India continues to be a very exciting region for me. I think if you look at it, India’s got the fastest number of startups. India continues to be a very exciting region for me. There's incredible momentum in the tech space. You can feel the energy, see the ongoing innovation, and witness strong interest from venture capitalists investing in the ecosystem. It’s a truly vibrant market. What excites me even more is the trends around the rapid adoption of AI, which directly aligns with Genesys’ vision. In a country of India’s scale, delivering seamless, intelligent customer experiences across industries is both a challenge and an opportunity, and we’re committed to supporting that journey.

If you look at a couple of years ago, we were living in a ‘service economy’. Traditionally, businesses focused heavily on the quality of their product or the efficiency of delivering a specific service. But today, we’re seeing a shift toward what we call the ’experience economy’ where the overall experience a customer has with a brand is valued just as much, if not more, than the product itself. This shift is fundamentally changing how brands engage with their customers. Previously, brands were just reacting to customer feedback; now, it’s transformed to being more proactive by anticipating needs, understanding intent, and delivering personalized interactions at every touchpoint.

Whether it's through a call center, a website, a mobile app, or even social media, the goal is to create a seamless and personalized journey across all channels. This requires not only front-end engagement but also deep integration with backend systems. That’s where AI-powered experience orchestration comes in by connecting data, channels, and systems to deliver intelligent, consistent, and scalable experiences. Given the sheer volume of interactions and rising customer expectations, achieving this at scale simply isn't possible with human effort alone. AI becomes essential in helping brands orchestrate meaningful engagements in real time, across every channel, at every step of the journey.

What’s really interesting across APAC is how different markets are approaching AI. In regions like India and broader Asia, the focus is largely on driving efficiency and reducing costs. Contrast that with Australia, where the conversation includes both efficiency and customer loyalty. Many businesses are realizing it's not a trade-off. One doesn't have to sacrifice loyalty for efficiency. In fact, with AI, one can achieve both. And that’s crucial in today’s landscape, where brand loyalty is at an all-time low and customers switch quickly. This dual focus of optimizing operations while building lasting relationships is becoming essential.

That’s something we’re tracking very closely. Across APAC, we now serve over 1,400 customers,  30% growth just last year, and we’re seeing rapid AI adoption among them. In fact, over 33% of our customers are already leveraging AI, and that number is rising fast. It began with generative AI use cases like Copilots assisting agents or supervisors by analyzing calls and offering insights. But we’re now entering the agentic AI era. With the launch of Genesys AI Studio, customers can build self-learning virtual agents that don’t just respond, they act independently, pass information between agents (human or virtual), and optimize the entire customer journey. These virtual agents could soon handle 50–70% of common queries, allowing human teams to focus on complex or sensitive issues. That’s the power of experience orchestration, where every interaction feels like a personal concierge who knows you, understands your intent, and delivers exactly what you need, proactively. I'll share a personal observation, we released 2 years ago, the levels of experience orchestration and getting to that universal orchestration, where when you engage with the brand, it almost feels like you've got your own personal concierge. Where they know exactly who you are, what you like, what your history is, and some of the traits that you have, and they can start understanding your intent. When you engage with the brand, what is your intent? What are you trying to solve? So they start solving the understanding of what you are looking for proactively and providing it.

It’s incredibly exciting. With Genesys AI Studio, you can build a virtual agent using natural language, no coding required. It connects seamlessly with back-end systems and automatically generates chatbot scripts based on business needs, driving efficiency in contact centers. So, you start looking at how it drives optimisation and efficiency into the contact centre, where you get someone who understands the business problem. What’s equally important is the ethical framework we’ve built in. These virtual agents operate within defined guardrails aligned with corporate policies and regulatory standards, ensuring responsible AI use from day one.

India’s startup ecosystem is incredibly agile. Digital natives here adopt SaaS, cloud, and AI very quickly. But when it comes to larger, more traditional enterprises like big banks or conglomerates, there’s still hesitation, especially around moving to the cloud. That’s where a big part of our focus lies: educating and enabling these organizations to take that leap. The truth is, no one’s doing AI on-premise anymore. You have to make that first move to the cloud to unlock AI’s true potential. Interestingly, this need for AI is now what’s pushing many of these companies to finally embrace the cloud. If we look at Japan, it was slower to adopt cloud than markets like Australia, but once that shift began, the move toward AI accelerated. We're seeing the same urgency now in India and across APAC. Not just to boost efficiency, but because a brand’s competitiveness will soon depend on how well it leverages AI. Falling behind simply won’t be an option in this fast-moving landscape.

Security is our number one priority. We comply with most of the international standards, which is also one of the reasons that in 2021, we put a Genesys Cloud instance into India. Last year, we got our Unified License (ULVNO) as well which allows us to start looking at how we protect data for India, in India. Security is our top priority, especially in a cloud-first world where personal data is constantly in motion. We take our responsibility to protect customer information very seriously. Our dedicated security teams are continuously improving safeguards, and we’ve also established an internal AI ethics board to ensure our AI adoption aligns with evolving regulations and responsible practices.

Digital-native companies in India adopt cloud and AI quickly, largely because there’s a stronger level of trust in security practices. The challenge lies with traditional enterprises, where leadership often hesitates to relinquish data control. That’s where we focus by educating these organizations on the benefits and security of the public cloud. In fact, we believe we can often protect their data more effectively in the Genesys cloud than they can within their own data centers.

I just want to say it, if I look at it 6 months ago, we were talking about generative AI, and now everything is about Agentic AI. The industry is moving so quickly, and I think as we continue, if I just look at the next 3 to 5 years, we will continue to evolve self-service within an AI space. AI will get smarter in terms of its ability to operate independently and autonomousl,y where systems can operate independently without constant human input. That’s where the next wave of innovation lies. But for AI to truly evolve, it all comes down to data. A major focus for us is building robust data models that can pull from diverse sources and structure that information in a way AI can learn from and continuously improve. Ultimately, our innovation is geared toward powering the experience economy by connecting front-end engagement with back-end systems and unifying customer interactions across every channel.

Our focus in APAC is twofold - expanding our regional footprint and deepening localisation. We're investing heavily in local language support, with Hindi now a tier-one language for us, and integrating local vendors, tools, and LLMs to tap into country-specific innovation. As AI adoption grows, accurate local language integration becomes critical. We're also helping enterprises across the region move to the cloud, the first step towards true experience orchestration. 

Two years ago, we introduced the five levels of experience orchestration, a roadmap guiding companies from traditional on-premise call centers to AI-driven, customer-centric environments. It's a journey, and we’re committed to helping organizations map and navigate it as they modernize and embrace AI-led transformation.

I think it is important that it doesn't go ‘Big Bang’. I see a lot of AI projects failing because the use case hasn't been clearly defined. First, having a clear roadmap and identifying which areas deliver the most business value is critical. Nowadays, AI is often used as a broad term. Our major focus with our customers is understanding the outcomes they want to achieve, pinpointing specific use cases, and aligning AI solutions to those goals. Success comes from tying AI to measurable, outcome-driven use cases.