investor, understanding their behaviour and giving them intelligence that historically required several platforms.”

About DB Investing

DB Investing is an international financial services and trading brand providing access to global markets. Through dbinvesting.ai, it is developing fintech, AI and trading technology that connects trading, investing, market intelligence and education.

Experian

The report highlights that financial services are entering a new phase of transformation driven by the convergence of digital ecosystems, expanding data availability, advanced analytics and rapid progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is evolving from primarily predictive and assistive applications towards systems that can increasingly interpret intent, comprehend context and act within defined boundaries. It has the potential to transform how consumers discover, compare and access financial products, while creating new opportunities for lenders to deliver more connected, personalised and seamless customer journeys.
 

The report considers how an increasingly agent-enabled financial ecosystem could allow AI to support consumers in understanding financial concepts, comparing options and moving from intent towards informed action within clearly defined permissions and controls. As financial institutions navigate this shift, the opportunity is not simply to deploy more agents, but to provide Trusted AI that combines intelligence with reliable information, appropriate financial context and strong governance.
 

The report emphasises several shifts that could shape the next phase of financial services:
 

• The emergence of the Agentic Consumer, with AI potentially playing a greater role in supporting how consumers discover, compare and access financial products.

• Trust could become an increasingly important differentiator, as consumers seek intelligence supported by reliable information and appropriate financial context.

• Product discovery and comparison could become more intelligent, creating opportunities for institutions that are discoverable, responsive and trusted.

• Agent capability and trust infrastructure need to evolve together, with transparency, governance and accountability becoming increasingly important.

• Connected and governed platforms could help reduce friction across financial journeys by stitching data, analytics, and decisioning with context.

• Agent-ready institutions could be better positioned to support more connected customer experiences, while maintaining evidence and accountability across decision-making processes.

Commenting on the findings, Manish Jain, Country Managing Director of Experian in India, said, "Artificial Intelligence has the potential to reshape the next phase of financial services, not simply by making existing processes faster, but by changing how consumers and institutions interact, make decisions and take action within clearly defined boundaries. India’s retail credit market is already operating at significant scale, with lenders sourcing 51.69 crore loans worth Rs.97.7 lakh crore in FY26. As AI becomes more embedded across this ecosystem, trust, governance and clear accountability will be critical to scaling its use responsibly. The next phase of adoption will be defined not by how autonomous technology can become, but by how confidently consumers and financial institutions can trust it."
 

"The opportunity ahead is to build a financial ecosystem where technology helps people and organisations make better decisions while trust remains the foundation on which those decisions are made. This means combining innovation with reliable data, transparency, appropriate human oversight and clear accountability. Those that can combine innovation with transparency, accountability and responsible governance will be best positioned to create long-term value and stronger customer relationships.”
 

As organisations prepare for an increasingly agent-enabled future, Experian believes that trusted intelligence, contextual decisioning and responsible innovation will play a critical role in helping lenders create more seamless customer journeys, make better decisions and drive sustainable growth. Through its data, analytics, decisioning and platform capabilities, Experian continues to help financial institutions navigate this transformation with confidence while maintaining trust, transparency and governance at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

REAN Care Foundation (India) invests in Epilepto Systems to support DhyanApp’s development

DhyanApp is built around traditional Indian contemplative systems, presenting dhyana, pranayama, mantra and yoga as connected disciplines with their own structure, lineage and progression. The platform brings practice resources and a community of seekers together in one place, with the aim of making thoughtful, structured access more available to people across locations and languages.

Artificial intelligence is integral to the platform’s approach. DhyanApp uses AI to personalise yoga, Ayurveda and spiritual guidance according to a practitioner’s level, constitution and stage of practice. It also applies optical character recognition and AI audio processing to digitise traditional Indian scriptures at scale and make this material available in 15 languages. The intent is to widen access to source material while retaining the context and progression central to the traditions it represents.

For REAN Care Foundation (India), the investment aligns with its charitable objects. Structured access to contemplative practice can be uneven, often concentrated in particular institutions, cities and languages. By supporting a platform available on a phone and in a practitioner’s own language, the Foundation seeks to extend the same principle it applies across its work: putting useful tools directly in people’s hands.

Focus areas for the collaboration

• Personalised yoga, Ayurveda and spiritual guidance through the platform’s AI capabilities

• Continued digitisation of traditional Indian scriptures using OCR and AI audio processing

• Translation and availability of the growing corpus across 15 languages

• Expansion of the practice library and pathways for community programmes and practitioner groups

The Foundation’s Board recorded that the investment is expected to promote and facilitate the activities of the investee company and thereby advance the Foundation’s charitable and not-for-profit objectives. As a Section 8 company, no returns from the investment will be distributed as profit; any proceeds will be redeployed towards the Foundation’s charitable objects.

Leadership comments, “Wellbeing is something a person builds daily over years. Access to good instruction for the inner life remains thin outside a few cities and institutions. DhyanApp puts that instruction on a phone, in the practitioner’s own language. That reflects the principle we apply to everything we support: useful tools in people’s hands, wherever they live.”

Praveen Vasireddy, Director, REAN Care Foundation (India), “These practices were never meant to be received in the same form by everyone. A teacher watches the student and offers what that student is ready for. Our work is to make that individual attention more accessible while remaining faithful to the source material. Bringing scriptures into more languages is intended to return them to a wider community of readers.”

Rutuparna Sahani, Chief Marketing Officer, DhyanApp

About REAN Care Foundation India
REAN Care Foundation (India) is a Section 8 not-for-profit company registered in Hyderabad, Telangana. It works to improve quality of life by supporting accessible, technology-led platforms that enable people to take charge of their own health and wellbeing. Learn more at reanfoundation.org.

About Epilepto Systems Private Limited
Epilepto Systems Private Limited is a Bengaluru-based technology company building AI-led products. It develops DhyanApp, a platform for meditation, yoga, pranayama, mantra and spiritual knowledge grounded in traditional Indian systems. To experience the app, visit dhyanap.onelink.me/quzA/9x8xtq49.

Arrow Electronics to Showcase Intelligent and Sustainable Technology Solutions at Electronica India 2026

According to the India Brand Equity Foundation, India’s electronics manufacturing industry is projected to reach USD 500 billion by 2030, fueling demand for advanced technologies that help accelerate innovation across industrial automation, energy, mobility and AI applications.

At the event, Arrow will showcase solutions across several key technology areas:

Autonomous Mobile Robotics
Intelligent automation and autonomous systems designed for smart manufacturing, logistics and industrial applications.

Battery Energy Storage & Battery Management Systems
Advanced technologies for energy storage, safety and power management.

EV Charging & Motor Control
Power and control solutions supporting the future of electric mobility.

Smart Metering & Solar
Connected technologies for smarter energy monitoring, renewable energy integration and more efficient energy use.
 

Edge AI & Connectivity
Intelligent, connected solutions enabling real-time insights and decision-making for industrial and IoT applications.

AI Server Power
High-efficiency power solutions designed to support the growing demands of AI infrastructure and data-intensive computing environments.

Arrow will be joined by sponsoring suppliers Altera, Skyworks, TE Connectivity, and YAGEO, demonstrating how collaboration across the technology ecosystem helps customers accelerate the development of next-generation solutions in industrial automation, electrification, sustainable energy and AI-enabled applications.

“India’s growing role in the global technology value chain is creating significant opportunities across industrial, energy, mobility and AI applications,” said Dr. Raphael Salmi, President of Arrow Electronics’ semiconductor business for South Asia, Korea, and Japan. “By combining leading technologies, engineering expertise and global supply chain capabilities, Arrow helps customers reduce complexity, accelerate innovation and bring solutions to market faster. We look forward to engaging with customers and partners at electronica India and demonstrating how Arrow can help turn innovation into impact.”
 

About Arrow Electronics

Arrow Electronics (NYSE:ARW) sources and engineers technology solutions for thousands of leading manufacturers and service providers. With 2025 sales of USD 31 billion, Arrow’s portfolio enables technology across major industries and markets.

Learn more at arrow.com.

This expansion follows Air India’s initial Agentforce deployment for refund processing—one of the more complex service processes in airline operations, involving multiple validations, policy checks, backend-system interactions, and cross-team dependencies. By orchestrating validations, approvals, and backend refund processing activities, Agentforce has helped reduce Air India's internal refund processing time from approximately 14 days to about 4 hours. Bank processing time remains unchanged.
 

The latest deployments focus on three high-impact service processes, bringing greater speed, consistency and intelligence to complex customer requests that span multiple systems and workflows: Automated Email Resolution, Name Change Automation and a Knowledge Agent for service teams.

Automated Email Resolution: Customer emails can contain multiple requests — spanning refunds, baggage, loyalty, and other service needs — requiring agents to triage, investigate, and validate information across systems before responding. Agentforce identifies multiple intents within a single email, invokes specialized sub-agents, gathers and validates information, executes required actions, and consolidates the outcome into one coherent response generated in Air India approved template. For eligible cases, responses are generated only when the system exceeds a 95% confidence threshold, with human oversight where required. This helps reduce response times, customer back-and-forth and repetitive work for service teams. Over time, the platform leverages ambient learning capabilities to generate insights from customer interactions and agent interventions, to continuously improve prompts, workflows, and model performance.

Name Change Automation: Name corrections require multiple eligibility checks, validations, and ticketing actions, making them particularly challenging when travel is imminent. Agentforce orchestrates the process end-to-end — validating multiple eligibility rule combinations, completing various workflow callouts, initiating ticket reissuance, and delivering the updated ticket to the customer. With Agentforce, Air India has reduced turnaround time for the process from approximately three days to 30 minutes.

Knowledge Agent: The AI-powered representative acts as a real-time assistant for customer service teams, providing instant access to policies, procedures, fare rules, and operational guidance through a conversational interface. By eliminating the need to navigate multiple knowledge repositories, the solution significantly reduces information retrieval time and agent hold times during live customer interactions. The deployment has improved response consistency, accelerated agent onboarding, enhanced first-contact resolution rates, and enabled service teams to deliver faster, more accurate, and more confident customer support at scale.
 

Air India has built a cloud-first digital ecosystem spanning more than 140 enterprise systems and has more than 30 agentic AI initiatives underway. It evaluates those initiatives across four strategic pillars: increasing revenue, reducing cost, enhancing customer experience, and doing things that were never possible before. Within that framework, its work with Salesforce has progressed from building a unified customer data and engagement foundation, to redesigning service processes and agent workflows, and now to executing increasingly complex workflows autonomously. As Air India continues to scale, this foundation will support more intelligent, responsive, and personalized customer service across its operations.
 

Comments on the news:
 

Dr. Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Air India, said, “Our journey with Agentforce is not simply about deploying AI; it is about redefining what is possible in airline customer service. We are moving from AI that assists our teams to AI that can understand, decide and execute within clearly defined guardrails. The impact is visible in faster resolutions, greater consistency and lower customer effort. As we scale these capabilities, our focus remains on using AI to address real customer needs while maintaining the accuracy, governance and human oversight expected from an empathetic global airline.”
 

Arundhati Bhattacharya, President and CEO, Salesforce – South Asia, said, “The next chapter of customer experience will be defined not simply by how quickly organizations respond, but by how intelligently they can act on behalf of customers. Air India is bringing that future to life at the scale and complexity of global aviation — combining trusted data, AI agents and human judgment to make service more proactive, responsive and effortless. We are proud to partner with Air India as it reimagines customer service for the agentic era and advances its ambition to become an Agentic Airline of the future.”
 

About Salesforce
Salesforce helps organizations of any size become agentic enterprises - integrating humans, agents, apps, and data on a trusted, unified platform to unlock unprecedented growth and innovation. Visit www.salesforce.com/in/ for more information.

Aditya Birla Capital unveils ‘Agentic AI for Bharat’s BFSI: A Practitioner’s View’

Click here to download the whitepaper

The whitepaper presents a fundamental shift in financial inclusion, from providing access to the depth of offering. With access to financial services having expanded significantly, the next frontier lies in helping customers understand, adopt and appropriately use products that are relevant to their financial needs.

The whitepaper also explores how Agentic AI can make personalised guidance, engagement, onboarding and servicing more economically viable at scale, enabling financial institutions to reach wider customer segments and serve them better.

Mr. Pankaj Gadgil, MD & CEO, Aditya Birla Housing Finance Limited and Head, Digital Platforms and Payments Strategy, Aditya Birla Capital, said, “Our vision is to build a future-ready, scalable enterprise where intelligence, foresight, and customer-first approach drive decision making. Through our AI-first strategy, we are simplifying customer journeys, accelerating product innovation, automating underwriting, enhancing service delivery, and delivering greater operational efficiency. Responsible AI is a core enterprise capability for us to drive sustainable scale, trust, and resilience. As we evolve from individual AI use cases to enterprise-wide connected intelligence, robust governance, human accountability, and customer trust will remain fundamental to how we innovate, grow, and create long-term value for all stakeholders.”

Drawing from Aditya Birla Capital’s experience, the whitepaper presents eight areas of Agentic AI deployment across the enterprise, from orchestration of customer journeys, tele-sales and cross-sell, top-of-funnel engagement, customer service and retention, sales coaching, marketing and personalisation, software development, and audit, finance, investment and compliance. Several of these initiatives are already operating in production and demonstrate how AI can be embedded into end-to-end workflows rather than deployed as standalone point solutions.

Agentic AI in Action: Areas of Deployment at Aditya Birla Capital

A central proposition of the whitepaper is that the value of Agentic AI should be measured not just through efficiency gains, but through its ability to deepen financial participation and augment human capacity to potentially serve more customers. It examines what it takes to move from AI experimentation to responsible enterprise-scale deployment. It highlights the importance of trusted data, connected systems, workflow redesign, workforce readiness and clearly defined human decision rights. It also highlights responsible AI practices including traceability, monitoring, accountability, security and data protection by design.

At the Global Fintech Fest 2026, Aditya Birla Capital won the ‘Best Digital Transformation Program’ award under Excellence in Banking Technology for its use of Generative AI, intelligent automation and real-time data insights to streamline processes, enhance customer experience, and make finance simpler, smarter and more connected.

Through ‘Agentic AI for Bharat’s BFSI: A Practitioner’s View,’ Aditya Birla Capital brings together its experience and learnings from scaling AI across the enterprise, offering a practitioner’s perspective on how financial institutions can build the capabilities required to move from individual AI use cases to responsible, scalable deployment, with customer outcomes and human judgement at the core.

Aditya Birla Capital Limited and its subsidiaries/JVs provide a comprehensive suite of financial solutions across Loans, Investments, Insurance, and Payments to serve the diverse needs of customers across their lifecycles. Powered by over 66,500 employees, the businesses of ABCL have a nationwide reach with over 1,759 branches and more than 200,000 agents/channel partners along with several bank partners. ABCL and its subsidiaries/JVs manage aggregate assets under management of about Rs. 7.53 Lakh Crore, and the consolidated lending book crossed Rs. 2.19 Lakh Crore as of June 30, 2026 www.adityabirlacapital.com.

flowpilot turns plain English into live workflows in one day - AI builds at speed, while your people control every critical approval

flowpilot is an AI-powered Operations OS built on a straightforward observation: enterprise workflow software has often remained out of reach for Indian SMEs because of long implementation cycles, dependence on consultants and the need to replace systems that already work.

flowpilot takes a different approach. An operations manager describes a process in plain English-such as a purchase request, stock transfer or vendor onboarding-and flowpilot generates the forms, business rules, owners, approval chains and escalations. Initial workflows can go live within one day, without coding or replacing the accounting, CRM and spreadsheet systems the business already uses.

AI creates the workflow, but it does not take control of the business. Managers decide which actions require approval, who can approve them and when an issue must be escalated. Purchases, expenses, vendor onboarding and master-data changes pause for an authorised person before moving forward, with every decision recorded in an audit trail.

After seven months in the market, flowpilot supports 40 live workflows across Indian trading, distribution and services businesses.

“Owners don’t resist software. They resist the cure being worse than the disease,” said Yugal Kishore, CEO and Co-founder of flowpilot. “Long rollouts, consultants stationed in the office and being asked to abandon systems that teams have used for years create more disruption than value. We built the opposite: describe how your business already works, and the workflow can be running by evening. AI provides the speed, but your people retain control over every decision that matters.”

Approvals reach decision-makers through WhatsApp, Slack or email, so work does not wait for someone to log into another application. Owners receive a live view of what is pending, who is responsible and where work is delayed.

