Kamal Ghorui
At the Nasscom GCC Summit last week in Mumbai, we had a discussion with two leading GCC heads – Ankur Mittal, CTO and MD of Lowe’s India, and Praveen Kumar, CEO of Barclays Global Services India – on how much of a foundational shift AI is, and the impact the technology has had. Both said the shift is fundamental, and is forcing companies to rethink customer experience, employee productivity, business processes, and the nature of talent.“There are going to be some places where we have to reimagine the business, foundational changes. There are going to be some places where we overlay AI on top of what we are doing today,” Mittal said.Lowe’s, the 105-year-old, $86-billion US home improvement retailer, is looking at AI through three lenses: how customers shop, how employees work, and how store associates sell. The third is particularly important because Lowe’s operates about 1,750 stores and has 300,000 store associates helping customers with specialised home improvement needs.
A customer may ask which generator is needed for a home, what HVAC system suits a 2,400 sqft house, or how to fix a leaky faucet. No associate can know every detail across a 120,000 sqft store with 40,000 SKUs. Lowe’s response has been MyLow Companion, an AI assistant for store associates. The app pulls together product information, store inventory, nearby store availability and guidance on customer questions. Lowe’s has also created a version for customers on lowes.com. “The app can answer questions like: how do I fix my patio, or which battery do I need for this tool,” Mittal said.
The impact is already visible. Lowe’s gets nearly a million questions a month on these AI apps. Customers who interact with MyLow on lowes.com convert at twice the rate of those who do not use the AI assistant. When store associates use the app to help customers, Lowe’s has seen a 200-basis-point improvement in likelihood-to-recommend scores and associate helpfulness.At Barclays, Praveen Kumar said, AI is foundational because banking is fundamentally about allocating capital and managing risk. The quality and speed of decisions matter deeply.
“The more data-centric and faster those decisions can be, that makes a material difference to our outcomes,” he said.Barclays’ first wave of AI adoption focused on individual productivity. These included call summarisation, content summarisation, credit underwriting support and other tools that help employees make faster decisions. The bank has also developed customer-facing use cases. Its FX bot can cut the time taken for foreign exchange quotes by 75%. Conversational AI in customer service can deliver decisions 95-99% faster.But Kumar said the next phase will be more ambitious. Barclays is now looking at end-to-end process reinvention using AI and agentic AI. This includes know-your-customer processes, customer due diligence, financial client processes, and fraud technology. Referring to this last issue, he said that when external threat actors are becoming more and more sophisticated using technology, you have to counter them in real-time using technology as well.Both leaders said the bigger opportunity lies in new business possibilities. “We have to look at: can I create something new, something very different, big bets. It balances out cost and top line,” he said.
