AI Appreciation Day 2026: Trust and infrastructure emerge as the next frontier for AI, say experts

Tushar Agnihotri, CEO, Route Mobile

Artificial Intelligence is no longer a technology conversation; it has become a boardroom imperative. Business leaders today are looking beyond experimentation and focusing on how AI can fundamentally improve decision making, customer engagement and long-term competitiveness. The next phase of AI adoption will be defined by organisations that seamlessly embed intelligence into everyday business interactions, enabling faster decisions, more meaningful customer experiences and greater operational agility.

In communications, AI has the potential to transform every interaction into one that is contextual, proactive and personalised, allowing enterprises to build stronger relationships at scale while maintaining trust and authenticity. However, sustainable value will come not from adopting AI for its own sake, but from deploying it responsibly with robust governance, transparency and human oversight.

As AI continues to reshape industries, leadership will be defined by those who can translate technological innovation into measurable business outcomes while keeping customer trust at the centre of every decision. AI Appreciation Day is a reminder that the greatest impact of AI will not be the intelligence of the technology itself, but the intelligence with which organisations choose to apply it.

Unnatie Tussar, Founder & CEO, Ant Systemz

AI Appreciation Day is a reminder that the true value of artificial intelligence lies not just in technological advancement, but in its ability to solve real-world challenges responsibly and at scale. AI is no longer just about automating tasks; it is becoming the foundation for how businesses create, communicate, and scale globally. At Ant Systemz, we see AI as an enabler that amplifies human creativity rather than replacing it. The real breakthrough lies in making AI context-aware, culturally intelligent, and capable of preserving intent across languages. As enterprises increasingly serve multilingual audiences, language intelligence will become a strategic differentiator. The future of AI will be defined not just by how fast it generates content, but by how responsibly, accurately, and authentically it connects people across cultures and geographies.

Krupali Raval, Director - Head of HR, Hexagon R&D

AI has moved beyond the domain of technologists. Today, it is reshaping how every business function operates. From HR and finance to marketing, sales, and engineering, AI is becoming an integral part of everyday work. But in my view, AI literacy is not about mastering every new tool or writing the perfect prompt. In fact, AI will be most valuable in the hands of people who pair it with critical thinking, creativity, empathy, and good judgment. That's why organisations need to make AI learning a part of everyday work, not just a one-time training session. This is the approach we've been encouraging in Hexagon R&D. During our recent hackathon, we encouraged teams to use AI in meaningful ways. It wasn't just about adopting AI; it was about making it a natural part of how people think, innovate, and solve problems.

As both an HR leader and a parent, I see this shift every day. My six-year-old doesn't type to search on YouTube; she simply speaks to it. Asking Alexa questions is second nature to her. For this generation, interacting with AI isn't something they have learned; it's how they have grown up. That changes how they will approach work. They won't see AI as a new technology to adopt; they'll expect it to be part of every tool and every workflow. The real challenge isn't preparing this generation for AI; it's preparing organisations for a workforce that expects AI to be embedded into the way work gets done. As employers, our responsibility is to create workplaces where AI helps people do their best work, while also developing the critical thinking, ethics, and judgment that AI cannot replace.

Prashant, COO & Co-founder, LeadSquared

AI Appreciation Day is an opportunity to recognize how artificial intelligence is evolving from a layer of insight into a driver of real business execution. Traditionally, CRM systems helped organizations understand past interactions. Today, AI is transforming them into systems of execution that can interpret customer intent, recommend the next best action, and automate engagement across the lifecycle. The real shift is not just in intelligence, but in the ability to act on it in real time.

This transformation is becoming increasingly industry specific. In BFSI, AI is accelerating lead qualification, onboarding, and customer servicing. In healthcare, it is streamlining patient acquisition, appointment management, and care coordination. Educational institutions are using AI to personalize enrolment journeys and engage prospective students at scale, while manufacturers are improving distributor management, channel visibility, and field force productivity. Across these sectors, the common thread is AI's ability to translate customer signals into timely, contextual action rather than simply presenting another layer of analytics. Increasingly, this begins with AI that can listen and understand — analyzing conversations across voice, calls, and email to capture intent, sentiment, and commitments that would otherwise be lost. Capabilities such as voice AI, conversational intelligence, and AI agents then act on that understanding: engaging customers across voice and digital channels, automating routine interactions, and ensuring consistent follow-ups, while freeing human teams to focus on the decisions that require expertise and empathy.

The organizations that benefit most will be those where AI is not an add-on but built into the workflows where customer engagement actually happens. As AI becomes embedded into everyday work, its success will be defined not by the sophistication of the models alone, but by the outcomes it delivers. The AI worth appreciating is responsible, context-aware, and seamlessly integrated into how businesses engage customers, empower teams, and drive growth.

Brathaban Karuppaiah, Country General Manager, SBM Offshore

Artificial intelligence is transforming how industries tackle complexity, turning data into actionable insights that enable faster, better-informed decisions. In the offshore energy sector, where safety, reliability and operational excellence are paramount, AI, robotics and digital technologies are reshaping how we design, operate and continuously improve offshore assets.

