Return on investments in GenAI needs time and patience: Oracle India's Shailender Kumar

The senior vice president and regional managing director, Oracle India and NetSuite JAPAC talks about the company's presence across private and public sectors, agentic AI, and more

By Naini Thaker Forbes India Staff

Published: Mar 4, 2025 05:50:28 PM IST

Updated: Mar 5, 2025 06:42:05 PM IST

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Shailender Kumar, senior vice president and regional managing director, Oracle India and NetSuite JAPAC; Image: Amit Verma

In the first half of FY25, Oracle’s India business saw 30 percent of its bookings being driven by artificial intelligence (AI). While this signals rapid adoption and demand of enterprise AI in the country, Shailender Kumar, senior vice president and regional managing director, Oracle India and NetSuite JAPAC, says, “A key challenge of GenAI’s rapid adoption is effectively quantifying the return on investments, which will take time, patience and the right kind of investments.”

The India business has seen a growth of 51 percent in the quarter ended September 30, 2024, and 17 percent in H1FY25. This growth has been led by sectors such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), telcos, manufacturing, automotive and health care. Oracle has been operating in India for over 30 years, servicing both private and public sectors. It has close to 5000 customers in India, and supports 85 public sector organisations. It employs 50,000 professionals in India, the largest workforce outside of its headquarters in the US. India also has nine product development centres, again making it the largest R&D markets outside the US. The company operates two cloud regions in India, in Mumbai and Hyderabad.

In an exclusive conversation with Forbes India, Kumar talks about returns on GenAI, agentic AI being the next big thing, growth drivers for India and more. Edited excerpts:

Q. What have been the key growth drivers for Oracle India over the last couple of years? Where does India stand as a market for Oracle globally?

India has been the best performing region for Oracle, across Japan and Asia Pacific (JAPAC), and that growth is visible across all business segments. Oracle in India has grown almost 100 percent for all its verticals, and we have added 65 new customers in the first half of this fiscal year already, with AI contributing approximately 30 percent of our new bookings.

Some growth drivers for the India business have been vertical applications, which refers to software that is designed to meet the specific needs of a particular industry or market segment. These have been particularly effective for the BFSI industry. Where deploying these applications are concerned, we let the customer choose if they would like to deploy them in the public cloud, private cloud or in a public cloud but within their data centre.

In the public sector, we have been involved in the modernisation of several government programmes across states and the Centre. Some of these projects include UPI—a majority of banks use Oracle platforms—content and learning platform Diksha, which is used by 210 million students and teachers, the Digital Sansad initiative, and smart electric meter projects.

Q. How do you assess the pace of cloud adoption in India, and what role is Oracle playing in this transformation?

We have been in India for the last 32 years, so we have had the opportunity to experience the evolution of digitalisation in this country. The pace at which clients are embracing the cloud and innovating new products, is unbelievable. India is at par with its counterparts anywhere else in the world. There was a time, where on global calls we would keep hearing about projects that are happening in other countries. Now, it’s the other way around. People want to hear about the new things that India is doing.

It has never been more important for Indian companies to boost performance, reduce costs, and be close to their customers. Today, India's financial ecosystem relies on Oracle, given that every bank and every insurance company in India works with us in some form. In fact, we work with the Ministry of Finance across multiple projects as well.

The company operates two cloud regions in India, in Mumbai and Hyderabad. Both are empanelled by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) as a cloud infrastructure solution provider for governments and public sector entities. We have been growing very aggressively for the last few years, and we feel the opportunity is huge, especially in the public sector. The reason we have expanded our data centres is because we have to accommodate all these customers.

Also read: If there is one place where you can scale with stability, it is India: NTT Data's Amir Durrani

Q. There is a lot of investment that’s been happening in the space of GenAI. When will we start seeing this leading to revenue generation at scale?

Oracle's AI strategy spans the entire company. AI and machine learning (ML) have been embedded into our infrastructure layer, database and platform services, long before GenAI became a buzz word. This has put us in a unique position to help every industry optimise its workload and solve complex and strategic challenges.

However, a key challenge of GenAI’s rapid adoption is effectively quantifying the return on investments. Many organisations expect immediate results. In fact, we have seen some of them scale back investments prematurely as well. But, we need to be bold and embrace AI, as its the future. The return on investments will take some more time, patience and the right kind of investments.

Q. Agentic AI is seen as the future. What are your thoughts about this?

With the ability to operate autonomously, pursue complex goals and continuously learn from real-world interactions, agentic AI has the potential to revolutionise industries. It will help drive efficiency and enhanced decision-making.

As the volume of data continues to grow and become more complex, the need for intelligent adaptive systems will increase. Hence, embracing agentic AI is a strategic move, towards smarter and resilient operations. It can make its mark through the entire AI stack.

So far, Oracle has integrated 50 GenAI agents in our fusion applications and these agents can help organisations achieve productivity by successfully completing frequent, repetitive tasks, allowing employees and managers to focus on strategic tasks.

Q. How is Oracle adapting its products and services to the evolving data privacy regulations in India, such as the DPDP Rules, while ensuring clients' data security?

Achieving sovereignty or data localisation requires customised solutions, depending on the company, where it operates and its varying needs in different locations. We have 50 public cloud regions across 25 countries.

Each Oracle cloud region offers a consistent set of more than 150 cloud services designed to run any application much faster, more securely and for a lot less, in terms of cost. When we started, there were well established hyper-scalers in the market. So, if we had to come to the market, we had to win the market share. We have to be better and cheaper.

In India, since we operate in two cloud regions, they provide more control over data residency for customers to achieve local compliance and at the same time implement disaster recovery [DR].