PV Enterprise, a trading and distribution business operating across four warehouses and three offices, moved stock movements, orders, approvals and payment follow-ups onto flowpilot from a combination of Tally, Zoho CRM, Excel and WhatsApp. The company now uses one live operational view while continuing to use Tally for tax compliance.

flowpilot supports workflows across operations, finance and procurement, including order tracking, inventory movement, purchase requests, vendor approvals, payment follow-ups and internal sign-offs.

For details or a live workflow demonstration, visit flowpilot.svelto.ai

About flowpilot by Svelto
flowpilot by Svelto is an AI-powered Operations OS for Indian SMEs and mid-market businesses, enabling same-day deployment of governed business workflows without code or system replacement.

This AI integration is a ready-to-use plugin, rather than a developer tool. So far, connecting a demat and trading account to an AI assistant typically meant opening advanced or developer settings and manually adding server configuration details. Bajaj Broking's plugin sits directly inside ChatGPT's built-in plugin directory, where any user can find it, connect their demat and trading account securely using two-factor authentication, and start asking questions in under a minute.
 

The solution is expected to benefit a wide range of users, including active retail investors and traders seeking quicker access to portfolio information, technology-savvy investors exploring AI-powered tools, young professionals looking for smarter ways to track investments, and developers or algo traders looking to use market data.
 

"Investors today expect information on their own terms, instantly, in plain language, wherever they already are," said Anurag Misra, Chief Technology Officer, Bajaj Broking.

“Technology is most powerful when it removes friction rather than adding another layer of complexity. This launch is about making an emerging technology relevant to the everyday investor and creating a more intuitive way to access information that already belongs to them,” he added.

The Bajaj Broking plugin is now available for customers and can be connected directly through ChatGPT.

Haus of Intelligence, an AI education technology company powered by LanceMart AI, today announced that it has crossed 1,000 enrolments in the first cohort of its Agentic AI Mastery Program. This milestone further establishes it as Bharat's Biggest Agentic AI Program. It also reflects the growing recognition among learners across the country that Agentic AI is no longer optional knowledge, but a foundational skill for the future of work.
 

Over 1,000 learners enrolled for the 28-week Agentic AI Mastery Cohort Program

The Agentic AI Mastery Cohort Program is a structured 28-week regime built around three progressive cohorts, AI Builder, AI Architect and AI Operator, all included in a single enrollment priced at less than Ten thousand Rupees, paid once and accessible for life. Unlike most AI education available today, which focuses on single-tool automations such as chatbots or voice agents, HOI's program is built around orchestrated, multi-agent AI systems, the kind of infrastructure that businesses actually need to run real operations.

Speaking on the achievement, Mr. Aryaman Upmanyu, Founder & CEO, Haus Of Intelligence, commented, "This program did not start as a business plan. It started because I kept meeting people who were terrified of being left behind by AI and had nowhere honest to go for help. Working across D2C and real estate through LanceMart, I saw firsthand how a handful of well-built AI agents could quietly replace entire teams of manual work, and I also saw how little of that knowledge was reaching ordinary people outside of tech circles. That gap is what led to Haus of Intelligence. The vision was never to teach one automation trick or one chatbot build. It was to give someone with zero technical background the same command over AI systems that a trained AI architect would have, and to do it in a way that respects their time, their age and their profession. Crossing 1,000 learners across 13 to 70 year olds, students, working professionals, business owners, tells me that vision was not just personal to me. It is a need that Bharat has been carrying quietly, waiting for someone to build the right door into it. We built that door, and this is just the beginning of walking people through it."

Behind this milestone is an engineering core that turns the program's vision into daily practice. Ojas Kulshrestha, Head of Engineering at LanceMart AI, and Satyam, Director of Engineering at LanceMart AI, lead the design of the very multi-agent systems that learners study inside the program, ensuring the curriculum is built on architecture that is already running in live businesses, not theory borrowed from elsewhere. Their work translates directly into how confidently HOI's learners implement agentic AI in their own work and daily lives.

The program continues to operate on a bundled structure, where a learner enrolling in Cohort 1.0 automatically receives Cohort 2.0 and Cohort 3.0 at no additional cost, all under the single price tag. This is paired with weekly live sessions held every Saturday, where new automations are built live with the community, along with dedicated Q&A access to the HOI team.

About Haus of Intelligence

Haus of Intelligence (HOI) is an AI consultancy, automation and training company building agentic AI infrastructure for individuals and businesses across Bharat. Its flagship offering, the Agentic AI Mastery Cohort Program, is a 28-week structured regime spanning three progressive cohorts, AI Builder, AI Architect and AI Operator. The program includes 56 modules, 120+ lessons and 10+ hours of recorded content, delivered through the HOI Dashboard alongside an active community on WhatsApp and Discord. HOI's learner base spans age 13 to 70+ across cities and states throughout the country, reflecting its mission to make agentic AI accessible to people of all ages and all professions.

About LanceMart AI

LanceMart AI is the parent AI Infrastructure company behind Haus of Intelligence, building the intelligence layer that runs entire businesses through orchestrated, multi-agent AI systems rather than single-tool automations. The company operates across two core service lines: the D2C Agent as a Service Operating System (AaaS OS), a roster of 110 specialized AI agents that run acquisition, sales, retention, and operations for direct-to-consumer brands, and the Real Estate Multi-Agent AI Infrastructure, an 11-system suite that automates lead management, client communication, and commission tracking for real estate teams and brokerages.

LanceMart AI serves lean and scaling D2C founders in India and global markets, alongside independent real estate team leads and boutique organisations in the US and UAE, giving each customer a dedicated bench of AI specialists rather than a generalist tool. Haus of Intelligence operates as LanceMart AI's education and training arm, extending this same agentic AI infrastructure expertise into a structured learning program for individuals and businesses across Bharat.

Leaders and partners from across the social impact ecosystem at the launch of the DT4SI Toolbook by ILSS's Koita Centre for AI & Digital Transformation (KCADT)
 

Launched under ILSS’s Koita Centre for AI & Digital Transformation (KCADT), DT4SI toolbook seeks to make the discovering the AI & digital journey easier by contextualising and categorising digital tools for the social sector. The tool book brings together information that can help organisations understand what a tool does, what problem it can address, where it may be useful, its key features, pricing and relevant use cases.
 

DT4SI also brings together case studies from social purpose organisations that have successfully adopted AI & digital technologies. These examples are intended to make AI & digital transformation more tangible by showing how organisations are using technology in real settings, what they are trying to solve and what they have learned along the way.
 

The toolbook also aggregates learning resources and courses to help organisations build the internal capabilities required to use digital technologies effectively. Together, these resources create a pathway from awareness to understanding, from understanding to choose, and from choice to action.
 

Lastly, DT4SI is intended to evolve beyond a repository of tools and information. Its long-term ambition is to create a collaborative space where social purpose organisations, technology providers, practitioners and experts can learn from one another and contribute to the sector's digital transformation journey.
 

Anu Prasad, CEO, India Leaders for Social Sector said, “India has emerged as a global technology powerhouse, with deep capabilities in software, digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence and technology services. AI and digital technologies are increasingly embedded in how corporate India operates. The opportunity now is to bring India's growing AI and Digital capabilities accessible to Social Purpose Organisations working to solve population-scale challenges and advance India's development. For many social purpose organisations (SPOs), the challenge is knowing where to begin, what technology is relevant to their needs, which tools are appropriate, and who can help implement them. For close to a decade, ILSS has believed the social sector's greatest constraint isn't a shortage of purpose or passion, it's a shortage of capacity. That gap isn't just a technology gap, it's an equity gap, and equity is exactly what ILSS exists to protect. The bigger question is often how to make these choices with confidence, using evidence, real-world use cases and learning from other organisations in the sector. It is this gap that ILSS's Koita Centre for AI & Digital Transformation (KCADT) is seeking to address with the launch of 'Digital Toolbook for Social Impact' (DT4SI), a single, freely accessible space bringing together trusted service providers, real case studies, mentors and practical resources, with no gatekeeping, so that any non-profit leader, anywhere, can begin decoding their own digital-enabled strategy.”
 

Rekha Koita, Co-Founder, Koita Foundation said, "Digital and AI capabilities are non-negotiable in the social sector today. As any organisation looks to scale, technology is the only thing that will enable it to maintain and improve programme quality and consistency. Over the last 10 years, working closely with nearly 35 organisations and engaging with many more, I have seen tremendous growth in the availability of new technology and now AI, along with a real increase in the number of NGOs embarking on this journey. But what I have also learnt, from working with organisations on the ground, is that access to tools or funding alone is not enough. The real gap is between the availability of technology and the ability to use it effectively. We need to stop viewing technology as a tech project, an overhead, or an MEL exercise, and instead treat it as a core part of organisational capacity building. That means asking three simple questions together as a sector, what NGOs need to do differently, what donors and funders need to do differently to enable this ecosystem, and what platforms like KCADT's DT4SI can do to make that capacity building faster, easier and more accessible."

The toolbook was launched at an ILSS-hosted leadership event in Mumbai, featuring a panel, ‘Accelerating Social Impact with AI & Digital’, that brought together senior leaders from the philanthropic, corporate, and technology ecosystems, including Rizwan Koita (Chairperson, NABH; Co-founder Koita Foundation; Co-Founder Citius Tech), Rekha Koita (Co-Founder, Koita Foundation), Ms Amrtha K. Rangan (COO, A.T.E. Chandra Foundation), Gayatri Nair Lobo (CEO, Educate Girls), Maharshi Vaishnav (CEO, Motilal Oswal Foundation), and Abhejit Agarwal (Head, Sustainability & CSR, Axis Bank).
 

The event featured a live presentation and demonstration of the DT4SI toolbook, followed by a panel discussion that explored the opportunities and barriers to AI and digital adoption within the social sector. The discussion highlighted that while SPOs are increasingly primed for AI- and digital-led transformation, many continue to face challenges in accessing affordable, contextually relevant tools and replicable models. Panellists also shared examples and case studies from the field, demonstrating how organisations are already overcoming these barriers and using India-specific solutions to drive meaningful impact on the ground.
 

The need for such a toolbook emerged from ILSS's work with social purpose organisations and from its research on the state of digital transformation in India's social sector. The research found that organisations across different geographies and areas of work face common challenges: uncertainty about available technologies, difficulty identifying and articulating their technology needs, questions around affordability and budgeting, and uncertainty about how to navigate an increasingly crowded technology landscape. DT4SI toolkit will continue to expand its collection of tools, solution providers, case studies, learning resources and insights as more organisations across the sector experiment, learn and share their experiences.
 

About India Leaders for Social Sector
Established in 2018, India Leaders for Social Sector (ILSS) is India's pioneering leadership and institution-building organisation dedicated to strengthening the leadership infrastructure of the social sector. ILSS believes that India's greatest development challenge is not a shortage of purpose, but a shortage of leadership capacity. Through its four Centres of Excellence—Talent and Leadership Development, Fundraising, Board and Governance, and AI & Digital Transformation—ILSS develops leaders, strengthens institutions, and advances knowledge to help social purpose organisations build resilience, strengthen governance, mobilise resources, embrace innovation, and create sustainable social impact at scale. Through executive education, flagship convenings, original research, and practitioner-led thought leadership, ILSS is advancing leadership and institution building across the sector. ILSS has trained over 1,300+ leaders, partnered with 800+ social purpose organisations, facilitated 250+ leadership placements, and built a robust community of alumni network. Guided by its vision of "Transformed Leaders. Transformed Society. Transformed World.", ILSS aims to partner with 1,000 leading social purpose organisations and empower 5,000 impact leaders by 2030.

Pepper’s Agent Atlas: Turning GEO Insights into Action

Search has changed, and so has the place where a brand gets judged. People put their questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and they act on what they hear without ever opening a website. Pepper tracks more than 10 million prompts across those engines, and the pattern it sees is that whether a brand turns up in those answers now decides whether it makes a buyer's shortlist at all. Sangeeta Bavi, Head of Sales for Digital Natives, Startups and Growth at Anthropic, framed the test at Index: "Go ask your marketing, product and engineering team: if you search for your product or brand, is it discoverable, and will an agent actually complete the transaction?"

Agent Atlas is built to answer that. It sits as the chat layer of Pepper's GEO platform. A question goes in the way you would put it to the sharpest analyst on the team. Atlas works across AI search visibility, rankings, analytics and content in one pass, shows what is happening, recommends what to do in order of impact, then carries out the work once it is approved.

One thing Atlas is not: software the client logs into. "You do not log in. Pepper does," is how the company puts it. Every Pepper customer is on Atlas from today, and their Pepper growth team runs it. Self-serve is not part of this release.

"We are not trying to build another tool in the category," said Anirudh Singla, Co-founder and CEO of Pepper. "We are trying to engineer organic growth for an AI era. Our understanding of organic growth has moved from SEO to Search Everywhere Optimization, and that needs strategy, agents and human subject matter experts working together."

"Atlas has brought our decision time right down," Singla said. "An analysis that used to take two weeks now runs through Atlas, so our teams spend their hours on leads and business outcomes instead. If you are a CMO with two minutes before you walk into your CEO's office, you should not have to wait a week for an agency report. You ask Atlas and you have the answer before you sit down."

Along with the launch, Pepper was clear about what it will and will not be measured on. The company said it will not sign a contract against a one-shot AI visibility score, because the same prompt run repeatedly against the same model comes back with a different answer each time. What it commits to instead goes into the contract: a full strategy and a projected number before a client signs, KPIs written in, weekly reviews against baseline, and an annual term Pepper keeps only if the number moves.

"Every AI engine is a black box today, and anyone claiming clean attribution is guessing with confidence," said Rishabh Shekhar, Co-founder and COO of Pepper. "That will change, because advertisers will not spend without reporting and these models will have to open a console. We are making sure our customers are already measuring the right things when it does."

The chain Pepper says it stands behind runs from Earned Authority, the agreement across the third-party sources that buyers and models trust, through citations and mentions, to branded search lift, to demand.

The launch came at the third Index, Pepper's GEO Growth Summit, held in Bengaluru after San Francisco and New York, in front of 150+ marketing leaders. Anant Vidur Puri, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, made the case for moving now: "Unless AI is front and center of your marketing strategy, I don't think the business can go fast." Ashutosh Wadhwani, Head of Growth at Swiggy, put the same shift more bluntly: "Stop optimizing for clicks. Start optimizing for recommendations and citations."

Pepper's argument has not changed in eight years. Organic is the channel a brand owns rather than rents. With Agent Atlas, a lean team can own all of it. Agents for scale. Humans for judgment. One team that owns the number.

Razorpay, India’s Omnichannel Payments Platform for Businesses, today launched RAY, an AI Account Manager on WhatsApp, in partnership with IndusInd Bank, with Bajaj Finance among the first businesses live on the platform. Built for businesses of every size, RAY gives founders an always-on, intelligent way to manage their payments and get support whenever they need it, day or night. Businesses have already had 20,000+ conversations with RAY, an early signal of how readily they are shifting to conversational, AI-led resolutions over dashboard-based ones for faster, more accessible support.

Razorpay Launches AI Account Manager on WhatsApp, with Induslnd Bank

Starting today, businesses can send RAY, Razorpay's AI Assistant, a simple message or voice note saying, “Show me a summary of my payments from yesterday” or go deeper with a request like, “Analyse my payments from the last two months and project my sales for the next two months.” RAY responds in natural language, without founders having to navigate dashboards or multiple screens to find the information they need. For India’s small businesses, getting help from their payments provider has just become as simple as texting a friend.

But the bigger shift is what happens next. For years, the largest businesses have had someone they could call to help them manage their payments and business needs. Most small and growing businesses haven't. Whether it’s checking the status of a settlement ahead of an urgent payout, sending a payment link to a customer, or issuing a refund while on the go, Razorpay is now putting that experience inside WhatsApp, the app most MSME’s already use for their business.

RAY is designed to do more than answer questions. It proactively tracks a business’s payment health and shares useful insights and actions before a business owner has to ask. From recommendations such as “Here’s how you can improve your payment success rate,” to flagging an upcoming settlement with a message such as, “Your Rs 94,600 settles Wednesday. Tuesday is a bank holiday. Would you like to get it settled today?”, RAY helps businesses stay ahead of issues and make faster decisions.

The launch marks the next evolution of RAY, Razorpay's AI-powered merchant assistance technology. While RAY was originally built to help businesses access information and support by leveraging AI, it no longer just answers questions when businesses reach out - it independently triggers actions across Razorpay’s systems. Where businesses once had to log into a dashboard to issue a refund or generate a payment link, they can now simply ask RAY to do it - on WhatsApp, in the middle of a conversation. 

