Genesys’ Chairman and CEO Tony Bates
Global leader in tech-based solution provider to over 8,000 companies globally for customer experience, Genesys’ Chairman and CEO Tony Bates affirmed his company’s effort to further expand the business in India. He also said that Indian’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) units have been good learning for his company.“We will continue to invest. We will continue to grow there,” Bates told businessline during Genesys’ annual mega event Experience 2026 here. Further, he said that India is a very fast-growing market for the company. “We have quite a large investment in India. We anchored more in Chennai. We have a team in Hyderabad as well and it is mainly R&D, and they work on many aspects of the product. They’re part of our existing Engage product as well as our Genesys Cloud product,” he highlighted.According to the company, during Q2 (May 1-July 31) of FY27, Genesys Cloud ARR grew by over 48 per cent as compared to corresponding quarter of last fiscal. India is a core part of Genesys’ global product development. It is the company’s third-largest R&D hub worldwide and a leading contributor to its patent filings, meaning much of the technology used by Genesys customers globally is built by teams based in India. Centres in Chennai, Hyderabad, and Bangalore work on advances in speech analytics, AI, and cloud infrastructure that feed into Genesys’ global product portfolio.When asked about learnings from India, Bates listed BPO. “When I joined the company, we didn’t focus much on BPOs. We felt that it was a low margin business. They weren’t necessarily going to be a growth driver for our business. But what I’ve seen changed, I’ve seen this very much in India, (It’s) is a whole new way of thinking. I think about them much more as almost at the front end of the knowledge to help companies,” Bates said. Further, other big learning is just the tremendous growth in consumers, their appetite to get more online and so on.“We can go where the business needs to grow. India is growing very fast. Saudi Arabia is growing very fast. Parts of Latin America are growing very fast. And often they’re much more digitally native to start with. India is much more mobile centric first in its approach. It is very important market for us,” he said.According to Genesys’ State of Customer Experience report, Indian consumers are more optimistic about AI-powered customer service than consumers anywhere else in the world. 94 per cent expect AI to improve service speed and quality, well ahead of the 76 per cent global average. This high level of trust is giving Indian businesses a strong mandate to modernise their customer service operations faster than most other markets.Furthermore, 52 per cent of Indian CX (Customer Experience) leaders are actively modernising their technology stacks for cloud and AI, compared with just 32 per cent globally, showing India is ahead of the curve in investment. However, this pace of investment hasn’t yet translated into faster service on the ground, leaving a gap between how quickly organisations are adopting new technology and how quickly customers actually experience improvements, company officials said.(The reporter is in Las Vegas at the invitation of Genesys)Published on September 3, 2026
