Coalesce 2025: Where leaders came together to find their north star

Coalesce 2025 marked a defining moment for Deloitte India, returning in its fourth edition with renewed purpose, sharper conversations and an unmistakable sense of forward momentum. The event brought together 270+ industry leaders and a powerful ecosystem of alliances to brainstorm, exchange ideas and explore solutions for the future.

With the overarching theme “North Star,” this year’s gathering encouraged organisations to move beyond incremental thinking and identify the bold, audacious idea that would redefine their industry and become the strategic breakthrough guiding their next chapter of growth. As the platform continues to evolve, this edition reinforced Coalesce’s core promise — offering clarity amid complexity and conviction amid rapid technological change.

The opening moments set the tone for the days to come, days filled with energy and rejuvenated shared intent. In his inaugural address, Vinay Prabhakar, Partner and Alliance Leader, Deloitte South Asia, highlighted how Coalesce grew from an understanding of customer behaviour to covering themes like digital transformation, trust and changing expectations of leaders across industries.

This year, he noted, the focus was intentionally more introspective—an invitation to look beyond the familiar, challenge assumptions and define a North Star rooted in bold, disruptive and audacious ideas that can guide leaders through uncertainty and shape what comes next.

Leaders across industries came together not just to exchange views on technology and business transformation, but to articulate the bold, breakthrough ideas that will reshape their industries in the decade ahead. Through debates, scenario-based reflections and working sessions, CXOs examined disruptions such as AI-enabled productivity, the evolution of digital public infrastructure, shifts in consumer behaviour and the reinvention of talent models.

By the end of these design thinking workshops, each leader had defined their own North Star not as a value statement, but as a decisive, disruptive vision that would power disproportionate growth rather than incremental progress.
One of the key highlights was the announcement of a multi-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) between Deloitte India and Amazon Web Services (AWS), underscoring Deloitte’s commitment to accelerating cloud- and AI-led enterprise transformation in India.

Through this agreement, Deloitte India becomes the first global system integrator in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) to collaborate with AWS in this model. As part of the SCA, Deloitte India will establish India’s first AWS Agentic AI Lab, supported by an AWS Centre of Excellence, and make its digital and AI-driven industry solutions available on AWS Marketplace.

The collaboration builds on successful cloud and AI programmes across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, now being extended to India with a focus on high-impact sectors such as financial services, public sector, energy and utilities, automotive, consumer products, manufacturing, conglomerates and global capability centres.

The second announcement strengthened Deloitte India’s alliance with Workday, marking an important milestone in enterprise transformation. The collaboration seeks to modernise finance and people functions across Indian organisations by combining Workday’s unified, AI-powered cloud platform with Deloitte India’s business, technology and change-management expertise.

By leveraging Deloitte India’s localised accelerators, human-centred design and sector insights, the alliance will support organisations in making smarter decisions, improving productivity and enhancing workforce engagement. A key focus of the roadmap includes training more than 5,000 professionals globally on Workday technologies to enable sustained transformation.

The third announcement introduced INTEGRATE, Deloitte India’s suite of industry-specific solutions built on SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud to help Indian enterprises fast-track digital transformation with lower risk and higher ROI. Designed for industries such as chemicals, automotive, retail and consumer, professional services and renewable energy, the preconfigured solutions enable enterprises to move to the cloud faster while maintaining business performance and compliance.

Backed by Deloitte’s factory-based delivery model and Operate services, INTEGRATE is aimed at reducing deployment timelines, optimising total cost of ownership and driving long-term innovation on SAP Public Cloud.

Beyond the announcements, the persona-based and cross-functional tracks offered leaders a practical way to translate inspiration into action. These sessions helped CXOs step away from day-to-day urgency and confront the challenges of scaling AI, managing risk, building human-centred organisations and enabling resilience across the value chain. A standout among these was the Bharat track, which explored how partnerships, capital and alliances can act as multipliers for innovation in India’s growth economy.

Drawing from global and Indian case studies, the discussions demonstrated that organisations innovating across the value chain, not just through product, consistently generate outsized returns. Participants left with clear convictions: think long-term but act short-term, global ambition must be adapted locally, and partnership conviction must come from leadership to unlock scale.

The final morning provided space for leaders to unwind and build deeper human connections through curated Goan experiences. Royal Enfield rides along the coast, a heritage walk through Fontainhas, artisanal coffee brewing sessions, bespoke bread-making and a serene cruise on the Mandovi River encouraged participants to pause and rejuvenate.

As Coalesce 2025 drew to a close, one realisation consistently echoed across conversations, corridors and coastal horizons: transformation today must be driven by something deeper than adopting the latest technologies or refining strategy. It demands a clear anchor, a North Star that provides conviction, direction and momentum in times of rapid change.

With its fourth edition complete and three high-impact announcements setting into motion India’s next chapter of AI-enabled and people-centric transformation, Coalesce 2025 reinforced its position as the platform where industry leaders and alliances come together to explore solutions, find alignment, imagine boldly and define what is truly possible.