Artificial intelligence has entered a new phase in India. What was once limited to pilots and experiments is now being deployed at scale, reshaping how businesses serve customers, manage operations, and create value. This Playbook, developed from the sessions at the Delhi edition of the Strategy Shift Forum, distills those discussions into five practical plays that leaders can apply immediately.

A recurring theme from the Forum was that AI performs best when its scope is tightly defined. As Neil Thompson of MIT’s FutureTech noted, today’s systems excel at tasks that would take a human only a few minutes, such as document checks or short queries, but performance drops sharply when problems become more complex, open-ended, and less structured. The message is clear: AI is most powerful when paired with human oversight, not as a replacement for it.

The Forum provided concrete illustrations of this shift. SMS Auto Leasing India Pvt. Ltd reduced customer onboarding from several days to just a few hours by automating KYC checks with guardrails. Apollo 24/7 scaled millions of doctor-patient interactions through its Ask Apollo platform, extending care beyond what individual practitioners could deliver. Indian insurers cut claims processing times from five hours to 30 minutes by adopting hybrid human-AI systems. Each case showed how disciplined deployment, backed by strong oversight, translates directly into measurable results.