On the morning of June 20, 2026, senior HR, L&D, and Talent leaders gathered at JW Marriott, Pune, for iMocha’s “Look Beyond the Label” Executive Roundtable, hosted in partnership with Flexi Roundtables and Catalyst 24.
Setting the Stage: Skills Are the New Currency
The theme “Look Beyond the Label” wasn’t just a tagline for the morning. It was a provocation that the room took seriously from the first introduction. Across technology, automotive, manufacturing, financial services, and HR tech, every leader present was wrestling with some version of the same problem: how do you move beyond job titles and degrees to actually understand what someone can do?
The conversation that followed was candid, practitioner-led, and refreshingly free of jargon. What emerged was a clear picture of where Indian organizations are on the skills-first journey, and where the real friction lies.
The Fireside: Ashish Patharkar on Transformation at Scale
The session opened with a fireside chat between iMocha CEO Amit Mishra and Ashish Patharkar, Former EVP HR and Board Member at Capgemini, one of the few organizations in the world that has operationalized skills-first workforce design at genuine scale. Ashish’s perspective set the intellectual tone for everything that followed.
His central argument: don’t start with people, start with process. Map your core business processes end to end, identify what can be automated, define what remains distinctly human, and only then design the skills you actually need. On learning, he was equally direct: long classroom programs don’t work anymore. And on the effort required, he was characteristically honest: change management consumes more than half of any transformation effort.
“We track skill parameters across multiple dimensions and focus on modular, hands-on learning with peer benchmarking. We were able to redeploy a large cohort of people reskilled in just eight weeks with a GenAI focus. Skills truly become the currency for rewards, but the change management required is huge.”
- Ashish Patharkar, Former HR Leader, Capgemini
The Capgemini model, dynamic skill profiles built from assessments, peer feedback, project history, and performance data, offered the room a concrete reference point for what evidence-based talent management looks like in practice.
From the Floor: The Challenges Leaders Are Actually Facing
After the fireside, the session opened into a participant-driven discussion, with challenges surfaced anonymously and then discussed openly. What follows are the themes that dominated the room, in the words of the leaders who raised them.
Making Skills Visible: The Evidence Problem
The inability to validate skills beyond what's on a resume came up almost immediately. Self-reported data, managers' instincts, and past performance reviews are still the dominant signals used to assess existing talent, and leaders across the room felt the inadequacy of that picture.
“AI can be plugged into all your internal systems to provide a comprehensive employee profile and provide more evidence-based evaluations based on actual work being done.”
- Talent Development Lead at a leading IT Company
Upskilling at Scale and Measuring Whether It Works
Almost every organization in the room is running upskilling or reskilling programs. The problem isn’t the learning. It’s knowing whether the learning has actually translated into capability that shows up in the work.
“AI awareness is progressing well; the next focus area is driving consistent adoption in day-to-day work and implementing measurable outcomes to assess the effectiveness and business value of AI learning initiatives.”
- Kapil Kella, NCS Group
Captain Shantanu from Suzlon, whose team has been among the more active AI adopters in the room, pointed to a shift that goes deeper than any individual programs:
“We are seeing a massive, fundamental shift in how you learn post the AI evolution. The organizations that recognize this early and rewire their learning models will be the ones that come out ahead.”
- Capt. Shantanu C, Suzlon
Internal Mobility: The Push, the Pull, and the Organizational Friction
Internal mobility was one of the session’s most actively discussed themes. The appetite is there from both organizations and employees. The friction lies in the mechanics: role definitions, manager mindsets, and the challenge of moving people across very different functional worlds.
“The focus has to be on redeploying your resources and internal mobility, especially helping employees from different domains like IT and manufacturing work together. We think of it as a push and pull approach.”
- Archana Saraf, Tata Motors
Tata Motors’ experience of hiring IT talent directly into manufacturing teams, and the significant manager mindset shift that required, was one of the session’s most cited examples of what genuinely blended teams look like in practice.
“We need a blended approach on hiring and internal mobility. The real question is, how do you hire employees from a tech organization and merge them into a manufacturing organization?”
- Dilip Choudhary, Syngenta
Syngenta’s internal gigs program, where employees apply to short cross-functional assignments ranging from a few hours to several days, was highlighted as a practical model for building mobility from the ground up.
AI Adoption: Acceptance Is the Real Barrier
For all the conversation about tools and programs, the roundtable kept returning to a more fundamental challenge: getting people, and leaders, to genuinely accept and use AI as a normal part of how work gets done. Not as a proof of concept, but as a default.
“Acceptance and adoption of AI across every industry and geography is what matters. We believe in rewarding failures. We learn from what goes wrong, what would go wrong, and what can go wrong. There’s also a genuine lack of AI talent and talent with AI skills in the market.”
- Priyadarshee Pradhan, Yazaki
The question of how to build internal capability, rather than simply buying it externally, came through strongly in several contributions. iCertis has been working through this by making AI strategy an organization-wide commitment rather than a function-level initiative.
“Adoption of AI and learning go hand in hand. We need an org-level AI strategy that keeps AI at the center and makes the whole organization AI-native, and that means creating a team of AI champions internally who can train or inspire others.”
- Shwetambari Salgar, iCertis
The point about AI champions resonated strongly across the room. Distributing expertise, building networks of practitioners who can support peers with domain-specific, hands-on guidance, was consistently seen as more effective than centralizing it.
“Acceptance of AI and adoption is the main challenge. It’s not just about deploying the tools. It’s about getting people at every level to genuinely embrace them as part of how they work.”
- Swati Nair, FIS
“We struggle with AI readiness and understanding of AI, and we see it most clearly at the recruiter level.”
- Mayura B, CRISIL
The Questions That Kept the Room Thinking
Some of the most valuable moments in the session were the ones that sparked the most debate. Three questions kept resurfacing throughout the conversation, and they're worth sitting with:
How do you measure the real-world effectiveness of upskilling programs, beyond completion rates? What are the acceptable boundaries when using AI to infer employee skills from workplace data, such as emails, meeting transcripts, activity logs? And how do you operationalize evidence-based internal mobility at scale while respecting local labour laws, union agreements, and employee consent?
These aren’t edge cases. They sit at the hard center of the workforce transformation challenge, and the fact that a room full of senior practitioners is still working through them is precisely why conversations like this one matter.
What Comes Next
The Pune roundtable was the opening chapter of iMocha’s Look Beyond the Label series. The conversation continues this summer, with executive roundtables in Atlanta (July 14), Dallas (July 21), and Los Angeles (July 23), bringing the same practitioner-led, evidence-first spirit to HR and talent leaders across the US.
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