National Technology Day - Industry Leaders Speak
Monday, May 11, 2026
The National Technology Day is being observed in India on May 11th. The focus of 2026 is to make innovations in AI in all the major languages of India and to take the country forward on the path of innovation and not stay as mere consumers of technology.
This is the moment when the industry is increasingly adopting Smart technologies such as AI, Cloud, Data management platforms and digital infrastructures. At this time, it is very important that the country does not remain just a market to consume the techs evolved elsewhere in other countries. Rather, Indian industry leaders must take the tech evolution forward and make India the exporter of technology to the world.
On this occasion, several industry leaders have commented on this Day -
"India crossed a technological threshold in 1998 that quietly changed the trajectory of a nation. Twenty-seven years on, the ambition has scaled, but so has the stakes. The next decade of AI will be won in the infrastructure layer, in the power systems, the cooling architecture, and the data center design decisions being made right now. Vertiv believes in building the critical infrastructure that ensures India's AI workloads run at the speed and scale the country's growth demands. National Technology Day is not just a commemoration. It is a checkpoint. And the only question worth asking is whether we are engineering boldly enough for what is coming."
--AS Prasad, Vice President, Product Management, Vertiv
"Global competitiveness in manufacturing is no longer a single-factor equation, and any enterprise that reduces it to cost alone will always find another country willing to undercut it, which is precisely why the winning formula today combines cost, quality, innovation, and time to market simultaneously. China understood this better than most, and the fact that mobile companies there are building cars in one year while the Indian automotive industry still takes three is not a technology gap but a transformation mindset gap. The good news is that AI has arrived at exactly the right moment to close it, and the evidence is already on the ground. We are seeing commodity price prediction accuracy improve sharply by triangulating quantitative and qualitative models, supply chains being managed in real time by connecting shipping, warehousing, and geopolitical signals together, and a glass manufacturer capturing 200 million data points on the production line to control quality at the input stage rather than inspecting failure at the end.
In EV battery research, AI reduced 80,000 material substitution possibilities to 8 viable prototypes within months, compressing what would have taken years into a single product cycle. On process efficiency, an invoice management workflow that had 33 human touch points and took 30 days to complete now runs on 4 touch points and closes in 96 hours. The lesson from every one of these cases is identical: companies that scaled AI successfully did not treat it as a pilot or a proof of concept. They committed to it fully, infused it across every function, and redefined themselves as software factories. Every enterprise today, regardless of sector, must think and operate that way, because the advantage ahead belongs to organisations where every process is human-led but agent-operated."
--Pravin Panchagnula, Country Head, Manufacturing & Conglomerates, Microsoft India & South Asia (spoke at ICC Indian Technology Convention 2026)
“India’s technology moment will not be defined by how much we build, but by how intelligently and inclusively we deploy it. As AI, semiconductors, and connected systems converge, the real opportunity lies in engineering outcomes, not just outputs.
At Sasken, our ‘chip-to-cognition’ approach is rooted in this belief, bringing together silicon, software, and intelligence to create systems that are not only advanced, but also relevant to real-world challenges. Whether it is enabling smarter mobility or more resilient communication networks, the focus must shift from isolated innovation to integrated impact.
As the pace of technological advancement accelerates globally, the industry’s responsibility is to ensure that innovation scales with purpose, secure, contextual, and accessible. Because the true measure of progress will be how effectively technology improves everyday lives at scale.”
“As AI moves from digital interfaces into the physical world, responsible innovation is no longer optional; it becomes foundational. This year’s National Technology Day marks a decisive inflection point for India, where the conversation is rapidly shifting from capability to control. The emergence of advanced systems, including vulnerability-discovery models, has underscored the real risks of AI operating on legacy and mission-critical infrastructure, accelerating the need for stronger guardrails, regulatory oversight, and industry-wide governance frameworks.
As physical and agentic AI begin to interact with real-world systems, the convergence of software, data, and machines introduces new dimensions of risk, ranging from systemic failures to amplified vulnerabilities at scale. This demands that governance is not layered on after deployment, but engineered into the core through secure architectures, real-time observability, and accountable AI frameworks.
At GlobalLogic, we have been building and scaling AI long before it became mainstream, embedding intelligence deep into engineering, platforms, and real-world systems. Today, with over 75 AI-powered solutions, 200+ AI-enabled client engagements, and nearly half of our business augmented by AI, our focus is on engineering differentiation that translates into real-world impact. Equally, we are investing in transforming talent at scale through platforms like GLX, driving over a million learning hours and delivering measurable gains of 10–30% across efficiency, cost, and retention through AI-led skilling. For us, the future of innovation will not just be defined by how intelligent systems become, but by how responsibly they are engineered, ensuring AI moves from insight to action in a way that is safe, resilient, and trusted by design.”
--Piyush Jha, Group Vice President and Head, APAC, GlobalLogic
National Technology Day is not just a celebration of past achievements of our country, but a promise we make to shape a prosperous future for all. As the adoption of every wave of technology accelerates across enterprises and society, we must embrace the use of responsible innovation to improve the quality of lives of our fellow citizens. At Wipro, technology is the primary engine for both Business Growth and Social Impact.
We are navigating an era of increased technology autonomy, and we believe that humans should remain accountable for the outcomes. Technology is a force multiplier and an accelerator to design and develop human centric solutions. Our strategy is anchored in three principles -
- While leveraging agentic systems for scale, human judgment remains in charge to ensure accuracy, consistency, explainability, safety, security, and alignment with ethical standards.
- Guardrails must be embedded into all platforms, solutions, and delivery processes by proactive design and not as an afterthought.
- Architects of technology must reflect global diversity so that solutions remain equitable
"Every National Technology Day, we tell ourselves a familiar story. Indian tech is at an inflection point, AI will disrupt everything, the future belongs to the bold. The story I'd rather tell is more specific. AI is going to create more digital doorways into businesses in the next three years than the internet did in its first twenty. Every agent, every API, every automated workflow is a new way for hackers to get in. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic will ship the models. Someone has to make sure enterprises can deploy them without handing attackers the keys. That isn't a constraint on innovation. It's the precondition for it. The Indian technology firms that understand this won't just survive the AI shift. They'll define the category that comes out of it: security and trust, delivered at machine speed."
--Ashish Tandon, Founder & CEO, Indusface
