Forbes India - Tech Conversations

In this episode, recorded on November 19, Avinash Krishnamurthy, co-founder of Biome Environmental Trust, a sustainable development think tank and consultancy, and Vikas Brahmavar and Gowthaman Desingh, co-founders of Boson Whitewater, a water treatment venture backed by investors including Rainmatter, talk about a landmark collaboration to return potable-quality treated wastewater to communities in Devanahalli town, on the outskirts of Bengaluru city. They also talk about how this project can be a model with lessons relevant across India.

In this episode, recorded on November 21, Christopher Young, EVP of business development, strategy, and ventures at Microsoft, talks about how AI is evolving from generating responses to actually fulfilling various tasks on behalf of human users. Young gives us a quick overview of how Microsoft aims to become a platform, underpinning AI innovation and adoption in markets around the world, including India. He expects that some AI innovation, in healthcare, for example, will start first in India, to be adopted in other parts of the world.

In this episode, Leena Walavalkar, Global Head of TCS PACE, talks about the IT giant’s innovation network comprising centres around the world, called Pace Ports, where teams of multidisciplinary experts from TCS brainstorm and collaborate with customers on cutting edge solutions. In this conversation, Leena gives us a peek into how TCS is using its experience in a variety of areas to go from assisting and augmenting its customers’ tech operations to innovating solutions that could potentially transform those businesses for the better.

In this episode, Vishnu S talks about how his fascination for opensource software set him on a journey of entrepreneurship, and how he started Jarvis Labs – a data centre orchestration startup for India’s AI needs that’s ready to go global. Jarvis, based on the outskirts of Coimbatore, not only offers affordable GPU options, but also a software layer that allows customers to quickly start focusing on their own work rather than worrying about the complexities of spinning up cloud infrastructure for AI

In this episode, NP Sridhar, CEO and MD of Titan Engineering and Automation Ltd. (TEAL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Titan and its only B2B unit, talks about global opportunities in automation and manufacturing services. The automation business offers turnkey assembly automation across India and overseas. The manufacturing services operation caters to aerospace, defence and will soon expand its footprint in the semiconductor sector. TEAL expects to finish the current fiscal year with revenues of about Rs. 900 crore.

In this episode, Shailendra Singh and Rajan Anandan, managing directors at Peak XV Partners, talk about their venture capital firm’s Surge programme for early-stage startup founders, which today revealed its 10th cohort. In this interview with Forbes India, the two VC investors talk about why Surge was started, its design around the objective of improving the chances of success of the participating entrepreneurs, and how it’s becoming increasingly global. Expect a couple of IPOs, even, over the next two years, they said.

In this episode, Tanvi Lall, director of strategy at People+ai, talks about the potential that micro data centres hold in supporting the development of AI in India. People+ai is a non-profit organization working to identify and support population-scale use cases of AI that are relevant to India. Lall is the head of a project called Open Cloud Compute, within People+ai, to support the growth of micro data centres in India. In this conversation, recorded on Aug. 27, she gives us a quick update on the project.

In this episode, recorded on Sep. 5, Vivek Raghavan talks about the vision he and Pratyush Kumar have for Sarvam AI, their Bengaluru startup. Both are among the leaders of India’s digital public infrastructure community and the plan for Sarvam is also to find “use cases” that will touch the masses, helping them to complete everyday tasks easily. Sarvam’s technologies, including voice-based assistants, or agents, are also being evaluated by some of India’s biggest companies to provide better experiences to their end consumers.

In this episode, Rajesh Ganesan, president of ManageEngine at Zoho Corp, India’s biggest software company, talks about how generative AI is beginning to influence IT management. It’s an area where ManageEngine offers a suite of some 65 products to enterprise customers. Ganesan also talks about building small AI models focused on specific needs such as observability of data, for example, or specific cybersecurity functions. He also spoke about developing such solutions to support various regional languages spoken in India.

In this episode, Amit Chadha, CEO and MD at Larsen & Toubro Technology Services (LTTS), gives us a quick update on the company’s progress after a recent reorganization along three large opportunities, each of which could become a billion-dollar operation. Chadha, who’s based in the US, also talks about the sentiment among his biggest customers on technology spending, the impact of generative AI on the engineering services industry, and how AI is indeed a source of new revenue for LTTS. This interview was recorded on Aug. 26.