In the race to be AI-first, discipline matters more than speed: Abhinav Srivastava, CIO, Daimler India Commercial Vehicles

At a time when enterprises are racing to brand themselves as “AI-first,” Abhinav Srivastava, CIO, Daimler India Commercial Vehicles, offers a rare note of restraint. AI, he insists, will not save broken systems, compensate for poor data, or magically transform organisations unprepared for change. In manufacturing especially, the real work of digital transformation is far less glamorous, and far more demanding, than the AI hype suggests.

“As glamorous as AI looks, if the core is not intact, all of this will fizzle out,” Srivastava says. “It becomes a soda-water effect. There’s effervescence initially, and then everything stabilises, and fades.”

That belief forms the backbone of how Srivastava approaches technology leadership today. For him, AI is not a shortcut to transformation; it is a stress test of how strong an organisation’s fundamentals really are.

From support function to strategic nerve centre

Srivastava is clear that the ...