The idea behind RAY started with a simple insight. Razorpay’s systems can already detect the early signs of a merchant needing support - from improving payment success to staying ahead of settlements. The opportunity was in how to act on those signals at scale. Manual outreach, however well-intentioned, depends on someone picking up the phone, one merchant at a time - a model built for hundreds of businesses, not millions. RAY was built to close that gap: turning real-time signals into real-time action, reaching every business on time, automatically.

Khilan Haria, Chief Product Officer, Razorpay said, “We’ve been thinking about how AI can fundamentally change the way businesses interact with their payments infrastructure. Millions of businesses across India are building and growing every day, and we wanted to make it easier for them to access the information, intelligent insights, and support they need along the way. With RAY, an AI Account Manager on WhatsApp, a business owner can simply ask for what they need in the most natural way possible and have it acted upon.”

He added, “More importantly, we are moving towards a world where they may not even need to ask us first. If we see an opportunity to help, whether it’s improving payment success, staying ahead of a settlement, or taking an action at the right moment, RAY will proactively reach out and help. Every founder, regardless of the size of their business, should feel like they have someone looking out for them.”

Amitabh Saraff, Head – Institutional and Government Coverage, IndusInd Bank said, "At IndusInd Bank, we are committed to making banking simpler, faster, and more accessible for businesses. Our partnership with Razorpay reflects this focus by bringing account management capabilities to a familiar platform like WhatsApp, helping make business support more immediate, intuitive, and convenient."

Bajaj – Tanaji Khot – Senior Head Banking, Bajaj Finance said, “When you're running a business, you don't always have the time to open another dashboard or follow up on multiple support channels. You just want to know what's happening and get an issue resolved quickly. Being able to simply send a message on WhatsApp makes the experience much more natural. It feels less like using another business tool and more like having someone available when you need help.”

Razorpay’s AI Agent Platform is built around a single intelligent agent that can handle a wide range of business needs end-to-end. Instead of building separate AI agents for payments, settlements, refunds, and other functions, the platform allows a single agent to draw on different capabilities, tools, knowledge, and memory depending on what a business needs in the moment. It holds full 360-degree context for each merchant, and an extensive evaluation system validates every response in real time, keeping hallucinations in check without compromising latency. The result: RAY moves seamlessly within a single conversation - from understanding what a business needs, to finding the right information, to recommending the next step, to taking the action itself.

With this launch, Razorpay is taking another step towards a future where AI doesn’t just help businesses understand what is happening, but helps them act on it. Built on Razorpay’s growing intelligence layer across payments, risk, and business operations, RAY is part of the ecosystem the company is building to make running a business simpler, more proactive, and increasingly intelligent.

About Razorpay

Razorpay, an omnichannel payments platform for businesses, strives to help Indian businesses with innovative solutions built with technology to address the payment and banking journey for businesses. Established in 2014 by alumni of IIT Roorkee, Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur, the company strives to provide technology payment solutions to many businesses. A few angel investors have also invested in Razorpay’s mission to simplify payments and business banking.

Japan’s Consul-General Mr. Hiroshi Nawata inaugurates SOLIZE PARTNERS India’s AI Innovation Lab in Bengaluru, alongside SOLIZE PARTNERS global leadership
 

The AI Innovation Lab will focus on applying AI to real engineering and manufacturing challenges. The current focus areas include Generative Design Engineering, Smart Quality Monitoring, Phygital AI through collaborative robots and Digital Agents. The Lab is also working across applications including natural-language 3D CAD generation, mechanical-part lifespan prediction, image-based fault detection, AI and IoT applications in 3D-printer factories and autonomous robotics.
 

“The SOLIZE Group’s focus with AI is not simply to introduce a new technology, but to build on the engineering expertise we have developed over 35 years. Our strength comes from our people, our understanding of manufacturing and our experience of solving complex engineering challenges. By combining this foundation with AI and leveraging the synergies of our teams in India and Japan, we will achieve enhanced productivity, take on more complex challenges and create scalable solutions that deliver real value to the industry,” shared Mahadevan V. S., CEO & Director, SOLIZE PARTNERS India.
 

The global leaders explained the unique capabilities of SOLIZE PARTNERS' additive manufacturing expertise, highlighting how the group’s journey began with industrial 3D printing and expanded through 3D data creation, engineering support, training and manufacturing-related services. Over the years, these capabilities have grown to include product development, the R&D value chain and across multiple industry segments.
 

The event also showcased the complementary strengths of Japan and India - Japan's precision, engineering and process expertise alongside India's software capabilities and engineering talent. The SOLIZE Group connects these strengths with the expertise of its global teams to develop transformative solutions for evolving engineering and manufacturing needs.
 

Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Hiroshi Nawata, Consul-General of Japan in Bengaluru, said, “Japan and India bring complementary strengths to their partnership. Japan has built deep capabilities in precision, quality, engineering and manufacturing, while India has developed strong engineering and technology talent and the ability to scale these capabilities. When these strengths come together, they create opportunities not only for business, but also for developing new capabilities and contributing to growth. SOLIZE PARTNERS India's 35-year presence in India is a meaningful example of this long-term relationship, built on trust, technology and a shared commitment to quality. Initiatives such as the AI Innovation Lab demonstrate how the partnership between our two countries can continue to evolve and create new possibilities for the future.”
 

The inauguration comes in a landmark year for SOLIZE PARTNERS India, which is celebrating its 35th anniversary. The milestone was also marked through the company's Annual Townhall 2026, bringing together team members and leadership to reflect on the organization’s journey, its people and its future direction.
 

Together, the events marked an important point in SOLIZE PARTNERS India's story—bringing its AI capabilities, additive manufacturing expertise, India–Japan relationship and 35 years of engineering legacy together as it looks towards the next phase of growth.

Synup, the local marketing platform managing more than two million business locations, has launched Sydekick, an autonomous AI agent designed to execute local marketing tasks rather than simply surface them. The launch marks a broader shift in Synup’s business model, from software that teams use to manage local marketing to an agent that can perform the work itself.
 

The launch follows a ground-up rebuild of Synup’s platform, with an agent placed at the centre of the product. The company has developed its own agentic harness with memory, capabilities and integrations, and runs the system on large language models (LLMs) and inference that it owns and operates.
 

For local marketing teams managing multiple locations, a large part of the work traditionally involves monitoring listings, responding to reviews, creating local content, conducting SEO audits and tracking performance. As the number of locations increases, the amount of specialist time required to manage these activities also increases. Sydekick is designed to change this model by allowing scheduled actions to be executed by the agent, reviewed by teams and completed at scale.
 

The agent has memory that carries context across a workspace, client, location and conversation, along with capabilities to take actions across listings, reviews, posts, reporting and AI visibility. It connects to more than 5,000 integrations and can operate through Synup as well as platforms including Slack and Microsoft Teams.
 

Unlike a conventional AI assistant that primarily generates responses or recommendations, Sydekick is designed to execute work. Agencies, for instance, can provide clients with a white-labeled dashboard and Sydekick experience while retaining control of the client relationship, branding and oversight. The agent can also execute recurring activities such as local post generation, SEO audits and review response drafting through scheduled playbooks.
 

Sydekick can create on-brand assets such as images, rich media and location landing pages using integrated vision, image generation and coding models. It can also combine information across multiple sources to create location-specific actions. For example, it can identify locations expecting rain, create relevant content for those locations and prepare a posting schedule and call to action for approval.
 

Human oversight remains built into the system. Proposed actions move through an approvals queue, with assignments to team members, an audit trail of what the agent did and why, and usage attribution by client and skill. Across live workspaces, 94% of the actions Sydekick proposes are approved without edits, according to Synup.
 

The company believes its existing infrastructure gives Sydekick an advantage in executing local marketing tasks. Synup has more than 100 publisher integrations, thirteen years of accumulated business logic and has managed more than two million locations. Its agent is also grounded in clients’ actual listings, reviews and performance data within the platform.
 

Synup currently powers nearly 5,000 partners, while three of the ten largest U.S. listings providers run on its API. Sydekick also supports MCP, allowing it to connect with external tools while enabling external agents to reach into Synup.
 

The launch also brings a change to Synup’s commercial model. Instead of pricing primarily around seats and software access, the company is moving towards usage-based credits that measure actual actions performed by the agent and attribute them by client and skill. A free trial with included usage is also available.
 

The move comes as consumer discovery increasingly shifts from traditional search results towards AI-generated answers. Synup has spent thirteen years maintaining structured, verified and publisher-distributed business data, positioning the company to both maintain the information used by AI systems and act on that information through its agent.
 

Ashwin Ramesh, Chief Executive Officer, Synup said, “We are excited to progress to the next transition for our business and our industry, building a truly agentic offering across the value chain — from application tooling to memory to inference. Having been in the industry for several decades now, I can say honestly and without a doubt that Sydekick and the new Synup service offering is truly game-changing. The aha moments we've unlocked with our client-deployed agents are unlike any I've seen before.”
 

About Synup

Synup is an AI company for local marketing. Its agent, Sydekick, manages listings, reviews, social, local SEO and AI visibility for agencies and multi-location brands across 100+ publisher syndications, running on Synup's own models and inference.
 

Sydekick is available to Synup partners and customers today, with a free trial that includes usage. Because Synup builds and operates its own intelligence layer, the platform remains a single accountable stack rather than a set of dependencies passed on to the customer.

The shift is transforming how Paisabazaar builds and scales technology, significantly improving development velocity and enabling teams to take on a larger product and technology roadmap.
 

CTO Mukesh Sharma says as AI capabilities scale, Paisabazaar is able to build, test and deploy products faster and more efficiently
 

Mukesh Sharma, Chief Technology Officer, Paisabazaar, said, “AI has fundamentally changed the way our engineering teams build. But the objective is not to replace engineers—it is to make them significantly more productive, taking away repetitive development work and allowing them to spend more time on architecture, problem-solving and innovation. As AI capabilities scale, we are able to build, test and deploy products faster and more efficiently.”
 

Paisabazaar is also expanding its technology team even as AI takes on a larger role in development, reflecting the company's focus on using productivity gains to expand its technology ambition rather than simply reduce resources. As AI enhances productivity, the company sees an opportunity to build more, experiment faster and address more problems simultaneously.

AI-assisted development is now integrated across the engineering lifecycle at Paisabazaar, from writing and testing code to debugging and documentation. Engineers continue to provide human oversight across critical stages, while AI enables teams to accelerate development and focus their efforts on higher-value technology and product challenges. As the role of engineers evolves, greater emphasis is placed on systems thinking, complex problem-solving, architectural decision-making and the ability to work effectively with AI tools.

“We are not looking to build the same things with fewer people; we want to use AI to expand what we can build. AI will not reduce our ambition—it will expand the surface area of what we can build,” added Sharma.

The broader AI strategy at Paisabazaar extends beyond engineering, with the company using AI across consumer-facing experiences to simplify complex credit information, generate personalised credit insights and enable more contextual interactions. AI and machine learning are also being used across product discovery and lending journeys to enhance personalisation and decision support.
 

The company expects AI adoption across engineering and consumer experiences to deepen as the technology evolves, focusing on expanding innovation, improving productivity and delivering simpler, more personalised financial experiences at scale.

About Paisabazaar

Paisabazaar, a part of PB Fintech (listed since 2021), is India’s leading marketplace for financial products and a free credit score platform. Over the last 12+ years, Paisabazaar has earned the trust and goodwill of over 58 million consumers from 850 cities and towns across India. Paisabazaar has built wide and deep partnerships across the ecosystem, to offer a broad range of financial products, ranging from loans and cards to investments and savings along with bill payments and mobile recharge. The platform also enables consumers to check their free credit score from all 4 CICs (Credit Bureaus) in India. Paisabazaar is an ISO (27001:2013) and PCI DSS certified organisation, with industry-best controls, to safeguard the best interest of consumers.

The framework captures pattern outlines, 3D geometry, and sewing information in a unified representation. It can use text, sketches, images, patterns, or point clouds as inputs, then generate structured assets, reconstruct sewing relationships, and initialize physical simulation for design exploration, digital sampling, and editing. By linking inputs with patterns, sewing relationships, and simulation, GarmageNet illustrates how fashion AI can become part of a connected product-development workflow rather than remain an isolated image-generation tool.

GarmageNet is supported by GarmageSet, a dataset of 14,801 professionally created garments. In the paper’s evaluations, GarmageJigsaw achieved 99.16% precision and 97.13% recall in sewing-point identification. GarmageNet achieved a 91.41% simulation-initialization success rate on 150 complex patterns, with reported inference time of approximately eight seconds per garment under the study’s test conditions.

The research reflects Style3D’s foundation in deformable-object simulation, garment deformation, digital fabrics, and AI-assisted workflows. Style3D maintains a substantial, dedicated R&D organization, and had published more than 30 papers at conferences including SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, CVPR, NeurIPS, and 3DV.

As of 28 July 2026, Style3D held 106 granted patents worldwide, including 58 invention patents and 12 granted in Europe and the United States, with a further 155 invention patent applications pending. It also operates an overseas R&D center in Germany.

Style3D’s AI and 3D technologies are already being applied across diverse customer workflows. German menswear brand OLYMP uses Style3D and Assyst to connect 2D patterns, 3D simulation, visualization, and digital showrooms. The company reports developing styles in days rather than weeks, reducing physical samples and improving communication across design, sales, and production.

As Style3D CEO Eric Liu told Just Style, “The most important development is the agent. We use agents to link different skills.” Style3D is advancing a connected fashion workflow in which AI agents can coordinate product data, 3D design, simulation, content creation, and production preparation—while human teams retain creative and operational responsibility.

Through 30 sessions featuring Salesforce leaders, customers, industry experts and partners, the virtual summit explored how organisations can move from AI experimentation to responsible enterprise-wide adoption. The agenda featured sessions on ‘From Campaigns to Conversions: AI Across the Customer Journey’, discussions with Deloitte, Grant Thornton Bharat, KPMG and PwC on governance, data readiness and measurable AI outcomes; and masterclasses exploring how organisations can turn intelligence into influence and build enterprise success with AI.

A key highlight was a leadership conversation with former Indian cricket captain and coach Rahul Dravid, who drew on his career to share lessons on resilience, adaptability, teamwork, and building sustained performance, qualities equally critical for businesses navigating AI-led transformation.

Mankiran Chowhan, Managing Director, Salesforce India, said “India is not going digital, it is already digital. The question now is whether enterprises can operate with the speed, intelligence and trust their customers expect. AI will not fix a fragmented customer journey, it will reveal the gaps faster. The next phase of transformation must therefore move from pilots to performance, from disconnected channels to connected customer moments, and from automation to intelligent orchestration. The Great India Sales, Marketing & Service Summit brought together leaders to explore how trusted data, AI agents and empowered people can operate as one system. Ultimately, the winning enterprise will not be the one with the most tools, but the one with the clearest customer truth and the ability to act on it.”

Rishabh Chhajer, VP- IT & Cybersecurity, Allen Career Institute Pvt. Ltd., said, “Every student’s journey is different, and engaging them effectively requires communication that is timely, relevant and informed by context. With Salesforce, we are bringing our regional teams and engagement channels onto a unified platform, enabling us to move from fragmented campaigns to more connected and measurable student journeys. This is helping us engage prospective students and their families more meaningfully, while building the scale and agility required to support learners across India.”

Now in its third edition, the Great India Sales, Marketing & Service Summit has evolved into an annual Salesforce India platform for business leaders to exchange ideas, learn from customer transformation stories and explore emerging approaches to growth and customer engagement. The summit reinforced Salesforce’s commitment to helping Indian businesses put trusted AI to work and translate innovation into meaningful customer and business outcomes.

About Salesforce
Salesforce helps organizations of any size become agentic enterprises - integrating humans, agents, apps, and data on a trusted, unified platform to unlock unprecedented growth and innovation. Visit www.salesforce.com/in for more information.

(L-R): Sujeet Tyagi, COO, Montran India; Shri Adv. Ashish Shelar, Hon' Minister, Government of Maharashtra for IT, Electronics, AI, and Cultural Affairs; Julie Esca, CEO, Montran India

The Summit focused on India’s evolving financial ecosystem and the next set of opportunities across payments, capital markets and emerging technologies. Discussions centred on how India can build on the scale achieved in digital payments while developing financial infrastructure that is faster, more resilient and equipped for an increasingly real-time economy. As part of the programme, Montran also showcased its work around AI-led Payment Intelligence, highlighting how artificial intelligence and greater automation can strengthen areas such as fraud and risk management across increasingly complex digital payment environments.

