Kulwant Singh, Vice President, Diversified Industries and Conglomerates, SAP India explains how Indian conglomerates use unified data, AI, and cloud to enable real-time decisions, optimise capital, manage risk, and drive synergy while balancing centralised governance with business agility.
As India’s conglomerates scale across sectors and geographies, managing capital, risk, and operations in a unified manner has become critical. The shift toward integrated digital cores is enabling real-time decision-making, stronger governance, and greater resilience in increasingly complex, interconnected business environments.
In this conversation, Kulwant Singh, Vice President, Diversified Industries and Conglomerates, SAP India, explains how leading groups are leveraging unified data layers, AI, and cloud platforms to drive enterprise-wide intelligence. He discusses balancing centralised control with subsidiary agility, the rise of agentic AI in inter-company processes, and the growing importance of synergy as Indian conglomerates expand globally.
CIO&Leader: How are India’s top conglomerates using a unified data layer to make real-time decisions on shifting liquidity between radically different business units?
Kulwant Singh: India’s leading conglomerates are increasingly moving toward unified data layer, built on cloud platforms and AI-driven analytics to enable real-time liquidity decisions across highly diversified business units. This has become critical as they manage portfolios spanning energy, telecom, retail, financial services, and manufacturing.
By integrating data from ERP systems, treasury platforms, supply chains, and customer applications into a harmonised environment, CFOs and treasury teams gain continuous, real-time visibility into cash flows, working capital, and capital allocation. This marks a decisive shift from periodic, siloed reporting to always-on, intelligence-led decision-making.
A decisive shift from periodic, siloed reporting to always-on, intelligence-led decision-making.
This direction is already visible across leading enterprises. TATA Projects, for instance, is using SAP’s cloud-based business suite to unify critical functions including finance, procurement, HR, compliance, and analytics on a single digital backbone, enabling stronger data visibility and real-time decision-making across the enterprise. Companies such as WIPRO and Mahindra & Mahindra also reflect this broader shift, as diversified groups increasingly invest in connected digital cores that allow leadership teams to respond faster to changing business demands and capital requirements.
In practice, this enables three key capabilities:
- Dynamic liquidity visibility: Real-time tracking of cash, debt, and liquidity across entities, allowing rapid reallocation between surplus and deficit units
- AI-driven scenario modelling: Simulation of demand shifts, commodity volatility, and currency movements to optimise capital deployment
- Automated treasury orchestration: Seamless intercompany transfers, borrowing, and risk management with embedded governance
This transformation is not just technological but operational. Many conglomerates are establishing centralised treasury hubs or “data command centres,” where cross-functional teams collaborate using shared, predictive insights.
The outcome is a fundamental shift in liquidity management leading to a proactive, real-time function that continuously directs capital toward the most strategic opportunities.
CIO&Leader: Where should a group-level digital core mandate end and subsidiary-level operational autonomy begin to avoid transformation friction?
Kulwant Singh: The key to modern enterprise success lies in balancing a unified strategic foundation with the agility to innovate locally.
Rise with SAP plays a major role in enabling this group-level digital core by defining the non-negotiables: enterprise architecture, standardised data models, cybersecurity, governance, and building a unified data foundation through SAP Business Data Cloud. This ensures consistency, compliance, and interoperability across the portfolio.
With this structural support in place, all the subsidiaries need to do is build and focus on the execution layer. This approach will enable the local teams to refine customer experiences and adapt to the growing market-specific needs, ensuring they can stay nimble and effective in their day-to-day operations.
Ultimately, this federated model creates a practical synergy: a stable, centralised core that supports decentralised innovation. By using tools like Joule and embedded AI, teams can work with the flexibility they need while staying connected to the broader organisation. This balance minimises transformation friction, combining scale and standardisation at the core with speed and innovation at the edge.
CIO&Leader: As supply chains and cyber-threats become more interconnected, how are large houses redesigning risk frameworks to prevent “contagion” across diverse sectors?
Kulwant Singh: Conglomerates are moving toward integrated, enterprise-wide risk architectures anchored in unified data and AI to manage systemic risk and prevent cross-entity contagion.
