In an exclusive conversation with APAC Media and CXO Media, Arijit Bonnerjee, Senior Vice President & Head – India Region, Tata Communications, sheds light on the transformation of the company from a traditional telecom player to a digital solutions powerhouse. He discusses how the company is strategically leveraging emerging technologies like AI, 5G, and IoT to redefine enterprise connectivity and digital infrastructure, and shares insights into the company’s growth strategy and plans for the next phase of expansion.
What are your roles and responsibilities as the Senior Vice President & Head – India Region, Tata Communications? What has been your primary focus in shaping the company’s direction?
My primary role is heading the India region for Tata Communications, a leading global communications technology player, across its entire products and services portfolio, industries, and market segments. In this role, I am responsible for driving the company’s revenue, profitability, customer lifecycle management, and customer satisfaction for the Indian market.
I drive strategic initiatives and operational performance, ensuring innovative, reliable solutions while focussing on growth and profitability. My role aligns with the region’s objectives with Tata Communications’ global vision, strengthens stakeholder relationships, and cements our leadership in the digital landscape.
A key priority is leveraging our digital fabric of solutions to meet India’s evolving business needs. I focus on driving digital adoption, enhancing customer experiences, and expanding our portfolio to support next-gen technologies. In a fast-changing digital economy, my commitment is to simplify enterprise processes, optimise costs, and unlock new growth avenues.
Tata Communications has undergone a gradual but significant shift from traditional voice services to a more digitally focused strategy. What are the strategic imperatives behind this transition, and how do you envision the company’s growth trajectory in the digital-first era?
The company’s value today is very differentiated. We provide a digital fabric of solutions for enterprises seeking digital transformation. Rather than seeing itself as a product, Tata Communications is today more solution-oriented — combining products to deliver them as platforms and solutions to our customers.
Earlier, enterprise customers were operating in silos, and they would then go scouting for different products with other companies. They were overwhelmed with the complexity of, say, integrating communications infrastructure with Cloud services — it was becoming too complicated for them. The mindset of providing a holistic digital solution to customers was missing.
Tata Communications’ Digital Fabric combines the capabilities of Networking, Cloud and Cybersecurity Fabric, Customer Interactions, and IoT to facilitate the exchange of data, information, and intelligence across diverse digital systems and applications. These can be easily integrated with enterprise customers’ suite of applications through APIs.
The Digital Fabric today combines infrastructure, platforms, and services through an orchestration and management layer that enables greater visibility and control and helps CIOs uncomplicate the complex technology ecosystem provide better services and future-proof the architecture. With a global network, deep Cloud relationships, and a portfolio of IT services, we help global companies make sense of the growing complexity of hybrid environments (enterprise, datacentre, Cloud) leading to greater innovation, enhanced agility, and decreased costs.
As we accelerate toward a hyperconnected future, our goal is to grow annualised data revenue from Rs 20,000 crore to Rs 28,000 crore by FY27, with digital revenues contributing 60% of overall earnings.
What are the key industries driving demand for Tata Communications’ solutions in India, and how do you cater to their needs?
Tata Communications plays a pivotal role in powering India’s digital transformation by catering to industries that are rapidly embracing technology to drive efficiency and innovation. At the core of it is our next-generation network that is future-ready, resilient, intelligent and is delivered as a service.
For example, in manufacturing and automotive, we enable smart factories with IoT connectivity, optimising production lines and supply chains. We have also undertaken comprehensive network transformation for healthcare and pharma companies with our best-fit SD-WAN solutions and managed services expertise that support telemedicine and protect sensitive patient data.
The financial sector demands our robust cybersecurity and Cloud solutions to ensure compliance and enhance digital banking experiences. Retail and e-commerce thrive on our scalable digital infrastructure, ensuring seamless customer interactions and secure transactions. Meanwhile, the media and entertainment industry depends on our high-bandwidth connectivity and subsea cable networks for fast, reliable content distribution.
We address industry-specific challenges by delivering tailored digital solutions that enhance operational efficiency, security, and customer engagement. Our expertise in networking, cybersecurity, customer interactions, IoT, cloud computing, and AI empowers businesses with agile, future-ready capabilities.
With a presence in over 190 countries, we combine global reach with deep local expertise, ensuring seamless service delivery. Sustainability and innovation remain central to our approach, helping enterprises align with evolving environmental and technological trends. By enabling these industries with cutting-edge solutions, Tata Communications strengthens India’s digital economy and empowers businesses to navigate an increasingly connected world with confidence.
How is Tata Communications leveraging emerging technologies like 5G, IoT, and AI to enhance its services?
Tata Communications is driving innovation across 5G, IoT, and AI to enhance connectivity, efficiency, and security for enterprises.
5G: Our Tata Communications Cloud-based 5G Roaming Lab, launched in August 2023, empowers Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to trial 5G standalone use cases before deployment. Equipped with high-tech server applications, the lab ensures seamless, high-speed 5G roaming with advanced network security. By closely monitoring traffic movement and network usage, we help deliver an unmatched roaming experience for mobile users worldwide.
IoT: In this space, our solutions seamlessly integrate with Tata Communications’ Digital Fabric, providing a resilient and scalable infrastructure. Our IoT platform is designed with a people-first, planet-centric approach, featuring plug-and-play capabilities with multiple communication protocols for simplified integration. A key innovation is our ‘connected worker’ solution, using AI-powered wearable and carry-on devices to enhance worker safety, preventing accidents and saving lives. Our advancements in video-based vision analytics and worker safety solutions align with growing industry needs for security and operational insights. Additionally, our IoT fabric leverages Tata Communications MOVE and Oasis’ eSIM capabilities to offer secure, end-to-end connectivity for global enterprises, unlocking new opportunities in intelligent IoT applications.