Speaking on the occasion, Julie Esca, CEO, Montran India, said, “India has already won the first phase of its fintech journey by achieving extraordinary speed, scale and adoption. The next phase will be defined by trust, built transaction by transaction through resilient infrastructure, stronger authentication and fraud detection, and technology that performs reliably every time. India’s regulatory landscape, transaction volumes and customer expectations are evolving at an unmatched pace, compelling the industry to continuously innovate. The solutions we are developing here are not only addressing the needs of one of the world’s most demanding financial markets but are also strengthening Montran’s global product capabilities. As financial infrastructure becomes increasingly real-time and intelligent, lasting partnerships between banks, regulators and technology providers will be critical.”

Shri Adv. Ashish Shelar, said, “India’s digital public infrastructure has demonstrated how technology can democratise access to financial services at an unprecedented scale. If the previous decade was about democratizing access, the next must be about democratizing intelligence through responsible AI. As India’s financial capital, Mumbai is well positioned to become a global centre for financial technology innovation, where companies can design in Maharashtra, build for India and scale for the world. As we move forward, security by design, accountability by design and inclusion by design must remain non-negotiable. By combining India’s scale with global expertise, we can build financial systems that are faster, more resilient and accessible, and help define the future of global finance.”

The Summit featured two panel discussions examining key developments across India’s financial infrastructure. The capital markets discussion highlighted how India’s successful instant payments revolution has helped pave the way for a rapid and seamless transition to T+1 securities settlement, while positioning the market for a future move to T+0. India’s securities market infrastructures also shared how their technology strategies are enabling progress on multiple fronts, notably tokenization and internationalization, with the resulting efficiencies and opportunities set to benefit the country’s large and fast-growing investor base. The second explored how banks and financial institutions can build more resilient, scalable and AI-enabled payment systems for an increasingly always-on digital economy.

The discussions pointed to a broader shift underway in India’s financial ecosystem: having built payments infrastructure at a scale few markets have matched, the industry is now turning to what comes next, from faster securities settlement to more resilient, AI-enabled risk management. Montran said the Summit will continue to serve as an annual platform for that conversation, as Montran India works with the industry to build the country’s next generation of financial infrastructure.

Senior representatives from NSDL, NSE Clearing Limited, IFSCA, Bank of India, Axis Bank and Montran participated in the panel discussions, sharing perspectives on the evolving payments and capital markets landscape.

About Montran India
Founded in 2013, Montran India is the largest subsidiary of Montran, delivering payment and capital market infrastructure solutions to India's banks and financial institutions. The company is a certified technology partner of NPCI and SWIFT, and holds ISO 27001/9001 certifications. It operates six offices across India, led from its head office in Mumbai. Discover more at www.montran.in

About Montran
Montran is the leading provider of Payment and Capital Market Infrastructure solutions, servicing the world's foremost financial institutions with mission-critical installations and operations in over 90 countries. Discover more at www.montran.com

Rodic Consultants, one of India's leading infrastructure and engineering consultancies, has partnered with Nasscom to launch the Rodic InfraAI Innovation Challenge, a first-of-its-kind initiative aimed at accelerating the adoption of artificial intelligence across India's infrastructure and strategic sectors. Supported by Startup India through outreach to DPIIT-recognised startups, the initiative seeks to bring together the country's rapidly expanding AI and deep-tech ecosystem to develop scalable, deployment-ready solutions for some of India's most pressing infrastructure challenges.

The Innovation Challenge marks the first milestone in a broader strategic partnership between Rodic Consultants and Nasscom to discover, nurture and deploy frontier AI technologies across live infrastructure projects in India. By combining Rodic’s extensive domain expertise, real-world project environments and infrastructure problem statements with Nasscom’s innovation ecosystem, while leveraging Startup India’s outreach to DPIIT-recognised startups, the partnership aims to bridge the gap between technological innovation and on-ground implementation and create pathways for promising AI solutions to be tested, validated and scaled across real-world infrastructure applications.

Unlike conventional innovation programs built around hypothetical use cases, the National AI Innovation Challenge is anchored in real-world infrastructure challenges drawn from Rodic's live projects. Participating startups will gain access to actual project contexts, enabling them to develop practical solutions with a clear pathway from concept validation to pilot implementation and eventual commercial deployment.

The inaugural edition of the Challenge will focus on four priority themes aligned with India's infrastructure needs. AI on India Energy Stack invites innovators to build solutions leveraging the Ministry of Power's emerging digital public infrastructure for the energy sector. AI for Roads, Bridges and Tunnels focuses on applications such as asset monitoring, defect detection, predictive maintenance and construction intelligence. Climate-Resilient Infrastructure seeks AI-driven solutions to strengthen roads, railways and transmission networks against floods, landslides and extreme heat. The fourth theme, GenAI for Public Works and Citizen Benefit Delivery, aims to improve access to public services and government health entitlements through multilingual AI-powered platforms.

Speaking on the partnership, Raj Kumar, CMD Rodic Consultants and CEO Rodic digital Advisory said, "India is at an inflection point where artificial intelligence can fundamentally transform how infrastructure is planned, built and managed. At Rodic, we have spent a considerable time working inside the country's most complex highways, bridges, tunnels and urban infrastructure programmes, and we know exactly where technology can make the biggest difference on the ground. Through our partnership with Nasscom, we are creating a platform that connects India's brightest AI innovators with real infrastructure challenges, not hypothetical ones. Our objective is to identify technologies that can be tested, deployed and scaled across live projects, accelerating India's digital transformation while building infrastructure that is smarter, safer and more resilient for the decades ahead."

Sharing his thoughts, Ankit Bose, Head of AI, Nasscom, said, "Infrastructure is the backbone of India's growth story, and AI has the power to reshape how it is built and maintained. The InfraAI Innovation Challenge gives tech startups access to real industry problem statements, expert mentorship and a genuine pathway to deployment. By combining Nasscom’s innovation ecosystem with Rodic's deep infrastructure expertise, we hope to accelerate practical AI adoption that delivers measurable impact across India's infrastructure landscape, while giving the country's deep-tech founders a stage where their work can truly move the needle."

The Challenge has been conceived as more than a startup competition. It is a long-term innovation platform connecting emerging AI companies with industry, enabling promising technologies to be tested, refined and deployed within live infrastructure environments. 

High-potential startups emerging from the Challenge will have the opportunity to advance into Rodic's Pilot Partnership Program, where selected solutions are validated on live projects before progressing towards commercial deployment. The partnership also envisages strategic investment in select startups as part of Rodic's long-term innovation roadmap.

Rodic Consultants has played a significant role in shaping the country's development across highways, bridges, tunnels, urban infrastructure, water, hydropower, energy, railways, metros and smart technologies. Through this collaboration, the company aims to systematically identify, validate and scale artificial intelligence, Generative AI, hardware and software innovations capable of addressing complex infrastructure challenges, creating growth opportunities for India's startup ecosystem and strengthening the country's position in AI-led infrastructure development.

About Nasscom
Nasscom represents the voice of over USD 300bn technology industry in India with the vision to establish the nation as the world's leading technology ecosystem. Boasting a diverse and influential community of over 3500 member companies, our network spans the entire spectrum of the industry from DeepTech and AI startups to multinationals and from products to services, Global Capability Centres to Engineering firms. Guided by our vision, our strategic imperatives are to accelerate skilling at scale for future-ready talent, strengthen the innovation quotient across industry verticals, create new market opportunities – both international and domestic, drive policy advocacy to advance innovation and ease of doing business, and build the industry narrative with a focus on Trust, and innovation. And, in everything we do, we will continue to champion the need for diversity and equal opportunity.

For more details visit our website nasscom.in or write to us at: comms@nasscom.in 

Millennium Group of Schools - AI Championship 2026

With Times Now, the leading English news channel from The Times Network as the Official Broadcast Partner, the championship will bring together students from schools across India to explore the creative possibilities of AI through storytelling, music, and filmmaking. Built around the theme ‘Sustainable Cities. Intelligent Futures.’, the initiative encourages students to imagine how technology and human creativity can come together to build cleaner, greener, kinder and more inclusive cities.

The championship has been designed across three age-specific categories:

• Grades 5–7: Storytelling Challenge

• Grades 8–9: Song Creation Challenge

• Grades 10–12: Short Film Challenge

With nationwide outreach, the championship aims to engage over 25,000 students, 50,000 parents and 2,000 educators, while generating more than one million digital impressions. At this scale, the initiative is designed to create a powerful school-led platform for advancing responsible AI, creativity and future-ready learning across India. Registered participants will also receive complimentary access to expert-led sessions on prompt engineering, AI ethics and digital citizenship, equipping them with the knowledge and mindset to use AI responsibly while strengthening critical thinking, creativity and innovation.

Sharing her thoughts on the launch, Neha Vaz, Head of Events & Strategic Alliances, The Millennium Group of Schools, said, "Artificial Intelligence is redefining the way the next generation will learn, create and solve problems. At The Millennium Group of Schools, we believe children should not just learn about AI, but learn to use it responsibly, creatively and with confidence. The Millennium AI Creators Championship is our effort to provide young minds with a national platform where human imagination meets technology. Guided by the philosophy, 'Human Imagination Leads. AI Assists.', the championship encourages students to use AI as a creative partner while ensuring original thinking remains at the heart of every idea." 

The championship will be evaluated by an esteemed National Jury comprising renowned leaders from the fields of artificial intelligence, education, technology, design, media, innovation and the creative industries. Confirmed jury members include Mr. Vikas Kanungo, Dr. Sujitha Kurup, Dr. Amita Kapoor along with other distinguished experts, who will assess entries based on originality, creativity, storytelling, relevance to the championship theme, responsible use of AI and overall impact. The Top 15 National Winners will be awarded an exclusive, fully sponsored AI Fellowship powered by TechnoKids in association with Knowledge Hub,

providing advanced AI learning and coding opportunities to further strengthen their AI capabilities and future-ready skills. Winners will also be awarded with robotics kits by E-BOT Plus, a uniquely designed solution for Computer Science, Coding, AI, and Robotics, built around the core principles of simplicity, intuition, and practical approach.

Sharing her views on the educational significance of the initiative, Dr. Priyanka Jain, Head of Academics, The Millennium Group of Schools, said, "The Millennium AI Creators Championship reflects our belief that education must evolve alongside technology while keeping human imagination at its core. Rather than asking students to avoid AI, we want them to learn how to use it thoughtfully, ethically and creatively. Through this initiative, students will explore real-world challenges around sustainable cities while developing critical thinking, problem-solving and creative confidence. Our goal is to nurture young learners who see AI not as a shortcut, but as a tool to amplify their ideas and contribute meaningfully to society."

Beyond being a competition, the Millennium AI Creators Championship is part of a broader national AI literacy movement that encourages students to build with AI instead of depending on it.

About The Millennium Group of Schools
The Millennium Group of Schools is a prominent chain of K-12 schools across India that follows the CBSE curriculum. Known for its holistic, child-centric approach, the institution follows the award-winning, research-backed Millennium Learning System™ (MLS™), developed through 10+ years of action research, to create personalised, experiential learning experiences that nurture curiosity, creativity, conceptual understanding and real-world application, while integrating global learning theories with the Indian education and value system.

To participate, please visit- www.aicreator.themillenniumschools.com/register

For enquiry: 87960 61075, 95950 82445

Core Team at the launch of the Quadcentrix Office

The rebranding comes as India's enterprise technology landscape undergoes a drastic transformation. The country's enterprise AI market is projected to grow from approximately USD 13 billion in 2025 to more than USD 130 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights, while IBM's Global AI Adoption Index found that 59% of large Indian enterprises already have AI actively in use, the highest share among the countries surveyed. As that shift accelerates, enterprises are increasingly looking for a single technology partner that can move fluidly across AI, blockchain and data, rather than stitching together point solutions from different vendors.

Shahzad Fatmi CEO Quadcentrix

Quadcentrix, formerly SettleMint India, has emerged to meet this demand. The rebranding signifies the company's evolution from a blockchain specialist into a full spectrum technology partner, spanning enterprise AI orchestration, blockchain trust, and data transformation.

Founded in 2019, the company has spent over six years delivering enterprise technology infrastructure, building a track record that today includes 20+ enterprise clients globally, with services and solutions delivered across 5 countries. Its work covers diverse sectors including Banking and Financial Services (BFSI), Government and Public Sector, Capital Markets, Agritech and Healthcare & Life Sciences. Having established itself in India in the last few years, the company plans to leverage its strong foothold and target a double-digit growth in the first year of the rebranded entity. 

“The market has moved faster than the vendor categories built to serve it,” said Shahzad Fatmi, CEO of Quadcentrix. “Our clients no longer come to us with a single blockchain problem to solve. They come with a business challenge that spans data, AI and trust, often all at once. Over six years, we built the team and the track record to meet them there, and Quadcentrix is the name that finally reflects that breadth.”

The name ‘Quadcentrix’ is built around two key ideas: “Quad,” representing the four pillars that power its delivery model (collaborative excellence, trusted expertise, agile delivery, and independent flexibility), and “Centrix,” reflecting a client centred approach to every engagement.

The company has confirmed that the rebranding will not impact existing client contracts, ownership structures, or the teams supporting current engagements.

Quadcentrix will begin rolling out its new brand identity across its digital presence, client communications and business materials, in the coming weeks. 

More information about the company's services, solutions and industry work is available at www.quadcentrix.com.

About Quadcentrix
Quadcentrix (formerly SettleMint India) is a technology company that helps enterprises modernise their data foundations, apply enterprise AI, and build trusted blockchain solutions. Founded in 2019, the company has delivered 6+ years of enterprise technology work for 20+ clients across 5 countries, serving sectors including Banking & Financial Services, Government & Public Sector, Capital Markets, Agritech, and Healthcare & Life Sciences. Quadcentrix is headquartered in India with a team spanning architecture, AI, engineering and delivery.

MAHE-IBM inaugurated the AI Lab in Bengaluru

The Lab was inaugurated by Prof. Madhu Veeraraghavan, Pro Vice Chancellor, MAHE Bengaluru & Nisha Gopinath, Vice President, Human Resources, IBM India and South Asia, in the presence of Shipra Sharma, CSR Leader, IBM India and South Asia, Dr. E. V. Ramana Reddy, IAS, Chairman, KSDA, Dr. Raghavendra Prabhu, Additional Registrar, MAHE Bengaluru, Dr. Iven Jose, Director, MIT Bengaluru and Dr. Dayanand, Dean, School of Computing & Engineering, along with senior leaders from IBM, faculty members, researchers, students, and industry representatives.

Powered by advanced GPU-enabled computing infrastructure, AI Lab will support cutting-edge research in machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, computer vision, natural language processing, cybersecurity, healthcare, intelligent systems and data analytics. The facility can simultaneously support 30 high-performance computing workloads. It will provide faculty members, researchers, innovators and students with world-class computational resources to develop next-generation AI solutions.

Beyond enabling advanced research, AI Lab has been envisioned as a collaborative platform/hub that bridges academia and industry. It will support industry-sponsored projects, interdisciplinary research, faculty development programmes, student innovation, hackathons, internships, startup incubation and collaborative technology development. Together, these initiatives will create an ecosystem where ideas can rapidly evolve into impactful solutions.

A defining feature of the initiative is its commitment to inclusive AI education. Through IBM SkillsBuild, IBM’s free technology education program, MIT BLRU will establish an AI Learning Initiative. The programme will offer AI awareness workshops, immersive bootcamps, hands-on training in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, IBM SkillsBuild digital credentials, mentorship from MIT BLRU faculty and student volunteers, and access to advanced computing infrastructure. By reaching students from Tier 2 and Tier 3 institutions, the initiative aims to bridge the digital divide and equip learners with industry-relevant skills for the AI-driven economy.

"I commend MIT, BLRU and IBM on launching the IBM-MIT, AI Lab and their shared commitment to advancing AI education and nurturing future-ready talent. This collaboration highlights the power of academia-industry partnerships in strengthening Karnataka's AI ecosystem. By providing access to advanced AI infrastructure, hands-on learning, and resources, the lab will empower students and researchers to accelerate innovation and develop AI-driven solutions that address societal challenges and contribute to inclusive growth," said Priyank Kharge, Cabinet Minister for Home, IT & BT, e-Governance, Government of Karnataka.

Speaking on the occasion, Prof. Madhu Veeraraghavan, Pro Vice Chancellor, MAHE Bengaluru, said, "Artificial Intelligence must become an enabler for everyone, not just a privileged few. AI Lab reflects our commitment to combining world-class research with social impact by expanding access to AI education, fostering innovation and preparing learners for an AI-driven future. Our collaboration with IBM is a significant step towards building an inclusive and globally competitive AI ecosystem."

Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India and South Asia said, "India stands at a pivotal moment in its AI journey, with the talent, innovation ecosystem, and digital foundations to lead the next wave of global AI innovation. Realising this potential requires stronger collaboration between talent, research, advanced computing, and industry. Our collaboration with MIT BLRU reflects IBM's commitment to democratizing access to emerging technologies, enterprise-grade computing, and digital skills, empowering students and researchers to advance AI innovation. Together, we are strengthening India's AI research ecosystem and driving innovations that create meaningful impact for India and the world,"

Dr. Iven Jose, Director, MIT Bengaluru, said the Centre would significantly strengthen the University's AI research ecosystem. "MIG provides our students and researchers with the computing power needed to solve complex challenges and accelerate AI innovation. By integrating advanced infrastructure with industry collaboration, we are creating an ecosystem that nurtures research excellence, hands-on learning and industry-ready talent."

MIG marks a significant milestone in Karnataka's higher education and innovation ecosystem. By combining advanced High-Performance Computing infrastructure with large-scale AI skilling, industry collaboration and community outreach, the Centre is expected to catalyse transformative research, innovation, entrepreneurship and talent development. As Artificial Intelligence continues to reshape industries and societies, MIG positions MIT Bengaluru as a leading hub for AI research, talent development and responsible innovation. 

About MAHE
Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) is an Institution of Eminence Deemed to be University. MAHE offers over 400 specialisations across Health Sciences (HS), Management, Law, Humanities & Social Sciences (MLHS), and Technology & Science (T&S) streams through its constituent units at campuses in Manipal, Mangalore, Bengaluru, Jamshedpur, and Dubai. With a remarkable track record in academics, state-of-the-art infrastructure, and significant contributions to research, MAHE has earned recognition and acclaim both nationally and internationally. In 2020, the Ministry of Education, Government of India, awarded MAHE the prestigious Institution of Eminence status. Currently ranked 3rd in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2025 rankings, MAHE is the preferred choice for students seeking a transformative learning experience and enriching campus life, as well as for national and multinational corporations seeking top talent.

About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

India has emerged as one of the world's leading exporters of education, technology, and skilled talent. Building on this momentum, Edubex Learning, an Indian global edtech company headquartered in Kerala, is expanding access to internationally recognised education across Africa, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and other international markets through AI-enabled learning, globally accredited qualifications, and industry-focused career development.

Edubex’s India-based operations support its growing global education ecosystem, connecting learners with internationally recognised programmes and career-focused learning

Founded in 2020, Edubex has grown from a small educational initiative into one of the leading international education providers serving Africa, with more than 10,000 learners, 1,000+ graduates, and a comprehensive portfolio of over 200 programmes spanning undergraduate degrees, postgraduate qualifications, professional diplomas, executive education, workforce development, artificial intelligence, business management, healthcare, logistics, digital technologies, and industry-specific short courses.

At a time when employers increasingly value practical skills alongside academic qualifications, Edubex is helping bridge the gap between higher education and employability by combining internationally recognised curricula with personalised mentoring and technology-driven learning experiences.

Strengthening India's Global Education Presence

India has earned worldwide recognition as a hub for technology, innovation, and higher education. Edubex is extending this reputation by connecting learners in Africa and beyond with internationally recognised qualifications through strategic partnerships with globally respected universities and awarding organisations.

Its academic collaborations include UCAM (Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia, Spain), Chartered Management Institute (CMI), United Kingdom, Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), together with other internationally recognised universities and academic institutions. These partnerships allow learners to earn globally respected qualifications while studying from their home countries, creating opportunities for career progression without geographical barriers.

By providing globally accredited education and practical workforce-focused programmes, the organisation aims to help professionals strengthen their careers while contributing to economic development and knowledge exchange across regions.

Looking Ahead

With digital learning becoming central to workforce transformation worldwide, Edubex continues to invest in academic innovation, AI-enabled education, strategic university collaborations, and globally relevant curricula.

The organisation also looks forward to engaging with universities, policymakers, employers, and international education leaders through global initiatives and industry forums, including the forthcoming Diaspora Economic Forum (DEF) 2026, where education, skills development, innovation, and cross-border collaboration are expected to remain central themes.

As India continues to strengthen its position as a global knowledge economy, Edubex remains committed to exporting educational excellence while empowering learners to build internationally competitive careers.

About Edubex Learning

Edubex Learning is an Indian global edtech company headquartered in Kerala, delivering internationally recognised higher education and professional learning opportunities to students across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and other global markets.

Established in 2020, Edubex has supported more than 10,000 learners through a portfolio of 200+ programmes, including undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, professional diplomas, executive education, AI and digital technology programmes, workforce development, and industry certifications.

Through partnerships with globally respected institutions including UCAM (Spain), Chartered Management Institute (United Kingdom), Scottish Qualifications Authority (Scotland), and other international academic partners, Edubex continues to expand access to affordable, globally recognised education that prepares learners for success in an increasingly connected world.

Website: www.edubex.com.

Chitkara University hosted the AIKosh University Engagement Programme under the IndiaAI Mission, where 250 CSE (AI) students participated in the workshop

The IndiaAI Mission, approved by the Government of India in March 2024 under the aegis of the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), aims to establish India as a global leader in artificial intelligence by fostering technological self-reliance, enabling ethical and responsible AI development, and ensuring that the benefits of AI reach diverse sections of society.

As part of the IndiaAI Mission, AIKosh has been established as a comprehensive platform to facilitate access to datasets, AI models, tools, and other critical resources. Through the University Engagement Programme, AIKosh seeks to deepen AI adoption in academia, nurture emerging talent, and create opportunities for students and researchers to contribute to India’s growing AI landscape.

As part of this engagement, 250+ students from the Computer Science Engineering (Artificial Intelligence) programme at Chitkara University participated in the programme on August 6, 2026, gaining exposure to national-level AI resources, industry-relevant tools, and emerging practices in artificial intelligence.

Chitkara University is now onboarded with AIKosh as a contributor.

Speaking on this milestone, Dr. Madhu Chitkara, President and Co-founder, Chitkara University, said, "Artificial Intelligence is transforming the way we learn, innovate, and solve complex challenges. At Chitkara University, we have always believed in preparing our students for the technologies that will shape the future. Being selected for the AIKosh University Engagement Programme under the IndiaAI Mission is a recognition of our commitment towards creating future-ready professionals equipped with knowledge, skills, and a responsible understanding of AI. This collaboration will empower our students to engage with cutting-edge AI resources and contribute meaningfully to India’s vision of becoming a global AI leader."

Speaking on the initiative, Shri Md. Y. Safirulla K IAS, Director, IndiaAI Mission, said: "Guided by the vision of our Honourable Prime Minister to democratize AI, we are committed to ensuring its transformative benefits reach every individual across the nation. This commitment rests upon three foundational pillars—People, Planet, and Progress—a philosophy prominently showcased during the IndiaAI Impact Summit in February 2026. As part of our University Engagement Programme, we will work to showcase the multifaceted elements of India's thriving AI ecosystem across educational institutions nationwide this year."

The participation of Chitkara University in the AIKosh University Engagement Programme aligns with its continued focus on emerging technologies, interdisciplinary learning, and industry-oriented education. The University has been actively strengthening its AI ecosystem through advanced academic programmes, research initiatives, innovation-driven learning, and collaborations aimed at preparing students for the evolving digital economy.

Through this association, Chitkara University continues to advance its mission of nurturing technology leaders who can leverage artificial intelligence for responsible innovation and contribute towards building a digitally empowered India.

About Chitkara University

Chitkara University is a UGC-recognised and NAAC-accredited private university in North India, with campuses in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, offering career-oriented undergraduate and postgraduate programs in Engineering, Business, Healthcare, Pharmacy, Design, Architecture, Hospitality and emerging technology fields. For Class 11 and 12 students planning higher education, the University provides industry-aligned programs designed to combine academic excellence with practical exposure.

The curriculum emphasises experiential learning through internships, industry projects, research opportunities and global collaborations, supported by modern infrastructure, advanced laboratories, industry mentorship and skill-based training that strengthens student employability. Backed by 2,000+ campus recruiters and 300+ international academic and industry collaborations, students gain strong placement support, international exposure, academic exchange and collaborative research opportunities.

Consistently ranked among leading institutions by national and global frameworks such as NIRF, QS World University Rankings and Times Higher Education, the University maintains high academic rigour and industry relevance. With strong corporate partnerships and a focus on innovation, entrepreneurship and interdisciplinary learning, it prepares students for emerging career opportunities in India and abroad.

For more information, please visit: www.chitkara.edu.in.

Distinguished industry representatives at the 20th edition of India’s premier marketing conference, Marketing Conclave (MarCon), organised by the IAMAI, powered by Google, in Mumbai

“In the emerging agentic era, the marketing opportunity shifts from search visibility to providing the precise answers and context that enable AI agents to act on a consumer’s behalf—always with explicit permission. We are working with the industry to lay the foundation of agentic commerce with open standards like the Universal Commerce Protocol to help brands thrive and build deeper, more valuable customer relationships. As we see, agentic capabilities are redefining how people search, discover, and shop," he added.

AI has become the talking point for the entertainment industry. At a session on ‘The Producer’s Paybook: TV, OTT and What Comes Next’, Goldie Behl, Filmmaker & Founder, Rose Audio Visuals, said, "AI is a tool that will enhance creativity. Ultimately, it will be human intelligence and AI working together. Human intelligence will always be driving storytelling.” Behl further added that AI should be viewed as a creative tool rather than a replacement for writers, while stressing the need for regulations around how AI learns from existing content and intellectual property rights.

Behl noted that OTT has undergone its own evolution, with the next wave of opportunities coming from brand-backed storytelling. “But, creators must understand and authentically communicate a brand's ethos,” he added.

The second day of the conference saw participation from notable industry experts, including Prashant Gutch, Head, Search & Shopping, Ads Marketing, Google; Poorva Bhatikar, Industry Head - Mobility, Google; Archit Goyal, Search & Performance Specialist, Google; Aviral Chandra, President Marketing, Shriram General Insurance; Pankaj Sharma, Chief Executive Officer & Director, MGID; Arpit Mankar, Senior Vice President – Head – NonBollywood, Shemaroo Entertainment; Somnath Mukherjee, Head of Programmatic and Performance Marketing, Reliance Retail, and Vinay Bhartia, Director - MEA & West Asia, Semrush, who shared insights on the evolving digital marketing landscape. MarCon featured an expo with participation from more than 30 leading marketing and technology companies. Over two days, the conference witnessed a footfall of more than 2,000. 

Among the partners of Marketing Conclave 2026 are Affinity Global Advertising, Consumr.ai, Connect Network, DoubleTick, Google, Helo.ai, mFilterIt, PubLive, Vonage, BC Web Wise, LS Digital, Truecaller, Semrush (An Adobe Company), ORIGIN8, Exotel, Shemaroo and many more.

About Internet and Mobile Association of India  
The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) is a not-for-profit industry body with more than 800 members, including Indian and multinational corporations, as well as start-ups. IAMAI has been instrumental in shaping India’s digital economy. IAMAI advocates free and fair competition, and progressive and enabling laws for businesses as well as for consumers. The overarching objective of IAMAI is to ensure the progress of the internet and the digital economy. Its major areas of activities are public policy and advocacy, business to business conferences, research, promotion of start-ups and promotion of consumer trust and safety. 

This expansion featured the availability of Agentforce, Salesforce's platform for building, deploying and scaling AI agents, and Data 360, the engine that unifies data and insights, giving AI the context it requires. Core applications like Agentforce Sales, Agentforce Service, Slack, and Tableau Next are also included, providing a complete foundation for customers.

By purchasing Salesforce products in AWS Marketplace, businesses in India can simplify procurement and IT management processes while benefiting from features such as consolidated billing, customized pricing, and a centralized view of their technology investments. This collaboration between Salesforce and AWS, first established in 2016, underscores both companies' commitment to delivering innovative solutions powered by data and agentic artificial intelligence. These technologies empower businesses to integrate advanced capabilities into their daily operations securely and responsibly.

Comments on the news
Mankiran Chowhan, Managing director at Salesforce India, said, "Indian enterprises are no longer asking if AI will transform their business, they know it will. The challenge is turning that ambition into action. Complex procurement processes, siloed data, and disconnected systems often slow down AI adoption. By bringing Salesforce to AWS Marketplace in India, we are making it easier for businesses to access and deploy our solutions through an infrastructure they already trust and use. This will help customers move faster, maximize their existing cloud investments, and accelerate time-to-value from their AI and digital transformation initiatives."

Customers in India can now purchase Salesforce products directly through AWS Marketplace today. For more information about product availability and details, visit www.salesforce.com/partners/aws.

About Salesforce
Salesforce helps organizations of any size become agentic enterprises - integrating humans, agents, apps, and data on a trusted, unified platform to unlock unprecedented growth and innovation. Visit www.salesforce.com/in/ for more information.

Pricing and packaging are subject to change. Availability may vary by region and is governed by customer agreements. Customers should base purchasing decisions on products and services currently available.

About Amazon Web Services India Services Private Limited 
Amazon Web Services India Private Limited undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS Cloud services in India.

^{*Salesforce, the #1 CRM, powered by AI technology and capabilities.}

Lucknow-headquartered AI-infrastructure platform InfoBay.AI. has crossed Rs 100 crores in revenue and Rs 50 crores in Profit After Tax (PAT) in FY 2025-26. While Profit Before Tax (PBT) increased to 3x, the platform clocked a Net Revenue Retention (NRR) of 140%-160% in the last fiscal year. This 10x revenue growth over the past two years is supported by a structural Gross Margin of 80%+, a hallmark of a scalable software infrastructure business.

InfoBay.AI has also expanded into five countries: Indonesia, Kenya, the Philippines and Uganda, besides India, as part of its expansion plan to 14 countries by 2027. In line with its expansion plans, it has also strengthened its leadership team with a new Chief Financial Officer, VP-Global Sales and R&D Manager on board. These key hires reinforce its governance and capacity for international enterprise scaling.

"AI is here to dominate, pivoting to a mission-critical AI-infrastructure platform, InfoBay.AI, is in line with our commitment to playing an even bigger role in India's growth story. It is also a testament to our unwavering belief in continuous evolution to cater to the changing needs of the industry. We are among the most profitable AI- powered companies in India, powering half of the world's frontier labs," said Rohit Manglik, Founder & CEO, InfoBay.AI.

"InfoBay's success is founded on a strategic evolution that converted EduGorilla’s legacy assets into proprietary AI infrastructure. It is not merely a rebranding; it is a sophisticated asset-repurposing strategy that leverages years of building complex STEM and reasoning content into structured data that now fuels the TIBET engine and provides a unique "reasoning trace" foundation for AI- driven models. The team structure and operations are now entirely aligned with this structurally superior, pure-play AI mandate," he added.

InfoBay's proprietary Asset Layer now includes a massive repository of structured data, including 2 million de-identified medical patient records and 34 million vertical videos. It has an expanded linguistic moat, with audio coverage in 40 languages and educational data in 15. The platform is actively leveraging multimodal capabilities (video, audio, text) to build deeper, vertical-specific datasets in adjacent, high-value domains like Physical AI.

As InfoBay continues to expand, its focus remains laser-sharp on being the Mission-Critical AI Infrastructure Platform. Every expansion, hire, and product roadmap decision is engineered to strengthen our moats—technical (TIBET), operational, and relationship-driven—ensuring sustained, high-margin growth.  

CloudifyOps | MIXIMO

Built with an AI-first approach, MIXIMO helps organizations understand their infrastructure and applications, map dependencies, and make migration decisions based on real utilization data rather than guesswork. Supporting AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform as both source and target environments, it enables both on-premises-to-cloud and multi-cloud transformation through one platform.

Sushanth Bellapu, Founder and CTO, CloudifyOps / MIXIMO, said, “The industry has long treated cloud migration as a logistics problem. MIXIMO reframes it as an intelligence problem. Built by engineers who have navigated large-scale transformations firsthand, MIXIMO applies AI to understand applications, dependencies, and modernisation opportunities before a single workload moves. The result is predictable outcomes, lower risk, and infrastructure that is truly cloud-native not just cloud-hosted.”

MIXIMO combines automated infrastructure and application discovery, portfolio assessment, dependency mapping, and AI-driven instance and service recommendations in one platform. Discovery supports agent-based, agentless, and repository-based approaches, enabling assessment at scale.

