Author Profile

Nikhil Malhotra

Chief AI & Innovation Officer, Tech Mahindra

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Nikhil has been a researcher all his life and is now leading the growth of AI and Quantum Computing research within Tech Mahindra. His area of business research is how quantum Computing, AI, and neuroscience would inspire the growth of AI and the next change in society, business, and humanity. He has won numerous awards, including the 2020, 2021, and 2023 Innovation Congress awards, for being the most innovative leader in India.

Nikhil is also a TEDx speaker and the author of a best-seller book – Courage, the Journey of an Innovator. One of his long-standing visions has been to enable machines to talk in the local Indian dialects. Most notably, he has spearheaded Project Indus, Tech Mahindra's seminal effort to build Indic LLM (homegrown large language model), which was successfully launched globally in June 2024.

Nikhil holds a master's degree in computing with a specialization in distributed computing from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, and is an avid physicist.

Insights

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Telecom networks generate more data than their operations teams can monitor, analyze, or keep up with. As a result, network operators face constant pressure from increased device volumes, a growing user base, and ever-changing customer expectations. Most operators are still managing their network with a static toolset, reactive workflows, and manual decisions that fail to scale. Faults take longer to find and fix, and customers feel the impact.

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Evaluating NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning Through Project Indus As governments and enterprises pursue AI strategies for regional needs, the challenge is no longer simply accessing foundation models. The challenge is identifying architectures that can balance quality, inference efficiency, multilingual capability, and deployment economics on a scale.