MC EXCLUSIVE Red Hat helping enterprises move from AI pilots to scaled deployment; says India among top three APAC markets

Visitors stand next to an advertising billboard at AI summit in New Delhi. (AP Photo)

• Red Hat sees India as a fast-growing AI and telecom market.
• Helping enterprises scale AI from pilot to production.
• Indian telcos are modernizing and entering cloud and AI services.

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India is fast emerging as one of the fastest-growing markets for Red Hat in the Asia-Pacific region, with the IBM-owned company sharpening its focus on helping enterprises move from AI experimentation to scaled deployment. The company’s immediate priority, said Navtez Singh Bal, vice president and general manager for Red Hat India and South Asia, is to help customers platformize AI so application development becomes seamless and easier for IT teams.

“About 70–80 percent of the enterprises we work with have already run some form of AI pilot. I believe 2026–27 will be when these pilots get productionized,” Bal told Moneycontrol. “To make that happen, organizations must approach AI in a scalable way. Adoption has to be simple for IT teams. Our priority in India is to help enterprises platformize AI so they can build and deploy applications more seamlessly.”

As AI moves from support functions into core business operations, Bal said concerns around governance, security, data control, model sizing, and deployment environments become critical. Red Hat is working closely with enterprises to address these challenges while also helping them avoid vendor lock-in, ensuring flexibility as the technology evolves.

Speaking on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi, Bal said India’s strategic importance goes beyond enterprise AI adoption. Telecom modernization is emerging as a parallel growth driver. As operators transition from 4G to 5G and eventually 6G, they are compelled to modernize legacy systems and adopt containerized architectures — a foundational shift in how networks are built and managed.

At the same time, Indian telcos are expanding beyond connectivity into cloud and digital services. “Many Indian telcos are emerging as potential cloud providers. Their ability to serve customers, enable multi-tenancy, and offer AI services is becoming increasingly important. So two major needs are emerging — modernization and entry into new business areas like AI,” Bal said. He pointed to Airtel’s cloud foray and Jio’s expanding government engagements as examples of this transition.

This dual shift is creating opportunities for open-source platforms across operating systems, application development, and AI infrastructure that can run across clouds, accelerators, and environments. Bal added that India’s scale — across banks, airlines, exchanges, and telecom operators — makes it an ideal proving ground, with successful deployments serving as global reference cases. He also highlighted India’s large open-source community, positioning the country as both a key consumption and innovation hub for Red Hat.

Bal emphasized that enterprises must prioritize standardization and platformization rather than running fragmented pilots. Designing for scale from the outset is essential. Companies should also look beyond initial capital investments and prepare for rising inference costs as models move into production, while ensuring architectural flexibility to avoid lock-in amid rapid advances in models and accelerators.

“AI should not be treated as a one-off tool,” he said. “As humans, AI agents, and automated systems begin working together, business processes must be redesigned to be simple, governed, and AI-ready. AI should be viewed as the foundation for long-term business transformation.”