First, SAP Business Data Cloud enables consolidated, real-time risk visibility across financial, operational, and cyber domains, helping identify interdependencies and early warning signals.
Second, organisations are adopting zero-trust security frameworks and segmentation strategies ensuring that breaches in one entity or ecosystem do not propagate across the enterprise. This is critical in increasingly interconnected supply chains.
Third, Business AI is being embedded into risk functions to enable predictive modelling simulating disruptions such as supplier failures, cyberattacks, or geopolitical shocks, and assessing enterprise-wide impact.
Operationally, many are establishing centralised risk command centers, supported by standardised protocols and AI-driven insights surfaced through unified interfaces like Joule.
The shift is from siloed risk management to a systemic, intelligence-led approach focused not just on managing risk, but on containing its spread across the enterprise.
The shift is from siloed risk management to a systemic, intelligence-led approach focused not just on managing risk, but on containing its spread across the enterprise.
CIO&Leader: Beyond shared services, what are the 2-3 advanced digital capabilities a parent company must now provide to its subsidiaries to stay globally competitive?
Kulwant Singh: Modern organisations are increasingly evolving their corporate structures to act as digital catalysts, empowering their business units with the tools needed to lead in their respective markets.
As many leading global enterprises are already demonstrating, three advanced capabilities have become critical to provide a strategic edge:
- Unified data and AI foundation: Through SAP Business Data Cloud, subsidiaries can access harmonised SAP and non-SAP data with full business context, enabling real-time insights and AI-driven decision-making without duplicating infrastructure
- Embedded and extensible Business AI: AI integrated into core business processes—accessible via Joule enables automation, predictive insights, and intelligent orchestration across functions
- Composable, suite-first architecture: A modern, API-driven SAP Business Suite allows subsidiaries to rapidly build and scale market-specific applications while staying aligned to enterprise standards
Together, these capabilities reposition the parent from a service provider to a strategic digital enabler driving both agility and intelligence across the portfolio.
CIO&Leader: How do you drive a unified digital mindset across a workforce that spans both traditional heavy manufacturing and new-age digital ventures?
Kulwant Singh: Driving a unified digital mindset across such a diverse workforce requires aligning intent, incentives, and capability building rather than enforcing a one-size-fits-all approach.
Leading conglomerates start by anchoring digital to business outcomes whether it’s efficiency in manufacturing or growth in digital ventures, so it is seen as a value driver, not a parallel initiative. They then invest in role-based upskilling, tailoring digital training to context: frontline workers in manufacturing focus on automation, IoT, and data-driven operations, while digital teams deepen expertise in AI, cloud, and product engineering.
Equally critical is creating shared platforms and common ways of working such as unified data layers, agile practices, and cross-functional squads, so teams across legacy and digital businesses collaborate using the same tools and metrics.
Finally, leadership plays a key role by aligning incentives and governance to digital KPIs and consistently reinforcing the narrative from the top. This ensures digital is embedded into everyday decision-making, bridging the cultural gap between traditional and new-age businesses.
CIO&Leader: What is the single most compelling ROI of moving to a unified digital core (like RISE with SAP) over maintaining a fragmented stack?
Kulwant Singh: The single most compelling ROI of moving to a unified digital core is end-to-end visibility that enables faster, higher-quality business decisions at scale, directly translating into measurable cost savings and revenue acceleration.
When organisations operate on fragmented systems, data remains siloed across finance, supply chain, operations, and customer platforms. This leads to duplicated processes, delayed insights, and reactive decision-making. A unified digital core consolidates these into a single source of truth, allowing leaders to optimise working capital, reduce operational inefficiencies, and respond quickly to market shifts.
In practice, this means fewer reconciliation efforts, lower IT maintenance costs, faster close cycles, improved inventory turns, and more accurate demand planning. At the same time, embedded AI and automation streamline core processes, reducing manual effort and freeing teams to focus on value-adding activities.
