AI solutions should deliver real application, says Xoriant CEO

As artificial intelligence continues to dominate technology discourse, Xoriant CEO Rohit Kedia is calling for a fundamental shift from AI innovation to practical implementation, warning that the industry faces a significant application gap despite massive capital investments.

Chrys Capital-backed mid-sized digital engineering and technology services company Xoriant, with operations across major Indian cities including Pune, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Chennai, has positioned itself as a leader in what Kedia terms "applied intelligence", a strategic approach focused on delivering measurable business value through AI rather than chasing technological trends.

"So much AI yet so little value," Kedia observed, citing an MIT report showing that 95% of AI efforts haven't created tangible value.

"For the first time in the history of digital technology, we've moved from a deterministic realm to a probabilistic realm. The world hasn't applied a probabilistic technology at scale to transform businesses before."

The company's applied intelligence strategy centers on three key pillars: workforce transformation, domain expertise through ontology development, and platform-led delivery acceleration through its Orion platform. Xoriant has already achieved 100% AI literacy across its workforce and aims to reach complete AI fluency by the end of next year.

"We don't just have software programmers who know AI – that's AI literacy," Kedia explained. "We have software programmers who know how to use AI really well to deliver value. That is AI fluency."

Central to Xoriant's strategy is the concept of software-defined businesses. Kedia believes every company, regardless of industry, is on a journey to become fundamentally software-driven, citing examples from Netflix and Tesla to healthcare companies like Dexcom and even pizza delivery chain Domino's.

The company recently acquired TestDevLab to address what Kedia identifies as a critical barrier to AI scaling: quality assurance. "AI quality assurance is a whole new field," he noted. "You cannot apply old approaches of software quality assurance to validate AI solutions because in the world of AI, one input can create a range of outputs."

Xoriant focuses on industries with high software intensity, including banking and financial services, retail and consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, technology, and healthcare. The company's mission is to help clients build large-scale platforms, monetize data assets, and transform business models as they transition to software-defined operations.

Addressing workforce concerns, Kedia emphasized that Xoriant's AI productivity gains translate into delivering more software faster rather than workforce reduction. "The world still needs a lot more software than the capacity it has," he said, positioning AI as a tool to enhance engineer capabilities rather than replace them.