Pega’s Blueprint is a GenAI-powered visual workspace that lays out the workflow stages, data models, roles, and integrations into a build-ready design that business and technology shape together. In an exclusive conversation Goutham Parcha, Vice President, Pega Applications, Pegasystems informs Rajneesh De, Group Editor, APAC Media & CXO Media about the ambition to make Pega the best agent-native AI platform for building and running enterprise applications – one that serves developers, business users, and end users equally well.
What are the solutions and services offered in the Pegasystems portfolio in India?
India is not a separate market for us, we bring the same globally unified Pega Infinity Platform here. It is built on Workflow Automation, AI-powered Decisioning, Pega Customer Service, 1:1 Customer Engagement, with Process Mining, Robotic Automation, and GenAI Blueprint alongside. Every one of these serves a single purpose: connecting people, data, systems, and decisions, so that critical work moves faster and every customer experience becomes consistently best in class.
And India is central to that mission, nearly 38% of our global workforce and around 60% of our product development sit out of our Bengaluru and Hyderabad centers. So, this is a market that doesn’t just use the platform; it builds it.
How would you elaborate on Pega’s GenAI Blueprint in the Indian scenario?
Blueprint solves a problem every enterprise knows well: the business has an idea, IT builds a solution, and the two do not quite match. Blueprint closes that gap. It is a GenAI-powered visual workspace where both sides start from the same design – where you describe an application in natural language, and Blueprint lays out the workflow stages, data models, roles, and integrations into a build-ready design that business and technology shape together.
With more than 100,000 blueprints created globally, it is already the fastest-adopted innovation in Pega’s history. For India’s GCCs, who now own global transformation programs, that means moving from idea to execution far faster, and with real clarity and control.
What would be your advice to Indian enterprises on best practices to harness the creative potential of GenAI?
My advice is simple: do not use AI everywhere just because everyone else is. Much of today’s craze is driven by a fear of missing out (FOMO as Gen-Z’s call it) – but an enterprise cannot afford unpredictable results, and indiscriminate AI delivers exactly that. The real skill is judgement: knowing where AI genuinely adds value, and where proven automation is the smarter choice.
Pick fewer, higher-value use cases, define the outcomes up front, build in governance early, and embed AI inside real workflows. Do that, and you get what an enterprise actually needs, predictable outcomes at predictable costs. Harnessing GenAI is not about using more of it; it is about using it precisely.
What role does Pega play in different market segments like Intelligent Automation, Customer Engagement, and Customer Service Solutions? What is the traction that you are witnessing vertical wise?
Our role is to connect what most organizations keep separate. In intelligent automation, we unify workflow, AI, machine learning, robotic automation, and BPM on a single platform. In customer engagement, Pega Customer Decision Hub makes real-time, next-best-action decisions for each customer. And in customer service, Pega Customer Service runs intelligent journeys on top of existing systems – modernizing the experience without ripping out the core.
The proof is in the outcomes: a leading North American insurance company brought a ~$25M modernization program down to a fraction of the cost and time with Pega AI; Vodafone automated work at scale; and leading banks cut average handle time by 8–10%. The strongest traction is exactly where volume, regulation, and complexity are highest – banking, insurance, and telecom and increasingly across GCC-led operations.
What are the key pillars on which Pega’s GTM strategy rests in India? What are some of the key initiatives under this strategy?
Our India go-to-market rests on the Global Capability Centers (GCCs), which increasingly influence, not just execute – the enterprise architecture decisions for their parent organizations. So, we engage their leadership directly: through leadership connects, hands-on solutioning sessions, and Expert Circles, and we upskill their teams through certifications, so the influence flows both ways.
We amplify all of this through our own platforms – flagship events like PegAInnovate, Pegafest, Expert Circles and Pega Days, where the ecosystem shows up in force.
What is the overall partner ecosystem that Pega currently follows in India? What are the dynamics of these partnerships?
I think of our partner ecosystem as a triangulation – Pega, the Partner, and the Client, all working toward the same outcome. We actively encourage our partners to sell Pega solutions autonomously, to both new and existing clients; when they are with a client, they bring the industry knowledge, we bring the platform, and together we solve the problem faster than any of us could alone.
