We ensure a full alignment with client objectives and deploy all-star teams: Shyam Enjeti, Encora

Encora’s Hyderabad centre has quietly transformed from an acquired outpost into a powerhouse of engineering and innovation for the company’s global operations. As Shyam Enjeti, Chief Delivery Officer at Encora, reveals, the city is poised to become the firm’s second-largest hub after Bengaluru—driven not just by scale but by a stable, long-term talent pool. Beyond geography, Enjeti highlights how Encora is tackling one of the biggest industry challenges: moving from AI experimentation to business outcomes. With its proprietary AI delivery platform, AIVA, and a philosophy rooted in ecosystem partnerships rather than reinvention, Encora is reshaping how global enterprises turn technology investments into tangible value.

Encora’s India Centre in Hyderabad has evolved into a strategic engineering hub for your global operations. Could you walk us through its current scale, focus areas, and how it aligns with the company’s broader goals for delivery and innovation?

We have centres across India, and Hyderabad is one of the larger ones. Looking at our future roadmap, it’s set to become our second-largest hub, right after Bengaluru. Hopefully, it will be on par with Bengaluru in the next couple of years. Hyderabad has been part of our journey for almost 20 years, as we acquired a company that had an office here. Since then, it has been one of our scale centres.

Hyderabad is a great place for talent from all over India to settle. It’s always been a multicultural melting pot where people from the north and south can easily assimilate. The infrastructure is great; schools are good, and housing is affordable. It’s a secure place, away from natural calamities, and the tech talent here is stable. Unlike other cities, our engineers, especially those with seven to eight years of experience, look to grow within the organisation rather than constantly seeking new opportunities. We strongly believe that Hyderabad will be a primary delivery centre for many of our large enterprise and GCC customers.

The GCC model is often used to address the global AI and cloud talent crunch. How is this model working for Encora in India, and how do you ensure the alignment of engineering outcomes with client objectives?

AI adoption has been quite all over the place, as many customers initially jumped in without a clear strategy. Our philosophy is to start every conversation with outcomes. We ask, “What do you want to achieve? What’s the operating model?” We first focus on getting the data right, because without it, you’ll get wrong outputs.

We ensure a full alignment with client objectives by deploying all-star teams that work persistently with a customer. They do the initial experimentation and build a minimum viable product, and once it’s ready, they hand it off to extended teams and move to the next priority. This approach prevents any loss of knowledge. For customers who need burst capacity, seeding their existing teams with AI experts and data engineers, we proactively create specialised talent pools based on the technology ecosystems our customers use, whether it’s GCP or Azure.

India has a large number of AI professionals and GCCs. How is your engineering centre enabling rapid experimentation, from POC to production, while maintaining quality standards?

Working with digital-native companies for the past 20 years has given us a significant advantage. We have created a proprietary AI platform. All our learnings from engagements have been codified and put into this platform. It offers a bunch of pre-coded agents for horizontal use cases like software engineering, data, and cloud operations. This platform, available on Azure and soon to be on AWS and GCP, is our operating system for delivery.

The platform ensures the consistency and quality of our deliverables because all our engineers are trained on it. This significantly reduces the learning curve for our engineers, allowing them to adopt best practices and use pre-coded agents efficiently. This is how we drive standardisation and maintain quality as we move from POC to production.

Can you share a recent example where your India engineering centre led a major AI or cloud innovation for a global customer?

We worked with a large US-based retail customer, a specialty grocery chain with a strong cult following, that was struggling with its marketing campaigns. They had invested in a data platform but couldn’t operationalize it to meet their business needs. Our teams stepped in to solve a range of problems they were facing in their campaign space.

As a result, the outreach and reactions they received from their customers doubled in just three months. This was critical because they needed to predict demand for specialty products sourced from all over the world. We used AI to analyse the data, run the campaigns, and then fed that intelligence back into their supply chain system. This created a full loop from problem identification to resolution, showcasing the power of AI in solving a critical business challenge.

The industry is looking at IP-linked credit and innovation zones. From your perspective, how is Encora preparing for this future through policy engagement, ecosystem partnerships, or talent development?

Our number one priority moving forward is building very robust ecosystem partnerships. We believe that success lies in leveraging the ecosystem to create the next-generation composable enterprise. The days of building everything from scratch are gone. The future is about orchestrating and composing the capabilities you need to deliver results, and the fastest way to do that is by collaborating with partners. We are not going to reinvent what others have already done. This is a trend we see even with major players like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Salesforce, who are all focused on building strong ecosystems. For us, this will be our guiding principle for the future.