Wrap Up

On 18th September 2025, GIC’s Technology Investment Group (TIG) held its second Bridge Forum Connects event in India. This follows last year’s inaugural CTO-focused edition, which brought together founders and partners to explore generative AI roadmaps.

In the second edition this year, more than 100 founders, CTOs, global partners and senior executives from companies including OpenAI, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, Airtel, Databricks, Eleven Labs, Temporal, Arize, Sanas.ai, Orkes and Replit came together at IF.BE Mumbai to exchange ideas and share best practices in leveraging AI to transform their organizations.

In his opening remarks, GIC’s Head of Tech Investing, Chris Emanuel, underscored the significance of the AI moment:

“In 2022, generating a million tokens cost $60. Today – it’s three cents. That’s about 2,000x drop in under three and half years. That’s the scale and speed of disruption we’re dealing with.”

Adding to this, Gaurav Jain, Head of India Tech Investing, highlighted the encouraging adoption among enterprises in India:

“We ran a survey among Bridge Forum participants in September this year. 75% said they have genAI projects in production, with many hitting full-scale adoption. 80% said their AI budgets will increase substantially next year.”

Data x AI: Integrating Data and AI for strategic excellence

AI is fundamentally changing how businesses operate, by accelerating product velocity, reducing costs, and improving employee productivity. Businesses can now extract actionable insights from vast amounts of data and automate complex workflows. As AI integrates into enterprise systems, strategic data management has become more crucial for every company’s AI strategy. Mike Gannon, CRO of Snowflake, expanded on this topic and highlighted AI’s transformative impact, sharing examples of how companies are boosting productivity with unstructured data. He emphasized deriving real business value from AI use cases and building trust through tangible results as the top two adoption levers. AI is revolutionizing team operations, especially in sales and marketing, by enabling rapid prototype development and improving customer interactions. Snowflake’s AI capabilities have notably reduced call volumes by 45% and empowered pre-sales engineers to swiftly create MVPs. He further added that India has become the fastest growing market in Asia-Pacific for Snowflake and the company has doubled its staff here.

“There is going to be no successful AI strategy without having a successful data strategy”

Transitioning towards an AI-native organisation

Integrating AI into business processes is what transforms companies into AI-driven organizations, where AI is used for all operations and decisions. Kunal Shah, founder of CRED, emphasized that leaders can benefit more by ensuring they have a good understanding of AI themselves rather than just hiring experts. This can lead to better decisions and smoother integration. While many companies might prioritize cost-cutting with AI, the technology’s true potential lies in driving revenue growth and fostering ambition. AI not only boosts productivity but also spurs innovation, transcending the mere reduction of expenses. Successful AI adoption necessitates the entire leadership team to embrace roles as chief AI users, ensuring a unified strategy and effective implementation. Although AI can support creative and judgment-based tasks, it cannot supplant human intuition and contrarian thinking, which are vital for innovation and astute business decisions.

“Every single company should think about becoming more ambitious and faster, leveraging AI to drive innovation rather than just cutting costs. Leveraging AI to increase productivity by 20% is far more impactful than just cutting costs. The largest employer in the world is inefficiency, and AI is the tool to overcome it.”

GIC is committed to investing long-term capital in cutting-edge AI technologies, fostering progress and new applications in this space, while building the vital connections between innovators and businesses to generate significant value. We sincerely thank our distinguished panelists and guests for making the Bridge Forum a platform for visionary leaders in technology and business to gather, ensuring our network is well-prepared for the future.

Acknowledgements to a few of our Distinguished Attendees:

• Mike Gannon, CRO at Snowflake
• Kunal Shah, Founder and CEO at CRED
• Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and CTO at Groww
• Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO at HDFC Bank
• Vyom Upadhyay, Deputy CTO at ICICI Bank
• Khilan Haria, CPO at Razorpay
• Pragya Misra, Public Policy Head at OpenAI
• Priten Bangdiwala, President-Group IT at Aditya Birla Group
• Balaji Narayanamurthy, Head – Business Intelligence Unit at Axis Bank
• Pradipt Kapoor, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Airtel
• Amol Hardikar, SVP Finance at Replit
• Manish Jindal, President at Arize
• Lalit Mishra, Director – India GTM at Clickhouse
• Ed Lenta, SVP and GM APJ at Databricks
• Naveen Kamat, Chief AI Officer at L&T
• Mukund Acharya, CTO at Sony Pictures