CX, manufacturing, and upskilling at the core of Godrej Enterprises' ₹1,200 cr digital initiative: CDIO

Mumbai-headquartered conglomerate Godrej Enterprises Group (Godrej) at the start of the year announced a ₹1,200 crore investment over 3-5 years, towards its digital technology and AI initiatives. Improving customer experience for its 1.1 billion users of its products and services is at the heart of this overhaul. Towards this, Godrej is implementing strategic digital platforms, AI, and generative AI technologies across business units. 

While the announcement of this transformation was made in 2025, the journey began four years back, Vijay Balakrishnan, Chief Digital and Information Officer (CDIO), told TechCircle in an interview.

“We are a legacy, 100-plus-year-old organization that has always stood for reputation, innovation, and trust. We wanted to continue that legacy in the digital and AI era as well. It started modestly with investments of about ₹30–40 crore. We moved to the cloud, made new technology cloud-first, and adopted a SaaS-first strategy for enterprise applications. The initial success and the credibility it created brought us to a tipping point last year.”

Godrej's digital transformation rests on three pillars—customer experience, manufacturing, and people. 

On the manufacturing side, key initiatives undertaken include AI-driven engagement through Customer ID and GenAI-powered chatbots, sentiment analysis and social listening, a digital process twin of the supply chain, and IoT-enabled, AI-powered products like refrigerators and ACs, with washing machines to follow. 

Further, Godrej, which operates over 30 factories and more than 10,000 work centres, is building an in-house manufacturing execution system (MES) platform called Factory 360 that focuses on sensorisation, operational analysis, predictive maintenance, and utility management. The Factory 360 platform, which was piloted in two factories last year, is now being scaled to five more factories this year.

Balakrishnan added that at the core of all these initiatives are the people and skill-building initiatives. “Through programs like Diginex, we will be delivering over 600,000 hours of skill development training. While we are investing ₹30–50 crore in training overall, ₹10 crore is dedicated to AI upskilling in the next three to four years,” he added. 

AI and data strategy

Balakrishnan’s view on data strategy finds root in the Data Mesh framework that he was introduced to seven years ago. Since then, his team and he have strongly aligned the core principle of decentralisation of data ownership. 

“At Godrej, we already have well-defined ownership of master data, but we are still evolving in building robust data products and ensuring interoperability. Legacy systems, developed at different times and lacking common standards, have been a key roadblock, but this is now changing,” he said.

Going forward, Godrej's data strategy will focus on building interoperable data products, creating a unified data catalog to resolve inconsistencies across 14 business units and 40+ lines of business, and strengthening data quality through modern frameworks.

The data strategy at Godrej also forms the foundation for its AI and data analytics initiatives. While data science and machine learning techniques have been implemented at Godrej for demand forecasting, sales forecasting, and inventory optimisation, the company is now advancing into computer vision, NLP, and agentic/Generative AI with a focus on business process optimisation, quality, and safety. 

“All our AI modules and agents run on a cloud hyperscaler platform designed for modularity, scalability, and reuse, which makes it easy for solutions to be deployed across businesses. Currently, we are piloting a few agents, and in the next two years, we will have 30–40 full-time AI agents operating across the organisation,” Balakrishnan said.

Technology teams

Godrej's technology team has over 400 people. The team works on driving pilots and proof-of-concepts, preparing businesses for large-scale adoption, and enhancing solutions over time. This team is structured into two groups: the IT backbone team, which ensures core strategic platforms, and the Digital Center of Excellence, which partners with startups and MSMEs to experiment with emerging technologies and drive innovation. 

“We actively engage with startups and niche players, particularly in areas such as agentic automation, as they challenge our assumptions and often deliver breakthrough ideas,” Balakrishnan explained.

Godrej works with strategic consulting partners on large-scale, cross-business programs that drive transformation across the Group, and rely on platform technology partners for enterprise applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). 

“Currently, about 30–35% of our technology stack is homegrown, but it is in these strategic domains where internal development matters most. Underpinning this approach is our hybrid cloud strategy. AWS is our strategic hyperscaler of choice, but we also leverage Microsoft Azure and other platforms to ensure flexibility and avoid lock-in,” he concluded