Healthcare is undergoing a fundamental shift from reactive treatment to proactive, intelligence-driven care, and AI is emerging as a key catalyst. For Practo, that transformation is rooted not just in automation, but in leveraging nearly two decades of longitudinal patient data to deliver more personalized, accessible, and scalable healthcare experiences. In this conversation with CIO&Leader, Srijesh, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Practo, discusses the company’s vision for building “Practo Care Intelligence,” the role of AI in care navigation, and why human oversight remains essential in healthcare. He also shares insights on data stewardship, agentic AI, global expansion, and how integrated product, engineering, and data teams are helping Practo move faster while staying focused on trust, outcomes, and patient care.
CIO&Leader: Healthcare has always been reactive by design — you see a doctor when something is wrong. What does it actually take to rewire that logic at a platform level, and how far along is Practo in making that shift real?
Srijesh: That shift is already happening across the industry. If you look back over the last five years and at the newer products that have launched, you’ll generally see a lot more focus on preventive care as well.
Now, specifically about Practo, one of the gold mines it’s sitting on is longitudinal data. We have a lot of data about a patient’s journey. And I’m not just talking about doctor visits. I’m talking about everything over the last 10 years — what a doctor prescribed, whether the patient was admitted to a hospital, and so on. We have tons of data dimensions.
What we’re trying to do right now is build intelligence. For lack of a better name, I call it Practo Care Intelligence. That’s where our focus is at this moment. This data will power multiple use cases. If we have that intelligence and those insights, we can enable a range of use cases across the platform. That’s largely the strategy we’re taking from a platform perspective.
CIO&Leader: Every health-tech company is claiming AI transformation right now. What separates genuine clinical impact from feature-washing — and by that measure, what has Practo actually cracked?
Srijesh: Yes, obviously, we’re no different in saying that we want to be an AI-first company. The lens we have is: where can we leverage AI? And it’s not just on the product side. On the product side, we’re thinking about consumer value propositions and certain experiences that we can build. But we’re also looking at it internally.
For example, how can we build a better care navigation experience by leveraging AI internally? How can we increase customers’ trust in Practo? Those are some of the dimensions we’re exploring.
At this moment, AI is still a relatively new journey for us. It’s only been a few months, but our investments have already shown remarkable results. Let me take a simple example. We have something like an OPD concierge product. By leveraging AI, our team has increased its coverage of patient touchpoints.
It’s a hybrid system now. AI handles many tasks, and wherever human intervention is required, we have a human in the loop to take over and guide the patient.
What that has led to is greater coverage. Earlier, if we were covering, say, 70% of our patients, today we can cover virtually 100% of our customers. We’re also seeing better accuracy because AI doesn’t get tired at night. So we do have the advantage of leveraging technology.
Collectively, this has resulted in more transactions for Practo because we’re able to offer a much better experience. Simply put, if you book an appointment on Practo today, you’ll find much more support and hand-holding than was available three or four months ago.
CIO&Leader: In fintech, a bad AI call costs money. In healthcare, it can cost a life. How do you build for speed and innovation while managing that asymmetry of risk?
Srijesh: The answer lies in the whole human-in-the-loop approach that I spoke about earlier. We’re not here to replace doctors. That’s not our objective.
Our job is to ensure that doctors can focus on what matters most — talking to patients and providing the right care. But that’s not always the reality. If you’re not leveraging technology, doctors end up doing a hundred other things. We’re trying to remove those distractions.
What that means is greater access to healthcare, and that’s the vision we have for AI. We’re not getting into the space of replacing doctors for diagnosis.
CIO&Leader: You’ve argued that the next phase of digital health must be measured by care consistency, not interaction volume. What does that demand of a business model built on scale?
Srijesh: Our vision for Practo is to offer Practo to the entire world.
We are very deep in India. We have an exceptional network and a fantastic product here. We want to take that to the rest of the world, and the only way to do that is by leveraging agentic AI, automated workflows, and more.
That’s where we’re heavily invested from a product perspective. We want to build a platform that can scale easily across markets. I don’t know if that fully answers the question, but that’s where Practo’s intersection with scale exists at this moment.
CIO&Leader: Patients share their most sensitive data on health platforms — diagnoses, prescriptions, mental health records. How does Practo think about data stewardship, and where do you draw the line on what AI can and cannot do with that information?
Srijesh: Yes, absolutely. This is something we think about almost every day.
Yes, we have the data. We’re an 18-year-old company, so we have a tremendous amount of data. But we also prioritize trust. That’s a critical value if you’re operating in the health-tech space.
Most of the data we leverage is used to derive insights and intelligence, not to work with targeted PII or anything similar. We’re very careful about that. We ensure compliance with all relevant standards and regulations.
Trust has always been one of our key tenets. Whenever we build anything, we want to ensure that trust is never compromised. Internally, that translates into a strong focus on data privacy and related safeguards.
CIO&Leader: What gives India the architectural advantage to build healthcare platforms for the world — and which markets have surprised you most in how differently healthcare actually works on the ground?
Srijesh: The advantage is very clear. India HealthTech has access to a large dataset and a huge sample size. Our product is battle-tested because it was built in India. It has been designed to deal with scale and volume.
So it’s a highly battle-tested product built by exceptional talent in India. Those are the two key advantages I see — the scale at which the product has been tested and the talent that built it.
When it comes to healthcare across different geographies, every market has its own regulations, compliance requirements, and operating models. That’s where the surprises usually come in.
But if you look at the core product, the underlying philosophy doesn’t change much. Certain things may vary, such as who pays for an appointment — it could be an insurance company or another stakeholder. There are always local nuances.
Whenever we enter a new market, our goal is to remain locally relevant. That is our primary focus. Roughly 80–90% of the core product remains intact and can serve any market.
CIO&Leader: Merging product, engineering, and data into a single function is still a contrarian organizational design choice. What breaks when you keep them separate — and what has surprised you since integrating them?
Srijesh: To be very honest, it’s a pendulum. Different organizations at different stages of their journey have tried both approaches.
The biggest advantage of bringing these functions together is speed. It enables faster decision-making, better alignment, and a stronger focus on outcomes.
At some stage, companies may need deeper specialization and build dedicated practices around certain capabilities. Right now, we don’t have that need.
What we need is the ability to move fast, build the right things, and stay aligned as an organization on outcomes. That’s why this model works for Practo today.
CIO&Leader: If AI delivers on its promise in healthcare, what does the role of the doctor look like in 2030 — and is Practo building toward that future or around it?
Srijesh: Absolutely. I touched on this earlier as well.
Our job is to increase access to healthcare. The more we automate and leverage AI to eliminate distractions for doctors, the more time they have to focus on what truly matters.
If I’m sitting in a clinic, I want the doctor to spend their time talking to me. If AI can automatically scribe conversations, provide recommendations, and handle a hundred other tasks, then doctors can focus entirely on patient care.
And yes, we’re absolutely building toward that future. We’re building agents that will support doctors, clinics, and hospitals. We’re also building agents that help care seekers. In addition, we’re creating internal agents that improve sales, support, and other functions within Practo.
So there are multiple dimensions through which we’re leveraging AI. To sum it up, we don’t have to wait until 2030 to see this future. We’ll probably get there sooner.