As the digital economy in Asia continues to surge, so too does the need for innovative partnerships and transformative technology. We’re sharing what success in this space can look like with the Frontier Forward: Asia Edition series, which spotlights impactful stories through interviews with executives at key Microsoft partner organizations.
Episode 2: Celebal Tech’s global innovation
In our second installment of the series, we connect with Anirudh Kala, co-founder and CEO of Celebal Tech, a leading data and AI partner headquartered in Jaipur, India. Anirudh shares insights into Celebal Tech’s partnership with Microsoft and discusses how they are empowering enterprises across the globe to harness the power of Azure AI and data capabilities.
Key takeaways from the conversation
- “Born in India, built for the world”: Celebal Tech began in India and now operates globally, combining local expertise with a deep understanding of regional regulations and markets.
- Industry-focused innovation: They deliver customized solutions for different industries and regions, driving compliance and relevance for each client.
- Transformative customer stories: Celebal Tech enabled a Canadian law firm to achieve near real-time reporting and helped a US manufacturer improve operations with AI-powered agentic solutions.
- Partnership with Microsoft: Their strong Microsoft partnership supports secure, end-to-end solutions for enterprise data, integration, and governance needs.
- Looking toward an agentic economy: While LLMs and AI agents are becoming commoditized, the real value lies in creating an agentic economy that is governed, traceable, explainable, and effective. Celebal Tech’s focus on domain-specific agents, such as those for oil and gas exploration, demonstrates the importance of deep industry expertise in AI adoption.
Access the video or the full transcript below to learn more about how Celebal Tech is shaping the AI frontier across industries.
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Full transcript:
Disclaimer: This AI-generated transcript may contain errors. Please verify with the original audio or script for accuracy.
Bhaskar Basu:
Good morning and welcome, Anirudh. It's wonderful to have you here with us today. As we start, please share a brief introduction about yourself for our audience.
Anirudh Kala:
Thanks, Bhaskar, and thanks team for having me here. I'm Anirudh Kala. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Celebal Tech. We're a company based in Jaipur, India. We are primarily data and AI partners with Microsoft—in fact, on October 13, we completed our nine years. We focus on Microsoft solutions to leverage their Azure AI and data capabilities—the stack available for large enterprises—and work with these large enterprises to bring intelligence to their existing legacy applications. This could be in the form of agentic, classical machine learning, transformer-based neural learnings, and so on and so forth.
The idea we started with was based on the fact that it has to be a combination of the two economies: the legacy enterprise and the modern cloud innovation. Azure happens to be the only platform, in my opinion, which has that complete stack from end to end. From their productivity to the ERPs to the integrations—and of course, on top of it is the big AI platform and the agentic platform that helps achieve that target. So here we are as a partner of Microsoft, working globally with some of the largest customers, I would say, here in this country, and then of course, all across the globe now.
Bhaskar:
That's fantastic, Anirudh, and once again, heartiest congratulations for the nine-year anniversary and for being such a strong and committed partner to Microsoft.
We did get a good understanding about Celebal Tech. Tell us a little bit more about the markets you serve and your larger vision for go-to-market.
Anirudh:
We work all across the globe, Bhaskar. Of course, it starts with India. We work with some of the giants here in this space. We cover the entire ASEAN market; Australia and New Zealand; and Japan, of course. Every country has its own flavor. There are manufacturing divisions, which are very prominent in certain countries, and there is energy which is very prominent in other countries. And of course, the US and Europe is where we cover a very large portion of our customers today.
I would say countries like Canada, Switzerland, and Germany are very big in energy and manufacturing with us. I would say US is largely retail, CPG, and healthcare and life sciences, for the obvious reasons. And Middle East, of course, is all energy—and manufacturing, to an extent—but primarily energy. So, what we've done is we've actually kept not just geography focus, but geography and industry focus: specific industry for specific geography. And the fact remains that all these industries don't behave the same way in each geography.
So we've kind of modeled ourselves in such a way that we use the Microsoft platform and run deep industry solutions with respect to that country and that industry, and very local to the geography with the local laws. Like in Europe, we have the GDPR laws. In India, we have new laws coming in for AI. So there is a way in which you deal with AI, with data in each of these countries and domains. And I think that's where we specialize.
Bhaskar:
Wonderful. To me, the headline is, "Born in India, but built for the world.” And your nuanced understanding of different markets—the challenges, the opportunities, and your understanding on how to address them—clearly makes you stand out. So thanks for sharing what you did.
So Anirudh, you mentioned your engagements with customers and the different markets that you serve. Can I go a little bit deeper on the customer engagement side, and could you share an example of a recent impactful story or transformative win that you enabled for your customers on top of the Microsoft cloud?
Anirudh:
I can talk about two of our big customers, one in Canada and one in the US.
The Canadian customer is a law firm that is having this challenge of near real-time reporting. Basically in law, what happens is, we understand law from a very different angle, but law on a tech perspective has a very different perspective. So there are cases, there are outcomes, there are adjustments, alignments—it happens every single moment. And they want that to happen as they happen in their execution platform. And for that, they need near real-time reporting.
They've been working on legacy BI solution, which takes almost a day for anything to be visualized for their lawyers all across Canada, and even in the US. So we used Fabric to build that platform end to end. It was a bit of a tough choice because to integrate it with some of the systems that probably are only used in law was not something we will find easily, let's say with respect to the connectivity and integration, but Fabric offers that. So that was one easy choice we made.
