Godrej Enterprises swapped scattered AI pilots for one governed backbone (interview)

In a February 2026 interview with ET Enterprise AI, Vijay Balakrishnan, Chief Digital and Information Officer of Godrej Enterprises Group, says that when he joined in 2024 the first priority was credibility: cloud-first and SaaS-first foundations plus early wins. He says the biggest gaps were fragmentation: non-standardised processes, inconsistent data definitions and siloed legacy systems. The group spans 14-plus business verticals, over 60 countries and revenue above ₹19,000 crore.

He says the group moved from scattered pilots to a governed, federated AI backbone called Amethyst, a unified AI engine with reusable agents. It has committed over ₹1,200 crore across three to five years to infrastructure, AI capabilities and business solutions. Factory 360, an AI production-monitoring platform, is being rolled out across more than 30 factories over two years.

He also says data definitions were standardised across businesses, over 600,000 hours of digital and AI training were delivered, and 140-plus Digital Champions were groomed over four years to drive adoption.

Results are Balakrishnan's and not independently verified: early Factory 360 gains of 10 to 15 percent lower conversion costs and 3 to 5 percent better yield, chatbots resolving nearly seven lakh queries a year with about 40 percent faster response and hold times, doubled order-processing capacity at the Interio furniture arm, and an ambition of ₹130 crore or more in cost reduction over three years.

Self-reported: 10-15% lower conversion costs, 3-5% better yield in early Factory 360 results; chatbots resolve ~7 lakh queries a year, response times down ~40%

AI only became strategic once the group had digital platforms and structured data, which he describes as the final step in a long transformation sequence.

A shared backbone lets agents be reused across functions, cutting duplication and speeding rollout.

Governance and ethics were designed in from the start, with a human-in-the-loop rule that keeps people accountable for final decisions.

AI scales only after the dull groundwork of clean data and shared platforms, and a governed common backbone lets agents be reused instead of rebuilt in every business.

The interview is a progress report, not a final tally: the Factory 360 rollout is still under way, the ₹130 crore saving is stated as an ambition, and the interview gives no independent measurement of the figures.