Avinash Joshi is the Executive Managing Director, India, at NTT DATA, a $30 billion global leader in AI, digital business and technology services, where he is responsible for end-to-end go-to-market, sales, delivery, operations, and profitability. He is a seasoned leader with over 30 years of extensive experience working in IT & telecom industry in client facing roles and P&L management.
In his exclusive interview with CIO Dialogues, Avinash outlines NTT DATA’s vision to be a globally trusted, AI-native digital infrastructure partner. He highlights a shift to outcome-led co-creation, multi-cloud orchestration, experience-driven transformation, strong ecosystem partnerships, India’s growing global role, and embedded sustainability as AI scales responsibly.
What is your long-term vision for your company in an increasingly AI-driven, decentralized digital infrastructure landscape?
Our long-term vision is to build NTT DATA as a globally trusted digital business and infrastructure partner, where AI is foundational, not an add-on. We see AI, cloud, data and digital infrastructure converging to create more decentralized, resilient, and intelligent systems and our role is to help enterprises navigate and operationalize that shift responsibly.
As infrastructure becomes more distributed, trust, security, data sovereignty will become critical and that is where our global scale and local depth matter.
Our AI report shows 59.4% of AI leaders identify cross‑geography data privacy and sovereignty as a top governance challenge. Our ability to deliver private, sovereign and hybrid AI environments, backed by NTT Group’s global networks and data centers, directly addresses this need.
At the same time, sustainability and responsible innovation are non-negotiable for us as we build infrastructure and AI systems that are efficient, secure and aligned with long-term societal impact.
India is already one of the top 10 markets for NTT DATA globally and we’re on the path to entering the top 5 in the coming years. Our Innovation center in Bengaluru focuses on AI, digital twin and quantum computing projects, combining deep engineering talent with industry context to deliver AI-led solutions globally. We recently announced the launch of six new AI-powered Cyber Defense Centers to strengthen cyber resilience and counter an evolving threat landscape. Four of these centers are already functional in India with the other two planned in UK and US. Our acquisition of Niveus, one of the largest Google Cloud partners globally is another example of global capabilities that are based in India. Clearly, there is a lot of confidence in Indian capabilities for the global market.
How has your client engagement model evolved from project delivery to value co-creation?
As I mentioned earlier, we’re on our own journey of transformation, consolidating capabilities, harnessing efficiencies while investing and orienting our strategy to become the leading AI-native services company. In line with this, our client engagement model has evolved significantly from being largely project- and output-driven to becoming a long-term partner focused on value and outcomes. Today, clients are not looking for isolated technology implementations; they want partners who can co-create solutions that directly impact business performance.
We now engage much earlier in the client’s transformation journey, working with their leadership teams to define the business problem first, and then applying AI, data, cloud and digital infrastructure in an integrated way. This has led to more outcome-based engagements, shared roadmaps, and longer-term managed services relationships rather than one-off projects.
For example, in one manufacturing engagement, early collaboration on anomaly detection and data quality challenges eventually expanded into a sustained co‑innovation model involving software engineering, data platforms and quality systems, all driven by a shared outcomes charter.
Co-creation is central to this shift. We increasingly build solutions with clients, not just for them, leveraging our global capabilities, industry expertise, and engineering talent much of which is based in India helping them innovate effectively and then scale what works.
Recent experience also shows that when clients experiment with us in the India Innovation Center, whether through rapid MVPs, agentic AI prototypes, or knowledge‑integration platforms, those proof points often lead to broader, enterprise‑wide programs. This reinforces the value of co‑creating in an environment where innovation, engineering depth and domain insight come together.
What’s your approach to managing multi-cloud complexity and interoperability for your clients?
Our approach is to help clients simplify, integrate and govern multi-cloud environments so they can focus on business outcomes rather than infrastructure fragmentation.
We have advanced partnerships across all major hyperscaler cloud platforms including AWS, Google Cloud, and this enables us to offer clients cloud-agnostic, interoperable architectures that combine public cloud, private cloud and on-premise environments based on workload criticality, data sensitivity and regulatory needs. This is supported by strong capabilities in cloud migration, modernization, platform engineering and managed services, ensuring consistency across environments.
As data and workloads move across clouds, issues of cost optimization, performance, security and data sovereignty become critical. We embed these controls by design, using automation, AI-led operations and unified management frameworks.
Increasingly, clients are also looking at cloud through a “service as a cloud concept,” where the focus shifts from infrastructure to a unified service layer. This aligns with our broader move toward service‑as‑software models, where workflows, governance, AI‑operations and interoperability are abstracted into a modular, consumable service layer that runs consistently across environments. This allows us to standardize orchestration, enforce policies and deliver management through predefined service blueprints, making cloud consumption predictable, compliant and scalable.
Ultimately, our role is to act as an orchestrator across the cloud ecosystem — bringing together hyperscalers, our own digital infrastructure capabilities, and industry expertise to give clients flexibility, resilience and long-term scalability without added complexity
What is your view on “experience-led transformation” — and how are you aligning technology and business outcomes? How do you measure success in customer transformation projects?
