Tech Leaders Emerge as Strategic Growth Drivers in the AI Era

As enterprises fast-track their journeys of digital transformation, technology leaders are stepping beyond traditional operational roles to become core drivers of business growth. In this exclusive interview with FE B2B, Siddhartha Tipnis, Partner and Technology Sector Leader at Deloitte India, spoke about how the role of the Tech C-suite is getting redefined in an AI-driven world.

1. How are technology leaders evolving from operational enablers to strategic growth drivers in today’s enterprises?

Technology leadership has repositioned to a pivotal business partner role across the organisation, particularly in the last three years. Technology leaders today play an influential position across key organizational strategic priorities such as revenue and growth, product evolution, elevating customer experience and enabling speed and agility to market. Deloitte’s Technology Executive Survey 2025 acknowledges today as a moment of reinvention for the Tech C-suite. As AI adoption accelerates, the tech C-suites are expected to embrace new skills, greater influence and cross-functional collaboration, and a unified approach to business transformation. 

2. What are the biggest challenges organizations face when modernizing legacy systems, and how can they overcome them?

As a trend, we see most large-scale core enterprise system providers integrate AI as a part of their offerings and capabilities. This is a significant shift in how businesses will adopt technology for operational excellence and competitive advantage. With this backdrop, organizations could look at an AI-first playbook in their legacy modernization objectives:

• Reimagine the core in an AI first world – from system to records to system of insights and actions
• Deploy composable and API led architecture for agility, accelerated innovation, and scalability
• Adopt AI-first approach on business outcomes and not for the sake of adopting AI
• Give equal importance to data governance, privacy, trust and security as a part of modernization journey.

3. How has AI transformed business strategy and operations across industries, based on your experience leading large-scale transformation programs? Give examples of specific use cases.

Deloitte’s 2025 compendium on ‘AI Dossier’, summarizes 80+ high-impact use cases across six major industries. A few standout examples:

• Consumer – Transformation of customer journey, enriching experiences and optimizing costs: Specific interventions include hyper-personalized engagement, dynamic pricing, autonomous supply chains, AI-orchestrated product design
• Financial Services – Generative and agentic AI for personalized journeys, more scientific risk modeling and underwriting, compliance and regulatory management
• Life Sciences and Healthcare – Optimizing R&D and clinical processes such as AI assisted diagnostics, AI assisted drug discovery, virtual patient support, and operational automation. 

4. What best practices do you recommend for building tech teams that are future-ready and capable of driving innovation?

Cross-functional teaming, embracing new job families such as AI product management, prompt/interaction engineers, data/ML, platform SRE, SecOps, FinOps, model risk and the creation of immersive upskilling/cross-skilling programmes such as Skills Academy (certification and badging programmes, annual recertifications to stay relevant) and Startup/Academia Crowdsourcing & Ideation; and fundamentally adopting build-fast/fail-fast/iterate-fast mindsets are some things which we have seen in action and work well. 

5. In your view, what’s next for IT transformation as enterprises accelerate their digital journeys?

Over the next 18–24 months, enterprises may experience vast improvement in their technology teams as generative AI is increasingly embedded into ways of working. Deloitte’s analysis suggests that by 2027, GenAI is likely to be embedded in every company’s digital product/software footprint. Manual and time-consuming processes such as code reviews, infrastructure configuration, budget management, and intelligent operations are some key callouts which are expected to be transformed significantly. 

6. How can technology and business strategy work together to maximize organizational value and competitive advantage?

Deloitte’s 2025 CIO Pulse Survey expects that companies that integrate tech strategy into the business strategy—with shared KPIs and co-owned governance—capture disproportionate value from digital investments. An emphasis on measuring outcomes (revenue, margin, NPS) rather than just delivery metrics is beneficial

7. What advice would you give to CIOs and technology leaders who are just beginning their digital transformation journey?

• Have a deep understanding of today’s environment and underlying challenges of legacy systems, infrastructure and data
• Define the business case of infrastructure/application modernization linked to business outcomes – revenue & growth, cost to serve, operational excellence, customer experience, any other
• Spend considerable thought on architectural choices – Deploy composable and API led architecture framework for agility, accelerated innovation, and scalability