What Every Tech Professional Can Learn | ft. Kanchan Bhonde

Industry Magnates Premier: Interview with Kanchan Bhonde, Senior Director at Sogeti (Part of Capgemini Group) with FaceTime with Leaders—A WDC Initiative. We are honored to premiere the "Industry Magnates" with our esteemed guest, Kanchan Bhonde. Explore leadership philosophy, ideas, and best practices that have propelled them in their professional and personal lives. Brief about Kanchan Bhonde: Kanchan Bhonde is an accomplished technology leader with nearly three decades of experience across Telecom, BFSI, Healthcare, Manufacturing, and Agritech. Her career reflects a unique blend of technology leadership, business strategy, product innovation, research, and large-scale digital transformation. Currently serving as Senior Director at Sogeti, part of Capgemini, she leads the Quality Engineering Centres of Excellence, including Innovation, with a 4,000+ member team in India. Her responsibilities include driving Agentic Quality Engineering, strengthening the quality of AI systems, and enabling Quality Engineers globally to adopt AI-driven approaches. She also contributes to enterprise AI initiatives through the AI Council and AI Evangelists team and is one of four Lead Authors of the World Quality Report 2025. Before joining Sogeti, Kanchan spent over 26 years at Tech Mahindra, progressing from Software Engineer to Assistant Vice President and Head of the Metaverse Practice. Throughout her tenure, she led large-scale technology programmes, managed strategic client relationships, drove product development, and established innovation-led business practices. Her achievements include developing a telecom planning product that generated $2 million in revenue and was implemented by six customers, managing Tier-1 accounts worth $20 million+, leading teams of more than 400 professionals, and overseeing an OSS platform involving over 350 applications and 800 geographically distributed team members. She also managed a critical 3 TB database migration with only eight hours of downtime, secured a £1.2 million technology-led deal through pre-sales, and established the Makers Lab at Adastral Park, UK. Her innovation journey extended into the Metaverse, where she built a practice from proof of concept to full-scale delivery and created the first Meta Lounge for a public sector undertaking (PSU) bank in India. Beyond corporate technology leadership, Kanchan has contributed to initiatives addressing broader economic and societal challenges. As a World Economic Forum Fellow, she helped develop an Agritech perspective for India and worked with the Government of India's Principal Scientific Adviser’s Office on an application intended to serve 140 million farmers. She also contributed to Project Indus, an initiative to develop an Indian large language model from scratch, incorporating Hindi and its 40 dialects. Her research on Panchang-based rainfall prediction, published in the *Indian Journal of Science and Technology*, reflects her interest in exploring how traditional knowledge and modern technology can work together to address contemporary challenges. These experiences have shaped her belief that innovation must go beyond technological trends and deliver measurable business value and meaningful societal impact. Watch the exclusive interview where our esteemed guest shares views on: 00:00 Introduction 03:54 – Kanchan Bhonde on Was the metaverse a real idea that came too early or just hype? 07:37 – Kanchan Bhonde on Does India really need its own homegrown AI model? 10:44 – Kanchan Bhonde on Why is India's agricultural transformation progressing slower than expected? 15:34 – Rapid fire round with Kanchan Bhonde 15:57– Kanchan Bhonde on What is the most overrated emerging technology of the last five years? 17:47 – Kanchan Bhonde on What are Indian boards missing about AI accountability? 20:33 – What made you join Directors Institute, and what value did you find in the experience? #KanchanBhonde #FaceTimeWithLeaders #DirectorsInstitute #WomenInTechnology #AILeadership #ArtificialIntelligence #AIGovernance #AgenticAI #GenerativeAI #Metaverse #QualityEngineering #Agritech #IndianAI #DigitalTransformation #WomenInLeadership #CorporateGovernance #DeepTech #futureofai