For us, experience-led transformation is about creating measurable business impact, not just better interfaces or isolated digital journeys.
We approach this by working with the client to identify the desired outcomes, whether that is revenue growth, faster time-to-market, improved customer retention, or operational efficiency. The next step is designing experiences that are powered by AI, data, cloud, and end-to-end automation. In my view, experience cannot sit on top of legacy systems; it has to be embedded into the core.
Success is not defined by deployment milestones alone, but by KPIs agreed with the client. This may include parameters like conversion rates, customer satisfaction, operational productivity, cost optimization or resilience improvements. Experience-led transformation is no longer a front-end conversation. It is a complete business transformation agenda, and our role is to ensure technological investments translate into sustained, real-world value for our clients.
How critical are partnerships with hyperscalers, SaaS providers, and OEMs to your business model and why?
Our rich ecosystem of partnerships is fundamental to our business model and even more critical in today’s AI-driven and multi-platform environment. We work closely with hyperscalers (like AWS, Microsoft, Google), SaaS providers (like SAP, Salesforce and Servicenow) and OEMs (like Cisco, Dell, VMware) to bring the best of the ecosystem to our clients.
The partnerships are key to our full-stack proposition, addressing all major digital transformation priorities, combining leading platforms and technologies with our strengths in systems integration, industry expertise, engineering depth and managed services. Our focus is always on helping clients make the right choices based on their business needs, data sensitivity, regulatory context and long-term objectives.
Our role is not to push a specific technology, but to act as a trusted advisor and integrator, designing architectures, ensuring interoperability, and taking accountability for outcomes across complex environments.
What markets, technologies, or partnerships excite you the most right now?
What excites me most right now is the convergence of AI, data, cloud, cybersecurity and digital infrastructure. We are seeing strong momentum where these capabilities come together to drive real, scalable outcomes rather than isolated innovation.
As said earlier, we are increasingly building solutions in India that serve clients worldwide, leveraging deep engineering talent and industry expertise. At the same time, global demand for trusted partners in areas like AI-led transformation, cloud modernizations and resilient digital infrastructure continues to grow.
We already have multiple partnerships aligned to enterprise AI, including our partnerships with OpenAI, Mistral AI and multiple hyperscalers, SaaS providers and OEMs which allow us to co-create solutions at scale, combine innovation with reliability, and move faster from experimentation to business impact.
What do you see as the next major disruption shaping your business over the next 5 years?
The next major disruption shaping our business over the next five years will be the industrialization of AI at scale, combined with the continued shift towards decentralized and intelligent digital infrastructure. We are moving beyond experimentation into a phase where AI becomes deeply embedded into core business processes, platforms and operations. Merely adopting AI will not be enough, how well an organization does it will determine its success in the coming years. Our 2026 Global AI Report reveals that these ‘AI leaders’ report significantly higher revenue growth and profit margins than other organizations.
At the heart of this new playbook for AI leaders is to align AI and business strategies, then pick one or two domains that deliver value and redesign them end-to-end with AI.
Another important disruption is the move from technology-led buying to outcome-led partnerships. Clients will increasingly expect partners to take accountability for business outcomes, not just delivery. This will continue to reshape engagement models, commercial structures and how value is measured.
For us, these disruptions align well with our strengths — end-to-end capabilities across AI, cloud, data and digital infrastructure, our global scale with strong local presence, and focus on responsible and sustainable innovation. The opportunity is not just to adapt to disruption, but to help the clients lead through it with confidence.
How is your company embedding sustainability and ESG goals into delivery models?
Sustainability and ESG are embedded into how we design, build and operate solutions — they are not treated as parallel initiatives.
From a delivery perspective, we focus on energy-efficient digital infrastructure, optimized data center operations, and the use of AI and automation to reduce resource consumption and improve efficiency. Sustainability considerations are increasingly part of architectural decisions whether that is workload placement, cloud optimization or lifecycle management.
We anchor this through the NTT DATA Group’s “3 Positives” framework: Planet Positive, Prosperity Positive, and People Positive; which includes 13 material ESG issues that guide every delivery engagement globally.
We also embed ESG principles into how we work with clients and partners, from responsible AI and data governance to secure, compliant and transparent delivery models. In many transformation programs, we help clients use technology to measure, monitor and improve their own sustainability outcomes, making ESG a tangible, measurable part of business transformation.
Our data centers with 1,500 MW of capacity globally are transitioning to 100% renewable energy. AI‑driven cooling, liquid‑cooling technologies and real‑time energy optimization have already reduced GHG emissions and improved PUE across multiple regions.
We are also embedding sustainable IT practices into delivery, aligned to the new ISO/IEC 21031:2024 SCI standard, which NTT DATA helped co‑develop. This ensures clients receive architectures and software engineered to minimize energy consumption, reduce lifecycle impact and improve carbon transparency.
If you were to summarize your leadership philosophy in one line — what would it be?
My leadership philosophy is simple: build trust, empower people, and stay relentlessly focused on creating long-term value for clients, employees and society.