We equip them with our publicly available client success stories, so they can speak with real credibility. And the model is maturing, from implementation support toward genuine co-design. With ‘Powered by Pega Blueprint’, partners bring their domain expertise straight into the design from the very first blueprint. Some of our global partners include Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, EY, Infosys, TCS, and Virtusa.
What are the key expansion plans for Pegasystems recently in India?
Our expansion is anchored in engineering. With nearly 38% of our global workforce and around 60% of our product development in India, our Bengaluru and Hyderabad teams are central to Pega’s global product development – the core Infinity platform, enterprise Applications, GenAI innovations like Blueprint, and the Cloud Engineering that underpins it all.
So, expanding here really means deepening the place where Pega is built. But it goes beyond footprint: we are rekindling our University Alliance Program to build a steady pipeline of Pega-skilled talent and partnering with academies and training partners to grow the wider certified ecosystem our clients and partners rely on. The ecosystem only scales if the skills scale with it, so this is as much a people-and-skills story as a real-estate one.
How is hyper-automation transforming the traditional business model in India, and what role is Pega playing in this transformation?
The real shift is that automation is no longer about the task, it is about the outcome. We do not start by asking which task to automate; we ask what experience and what outcome we want to create for the customer and then automate towards that. For a banking customer, it means delivering the right experience at the right time across the entire journey, not automating one isolated step.
Whereas, for complex organizations running many legacy systems, our Agentic Process Fabric leverages the power of agents to connect systems, applications, and data seamlessly – giving enterprises outcome-driven automation with full visibility and control. That is how hyperautomation is transforming the Indian business model: from doing things faster, to doing better things for the customer.
How should Indian enterprises address cultural, budgetary, and change management challenges in adopting GenAI?
There are three distinct challenges here, and each needs its own answer. Culturally, it comes down to learning agility and a growth mindset, where teams must understand where AI fits, and be willing to learn and adapt. On budget, indiscriminate AI use is the fastest route to cost overruns, so be precise about which problem genuinely needs AI and which needs proven automation; that precision is what keeps spend predictable. On change management, start small – one pilot team, clear change champions, prove the value on a single workflow, then scale it with senior leaders visibly driving adoption. Treat change as an afterthought, and even a flawless pilot stalls before production. And through all three, security and governance have to be embedded from day one, because trust is the foundation everything else rests on.
Can you elaborate on the Pega India University Program, UAP?
UAP, our University Academic Program is one of the clearest examples of demand pulling us forward rather than us pushing a program out. It maps straight to the campus hiring our clients and partners are already planning for, which is exactly why a high-quality talent pipeline is mission-critical to the ecosystem, not a nice-to-have.
We run it on two tracks. Through our implementation partners – SmartBridge, who have been with us for the past year, now joined by ai4process, The Skill Enhancers, and Tinkr Learning. We are building a cohort of 800 to 1,000 engineering graduates across 50-plus campuses, training them on Blueprint, Gen AI, and agentic engineering.
And through direct university partnerships, with VEMU, UEM Kolkata, and Woxsen – we train and certify the professors themselves, so these skills get embedded right into engineering education rather than bolted on afterwards. What I am most deliberate about is the balance: we train hard on the technology, but we are equally serious about the consultative and human skills that decide whether a graduate is genuinely productive from day one.
The most recent step is a five-week, fully virtual National Internship Program with SmartBridge that opens this up to engineering students right across India. Get that balance right, and the numbers stop being a headline and become a talent pipeline the industry can actually build on.
What are going to be Pega’s key focus areas in the next few quarters?
Our ambition is clear: to make Pega the best agent-native AI platform for building and running enterprise applications – one that serves developers, business users, and end users equally well. The near-term focus is turning AI from experimentation into controlled business execution, moving enterprises past the pilots and into AI that runs real operations at scale.
Anchoring it all is one promise: predictable outcomes at predictable costs. In a market where AI spend can escalate quickly, that predictability is what will separate the leaders. For India, that means deepening our work with the GCCs, strengthening the partner ecosystem, growing developer engagement through Expert Circles, and building a deep bench of certified Pega talent, all laddering back to agentic AI that enterprises can trust to deliver.