AI: AI is transforming our operations and market offerings. Our Customer Interactions fabric integrates Conversational AI with human agents to personalise interactions, analyse behaviour, and optimise customer engagement. AI-driven collaboration solutions anticipate client needs, enhance service delivery, and streamline workflows. In cybersecurity, AI/ML-powered networks detect and mitigate threats in real-time, ensuring resilience and performance as digital workloads grow. As AI-aware, self-healing networks become the norm, Tata Communications remains at the forefront of delivering intelligent, secure, and scalable digital solutions.
With the integration of Kaleyra AI, how does Tata Communications envision transforming customer interactions, and what innovations are you prioritizing to deliver more personalized and impactful communication experiences?
In December 2024, we launched Kaleyra AI, a next-generation Customer Interaction as a Service platform powered by AI. Designed for marketing and customer care teams, it offers flexible consumption models to transform enterprise-customer engagement.
Kaleyra AI enhances interactions across multiple channels, improving user experience and engagement with intelligent, immersive communication. Its no-code platform enables businesses to build interactive assistants effortlessly.
More than just a platform, Kaleyra AI is a force multiplier — reducing response times during peak volumes and providing generative AI-driven insights for decision-makers via natural language analytics.
What sets it apart are three industry-leading capabilities: a GenAI Omnichannel Template Creator, a Conversational AI Data Reporting Tool, and a No-Code Conversational AI Builder — all designed to redefine customer engagement.
Early demos showed significant reductions in response and resolution times, even under high query volumes. For the C-suite, Kaleyra AI delivers unparalleled performance insights through a conversational, natural language interface, empowering smarter, AI-driven automation at scale.
How is Tata Communications leveraging its strategic partnership with JLR to enhance the ecosystem of smart connected cars, and what future opportunities do you see in this collaboration for advancing automotive technology?
Tata Communications is enhancing JLR’s connected vehicle ecosystem through the Tata Communications MOVE platform, transforming the driving experience across 120 countries. This collaboration empowers JLR’s next-generation software-defined vehicles with seamless connectivity, even in remote areas.
An extension of their existing partnership, this initiative supports JLR’s digital transformation. JLR’s upcoming medium-sized SUVs on the new Electric Modular Architecture (EMA) will switch between mobile networks effortlessly, ensuring uninterrupted access to personalised services like media streaming.
The platform enables secure data exchange, enhancing software over-the-air (SOTA) updates and advancing driver assistance systems (ADAS). JLR’s connected fleet generates 2.5TB of data daily, with 500,000 ECU updates monthly. Tata Communications MOVE will boost data flow, providing engineers with real-time performance insights and enabling faster remote updates—improving maintenance, cutting costs, and enhancing vehicle reliability.
With these advanced vehicles hitting roads in 2026, Tata Communications aims to extend this innovation to global automotive leaders.
The partnership with NVIDIA is a significant step in shaping Tata Communications’ AI roadmap. Could you elaborate on how this collaboration will influence the development of future AI solutions and its implications for the industries you serve?
In October, Tata Communications announced a major AI Cloud upgrade in India, powered by NVIDIA GPUs. This integration includes NVIDIA NIM microservices, Omniverse, and Isaac platforms, offering businesses cutting-edge AI tools for simulation, automation, and more.
This move strengthens Tata Communications’ position in AI across manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and finance, providing the computing power needed for complex AI workloads. Recognising the demand for generative AI model training and deployment, the company launched GPU-as-a-Service in January and will introduce AI Studio, a platform-as-a-service, by March — built on its NVIDIA-powered AI Cloud.
AI Studio simplifies AI model development, enabling businesses to create advanced applications without deep technical expertise. It offers services like data management, multimodal search (text, photo, video), and machine learning operations, catering to hyperscalers, enterprises, startups, and government entities on a subscription basis.
Currently, Tata Communications is running early-stage trials with enterprises and startups, particularly those investing in model building. Government initiatives also hold potential for AI model development, benefiting citizens and businesses alike. As organisations refine their AI use cases, Tata Communications continues to explore opportunities with closed-weight model providers for future advancements.
What are your strategic priorities for Tata Communications over the next 5 years? Are there any new innovations, services, or initiatives that you’re particularly excited about?
One area that I’m particularly excited about is how Tata Communications is contributing to industry needs in the area of sustainability.
Sustainability is at the heart of our values, and we are dedicated to helping enterprises achieve their environmental goals through technology that reduces environmental impact. Our low-carbon products and services are designed to conserve energy, save fuel, and minimise natural resource usage — enabling customers to avoid GHG emissions and related costs.
From FY20 to FY24, across seven product categories (spanning 17 solutions) — MOVE, GlobalRapide, CPaaS and CCaaS, Cloud, incubation, IoT, and media and entertainment services — Tata Communications’ low-carbon offerings helped customers avoid nearly 10 million tonnes of CO₂e.
In FY24 alone, customers avoided 3.4 million tonnes of CO₂e — equivalent to burning 1.2 million tonnes of coal or removing 2.2 million cars from the road for a year.
Internally, we remain focused on sustainability with our goal to achieve Net Zero by 2035 across global operations. Our emissions reduction targets are validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), and we aim to be Carbon Neutral (Scope 1 & 2) by FY30 or sooner.