The tough part was getting execution every single second, and that too for millions of cases all across the US and Canada. That means maybe a million records would travel into the system, and then reporting on top of it that very instant. That was possible in Fabric. And today, I'm very happy to report that they've been able to cut down their overall execution time in terms of taking a decision by more than 60%—which is huge because that is immediate impact to their bottom line, and of course to the top line.
Another such use case was a big manufacturer for appliances. It's a very big name all across the US where we built this agentic solution for all the consumers using Copilot and Azure AI Foundry. It was a combination of both. Copilot, because it's on their laptops, it's on their browsers; every time, they can look at the data and chat with it. And I'm not just talking about the email summarizer or a simple chat in outcome that they've been trying: These are serious, serious outcomes with respect to the ERPs, with respect to the MESs, with a persona of a plant manager or a supply chain manager. And that's where we build this entire Foundry layer, which could do this orchestration of personas, of integrations, and most importantly, observability and governance.
Where I focus today, and where my company focuses, along with Microsoft, is on the fact that AI creating agent is commodity. LLM is commodity. Yes, we have the best of the best available in the platforms. There's no worry there, but that's not the real value. The real value the Microsoft AI platform offers is the observability and traceability. So as an agent gets instantiated, the ability to really ensure that it works exactly the same way a user would have envisaged, and then there's the ability to go and check every single step that it has performed—that, I would say, is the real differentiator for the customer, and that was possible because it's available out of the box on the Azure AI Foundry platform.
So, those are two very compelling use cases that I believe are driving value which is conspicuous. Of course, there are a lot of inconspicuous benefits, but there's a definite, tangible, conspicuous outcome that they're driving. So very, very happy that we could do that along with Microsoft for our customers.
Bhaskar:
Fantastic, Anirudh, and thanks so much for saying that your partnership with us is helping us scale and drive value for our joint customers. And on the same note, let's talk a little bit about our partnership.
What is your experience, and some of the best practices that you feel have helped you scale your business, working with Microsoft?
Anirudh:
We started our business with Microsoft as the only Alliance partner. In fact, even today, it’s like more than 95% of our channel partnership that we have with any other OEM, which means primarily it's the only partnership. With Microsoft, we've been able to really leverage the GTM channel. It used to be called the build-with and sell-with motion, as we were partnering with Microsoft in the initial days. And I think where it really worked well was the industry depth that we brought in, and Microsoft’s ecosystem that was present in those organizations.
So for an organization that's trying to leverage cloud for a specific outcome, Microsoft became a very obvious choice. And it helped us cruise in those customer ecosystems just because we brought in that industry expertise on the platform. I would say the mantra that has worked really well for us is: it's not just the tech, it's not just a solution that you may have for a particular kind of customers; it's the industry depth and the overall industry maturity that has really worked for us.
When I say industry maturity, what it means is: In a very compliant way, your ability to connect with all the legacy enterprise, give them the security layer, give them the governance layer, give them the consumption layer (the consumption of data in the BI or AI downstream applications), give them the application layer—and give it as a suite that a customer could then manifest, not just for driving an outcome, but also ensuring that every single compliance and the security, CISO, firewalls, and use cases are also met. Which has been, I think, the biggest differentiator in terms of pushing Microsoft Azure, because Microsoft has been present in these enterprises—specifically Azure, and now the AI platform—just because this enterprise maturity that Microsoft platform makes it.
Bhaskar:
Fantastic. Thanks for saying what you did. And we ourselves truly cherish this relationship, your industry orientation, your solutioning depth, and your committed partnership clearly allows us to scale as well.
So last question, really, Anirudh, if there's one thing that you would like to leave the audience with, what would that be?
Anirudh:
I think there is this big catchphrase in the market saying, there's agentic, there is AI, there’s whatnot. Of course, the LLMs have now probably become more commoditized. And I would say that even agents will become a commodity tomorrow, if not today. And it's not about who's going to sell agents fast. It's going to be about who's going to create the agentic economy that is governed, that is traceable, that is explainable, and most importantly, efficacious. Right? If you can think on those four parameters before even starting to think of an agentic ecosystem, I think that's where the world is headed.
And what has changed for us as a partner is of course the domain intelligence on top of it. We're not just selling agent; we are selling domain agents. For example, if I go to an oil and gas industry, I would talk to upstream, midstream, downstream—all three of them. In upstream itself, I'll go to exploration production; in exploration I'll go to lithology; and then I have a well completion agent.
Now, it might still be a chat summarizer; it might still be a RAG agent with three or four tech skills—but where I've really gone deep in the domain is, in a very specific use case, how does it take the persona of a person who's writing the well completion exercise, and how does it help that person? And the way to think about how to manifest AI in an organization is: It's going to be human and the AI, and I would say Microsoft and maybe Celebal Tech are the plus. We are the enabler. We're not AI ourselves; we are the enablers. I think that's the way to manifest AI in these large enterprise ecosystems.
Bhaskar:
Wonderfully put. So an agentic economy, and truly brought to life with the power of partnership between Celebal and Microsoft.
Anirudh, thank you so much for sharing your insights and your amazing journey. From the Microsoft side, we wish you the very best, and looking forward to scaling this partnership to completely new levels altogether. Thank you so very much.
Anirudh:
Thank you so much.