From Reactive To Proactive: Charting The Next Chapter Of Automation In India

By Samit Shetty

Across industries, the conversation around automation has moved well beyond efficiency and cost savings. Today, forward-looking enterprises in India are reimagining their operating models with AI-infused automation to unlock new value, build resilience, and accelerate innovation.

In the coming years, automation strategies will be expected to deliver far more than incremental improvements. The real opportunity lies in connecting data across IT and business environments, leveraging low-code/no-code capabilities to scale adoption, and embedding predictive intelligence into workflows. Automation is no longer just about replacing repetitive manual tasks; it is about building integrated IT ecosystems able to deliver business value and meet business SLAs while reducing cost as well as security incidents and system outages.

Automation In Action

Across industries in India, automation is enabling enterprises to transform operations, enhance agility, and deliver better customer experiences. In banking and financial services, AI-led automation is strengthening IT operations, reducing downtime, and ensuring seamless digital journeys through enterprise integration. Retailers are optimising supply chains and store operations, boosting efficiency and personalisation at scale.

Telecommunications players are also embracing automation. By applying AI-powered monitoring and optimisation, they’re proactively managing network health and outages as well as maintaining consistent service, even during peak loads. Tata Play Broadband, for instance, is using automation to monitor business critical applications, achieving a 30% improvement in issue resolution and significantly enhancing service quality for its customers.

Meanwhile, insurance providers are reimagining core processes like claims and underwriting by integrating AI with automation, reducing turnaround times and errors, and increasing operational accuracy. In health tech, for example, API Holdings, the parent company of brands like PharmEasy and Thyrocare, deployed an AI-powered observability platform to proactively manage their application stack. This led to a 30% reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR) and enabled faster, more reliable service delivery.

These real-world stories underscore a clear shift: automation isn’t a one-off initiative, it’s a strategic foundation for long-term resilience, innovation, and growth.

The Next Chapter: AIOps, Integration, FinOps, And Agentic AI

As the shift from reactive to proactive IT gains momentum, enterprises are increasingly turning to AIOps, AI for IT operations, to transform how infrastructure and networks are managed. By leveraging machine learning, pattern recognition, and real-time analytics, AIOps platforms enable early anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and automated remediation. This allows IT teams to monitor transaction reliability, manage hybrid environments more efficiently, and prevent issues before they disrupt operations. In short, AIOps empowers organisations to move beyond manual troubleshooting to intelligent, predictive IT management, laying the groundwork for data-led innovation and operational excellence.

In the age of digital transformation, application programming interfaces (API) are the cornerstone of enterprise integration. They enable systems to communicate effortlessly and unlock real-time data-exchange — fuelling innovation across the business. APIs and supporting technologies like enterprise service bus (ESB) acts as the connective tissue that allows businesses to seamlessly integrate, which is crucial for today’s digital transformation initiatives to succeed.

As cloud adoption skyrockets, so does the cost of running critical applications, often spiralling beyond expectations. Organisations often overspend on cloud software, with 24% of their spend estimated to be wasted. In this scenario, FinOps has emerged as the critical framework to regain control and ensure cloud spending is optimised. It’s no longer just an IT concern; it’s a strategic priority discussed in every boardroom. The ability to balance innovation with cost efficiency is now a key competitive advantage in the digital first world. FinOps solutions support the entire lifecycle, from inform to operate, and mature with an organisation's cloud-native application architectures.

Agentic process automation represents a significant milestone in automation, enabling real-time data-driven decisions and adaptability. AI agents can break down business goals into actionable steps, prioritise, and execute them in a sequence that evolves based on real-time context. They excel with unstructured data using natural language processing and generative AI, bringing their functionality closer to humans. Agents can work together in multi-agent AI orchestration, integrating with apps, APIs, and external systems to accomplish complex automated workflows. Though we are in the early stages of agentic automation, the methodologies are quickly evolving — emphasising the need for organisations to meticulously strategise plans for adopting it to drive competitive advantage.

The Road Ahead

For Indian enterprises, the path forward is clear: automation must evolve from isolated use cases to an integrated strategy that spans IT, business, and customer-facing operations. Investments must be consistent and innovation-led, with a long-term vision that embraces AI, automation, and observability as core building blocks.

Automation must be architected for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enabling dynamic application and infrastructure management across diverse ecosystems. This adaptability will be crucial as businesses scale, pivot, and innovate in response to evolving market demands.

Ultimately, the future of enterprise transformation will be shaped by the synergy between AI, automation, and data. This is how organisations in India will build intelligent workflows, drive resilience, and unlock sustained value for customers, employees, and stakeholders.

The author is country leader, Automation Platform, IBM India & South Asia.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of NDTV Profit or its editorial team.