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

Sandeep Kumar Jain, Managing Director, CDK India

Artificial intelligence is creating new possibilities for how organisations solve problems, make decisions and serve their customers. At CDK Global India, we see its greatest value emerging when technological capability is combined with human judgement, empathy and a deep understanding of context. In automotive retail, this partnership can help simplify complex processes, generate meaningful insights and create more responsive experiences for customers, dealers and employees.

As we observe AI Appreciation Day, it is also important to recognise that the future of AI will be shaped by the choices people make around its design and use. Responsible innovation, strong governance and continuous learning must evolve alongside technological advancement. AI should empower people to think more creatively and act with greater confidence, rather than distance them from the decisions that matter. Appreciating AI, therefore, also means investing in the human skills required to guide it well. The organisations that strike this balance will be best placed to turn AI’s potential into lasting and meaningful progress.

Manish Sharma - CISO, Aurigo Software

AI is entering a defining phase of enterprise adoption. In just a few years, it has evolved from a productivity tool into an active participant in business decision-making. The first wave demonstrated what AI could generate. The next will be defined by what organizations can confidently entrust it to execute.

This shift will be especially significant in capital infrastructure, where AI can help organizations plan investments, anticipate risks, and make decisions that shape critical public assets and long-term economic growth. As agentic AI becomes embedded in these environments, governance, accountability, auditability, security, and resilience must be built into every AI-driven action. Organizations must be able to understand what the system did, why it did it, and who remains accountable for the outcome. Autonomy without trust is not sustainable. Organizations that establish these foundations from the outset will be best positioned to unlock AI’s full potential responsibly.

Mrigank Tripathi, President - Growth, PeopleStrong

AI Appreciation Day is a reminder that the real value of technology isn't in replacing people, it's in helping them do their best work. As AI becomes part of our everyday lives, the conversation should move beyond automation to how it can make work more meaningful, reduce repetitive tasks, and give people more time to learn, create, and solve complex problems. We believe the future of work will be built on a strong partnership between people and AI. Our approach is simple: use AI to make work easier, help managers make better decisions, and create more personalised experiences for employees, while keeping people firmly at the centre. The organisations that will truly benefit from AI won't necessarily be the ones using the most technology, but those using it with purpose to unlock human potential, foster continuous learning, and build workplaces where people and technology grow together.

Shailesh Singla, vice president, Cloud Applications, Oracle India

On AI Appreciation Day, it's worth reflecting on how far we've come. Not long ago, organisations were experimenting with AI through pilots and isolated use cases. Today, the conversation has shifted to delivering meaningful business outcomes at scale. What's most exciting is that the best AI often works behind the scenes. It's embedded into the applications and workflows people use every day, whether it’s helping finance teams forecast with greater confidence, HR leaders make better talent decisions, or supply chains respond faster to change. As AI becomes native to enterprise applications, it's doing more than automating tasks. It's helping people make smarter decisions, work more efficiently, and focus on higher-value work. Ultimately, AI's greatest impact will come from embedding intelligence into the everyday work of every team, enabling organisations to innovate faster and achieve better outcomes."

Yashwant Singh, Founder & CEO of AmbitionHire

AI Appreciation Day is a timely reminder of how rapidly artificial intelligence has become an integral part of the way we work, recruit, and make decisions. AI is helping organizations automate repetitive tasks, uncover meaningful insights from data, and improve efficiency. However, its greatest value lies in enabling people to focus on what humans do best—critical thinking, creativity, and relationship-building—rather than replacing them.

In recruitment, AI can streamline hiring by automating routine processes, improving candidate matching, and enhancing the overall hiring experience. Yet, successful hiring still depends on human judgment. Qualities such as cultural fit, leadership potential, adaptability, and emotional intelligence are best assessed through human experience and intuition. Organizations that combine AI's speed with recruiters' expertise will have a distinct advantage in attracting and hiring top talent.

As AI continues to evolve, businesses must prioritize responsible adoption by ensuring transparency, fairness, and continuous upskilling of their workforce. The future belongs to organizations that are people-first and AI-enabled—not AI-first. This balanced approach will help companies attract exceptional talent, foster innovation, and build resilient workplaces.

