New Delhi [India], October 8 : Artificial intelligence is fast reshaping the telecommunications and enterprise landscape in India, driving a major shift towards AI-native architecture, sovereign networks, and massive enterprise network refreshes, according to senior leadership at HCLTech.
Speaking to ANI on the sidelines of the India Mobile Congress 2026 event, top company executives noted that enterprise network refreshes and new AI data center fabrics present substantial opportunities for technology providers and telecom operators looking to alter traditional bandwidth monetization models.
Gurpreet Kohli, Executive Vice President and Global Business Head for Telco and Enterprise Networks at HCLTech, stated that enterprise demand is accelerating sharply across the domestic market.
"What I see here is there is a lot of opportunity which is coming our way as far as the network refresh is concerned on the enterprise side of the house mainly. And this is where telcos are going to play a big role because their whole bandwidth monetization game is going to radically change," Kohli said.
Kohli highlighted that following large-scale global deals, including managing enterprise customers for Verizon, the company is actively pursuing similar collaborations with Indian telecom service providers. He pointed to partnerships, such as the one with Sarvam, to deliver curated and contextualized artificial intelligence deployments tailored specifically for India.
"So we are trying to play big in the AI space and particularly for India because that is contextualized and curated for the Indian market. And I think that is going to unleash a lot of value and that value will be leading into multiple areas which are public sector, government services and our engineering services foray which is going into our semiconductor business also where, we are basically a company which is silicon to all the services," Kohli added.
The push towards sovereign infrastructure and next-generation networks is concurrently steering the sector away from legacy cloud-dependent setups toward embedded, agentic AI frameworks.
Sumithra Ranganathan, Senior Vice President of Global Delivery, ERS, at HCLTech, emphasized that the ongoing transition from 5G to 6G requires an AI-native approach supported by robust human-machine interfaces and strict operational guardrails.
"Gone are the days when we put things in the Cloud, make things happen in the cloud, edge computing and things like that. But now, what is more prevalent and more the need of the hour is making it more AI-native, which makes it more agentic in nature," Ranganathan said.
Addressing enterprise apprehensions surrounding autonomous models, data sovereignty, and cybersecurity, Ranganathan stressed the obligation of technology professionals to maintain ethical safeguards and data security standards.
"As you might have heard from many instances, there are some occurrences and occasions where we have AI ‘misbehaving’, which is creating problems. I think it's on us when we transform or adapt as a world to move towards AI transformation, generate transformation, onus on each and every one of us as technology experts or professionals to make sure there are right guardrails put and checked," she said.
She noted that enterprise clients remain focused on data privacy during transitions from on-premise environments, necessitating standardized vulnerability assessments and rigorous security systems across deployments.