At SBM Offshore, we combine AI with deep operational expertise to optimize fleet performance, enhance asset integrity, strengthen decision-making and maximize uptime across our FPSO fleet. Supported by our standardized Fast4Ward® approach and digital capabilities, including predictive analytics and fleet-wide learning, we continuously improve reliability, operational efficiency and lifecycle performance. Robotics and remote technologies further enhance safety by reducing personnel exposure in high-risk environments, while lower-carbon innovations help us advance more sustainable operations.

The greatest value of AI lies in amplifying human expertise, not replacing it. As these technologies evolve, we remain committed to deploying them responsibly, with strong governance, transparency and an unwavering focus on safety. By combining standardized execution, intelligent technologies and the ingenuity of our people, we are building future-ready offshore solutions that deliver lasting value for our customers while supporting the broader energy transition.

Gaur Dattatreya, Chief Executive Officer, Bosch Software and Digital Solutions (Bosch SDS)

AI Appreciation Day is an opportunity to recognize how artificial intelligence has evolved from a promising technology into a practical enabler of business and societal progress. What makes AI valuable today is not simply its ability to automate tasks, but its ability to augment human expertise, accelerate better decisions, and create measurable outcomes across industries.

Across manufacturing, AI is enabling predictive maintenance, intelligent quality inspection, and digital twins that improve productivity and operational resilience. In healthcare, AI and connected technologies are helping clinicians make more informed decisions by transforming complex data into timely, actionable insights. Within energy and utilities, AI is optimizing infrastructure, forecasting demand more accurately, and supporting more sustainable operations. Across enterprises, AI is strengthening cybersecurity by enabling faster threat detection, intelligent risk assessment, and more adaptive security operations. Combined with cloud, IoT, and data platforms, AI is also helping organizations build connected, intelligent enterprises that are more agile, resilient, and future-ready.

As AI becomes increasingly embedded in critical systems, its success will ultimately be measured not by the sophistication of the models we build, but by the trust they inspire, the resilience they create, and the value they deliver. For us at Bosch SDS, AI is most impactful when it is responsible by design, secure by default, and developed to solve real-world challenges that improve industries, businesses, and lives."

Khadim Batti, CEO and Co-Founder at Whatfix

AI Appreciation Day is a reminder that the biggest gains are still ahead, particularly for the organizations willing to build the trust to get there. We've seen this pattern before. Every major technology wave, from the internet to the cloud, has unfolded in several acts: infrastructure first, platforms second, and enterprise transformation last. This happens because business-critical workflows demand a level of reliability that takes time to earn.

Building that trust starts with how we deploy AI. Too often, AI fatigue gets blamed on the tools themselves, when it's really an implementation failure. Employees are left to guess at boundaries, prompt their way through ambiguity, and absorb friction that good design should have removed. The organizations that will lead when AI reaches its next inflection point will be the ones that treat AI as an operating model transformation, rethinking how work gets structured so AI can execute autonomously within clear guardrails, while employees focus their energy on judgment, strategy, and creativity.

That's the vision behind Whatfix AI. Powered by ScreenSense, our AI engine that understands context and intent, Whatfix AI embeds agentic intelligence directly into enterprise workflows. Rather than expecting employees to navigate an ever-growing collection of AI tools, AI agents operate within enterprise guardrails to deliver contextual guidance, accelerate execution, surface adoption friction, and continuously optimize how work gets done. The real promise of AI is that intelligence becomes an invisible part of the operating model, empowering people with the right support, at the right moment, while organizations retain the governance and control needed to scale AI with confidence.

When organizations get this right, AI starts to feel less like another application employees have to learn and more like a trusted collaborator woven into every workflow. It stops competing for people's attention and starts compounding their impact, giving them back time to focus on the work that requires unique human judgment, creativity, and strategic thinking.

Kartik Raja, Founder Mozark AI

AI Appreciation Day is an opportunity to recognise how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way software is built, tested and experienced. Beyond improving efficiency, AI is enabling faster innovation, higher software quality and more seamless digital experiences. As organisations continue to adopt AI at scale, success will depend on using it responsibly, with the right balance of intelligent automation and human oversight. The greatest value of AI will lie in building technology that is not only smarter, but also more reliable, trustworthy and customer-centric and capable of delivering meaningful digital experiences for underserved users and communities.

Subhash Kalluri, Founder, FreJun

Voice AI now sits inside some of the most sensitive conversations a business has. As adoption accelerates, it is worth pausing on what is actually being automated. It is not just a task; it is a moment of trust between a person and an institution, and AI is now a participant in that exchange.

An AI agent that qualifies a lead or screens a candidate is making judgements that affect real outcomes for real people, and that responsibility cannot be an afterthought bolted onto a model. It has to be built into the infrastructure itself: how data is stored, how consent is handled, how calls are recorded and audited, and how a system behaves when it does not know the answer.

Ashwin Chandrasekar, Chief Information & Technology Officer at Table Space

AI has driven a paradigm shift in how enterprises innovate, make decisions, and create value. AI Appreciation Day is an opportunity to recognise what enables that shift: the ability to activate years of technology investment, enterprise data and operational knowledge through a unified intelligence layer. As this capability matures, lasting advantage will depend less on the models themselves and more on the strength of the technology foundation and enterprise-specific context beneath them.