Praveer Kochhar, CPO & Co-founder, KOGO AI

AI Appreciation Day must celebrate what private AI delivers, not just what public AI demonstrates. The rollercoaster of AI innovations has demonstrated that when it gets down to brass tacks, businesses need AI platforms that run real operations without exposing proprietary data to third party vendors. Private AI changes this equation, which deserves appreciation. When AI is private, it lets a company keep its models, data, and institutional knowledge inside its own infrastructure while agents execute actual work.

This shift is already visible across the industry. Enterprises now deploy agentic systems that read contracts, generate dashboards, and manage cross-team workflows inside infrastructure they control. Analyst work that once took days now finishes in minutes. And all of this can be done privately, which Indian startups have clearly demonstrated.

The industry has to recognize what that shift means. Public AI proved that large models can reason and generate. Private AI proves that enterprises can trust AI enough to hand it real authority over real processes. That trust depends on control over which models run, how data moves, and the audit trail behind every decision an agent makes.

This AI Appreciation Day, it’s important to celebrate the engineers who build guardrails, the governance layers that let a CFO sleep at night while agents touch financial systems, and the shift from AI as a feature to AI as infrastructure that enterprises actually own.

That’s what deserves recognition this year—AI that works for the enterprise, inside the enterprise, on the enterprise’s own terms.

Anand Sampath, EVP and Head of AI Innovation Centre, India, Visionet Systems

This AI Appreciation Day, enterprises need to ask an uncomfortable question: are we getting smarter with AI, or simply getting faster?

Every prompt, correction, and workflow we feed into AI carries institutional knowledge, judgment, and context that form an enterprise's competitive edge. The critical question is where that learning accumulates and who ultimately benefits from it. Speed alone is no longer enough. The leaders who maximize AI will be those who build a clear trust boundary around their proprietary knowledge, retain control of their learning loop, and keep human judgment in the calls that matter.

At Visionet, we believe enterprises should not invest in AI tools for the sake of adoption; they should invest in measurable AI outcomes, with architectures that compound their intelligence and competitive advantage within the business.

The winners in AI won't be the fastest adopters. They'll be the ones who keep their learning loop intact.

Hemant Tiwari, Managing Director and Vice President for India and SAARC, Hitachi Vantara

Artificial Intelligence has evolved from experimentation to enterprise-scale execution, making AI Appreciation Day an opportunity to recognise the critical role of strong data foundations. According to a 2025 global survey of business and IT leaders, 89 percent of Indian organisations have either widely adopted AI or consider it essential to their operations, compared with a global average of 69 percent. As AI adoption accelerates, building unified, well-governed, and secure data infrastructure will be critical to delivering reliable, scalable, and trustworthy AI outcomes.

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.

Pratap Mane, President & Country Head – India, Colt Data Centre Services (Colt DCS)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming how organisations operate. It is reshaping investment priorities, redefining digital infrastructure and influencing the future competitiveness of industries ranging from manufacturing and healthcare to financial services and logistics. As AI moves from pilots to production, the conversation is shifting from what AI can do to whether the underlying infrastructure is ready to support it at scale.

The next chapter of AI will depend as much on resilient power, scalable compute, high-performance connectivity and sustainable infrastructure as it does on advances in models and applications. Organisations that invest in robust, future-ready digital infrastructure today will be better positioned to accelerate innovation, adapt to changing business needs and scale AI with confidence. At Colt Data Centre Services (Colt DCS), we see this evolution as an opportunity to innovate continuously by developing AI-ready data centres that deliver the performance, sustainability and operational excellence required for the next generation of AI workloads.

AI Appreciation Day is an opportunity to recognise that every advance in AI depends on the infrastructure that powers it, providing the compute, connectivity, resilience and sustainability needed to support AI at scale. The organisations that will achieve the greatest long-term advantage will be those that invest not only in smarter AI, but in the resilient, scalable foundations required to support its continued growth.