The ROI comes from shifting the organisation from managing complexity to unlocking enterprise-wide efficiency and agility
Ultimately, the ROI comes from shifting the organisation from managing complexity to unlocking enterprise-wide efficiency and agility — delivering both cost optimisation and faster growth from the same digital foundation.
CIO&Leader: With SAP’s Sovereign Cloud in India, how are you specifically helping conglomerates in regulated sectors (Energy/Infra) bridge the gap between plant-floor OT and boardroom IT?
Kulwant Singh: SAP’s Sovereign Cloud in India enables regulated sectors to securely connect plant-floor OT systems with enterprise IT, while fully adhering to data residency and compliance requirements.
At the core is a unified digital backbone that integrates operational data from SCADA systems, sensors, and industrial controls into enterprise applications in near real time. Through SAP Business Data Cloud, this data is harmonised with financial and operational context, creating a single, trusted view across the organisation.
This allows leadership to move from delayed, plant-level reporting to real-time, enterprise-wide visibility-supporting decisions on asset performance, production efficiency, and risk.
At the same time, the sovereign cloud ensures that sensitive infrastructure and operational data remains within India, while benefiting from cloud-scale analytics and AI. Strong governance, access controls, and network segmentation further ensure that OT-IT integration does not expand the cyber risk surface.
The result is a secure, compliant bridge between OT and IT turning plant-level signals into real-time, boardroom-ready intelligence.
CIO&Leader: Moving beyond GenAI, where are you seeing Indian groups successfully deploy Agentic AI to automate complex inter-company processes like procurement or settlements?
Kulwant Singh: Indian conglomerates are deploying agentic AI in high-friction, multi-entity processes where continuous coordination, decision-making, and optimisation are required. This shift is increasingly being driven by a clear focus on measurable business outcomes and return on investment. According to the SAP Value of AI Report, Indian businesses expect a 7% ROI from agentic AI over the next two years, with 85% rating AI agents as having moderate to high potential to transform operations and 50% believing they can add significant value by managing complex workflows across business units. Additionally, 49% of businesses believe agentic AI will significantly influence their strategic planning during this period, highlighting its growing role in enterprise-wide decision-making.
In procurement, AI agents are orchestrating group-wide sourcing- aggregating demand across subsidiaries, evaluating suppliers, optimising pricing, and ensuring contract compliance. With access to unified, business-context-rich data, these agents continuously respond to changes in demand, pricing, and supply conditions.
In manufacturing-led businesses like Simpolo, where procurement spans raw materials across multiple plants and product lines, this kind of cross-entity sourcing intelligence directly improves margins and ensures supply continuity.
In inter-company settlements, agentic AI is automating reconciliation and cash netting. Instead of manual processes and periodic adjustments, AI agents track transactions across entities, resolve discrepancies, optimise netting positions, and trigger settlements based on liquidity conditions and policy rules.
We are also seeing adoption in supply chain orchestration, where agents dynamically rebalance inventory, reroute shipments, and respond to disruptions across business units and partner ecosystems.
The common thread is the use of unified data foundations like SAP Business Data Cloud and embedded AI to enable always-on, autonomous execution reducing cycle times, minimising leakages, and improving capital efficiency across the enterprise.
CIO&Leader: As Indian conglomerates go global, what is the biggest digital maturity gap they face compared to international peers: is it the tech itself, or the ability to drive “synergy” across the portfolio?
Kulwant Singh: As Indian conglomerates expand globally, the focus is shifting from adopting technology to integrating it effectively across diverse portfolios. Most large Indian groups already leverage world-class cloud, data, and AI capabilities, and are now accelerating efforts to connect these investments into unified digital core.
By aligning data models and standardising processes across business units, organisations can operate as unified enterprises, unlocking value through shared customers, integrated supply chains, and more optimised capital allocation. This integrated approach also supports faster, more coordinated decision-making across complex, multi-industry portfolios.
Strengthening the digital core, standardising data and processes through platforms such as SAP Business Data Cloud, and aligning governance around enterprise value creation will further help Indian conglomerates scale synergy and accelerate their global growth with agility and consistency.