The platform supports three migration strategies: Rehost, Replatform, and Refactor, making it suitable for different cloud transformation journeys. Its tri-mode instance recommendations provide 1-to-1, cost-effective, and high-performance mapping based on actual source utilization. MIXIMO also automatically generates a visual and actionable End State Blueprint for individual workloads, helping teams plan their migration architecture with greater clarity.

“We are not entering the migration tooling market; we are creating the migration intelligence category,” said Vaitheeswaran Krishna Subramanian, CEO, CloudifyOps. “MIXIMO turns years of migration expertise into a platform, making intelligence-led migration available to any engineering team, at any scale.”

MIXIMO is designed for startups, SMBs, and enterprises across healthcare, BFSI, SaaS and technology, e-commerce, logistics, and manufacturing. For organisations with data sovereignty and compliance requirements particularly in BFSI and healthcare MIXIMO supports self-hosted and hybrid LLM deployment, ensuring sensitive infrastructure data remains within the organisation's own environment.

With MIXIMO, CloudifyOps aims to make cloud transformation more intelligent, predictable and accessible for businesses at every cloud maturity stage.

CloudifyOps is India's leading AI Transformation Partner, helping enterprises move from manual complexity to autonomy through AI, cloud, and intelligent operations. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Bengaluru, with offices in Chennai, Dubai, and the United States, CloudifyOps combines over a decade of mission-critical cloud engineering with purpose-built AI capabilities.

An AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and one of the few organisations in India to hold the AWS AI Services Competency across both Generative AI and Agentic AI, CloudifyOps serves businesses across BFSI, healthcare, SaaS, and enterprise technology sectors in India, the Middle East, and the United States. With a team of over 150 cloud and AI specialists, CloudifyOps delivers AI Transformation, Cloud Transformation and Managed Services.

For more information, cloudifyops.com and miximo.ai.

Padma Shri Sridhar Vembu with H.E. Ahmed Mir Hashim Khoori, Mr. M. F. Rawoof Ali, Dr. Ishari K. Ganesh, and Dr. Preethaa Ganesh during the inauguration of the VELS Thiruvanmiyur Campus

The campus was inaugurated by Padma Shri Sridhar Vembu, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of Zoho Corporation, in the presence of His Excellency Ahmed Mir Hashim Khoori, Member of the Federal National Council, UAE, and Board Member of the Emirates Airline Foundation, who attended as the Guest of Honour. The function was presided over by Dr. Ishari K. Ganesh, Founder-Chancellor, VELS Institute of Science, Technology & Advanced Studies (VISTAS), along with Dr. Preethaa Ganesh, Vice President, VELS Group of Institutions.

Dr. Ishari K. Ganesh Unveils VELS' Vision for Future-Ready Education
Welcoming the distinguished guests, Dr. Ishari K. Ganesh highlighted the remarkable contributions of Padma Shri Sridhar Vembu in advancing indigenous technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, and nation-building. He also acknowledged the outstanding leadership of His Excellency Ahmed Mir Hashim Khoori in strengthening educational, aviation, and international partnerships between India and the UAE.

Addressing the gathering, Dr. Ganesh emphasized that universities must continuously evolve to meet the demands of a rapidly changing technological landscape. He described the AI-Integrated Vertical University Campus as a smart, sustainable, and innovation-driven institution designed to nurture research excellence, entrepreneurship, interdisciplinary collaboration, and globally competent professionals.

Welcoming the gathering, Dr. Preethaa Ganesh, Vice President, VELS Group of Institutions, said, “Technology transforms every industry, higher education must also transform the way students learn, think, and prepare for the future. Guided by this philosophy, VELS has established India's First AI-Integrated Vertical University Campus, a campus designed not only for today's learners, but for tomorrow's leaders."

Dr. Preethaa Ganesh further stated that every aspect of the campus has been built with one purpose: to put students first. From AI-enabled classrooms and collaborative innovation hubs to industry-connected laboratories, digital learning environments, and world-class student amenities, every element has been thoughtfully designed to create the best possible learning experience.

She added that the vision behind the campus is not merely to create one of India's most technologically advanced university buildings, but to develop one of the country's finest learning ecosystems, one that nurtures graduates who are future-ready, globally competent, ethically grounded, and committed to making a meaningful impact on society.

Global Partnerships to Strengthen Industry Integration
A major highlight of the event was the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between VELS Institute of Science, Technology & Advanced Studies (VISTAS), Aspin Holding LLC Group, and MH Cockpit to establish a Flying School in the UAE. The partnership aims to promote collaboration in aviation education, pilot training, faculty exchange, internships, skill development, research, and international career opportunities for students.

VELS also announced that it will soon sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Zoho Corporation to collaborate in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, emerging technologies, research, innovation, entrepreneurship, digital skill development, and industry-academia initiatives.

A major highlight of the campus is its Industry–Academia Centres of Excellence, established in collaboration with Intel Unnati, TCS iON, Microsoft, and Oracle Academy, enabling students to gain hands-on experience in Artificial Intelligence, cloud computing, high-performance computing, and other emerging technologies. The curriculum emphasizes experiential learning through live projects, internships, research, startup incubation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and industry engagement to prepare graduates for the rapidly evolving global workforce.

Addressing the audience, His Excellency Ahmed Mir Hashim Khoori congratulated VELS on its remarkable growth and compared the institution's journey with the phenomenal expansion of Emirates Airline. He observed that India and the UAE continue to strengthen their relationship through education, aviation, technology, innovation, and economic cooperation.

Delivering the inaugural address, Padma Shri Sridhar Vembu appreciated the vision behind the new campus and emphasized the importance of building indigenous technologies. "The VELS Thiruvanmiyur Campus is a beautifully designed institution with excellent architecture. India must build technologies from the ground up—from atoms to bits—to remain globally competitive. We must aspire to build next-generation technologies and strengthen our innovation ecosystem. Zoho looks forward to collaborating with VELS in the near future," he said.

Following the inauguration, Sridhar Vembu engaged in an interactive session with VELS students on Artificial Intelligence, entrepreneurship, research, technology, rural innovation, and nation-building. He encouraged students to develop deep technical expertise, embrace lifelong learning, solve real-world challenges through innovation, and contribute meaningfully to India's technological advancement.

The inauguration of the VELS Thiruvanmiyur Campus marks another defining milestone in the institution's journey towards redefining higher education through Artificial Intelligence, innovation, industry collaboration, global partnerships, and cutting-edge technology. More than the inauguration of a new campus, it represents the beginning of a future-focused academic ecosystem where students are empowered to become innovators, entrepreneurs, researchers, and leaders capable of shaping the world of tomorrow.

To Apply : velsthiruvanmiyur.com

Speaking on the platform's full availability, Mr. Amit Gupta, Founder of EAZYPETITION LLC said, “As students, IT professional and family members of naturalized US Citizens navigate complex and repeated petition preparation for renewal of their USCIS petitions for many-many years to maintain their legal status and work authorization, eazyPetition makes it very seamless by offering one solution to store their all underlying documents and create new petition or use previous one to prepare new petition under 30 mins"

Preparing USCIS petitions often involves collecting information from multiple documents, including passports, visas, I-94 records, previous petitions, educational credentials, and employment records. The same information is frequently entered repeatedly across multiple USCIS forms, making the process time-consuming and increasing the risk of errors that can lead to Requests for Evidence (RFEs), delays, and additional legal costs.

Adding to this, Stephen D. Marino, Chair of the Board of Directors at EAZYSTAR SYSTEMS Inc., said, “The transition from a successful beta program to full availability marks an important milestone for eazyPetition. As demand for intelligent legal technology continues to grow, platforms that combine artificial intelligence with reliable workflow automation will play an increasingly important role in improving efficiency and consistency across USCIS petition preparation. We believe eazyPetition is well positioned to help individuals, employers, and legal professionals navigate complex USCIS processes with greater confidence.”

eazyPetition uses artificial intelligence to extract information from immigration documents and supporting evidence, enabling users to review, verify, and generate print-ready USCIS PDF petitions through a guided workflow. By automating repetitive data entry and streamlining document preparation, the platform enables each stakeholder involved in the petition process to complete their part of the workflow in less than 30 minutes. The platform has already been successfully used by the IT professionals in USA during its beta phase, helping simplify petition preparation while improving efficiency and accuracy.

The platform currently supports offline USCIS petition preparation, allowing completed petitions to be printed, signed, and submitted through existing USCIS filing processes. To help users navigate the immigration process, eazyPetition has also created a library of more than 200 educational YouTube tutorials covering petition preparation and filing workflows.

A key innovation behind eazyPetition is EPML (Evidence Process Markup Language), a proprietary framework developed to intelligently model immigration evidence and petition workflows. The technology enables the platform to intelligently process supporting documents, automate information extraction, and simplify the preparation of complex USCIS petitions.

Today, eazyPetition is being developed by a growing engineering team in India, leveraging the country's deep expertise in artificial intelligence, document intelligence, workflow automation, and legal technology to build next-generation solutions for U.S. immigration.

L to R: Gaurav Jain, Achintya Gupta and Piyush Agarwal

Unlike traditional datasets that rely on static job titles or company-level segmentation, Reo.Dev’s Developer Knowledge Graph maps engineers based on what they are actively building, the technologies they use, the projects they contribute to, and the signals they leave across the internet. The system unifies fragmented developer footprints into a continuously evolving intelligence layer that reflects real technical behavior rather than inferred roles.

Today, the Developer Knowledge Graph includes 100M+ engineers, 30,000+ technologies, and 250+ tech functions, built by aggregating and correlating data from sources such as GitHub, Stack Overflow, LinkedIn, X, and specialized technical datasets. This enables DevTool companies to move beyond outdated outbound models and instead target developers based on real-time technical context and intent.

At the core of the platform is a fundamentally new approach to B2B technical intelligence: instead of relying on titles like “backend engineer” or “platform architect,” Reo.Dev builds a living map of engineering activity, capturing what systems developers are building, what frameworks they are adopting, and what technical problems they are actively solving. This allows go-to-market teams to identify audiences with far greater precision and relevance.

“Building and selling into technical audiences has always been difficult because the right data simply didn’t exist in one place,” said Achintya Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of Reo.Dev. “For example, if you’re an observability platform, you don’t just want to reach engineers with certain titles, you want to reach the ones actively building in the environments you support. That level of clarity was missing. With the Developer Knowledge Graph, we’ve brought together signals from across GitHub, Stack Overflow, LinkedIn, X, and technical ecosystems to finally make that possible.”

Achintya added, “Today, we’re at over 100 million developer profiles mapped across 30,000 technologies and 250+ technical functions. And this is just the beginning—the graph deepens with every developer action, making it more accurate and more powerful over time. For companies selling into technical teams, this changes the probability of reaching the right audience strongly.”

The platform is designed to solve one of the most persistent challenges in technical go-to-market strategy: building accurate, high-intent audience lists. By understanding the technologies developers are using, the projects they are contributing to, and the problems they are solving, Reo.Dev enables companies to align outreach with real engineering context, whether that involves LLM infrastructure, observability, DevOps, or application performance optimization.

The announcement comes as part of “Launch Month” at Reo.Dev, with the Developer Knowledge Graph serving as the foundational layer for a broader suite of upcoming capabilities aimed at redefining how DevTool companies’ approach GTM intelligence.

Reo.Dev continues to position itself at the intersection of AI-native intent systems and developer-first go-to-market infrastructure. Founded in 2023 and backed by Heavybit, the platform is already trusted by over 100 leading DevTool companies worldwide.

As the company puts it, the goal is simple: to build a living universe of developers—one where every signal brings go-to-market teams closer to the right engineer, at the right time, with the right context.

What CTOs Think 2026: Scaling the agentic enterprise with confidence

The third edition of Akkodis' What CTOs Think report, What CTOs Think 2026: Scaling the agentic enterprise with confidence, features insights from 500 Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) as part of the Adecco Group's Business Leaders 2026 research of 2,000 C-suite executives, The human premium: Leadership beyond the algorithm. It shows that while AI investment continues to grow, organizations are constrained less by access to technology than by the complexity of integrating AI across enterprise systems, workflows and decision-making.

Agentic AI emerges as a defining enterprise trend

The research identifies agentic AI - systems capable of planning, decision-making and executing tasks - as the most impactful technology trend shaping organizations in 2026, cited by 40% of CTOs as a top driver of impact. This shift marks a transition from AI as a tool that supports work to one that actively participates in execution - introducing new requirements for governance, accountability and operating model design.

However, despite growing adoption, most organizations have yet to establish the structures needed to scale these systems effectively. More than half of CTOs (57%) report using AI to determine which tasks are best suited to humans versus machines, yet clarity around task allocation continues to limit progress.

Why organizations struggle to scale AI

The findings point to a clear shift: the challenge is no longer deploying AI, it is integrating it into how the enterprise operates. As organizations move beyond pilot programs, execution complexity increases across leadership alignment, governance and workforce trust:

• Only 44% of CTOs believe leadership teams have sufficient AI understanding

• Just 46% report established frameworks for responsible AI

• Only 36% express satisfaction with workforce trust levels

Persistent barriers cited by CTOs continue to limit progress:

• Lack of in-house technology skills (32%)

• Uncertainty around return on investment (31%)

• Lack of urgency at the business level (27%)

Together, these findings suggest that scaling AI is increasingly an operational challenge, not a technology constraint, requiring organizations to redesign how systems, processes and decision-making work together.

Digital transformation shifts from efficiency to innovation

The report also highlights a fundamental shift in how organizations define the value of digital transformation. For the first time, CTOs cite innovation, not efficiency, as the primary driver of digital investment, signaling a move from cost-focused optimization toward growth, differentiation and new business models.

As AI capabilities mature, the marginal gains from efficiency are diminishing, increasing the importance of innovation as a source of competitive advantage. While the shift is global, priorities vary by industry - from workforce development in aerospace to innovation acceleration in life sciences and resilience in energy - underscoring the need for sector-specific approaches to scaling AI.

AI is reshaping work, not eliminating it

Rather than driving widespread job loss, AI is fundamentally changing how work is structured at the level of skills and tasks:

• 50% of CTOs report changes in required skills

• 49% report shifts in day-to-day activities

• Only 21% report workforce reduction due to AI

This reinforces the need for organizations to redesign workflows and responsibilities to support a hybrid human-AI workforce.

"What we're seeing now is not a slowdown in AI adoption, but a moment of realism," said Jo Debecker, President & CEO of Akkodis. "Organizations are moving beyond experimentation and encountering the reality of scaling AI across complex environments. The challenge is no longer deploying AI, it's integrating it into how work gets done. The companies making progress are those redesigning their operating models, aligning technology, human expertise and governance to deliver consistent results."

From pilots to orchestration: Scaling AI requires a new operating model

The report identifies three emerging organizational approaches:

• Task Automators - using AI primarily for efficiency

• Pilot Operators - experimenting with AI but struggling to scale

• Enterprise Orchestrators - embedding AI into workflows and decision-making

Organizations that succeed are those that move beyond isolated pilots to orchestrate AI across systems, processes, and teams, integrating technology with human expertise to deliver measurable outcomes.

Access the full report here.

About Akkodis

Akkodis is a global digital engineering consulting company that enables organizations to innovate and accelerate by applying technology to redefine how processes and products are developed, powered and optimized. With deep expertise across AI, data, cloud, edge and software engineering, we offer best-in-class technology consultancy. Through our strong, scalable delivery models and specialized talent, we provide end-to-end solutions, from strategy and consulting through implementation. Our commitment to Akkodis Intelligence helps businesses connect the exponential power of technology with the irreplaceable strengths of human thinking and collaboration. Part of the Adecco Group and headquartered in Switzerland, Akkodis brings together 40,000 engineers and digital experts in over 30 countries, with services that span Consulting, Solutions and Academy. With deep experience across the world's major industries, Akkodis empowers businesses to solve complex challenges and achieve sustainable impact. akkodis.com | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | X

About the Adecco Group

The Adecco Group is the world's leading talent company. Our purpose is making the future work for everyone. Through our three global business units - Adecco, Akkodis and LHH - across 60 countries, we enable sustainable and lifelong employability for individuals, deliver digital and engineering solutions to power transformation and empower organisations to optimise their workforces. The Adecco Group leads by example and is committed to an inclusive culture, fostering sustainable employability, and supporting resilient economies and communities. The Adecco Group AG is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland (ISIN: CH0012138605) and listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange (ADEN). www.adeccogroup.com

(L-R) Chetan Walunj, Founder, Repos Energy; Piyush Goyal, Union Minister of Commerce and Industry; and Aditi Bhosale Walunj, Founder, Repos Energy, at VivaTech 2026, Paris
 

The moment carries significant weight. India is making its debut as AI Country Partner at VivaTech 2026, Europe’s largest technology and innovation summit, and is hosting its largest-ever national pavilion at the event. Repos Energy is among the 25 high-potential Indian startups curated by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Ministry of Commerce and Industry, to represent the country under the ‘Bharat Innovates’ theme, a platform that positions India as a global hub for deep-tech innovation.
 

