60 cr touchpoints, 140 cr transactions a minute: A deep dive inside Bharti Airtel’s AI-driven digital core with Pradipt Kapoor – Express Computer
At Bharti Airtel, the numbers offer a glimpse into the scale at which the company now operates, over 60 crore customer touchpoints and more than 140 crore transactions moving through its systems every minute. Behind these volumes lies a complex digital backbone that spans networks, cloud infrastructure, and data platforms, quietly enabling everyday interactions at a national level. For Pradipt Kapoor, Chief Digital & Information Officer, Bharti Airtel, and CEO of Xtelify, working at this scale is less about managing systems in isolation and more about ensuring that speed, resilience, and innovation evolve together as part of a continuously adapting architecture.
"My mandate at Airtel very clearly is to put customers and the country at the centre of every technology decision we make," Kapoor says early in the conversation, setting the tone for what is clearly a philosophy anchored in purpose as much as performance. "I see my role as simultaneously driving business velocity, safeguarding digital resilience and building new digital capabilities that genuinely improve lives."
It is a triad that might sound ambitious in isolation, but Kapoor is quick to point out that at Airtel's scale, these are not parallel tracks, they are deeply interdependent. The network must be intelligent enough to anticipate demand, resilient enough to remain invisible in its reliability, and flexible enough to continuously evolve. Whether it is embedding AI into customer engagement, re-architecting the cloud backbone, or building platforms for enterprises, the underlying question remains consistent. "If it will empower more citizens, more securely and more affordably, while also strengthening India's digital foundations," he explains, "then it is the right direction."
This idea of building for the country, not just the company, runs like a thread through Airtel's digital strategy. Success, in Kapoor's view, is not defined merely by internal metrics, but by how deeply Airtel's platforms integrate into the nation's digital fabric. It is about becoming part of the invisible infrastructure that powers businesses, connects communities, and enables economic momentum.
That ambition becomes particularly evident in Airtel's cloud journey, which has evolved far beyond a conventional enterprise IT transformation. While many organisations debate between public and private cloud, Airtel approaches the question from a fundamentally different lens, one that is rooted in sovereignty, latency, and trust.
"At Airtel, our cloud choices start from a very simple question of what is right for our customers and for India's digital infrastructure," Kapoor notes. "Public, private, edge or hybrid is not merely technology for us; they are tools to deliver secure, low latency and trusted experiences at national scale."
This philosophy has led Airtel to build one of the largest private cloud environments in the country, not just to serve its own needs, but to extend those capabilities outward. The emergence of its sovereign cloud platform signals a broader strategic intent, one that aligns closely with India's data sovereignty requirements and regulatory landscape. Kapoor is unequivocal about where certain workloads belong. "For workloads that are highly sensitive, mission critical or deeply tied to Indian citizens' data, we default to sovereign and private cloud environments," he says, underscoring the importance of control, compliance, and resilience.
Yet, the real story lies not just in infrastructure, but in what Airtel is building on top of it. Xtelify, Kapoor's other mandate, represents a significant evolution in how the company thinks about its own digital capabilities. What began as an internal engine to manage Airtel's immense scale is now being reimagined as a platform for the broader ecosystem.
"Xtelify is built on the experience of Airtel's own journey of operating at scale, resilience and compliance," Kapoor explains.
But turning that internal capability into an external platform was anything but straightforward. The complexity lay in rethinking decades of tightly coupled systems and transforming them into modular, reusable components. "The hardest part was not the technology choices alone, but abstracting decades of telco processes… into modular services," he says.
This transformation required a fundamental shift in architecture, from monolithic systems to microservices, from closed environments to open APIs, and from single-tenant systems to multi-tenant platforms. The goal was not just scalability, but universality, the ability to serve different geographies, partners, and use cases without losing consistency or control. "The complexity lay in turning what used to be tightly coupled internal systems into an open, multi-tenant, API-driven platform," Kapoor adds.
At the core of this platform lies data, vast, continuous, and deeply interconnected. Airtel's converged data engine brings together signals from networks, customers, and channels, creating a unified intelligence layer that powers AI-driven decision-making at scale.
"We run over 60 crore user touchpoints and more than 140 crore transactions a minute," Kapoor points out, illustrating the sheer magnitude at which these systems operate. "AI models can predict intent, personalise journeys and flag issues before the customer even calls us."
This shift, from reactive to predictive, marks a significant turning point in customer experience. It is no longer about responding to issues, but about anticipating them, often before they are even visible. However, Kapoor is equally clear that such capabilities must be built on a foundation of trust.
"Privacy is not about compliance but an architectural principle," he says, emphasising that every AI and data use case is designed with consent, purpose limitation, and data minimisation at its core.
In a world where data is both an asset and a responsibility, this approach reflects a deeper understanding of the balance between innovation and accountability. It also reinforces Airtel's broader positioning as a trusted custodian of digital infrastructure.
That trust, however, is tested most rigorously in moments of failure, or the absence of it. In telecom, reliability is not negotiable. The expectation is simple, the network must always work.
"In telecom, 'always-on' is not just a tag line but the very core of our promise to customers," Kapoor says.
Delivering on that promise requires more than robust systems; it demands intelligent systems. Airtel's move to microservices and cloud-native architectures is complemented by zero-trust security models, automated failovers, and self-healing mechanisms. These are not add-ons, but intrinsic to the design.
Within this architecture, Xtelify plays a central role. Kapoor describes it as a "digital nucleus" that provides end-to-end visibility across networks, applications, and data pipelines. "Our teams get real-time intelligence to be able to intervene before customers feel pain," he explains.
As the conversation turns to the future, Kapoor's vision becomes even more expansive. The distinction between internal IT systems and external digital services, he believes, is rapidly dissolving.
"I believe that this blurring of lines is not just inevitable, but strategic to Airtel," he points out.
In this emerging model, Airtel's internal capabilities, whether in cloud, AI, CPaaS, or data platforms, are no longer confined to the organisation. They are being opened up as enterprise-grade offerings for partners, governments, and businesses.
"Whenever we build differentiated capabilities for ourselves, we will increasingly open them as platforms for customers and partners," Kapoor notes.
This shift signals a broader transformation, from delivering services to enabling ecosystems. Xtelify, in this context, is not just a product, but a strategic bridge between Airtel's internal strengths and external opportunities.
As Kapoor frames it, Airtel's role is evolving into something far larger than connectivity. It is becoming the underlying fabric on which digital innovation can thrive, a shared infrastructure that powers not just its own growth, but that of an entire economy.
In his words, Airtel aims to be the "digital superhighway and shared digital rails" that enable India's future.
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