Indian GCC Leaders Who Scaled AI From Pilots to Production

According to Deloitte’s ‘State of AI in the Enterprise 2026’ report, organisations globally are transitioning from AI experimentation into structured, strategic scaling. Surveying more than 3,200 C-suite and senior business leaders, the research found that enterprises have rapidly broadened access to AI across workforces and are increasingly embedding AI into core operations, not just pilot projects. 

While most companies still navigate the gap between ambition and realisation, the “untapped edge” of AI potential—adoption of autonomous systems like agentic and physical AI—is accelerating, setting the stage for a leap in operational transformation over the next two years. 

Here are seven Indian global capability centres (GCC) leaders who not only adopted AI first, but also integrated it into business models, governance, infrastructure, and talent strategies.

Sindhu Gangadharan - MD, SAP Labs India; head, customer innovation services, SAP; chairperson, Nasscom

Under Sindhu Gangadharan’s leadership, SAP Labs India has become a cornerstone of SAP’s global AI and data strategy, driving two of its most important innovations—SAP Joule and the SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC). 

Joule, SAP’s generative AI assistant, is reshaping how enterprises interact with software through natural language and intelligent automation, with both its core engine and user experience layer developed in India. 

Engineering teams at SAP Labs India combined deep enterprise resource planning, HR, procurement, and supply-chain expertise to evolve Joule from early pilots into a production-grade AI copilot used across real enterprise workflows, with a significant share of its AI agents and skills built in India.

In parallel, SAP BDC, developed over four years from concept to a production-ready platform, overhauls enterprise data management by unifying SAP and non-SAP data into a single, AI-ready foundation. 

With a large portion of the global BDC engineering team based in India, SAP Labs India’s BDC platform is designed to deliver semantically rich data, pre-built analytics, and integration with SAP Datasphere, Databricks, and third-party tools—already driving up to 30% efficiency gains by reducing manual data work and enabling AI-driven insights. 

Gangadharan has been associated with SAP for over 26 years. She also serves as an independent director at Siemens, and is currently the president of Indo-German Chamber of Commerce.

Ajeya Motaganahalli, VP of engineering and MD, Pure Storage

Ajeya Motaganahalli, VP of engineering and MD, India R&D at data management solutions company Pure Storage, has incubated a dedicated generative AI team in India. This India-based team operates as a focused innovation engine, continuously exploring how AI systems can be made faster, more efficient, more scalable, and significantly more cost-effective for enterprise customers. 

At the heart of this effort is Pure Storage’s India R&D and GCC, which has emerged as a central hub for the company’s enterprise AI strategy. The centre is spearheading multiple high-impact initiatives that sit at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, and performance engineering. 

One of the most significant innovations is the Pure Key-Value Accelerator (KVA)—a protocol-agnostic, high-performance key-value caching solution specifically designed to optimise LLM inference. By accelerating data access and reducing latency in AI workloads, KVA directly addresses one of the biggest bottlenecks in enterprise AI deployment—inference cost and performance at scale.

Before working at Pure Storage India, Motaganahalli led teams at Honeywell Technology to deliver solutions in IoT, healthcare, global tracking, and warehouse automation. He was also part of the leadership team at NetApp, and worked at EMC India in the 2000s.

Ruchika Panesar, country head - India and chief digital and information officer, Group Functions, NatWest Group

At NatWest Group, India teams have evolved from a delivery centre into a strategic innovation hub, embedding AI as an operating fabric across the organisation.

Under Panesar’s leadership, AI now plays a critical role in delivering customer experience. This is exemplified by the evolution of NatWest’s chatbot Cora, where GenAI pilots launched in June 2024 have expanded into production across more than 15 customer journeys, achieving containment rates of ~70% compared to ~40% on classic Cora. 

At the platform level, NatWest Group in India leads the development of global AI and data foundations such as Kepler, an AWS-based AI platform built in India for enterprise-wide data and analytics.

Responsible AI scaling is also a leadership priority, reflected in an enterprise-first approach that blends systems intelligence with human judgement—empowering more than 60,000 employees globally with access to Copilot and NatWest’s internal LLM tool, Aiden. 

AI is already driving measurable operational impact at NatWest, from fraud detection systems assisting over 7,000 colleagues with significant productivity gains, to developer transformation, where more than 8,000 software engineers across the bank now write code with AI assistants, up from 3,000 in January 2025.

Prior to NatWest, Panesar spent 23 years at American Express, leading its martech transformation and driving digital data, AI and ML solutions.

Santosh Kumar, managing director at Texas Instruments India

Texas Instruments (TI) was the first global technology company to establish an R&D centre in Bengaluru, and over the past three decades, its India centre has evolved into one of TI’s most critical global innovation hubs.

Today, India is deeply embedded in TI’s global R&D and product strategy, with engineers in the country driving end-to-end product development across a wide spectrum of domains—from sustainable energy and energy-efficient systems to industrial, automotive, communications, personal electronics, medical devices, and space technology. 

Under the leadership of Kumar, the India organisation is also advancing next-generation semiconductor innovation through Gallium Nitride (GaN) solutions, which are transforming power electronics use cases—such as two-wheeler chargers that can be reduced in size by nearly one-third compared to conventional technologies, while significantly lowering power consumption and heat generation due to reduced leakage—demonstrating how India-led R&D is delivering tangible, real-world impact at scale.

Pankaj Vyas, CEO and MD of Siemens Technology and Services

Siemens Technology and Services (STS), the global capability centre of Siemens AG, has emerged as a major driver of the company’s worldwide innovation agenda under the leadership of Pankaj Vyas, CEO and MD of STS. 

Indian teams now play a central role in shaping Siemens’ global technology platforms, delivering solutions that address some of the most critical enterprise and sustainability challenges. 

Among the most significant contributions is SiGreen, a cloud-based platform largely developed in India that enables supply chain leaders to track carbon footprints and embed sustainability across operations—an innovation that has earned Siemens’ prestigious Werner von Siemens Awards. 

The India teams have also built Circularity 360, a platform that integrates sustainability into product design itself by optimising material and component selection from the earliest stages.

Prior to Siemens, Vyas had stints at GE Healthcare, Telit India, and GainSpan Systems India.