A key agenda at the pavilion centred on how the Government of India, led by Shri Piyush Goyal, Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, intends to actively facilitate and accelerate the introduction of Autonomous Fuelling infrastructure across the country. The ministry’s commitment to enabling this next frontier of energy transition signals a decisive policy push that goes beyond participation at a global platform. For Repos Energy, this is a defining moment of alignment, one that validates the company’s long-standing conviction that autonomous, technology-driven fuelling is not a distant aspiration but an imminent reality for India.
 

The Autonomous Fuelling prototype on display integrates AI-based demand forecasting, IoT-enabled remote monitoring, robotic dispensing mechanisms, and frictionless digital payment infrastructure, designed to support both conventional fuels and emerging energy sources. The system envisions a future where fuelling stations operate with significantly reduced human intervention, contributing to operational efficiency, safety, and the broader decarbonisation agenda.
 

Speaking on India's commitment to introducing Autonomous Fuelling infrastructure, Shri Piyush Goyal, Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, said, “India’s vision for energy transition is not just about adoption, it is about building the infrastructure that defines the future. Autonomous Fuelling is a critical piece of that puzzle, and the Government of India, through the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, is committed to creating the right policy environment to introduce and scale this technology across the country. Startups like Repos Energy, who are building at the intersection of AI, IoT, and energy, are exactly the kind of innovators that will help India lead the global energy transition. VivaTech 2026 is a fitting platform to announce this intent to the world.”
 

Aditi Bhosale Walunj and Chetan Walunj, Founders, Repos Energy, showcase their Autonomous Fuelling Solution to Piyush Goyal at VivaTech 2026, Paris
 

Speaking at VivaTech Paris, Aditi Bhosale Walunj, Founder, Repos Energy, said, “Showcasing our Autonomous Fuelling vision here, on a day when India stands tall on the world stage, is a defining moment, not just for Repos Energy, but for every Indian entrepreneur who dares to build for the world. When we started in 2017, we never imagined it would bring us here. This is proof that when you build with conviction, the world takes notice.”
 

Chetan Walunj, Founder, Repos Energy, added, “The future of energy is autonomous, intelligent, and made in India. By combining AI, IoT, and robotics, we are not just reimagining fuel delivery, we are building the infrastructure that will power the world’s energy transition. This is Repos Energy’s commitment to Viksit Bharat, and beyond.”
 

For Repos Energy, the VivaTech platform represents more than an exhibition opportunity, it is a strategic inflection point. Founded in 2017 with the deceptively simple question 'What if fuel came to you?', the company has since built a network of 2,500+ fuelling partners and served 25,000+ businesses across India, while working directly with the Government of India to establish the doorstep fuel delivery policy framework. Backed by the late Shri Ratan Tata across two funding rounds, Repos Energy has steadily evolved from a last-mile logistics innovator into an AI-driven energy transition infrastructure company, and its VivaTech showcase is the most visible articulation of that pivot yet.
 

Repos Energy's selection under 'Bharat Innovates' and its presence at VivaTech 2026 positions it at the intersection of two of India's most consequential narratives: the global energy transition and India's emerging identity as a deep-tech exporter. The company aims to use the platform to advance strategic global partnerships and attract international interest in its Autonomous Fuelling infrastructure.
 

About Repos Energy
Founded in 2017 by Aditi Bhosale Walunj (Founder) and Chetan Walunj (Founder), Repos Energy is India’s pioneering AI-driven energy transition infrastructure and is on a mission to make all forms of energy accessible and efficient. With 2,500+ fuelling partners and 25,000+ businesses served across India, Repos Energy brings convenience, clarity, and control to nation-building organisations through technology, while doing its part for the planet. Backed by late Shri Ratan Tata, who invested in the company across two funding rounds, and having worked with the Government of India to establish the doorstep fuel delivery policy framework, Repos Energy stands for bringing a blend of innovation and excellence, to deliver value to consumers at large.

For more information, visit www.reposenergy.com.

Hero FinCorp has deployed Agentforce, Data 360, MuleSoft, Agentforce Sales, and Agentforce Service, to build a connected foundation for intelligent loan processing. With Agentforce, Hero FinCorp automates key steps across pre-sanctioning and post-sanctioning, including document extraction, application validation, PAN and Aadhaar verification, credit and bank checks, e-signature initiation, document processing, and loan disbursal — powering faster, more efficient lending at scale. Data 360 unifies Salesforce and external data sources to create a trusted foundation for automation, while MuleSoft connects government verification systems, financial institutions, and document repositories through API-led integrations. Agentforce Sales and Agentforce Service power the customer and operational workflows underpinning the lending journey. Together, these capabilities are helping Hero FinCorp streamline loan approvals and deliver better experiences for customers, dealers, and employees.

Hero FinCorp has achieved a 72% improvement in loan turnaround time for two-wheeler loan processing, with 92% of applications now going through Agentforce-enabled workflows. The company has also avoided 77% of Not In Good Order (NIGO) cases at the sales stage itself, helping reduce rework, minimise delays, and create a faster, smoother loan experience for customers and dealers. Today, the solution supports 6,461 dealers across India. These improvements are helping Hero FinCorp meet growing demand with greater agility, serve more customers, strengthen dealer relationships, and expand access to credit across India.

Commenting on the partnership, Mr. Abhimanyu Munjal, Managing Director & CEO of Hero FinCorp, shared, “At Hero FinCorp, we are leveraging AI, data and digital innovation to transform the way customers access credit. As we continue to scale our business and expand financial inclusion across India, enhancing speed, efficiency and customer experience through technology remains a strategic priority. Our collaboration with Salesforce supports this vision by helping streamline key stages of the lending lifecycle and significantly reduce turnaround times. This is an important step in our journey to build a more agile, data-driven and customer-centric lending platform that can serve customers and dealer partners at scale, while strengthening the foundation for sustained and responsible growth."

Mankiran Chowhan, Managing Director, Salesforce India, said, “As customer expectations continue to evolve and financial institutions look for new ways to deliver faster, more seamless experiences, AI is becoming a strategic enabler for the future of financial services. Hero FinCorp is at the forefront of this transformation, leveraging Agentforce, data, and automation to reimagine loan processing and unlock new levels of efficiency, scalability, and customer service. Their approach shows how organizations can apply trusted AI to modernize core business operations while staying focused on what matters most — serving customers better. We are proud to partner with Hero FinCorp as they continue to drive innovation and expand financial access across India.”

The collaboration builds on Hero FinCorp’s long-standing Salesforce foundation, with support from Salesforce Professional Services and Signature Success. After building and launching its first agent in just three weeks, Hero FinCorp is using Agentforce Builder to explore loan-processing agents for its business loans, loan against property and car loan teams, as well as a sales assistant agent to automate repetitive tasks for sales representatives. As Hero FinCorp expands its data and AI strategy, it is creating a trusted automation foundation to streamline operations, empower employees, and help more customers access financing.

About Hero FinCorp
Hero FinCorp is an Indian Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC) offering a diversified portfolio of lending solutions across Retail, MSME, and Corporate segments. Its product suite includes two-wheeler, car, home (through its subsidiary Hero Housing Finance Limited), and personal loans, along with business, SME, and corporate financing. 

The company has built an extensive national presence covering 18,600+ of India’s PIN codes, supported by a network of 4,200+ touchpoints. This wide distribution net enables Hero FinCorp to deliver financing solutions across 2,000+ cities, towns, and villages across India. 

Having served over 13 million customers, Hero FinCorp operates on an AI-led architecture that integrates underwriting, analytics, and marketing capabilities across the credit lifecycle. This technology backbone enables faster underwriting, lean operating model, and credit delivery at scale. 

As part of the Hero Group, Hero FinCorp draws on a legacy of trust, integrity, and long-term institution-building envisioned by the Hero Group’s Founder, Dr. Brijmohan Lall Munjal, while advancing responsible lending and building a future-ready financial services platform. For more information, visit: www.herofincorp.com.

About Salesforce
Salesforce helps organizations of any size become agentic enterprises - integrating humans, agents, apps, and data on a trusted, unified platform to unlock unprecedented growth and innovation.

Visit www.salesforce.com/in for more information.

Qualitest Becomes QualityAI: The Trusted Assurance and Engineering Partner Across Every Stage of Enterprise AI
 

Across every industry, companies are racing to adopt AI, and the pressure to demonstrate progress is rising. According to Deloitte's 2026 "State of AI in the Enterprise" report, the proportion of organizations expecting at least 40% of AI experiments to reach production is expected to more than double within six months. As AI moves from ambition to implementation, leaders need to prove that transformation is real, reliable, and effective. In a market crowded with AI claims, assurance is becoming the difference between AI momentum and AI washing.
 

"Every business wants to show it is moving fast on AI, but speed alone is not enough," said Andrew Duncan, CEO of QualityAI. "Leaders need evidence that AI is working safely, reliably, and effectively in the real world. QualityAI exists to give them that certainty, helping organizations move beyond AI claims and go live with confidence."
 

In regulated and high-trust industries, including financial services, health and life sciences, energy, utilities, and the public sector, the stakes are even higher. AI failure can create operational disruption, reputational damage, and loss of trust. As AI accelerates software development and decision-making, organizations need independent quality oversight that proves systems are ready for real-world use. That proof is becoming both a compliance imperative and a competitive differentiator.
 

Built on almost 30 years of software testing expertise, QualityAI operates across the entire quality assurance lifecycle, from early transformation planning through to go-live and post-launch optimization.
 

"Our heritage is in assurance, but our role today is much broader," Duncan said. "We work with organizations from the earliest stages of transformation, helping them define, design, engineer, test, and operate complex systems with greater certainty. That means supporting clients before launch, at go-live, and long after deployment."
 

QualityAI works with some of the world's largest technology companies developing AI models and helps enterprises embed AI into business-critical systems with greater assurance. Since 2019, it has implemented proprietary AI solutions that can accelerate software testing by up to six times, reducing the time required to validate and integrate technology across complex enterprise environments.
 

Duncan concluded, "The path to AI adoption can seem like uncharted territory, but it is familiar ground for QualityAI. We have spent almost 30 years helping enterprises trust the technology they depend on. As we look ahead, our role is clear: to help organizations design quality into the AI-powered systems that will define their future."

The Deloitte State of AI in the Enterprise report is available here: www.deloitte.com/uk/en/issues/generative-ai/state-of-ai-in-enterprise.html
 

About QualityAI

QualityAI is an AI-first quality engineering company helping enterprises deploy and scale complex systems with greater confidence. Operating across data, models, platforms, infrastructure, and operational environments, the company provides assurance and engineering expertise that helps organizations ensure systems perform reliably in real-world conditions.
 

Formerly Qualitest, QualityAI supports global enterprises across regulated and technology-driven industries, combining deep engineering heritage with AI-enabled delivery, operational assurance, and lifecycle expertise to help clients achieve certainty at go-live.

Unveiling ARIA in Mumbai: Wibmo's Agentic Risk Intelligence Assistant brings the power of AI to fraud, AML, KYC, and dispute operations

ARIA is designed to support risk teams at banks and PSPs, combining AI-driven analysis with human decision-making and accountability. This is highly relevant now, as digital payment fraud challenges becoming increasingly complex. With the sustained growth in the payments ecosystem, financial institutions are focused on improving operational risk efficiency while maintaining strong governance and oversight.

Early modelling shows ARIA achieving over 70% reduction in investigation time through agents acting in real-time, enabling teams to process significantly more cases per FTE per day. ARIA targets delivering recommendation accuracy close to 90%, designed to improve quality metrics across risk operations teams.

ARIA represents a fundamental shift in how financial institutions approach risk operations by introducing specialized AI agents that support data aggregation, analysis, and draft recommendations, while preserving human decision-making authority and governance controls at every critical juncture.

ARIA combines capabilities across investigation, decision support, and operational actioning. The platform gathers signals from transactions, risk models, customer and merchant history, linked transactions, and historical fraud patterns to automate data aggregation that typically consumes significant analyst bandwidth. Using frontier AI models, ARIA generates evidence-referenced verdicts, identifies emerging patterns through multi-signal reasoning, and provides transparent, auditable recommendations. The platform also enables SOP-driven resolutions, customer and merchant communications, reduction of false alerts, and proactive defence mechanisms against emerging anomalies.

Shailesh Paul, CEO, Wibmo, said, “As fraud becomes more sophisticated and regulatory expectations continue to evolve, risk operations teams must manage growing complexity with limited resources. ARIA is designed to help institutions scale intelligently by combining the speed and analytical capabilities of AI with the judgment, oversight, and accountability of human expertise. While AI agents assist with data analysis and recommendations, every critical decision continues to remain firmly under human control."

Unlike fully autonomous AI systems, ARIA is built with a governance-first architecture designed for enterprise financial institutions. Every recommendation continues to flow through existing approval mechanisms without autonomous production actions, while all analyses are supported by transparent reasoning chains and comprehensive audit trails. The platform brings together specialized agents across fraud, AML, KYC, and disputes within a unified framework, alongside replayable audits and complete operational provenance for every agent action.

The launch event brought together more than 50 senior leaders from banks, fintechs, payment networks, and technology organizations to discuss evolving challenges in digital payment security and the future of AI-led fraud prevention. Speakers from PayU, NPCI Bharat Billpay, Visa, Mastercard, Flipkart, CSB Bank, Jio Payment Solutions, and Network International participated in discussions around acquiring fraud risk management, authentication technologies, and risk-based decisioning.

About Wibmo

Wibmo, a PayU company, operates across entities in India, the US, and Indonesia. As a global full-stack PayTech company and an industry leader in payment security and digital payments in emerging markets, Wibmo stands out for its innovation and impact.

In addition to being India's largest authentication service provider in one of the leading digital payment markets globally, Wibmo offers comprehensive fraud and risk management solutions, digital financial services, prepaid solutions, and a broad range of merchant-acquiring services.

Learn more at: wibmo.com.

The entry places NeoSapien in one of the world's largest and most competitive consumer technology markets, where demand for AI-powered productivity and personal intelligence tools continues to grow. By launching through Amazon, the company gains access to a broad consumer base while accelerating awareness, adoption, and distribution in a market that is expected to play a central role in its long-term growth strategy.

At the centre of the expansion is Neo 1, India's first AI-native wearable, powered by NeoSapien's proprietary Second Brain Operating System. Designed to help users capture conversations, organise information, and access contextual assistance throughout the day, the device transforms real-world interactions into structured, actionable insights through an ambient AI experience.

India’s first AI wearable launches in the US, helping you remember what matters from real conversations so nothing is forgotten, Now available on Amazon US

Neo 1 will be available in the United States at a price point of USD 189. The pricing reflects NeoSapien's conviction that Indian-built AI products can compete in premium global markets on innovation, product experience, design, and trust - not cost alone.

The launch also reflects a broader shift in India's technology ecosystem. For decades, India has been recognised as a major market for global technology products and a source of engineering talent. NeoSapien's US entry signals the next phase of that evolution - one where Indian companies are increasingly building proprietary technology, creating intellectual property, and exporting products to international markets.

Traditionally, AI platforms and products have flowed from the United States to India and other global markets. NeoSapien's launch reverses that narrative, bringing an AI product conceived, built, and commercialised in India directly to American consumers. It highlights the growing maturity of India's AI ecosystem and the increasing ability of Indian startups to compete in premium global markets.

“India has often been associated with technology talent and cost-efficient execution. We believe the next chapter is very different: Indian companies building premium, proprietary products that can stand on their own in the world’s most competitive markets. Neo 1’s US launch at USD 189 reflects that conviction. This is not a value-led entry into the market; it is a premium AI product built from India for global consumers,” said Dhananjay Yadav, Co-founder of NeoSapien.

As AI moves from experimentation to everyday adoption, NeoSapien is focused on building products that help people think, remember, organise, and work more effectively. Its US launch marks an important step in the company's evolution into a global AI brand while reinforcing India's growing role in shaping the future of AI products.

