Cloud, AI, and the intelligent enterprise

Automated operations. Analytical insights enabling real-time decision-making. Agile innovation. Security and resilience. The synergies between Cloud and Artificial Intelligence are delivering immense value to drive the next wave of enterprise transformation.

Powerful in their own right, together, Cloud and AI make a formidable combination. AI applications, which process hundreds of petabytes of data, need massive, scalable, storage and computing resources that only the cloud can provide. With their versatile capabilities, Cloud and AI are becoming essential in every industry, delivering value through automation, insight, and innovation.

Versatile and valuable

Manufacturers, for example, are not just using Cloud ERP solutions with AI to automate shop floor tasks, such as quality inspection and maintenance, but also leveraging their real-time insights to enhance end-to-end supply chain operations and make decisions such as how best to allocate resources. More advanced enterprises are using Cloud plus AI to perform complex computations to drive experimentation and prototyping. Highly sophisticated innovations, such as digital twins of production systems, are powered by AI-Cloud.

On the other hand, the financial sector is embracing Cloud to support voluminous, fluctuating transactions in real time: the best example is the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which recorded 20.7 billion digital payments in October 2025. Banks are replacing legacy infrastructure with cloud-native, composable core banking platforms built on microservices-based architecture and powered by APIs, events, and a standards-driven approach; with these platforms, they can integrate advanced technologies, such as AI, robotic process automation, and predictive analytics, to optimise operations, enhance customer experience, and build resilience.

What’s more, by enabling financial institutions to integrate and exchange data across their ecosystems, Cloud and AI are driving adoption of innovative business models, such as financial and non-financial marketplaces, and embedded banking.

In the retail and consumer packaged goods industry, AI applications running on Cloud are analysing customer and transaction data to anticipate market trends and new needs. They can also spot patterns, correlate cause and effect, and derive inferences to enable timely action: for instance, intelligent analytics tools study a product’s past performance, sales data, and market response to predict servicing needs and proactively notify users.

Creating composable, intelligent, autonomous enterprises

An important benefit of Cloud-AI-driven transformation is composability: pre-built, scalable, modular capabilities that can be assembled and reassembled as required allow organisations to make quick changes and innovate with ease. This means that businesses can not only respond to their evolving market environments in real time but also ramp up, upgrade, or replace applications with minimal operational disruption. Accordingly, a healthcare provider could assemble best-of-breed components such as an AI-powered chatbot, appointment scheduling module, and messaging system on a patient portal to deliver seamless omnichannel experiences. Because capabilities, such as inventory management, payments, and recommendations, are decoupled, a composable e-commerce firm would be able to add or modify payment methods and introduce personalised offers without overhauling the entire system.

As Cloud-AI systems learn, adapt, and improve over time, they provide sharper business insights – which issues and opportunities to tackle first, potential solutions to unresolved problems, and so on – to enhance efficiency and competitiveness. And now, in combination with Generative and Agentic AI, these systems are creating a new breed of intelligent, autonomous enterprises: Generative AI provides the content – reports, draft text, code, etc. – required by the complex, multi-step workflows that are autonomously managed by Agentic AI, to enable a high degree of automation. In customer engagement processes, tailored content and recommendations created by Generative AI are deployed at scale by agents independently managing interactions across different channels, such as CRM, email, social media, etc.

Indian organisations need Cloud-AI

India’s Cloud-AI market, which crossed $4.5 billion in 2024, is projected to expand rapidly to nearly $57 billion by 2030. Indian organisations across sectors can leverage the power of Cloud and AI to enhance every aspect of their business. With Cloud-AI-driven automation, enterprises can become more efficient, productive, and agile; leveraging its insights, they can take better decisions and create smarter innovations. As their Cloud-AI systems learn and improve on their own, organisations will find it easier to keep pace with emerging trends and developments. Optimised, intelligent, innovative, and adaptive – that is the face of the Cloud-AI enterprise.

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By Saju Sankarankutty, SVP, Unit Technology Officer, Cloud, Infosys.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial position of Dataquest or CyberMedia.)