How Cloud and AI are redefining India's innovation story

At Deloitte India’s Coalesce 2025, business and technology leaders come together to chart the course for India’s next decade of growth. This year’s theme — “North Star” — invites organisations to step back from the noise, find clarity, and anchor their strategy around purpose, resilience, and innovation.

In this pursuit, Deloitte India and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have entered into a strategic collaboration to accelerate cloud and agentic-AI-driven transformation in India. From modernising legacy systems to building intelligent, future-ready enterprises, this collaboration aims to help organisations move toward their North Star with speed and confidence.

This article gathers key insights from a panel discussion that talks about how innovation is happening across sectors, how responsible AI frameworks are shaping the future, and how collaboration is at the heart of this journey. Industry leaders - Deepak Kagliwal (Executive Director, Deloitte India) and Praveen Sridhar (Head of Partner Business, AWS India and South Asia) share their views on how leaders can navigate disruption and innovation while staying true to collective purpose, growth, and impact.

The discussion highlights the fact that, beyond the technology and strategy, what stands out is the shared commitment to purpose - finding that North Star that guides every decision amid India’s digital transformation journey.

What Deloitte India and AWS collaboration stands for?

Deloitte India, a leading consulting firm and AWS, the world’s leading cloud provider, have joined forces to accelerate cloud and AI-led transformation across India, launching India’s first AWS Agentic AI Lab and the AWS Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru.

The innovation is further fuelled through Deloitte India’s global network of alliances and collaboration with technology leaders, startups, and academia, as well as innovation labs at DCIT.

By combining Deloitte India’s industry depth and AWS’s platform capabilities, both companies are setting a new benchmark for purposeful innovation, combining cloud, AI and human intelligence to help organisations reimagine what’s possible and to build a more connected, resilient and future-ready India.

A partnership built for India’s next digital leap

India is one of the fastest-growing public cloud markets in the world and the Asia-Pacific region. The country is experiencing exponential growth at 6.5 to 7 per cent annually and heading towards becoming a trillion-dollar digital economy.

The strategic collaboration between AWS and Deloitte India reflects their shared vision of strengthening India’s innovation pipeline and advancing nationwide digital initiatives.

While talking about India’s role in shaping the next wave of global digital innovation, Praveen Sridhar says, “AWS has expanded AWS Marketplace in India, which allows Indian enterprises and startups to engage with global as well as local partnerships in Indian Rupees (INR), which will ease procurement, simplify compliance, streamline workflow and accelerate cloud adoption in the country.”

With India’s strong cloud leadership, technology ecosystem, and the potential to export innovation globally, the country is perfectly positioned to lead the next wave of digital innovation and become a global technology consulting hub.

Driving business transformation through AI-led innovation

As businesses race to innovate and transform, Agentic AI Lab and Centres of Excellence are emerging as the drivers that turn ideas into actual, scalable solutions. They give organisations the tools and expertise they need to reimagine what is possible with AI on the cloud.

For example, Agentic AI Lab focuses on building and delivering agentic AI solutions which address critical industry-specific business challenges, such as financial planning inefficiencies, compliance complexities and customer experience gaps. Likewise, the establishment of the Centre of Excellence will reduce the time to market of AWS-powered offerings and provide tailored industry solutions and smart factory and IoT-driven manufacturing innovations to enterprises.

Modernising legacy systems with cloud and AI

In today’s times, Cloud and AI are transforming sectors from banking to manufacturing and public services by modernising legacy systems and strengthening resilience. Agentic AI agents are being used across the entire development lifecycle, from gathering requirements to building applications, testing and deploying to reduce effort and build faster.

Reflecting on this, Deepak Kagliwal says, “If you look at the technology impact, agentic AI is helping us meet customer expectations by drastically reducing the costs and turnaround time.” Praveen Sridhar emphasises that, “Beyond financial measures, organisations today measure technology impact based on trust and confidence in the models, data security, and transparency behind AI outputs. And that's what AWS focuses on - providing secure tools and a trusted marketplace, ensuring companies can innovate safely and at scale.”

In conclusion

As India rises as the epicentre of technology consulting and applied innovation for the world, Deloitte India and AWS are working together to push the boundaries of technology and ensure that this transformation is meaningful and human-centred.

Stay tuned for more updates on the fourth edition of Deloitte India’s Coalesce 2025.