About NeoSapien

Founded in 2024 by Aryan Yadav and Dhananjay, NeoSapien is a next-generation AI company shaping the future of wearable intelligence. The brand’s flagship innovation, Neo 1, is India’s first AI-native wearable, designed to transform everyday conversations into actionable insights. NeoSapien is building a new category in personal technology - one that blends adaptive intelligence with human intuition. With its proprietary Second Brain OS and a privacy-first approach, NeoSapien is on a mission to make 'Second Brain' technology a global standard, redefining how people think, work, and live in the age of AI.

To know more about the brand, please visit: Website | Instagram

Industry leaders and marketing executives at INDEX'26 New York, Pepper's summit focused on the future of AI-driven search and brand discovery

That was the ground truth at INDEX'26 New York, hosted by Pepper on May 27. More than 200 CMOs, VPs of Marketing, growth leaders, investors, and technology builders convened for the New York edition of what Pepper bills as the world's first The GEO Growth Summit - a forum built not to debate whether generative AI is disrupting search, but to determine what winning looks like on the other side of that disruption.

The results were unambiguous. Across every conversation - from the boardroom to the brand team - the same inflection point kept surfacing: organic discovery has been structurally rewired, and the strategies that drove growth for the past decade are losing their footing fast. CAC is climbing. Traditional SEO signals are weakening. Buyer journeys now fracture across seven or more touchpoints before a decision is made. And through all of it, AI models are forming opinions about brands - from reviews, citations, third-party content, and web authority - long before a human ever enters a search bar.

"INDEX was created to bring together operators who are actively rethinking how growth works in a world where AI has become the primary interface for discovery. Search is no longer about ranking pages - it is about being retrieved, cited, and trusted by AI systems. INDEX'26 is where leaders come together to understand this shift and build practical strategies to win in the new era," said Anirudh Singla, Co-Founder & CEO, Pepper.

The urgency extended well beyond the marketing function. Investors and board members, as surfaced in one of the day's most candid conversations, are already asking their portfolio companies about AI search visibility - often without the CMO in the room. For enterprise leadership teams, the message was pointed: Generative Engine Optimization is no longer a content team initiative. It has become a business continuity question.

That reality landed differently for regulated industries. In financial services, the stakes of AI getting it wrong go beyond brand damage. A misattributed claim, a hallucinated product detail, an AI-generated answer that contradicts compliance policy - these are not PR problems. They are regulatory ones. Leaders from DTCC and Arbor Realty Trust gave texture to what it means to navigate brand authority in an environment where no single team controls what an AI says about you.

"I think of myself as much more of an operations and architect of the department than a traditional marketer. We've gone from Chief Marketing Officer to Chief Architect," said Lauren Wagner Boyman, CMO, KPMG US.

The CMO role itself was on trial. Lauren Wagner Boyman of KPMG US and Drew Neisser of CMO Huddles - drawing on data from more than 600 CMO conversations - made the case that the function has been permanently restructured. Speed, agility, and content efficiency have displaced traditional brand stewardship as the core mandate. Consumer brand leaders from Uber, Unilever, Major League Soccer, and Samsung Ads confirmed the same pattern from a different angle: when AI compresses buyer choice to a single recommendation, the brand that wins is the one the model has learned to trust, not the one with the biggest media budget.

"The physical shelf had 100 options. E-commerce became endless but we shop above the fold - so 100 became 5. AI-led search is about to compress 5 into 1. You want to be that one - every time, in every platform," said Deepak Subramanian, Global VP Marketing, Unilever.

Pepper used the summit to unveil Atlas, its agentic OS for organic growth - positioned not as a GEO tool but as an outcome engine built to own traffic, citations, velocity, and pipeline in the AI era. Guy Yalif of Webflow separately debuted the AEO Maturity Model, grounded in data from millions of B2B websites, giving attendees a diagnostic framework to benchmark where their organizations actually stand. Practitioners from RocketReach, Optimizely, Stacker, and G2 closed the day with a ground-level view of what is working inside the GEO stack right now.

INDEX'26 New York follows the sold-out San Francisco edition in April, which drew more than 200 senior leaders from Salesforce, NVIDIA, Intel, Snowflake, Gong, and Demandbase. Future editions of the summit are planned for additional markets.

Rodic Consultant Team at Digital Construction Week London 2026

Built on years of infrastructure advisory experience across roads, railways, bridges, urban systems, and public infrastructure, Rodic’s AI ecosystem has been purpose-built to address the sector's most persistent challenges: fragmented workflows, disconnected data, and delayed decision-making across the project lifecycle. Designed as a secure, sovereign, and air-gapped platform, the ecosystem enables infrastructure organisations to harness AI while maintaining complete control over critical project and operational data.

Digital Construction Week (DCW) London is one of the world's leading events dedicated to digital innovation in the built environment. Bringing together industry leaders, policymakers, technology innovators, contractors, consultants, and asset owners from across the globe, the event serves as a platform for exploring emerging technologies, AI, digital delivery, BIM, and the future of infrastructure and construction.

At the event, Rodic Consultants will demonstrate six interconnected AI systems operating on a unified infrastructure intelligence stack. Together, these systems create a continuous flow of intelligence from project planning and field operations to executive decision-making and long-term asset resilience.

Rodic's Integrated AI Ecosystem for Infrastructure Delivery

• Planning Agent – Accelerates planning, feasibility assessments, and DPR preparation through structured infrastructure intelligence, enabling faster and more informed project development.

• Daily Progress Agent – Transforms field reporting by eliminating manual re-keying and enabling seamless field-to-boardroom visibility of project performance.

• Visual Monitoring Agent – Provides corridor-scale monitoring across project sites and assets through AI-enabled visual intelligence.

• Risk & Compliance Agent – Delivers audit-ready insights across contracts, compliance obligations, risk registers, and governance processes.

• Defect Management Agent – Enables AI-led identification, tracking, and resolution of infrastructure defects.

• AICIP (AI Climate Intelligence Platform) – Provides city-scale climate forecasting, resilience assessment, and climate-risk intelligence to support future-ready infrastructure planning.

Unlike standalone AI tools, Rodic's platform has been designed as a unified operating layer for infrastructure delivery. Its sovereign architecture allows deployment within highly secure environments where data privacy, auditability, regulatory compliance, and operational reliability are critical requirements.

"Infrastructure delivery is entering a new era where intelligence will become as important as engineering itself. Across the world, project owners and infrastructure agencies are looking for ways to improve productivity, strengthen governance, enhance resilience, and make faster decisions in increasingly complex environments. Our AI ecosystem has been built from decades of real-world infrastructure experience, designed specifically for the realities of project delivery and eagerly sought after by project proponents. What we are presenting at DCW is not simply a collection of AI tools, but a unified intelligence layer that connects planning, monitoring, compliance, quality assurance, and climate resilience into one secure operating ecosystem." said Shri. N.N Sinha (Managing Director- Rodic Digital And Advisory).

For Rodic Consultants, digital transformation transcends technology adoption. It represents a shift towards intelligent infrastructure delivery models where data, engineering expertise, and AI work together to improve project outcomes, strengthen institutional capabilities, and create more resilient and sustainable infrastructure systems.

The company's participation at Digital Construction Week London 2026 reflects its broader commitment to advancing the future of infrastructure delivery through secure, scalable, and purpose-built AI solutions that address the unique challenges of governments, infrastructure agencies, and project owners worldwide.

EC-Council’s ADG Framework enables secure, governed AI design through structured controls and accountability

Developed with input from practitioners and advisory board members across organizations including Citi, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, KPMG, Deloitte, NTT Data, GE Healthcare, GlobalLogic, Prudential and Salesforce, the ADG Framework gives enterprises a unified operating model; three pillars, 12 minimum controls, and nine governance surfaces. The framework is designed to align with the EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001, and the NIST AI RMF.

The urgency around AI governance is rising as organizations and enterprises accelerate AI adoption across business operations. Global AI spending is projected to reach $2.5 trillion in 2026, reflecting the speed and scale of enterprise deployment. Yet governance maturity remains critically low: industry findings show that only 1% of leaders believe their AI governance capabilities have reached maturity, while 78% of executives say they would not feel confident in passing an AI governance audit within the next 90 days.

The widening gap between AI acceleration and AI accountability is increasing pressure on organizations to address technical, societal, operational, and systemic AI risk at the same time. Many are deploying increasingly autonomous AI systems while still relying on fragmented policies, outdated security models, and governance structures that struggle under real-world operating pressure.

The ADG Framework has been developed to close this gap. More than a theoretical governance model, ADG is a practitioner-led execution framework engineered for real-world deployment. Designed by professionals actively managing AI risk in some of the world’s most complex operating environments, the framework establishes enforceable minimum controls, operational validation standards, governance surfaces, implementation overlays, and accountability mechanisms that organizations can apply across AI systems, agentic AI environments, multi-model architectures, and large language model ecosystems.

“Most organizations approached AI with a deploy-first mindset, prioritizing speed while governance and security struggled to keep pace,” said Jay Bavisi, Group President, EC-Council. “The result is that organizations are now scaling AI systems faster than they can securely govern them. The ADG Framework was developed to restore operational discipline, establish accountability, and help organizations operationalize AI responsibly before governance failures become systemic business liabilities.”

AI Without Guardrails Is a Business Risk

The ADG Framework is organized around three deeply integrated operational functions designed to create a complete governance life cycle for modern AI systems:

Adopt

Helps organizations align AI deployment with business objectives, operational readiness, workforce capability, and implementation accountability.

Defend

Focuses on securing AI systems against evolving threats including prompt injection, adversarial manipulation, model exploitation, data poisoning, and AI supply chain compromise.

Govern

Embeds oversight, auditability, governance accountability, and risk management into AI systems from deployment through enterprise-scale operations.

Together, the framework introduces 12 minimum controls, nine governance surfaces, nine deployment overlays, and three autonomy tiers covering technical, societal, operational, and systemic AI risk domains. Every control references major global standards and frameworks including the EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI RMF, OWASP Top 10 for LLM and Agentic AI, and MITRE ATLAS, helping organizations strengthen governance maturity while reducing compliance fragmentation.

AI Readiness Self-Assessment Tool Introduces Operational Visibility

Alongside the framework, EC-Council has launched a free AI Readiness Self-Assessment Tool to help organizations evaluate their governance posture before vulnerabilities emerge at scale.

The tool enables organizations to measure AI maturity across governance readiness, implementation discipline, operational resilience, security posture, and accountability structures while mapping findings into a prioritized implementation roadmap. For boards, regulators, and executive leadership teams facing growing scrutiny around AI governance, the tool provides an evidence-based view of organizational AI exposure and governance preparedness.

“The framework’s three pillars reflect the cross-functional model that leading AI organizations like Salesforce have used to scale AI responsibly. It establishes a solid, replicable blueprint across any industry, deployment model, or regulatory environment.” said Kathy Baxter, Principal Architect, VP of Responsible AI & Tech at Salesforce, AI Advisory Board Member, and Contributor to the ADG Framework.

New AI Certifications Aligned to the ADG Framework

To support implementation of the framework, EC-Council has also introduced three new AI certifications aligned with the ADG operating model. The certifications are designed to help organizations build workforce capabilities around AI governance, offensive AI security, and responsible AI implementation.

The certifications include:

• Certified AI Program Manager (CAIPM)

• Certified Offensive AI Security Professional (COASP)

• Certified Responsible AI Governance and Ethics Professional (CRAGE)

The programs help practitioners evaluate, test, secure, and govern AI systems across modern operating environments.

“The ADG Framework is the operating model that enterprise AI has been missing. It turns abstract standards into auditable practices and resolves the real tension between delivery speed and safety. For a board, that is the difference between scaling a fleet of agents with confidence and taking a leap of faith.” said Lewis V. Adams, VP, Enterprise AI & Capital Productivity Transformation at Citi, AI Advisory Board Member, and Contributor to the ADG Framework.

Open, Community-Driven, and Built to Scale

The ADG Framework is designed as an open, community-driven initiative that organizations can adopt freely, without licensing fees or vendor lock-in. It is structured to evolve alongside AI technologies while enabling practitioners, enterprises, governance leaders, and security teams to contribute to the continued development of operational AI governance standards.

“The industry doesn’t lack AI frameworks; it lacks operational clarity. The ADG framework places a strong emphasis on AI security, particularly in addressing adversarial risks and model vulnerabilities, while also mapping broader governance and regulatory expectations. What’s especially valuable is its inclusion of measurable indicators, which helps organizations move from high-level principles to more actionable and trackable AI risk management as they transition into real-world deployment.” said ShanShan Pa, Global Head of AI & Data Governance at GlobalLogic, AI Advisory Board Member, and Contributor to the ADG Framework.

The ADG AI Framework, AI Readiness Self-Assessment Tool, implementation guidance, and supporting certification programs are now available through EC-Council Official Website.

About EC-Council

EC-Council is the creator of the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) program and a leader in cybersecurity education. Founded in 2001, EC-Council’s mission is to provide high-quality training and certifications for cybersecurity professionals to keep organizations safe from cyber threats.

EC-Council offers over 200 certifications and degrees in various cybersecurity domains, including forensics, security analysis, threat intelligence, and information security.

An ISO/IEC 17024-accredited organization, EC-Council has certified over 400,000 professionals worldwide and serves clients ranging from government agencies to Fortune 100 companies. EC-Council is the gold standard in cybersecurity certification, trusted by the U.S. Department of Defense, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and leading global corporations.

The APMEA Direct Booking Friction Report 2026

The report maps, for the first time, exactly where and why hotels across APMEA are losing direct bookings before a guest ever reaches checkout, uncovering friction across visibility, pricing, booking experience, and guest trust. The findings also reveal sharp regional differences in digital maturity, pricing discipline, and booking experience readiness across APMEA markets.

What the Audit Found

• Before the journey begins: Visibility: 42% of hotels don't appear on Page 1 for unbranded search queries. Nearly half the market is invisible to high-intent travelers before consideration even starts.

• At the comparison stage: Reputation and rates: 63% of properties list higher rates on their own website than on OTAs, actively losing guests to third-party platforms on price.

• At the booking stage: Speed and experience: 72% of hotel websites fail the 3-second load benchmark. Average mobile load times reach 4.1 seconds. When a guest does persist, they face an average of 4 clicks to confirm a reservation against a global benchmark of 3. Every additional second and every additional click is a door left open for abandonment.

• At the commitment stage: Trust and transparency: 44% of hotels withhold taxes and fees until the final payment screen, the single largest checkout abandonment trigger in the study. And 1 in 3 properties expose guests to a URL or domain disconnect between their website and booking engine, introducing security anxiety at the precise moment trust is most fragile. 

“The findings of this report highlight a growing gap between where guests are actually being lost. The direct booking journey has become too fragmented across search, pricing, booking engine, and guest experience, while travelers increasingly expect a seamless experience across every touchpoint. What makes this moment urgent is that AI search is changing the rules of visibility faster than most hotels realize. Brands moving to unified platforms to fix these systematic gaps are already seeing up to 5X growth in direct revenue within 90 days, while hotels operating disconnected systems risk becoming invisible before the booking journey even begins,” said Ashish Sikka, Business Head - UNO Platforms, RateGain. 

The report also found significant regional variation across APMEA markets. Singapore and Thailand set the regional benchmark with average load times of 2.9 seconds and the strongest direct price parity discipline. The Maldives recorded the highest friction scores across speed, OTA bundle dominance, and pricing opacity.

The Direct Booking Friction Report 2026 is available for free download at www.uno.rategain.com/direct-booking-friction-report-apmea-2026. Benchmark your property against other hotels and identify which friction points are costing you the most.

Report Methodology
The Direct Booking Friction Report 2026 evaluated booking journeys across 65 hotel properties in India, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Maldives, analyzing visibility, pricing parity, website performance, booking flow efficiency, and checkout transparency benchmarks across the direct booking journey.

About RateGain
RateGain Travel Technologies Limited is a global provider of AI-powered SaaS solutions for travel and hospitality, working with 13,000+ customers and 700+ partners across 160+ countries. RateGain helps travel and hospitality businesses accelerate revenue generation through acquisition, retention, and wallet share expansion.

Today, RateGain is one of the world’s largest processors of electronic transactions, price points, and travel intent data, enabling revenue management, distribution, and marketing teams across hotels, airlines, destination marketing organizations, online travel agents, metasearch companies, package providers, car rentals, travel management companies, cruises, and ferries to drive better business outcomes.

Founded in 2004 and headquartered in India, RateGain works with 33 of the Top 40 Hotel Chains, 4 of the Top 5 Airlines, 7 of the Top 10 Car Rental companies, and all leading DMOs, OTAs, and metasearch platforms, including 25 Global Fortune 500 companies, unlocking new revenue every day.