Special category honours AI trailblazers: Meet the league of innovators across sustainability, accessibility, and more at the ET AI Awards 2025

The tone was set for the day when Deepak Ajwani, Editor, EconomicTimes.com, said that the first-ever ET AI Conclave & Awards 2025, held on February 26, 2026, in Bengaluru, was a culmination of six months of relentless research and rigour. Editorial research came together with the rigorous evaluation framework deployed by Ernst & Young (EY), as Evaluation Partner for the ET AI Awards 2025, ultimately meeting the expert opinions and nuanced perspectives of the esteemed jurors to finally have an illustrious list of winners across more than 40 awards as part of the inaugural edition.

The Special category of the ET AI Awards 2025 celebrates trailblazers embedding AI into core operations, rewarding innovative models, platforms, sustainability drives, customer service leaps, HR efficiencies, and access enablers that propel real-world adoption and national competitiveness.

Meet the winners under the Special category of the ET AI Awards 2025:

• Best AI-Powered Platform:
  Jio Platforms Ltd
  Uniphore
• Best Use of AI for Sustainability:
  Jio Platforms Ltd
  

• Best Use of AI in Customer Service: We have joint winners here:
  ICICI Lombard General Insurance Co. Ltd.
  ixigo

• Best Use of AI in HR:
  Welspun Transformation Services Limited
  

• AI Access Enabler:
  Masters’ Union
  CEAT Limited

The rigorous methodology that ensured rigour
EY deployed a rigorous, metrics-driven methodology that combined technical due diligence with business and impact assessment across startups, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and large businesses. Each entry was benchmarked on a 100-point framework spanned the AI value chain: AI layer sophistication from basic machine learning (ML) to deep learning, agentic, and LLM-based systems; IP ownership and novelty; proven performance via demonstrations, pilots, metrics, and client feedback; team AI depth; product clarity and differentiation; use case robustness; and commercial traction via revenue growth, retention, and product-market fit. Calibrated scoring guaranteed fairness, enforced by strict eligibility norms on incorporation, revenue, headcount, funding, and IP.

All submissions and supporting artefacts were reviewed under a confidentiality protocol to be presented to the esteemed jurors to identify high-impact, scalable, and responsible AI deployments.

The jurors who ensured true gems were rewarded
The ET AI Awards 2025 was helmed by Dr Vishal Sikka, Founder and CEO of Vianai Systems Inc, as the Jury Chair, joined by Abhishek Singh, IAS, Additional Secretary at MeitY and CEO of IndiaAI Mission; Naveen Tewari, Co-Founder and CEO of InMobi and Glance; Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-founder, Group CEO and Executive Vice-Chairman of Fractal, and Nasscom Vice Chairperson; Sharad Sanghi, CEO of Neysa Networks and Chairman of NTT GDC India; Darren Mowry, VP Global Startups at Google Cloud; Prukalpa Sankar, Co-Founder of Atlan; Sandhya Devanathan, VP & Head of India and Southeast Asia at Meta; and Kirthiga Reddy, CEO and Co-Founder of OptimizeGEO.ai & Verix.io.

The ET AI Awards 2025 had more than 1,000 nominations from which more than 40 winners were chosen across categories. The ET AI Conclave & Awards 2025 has L&T Finance as the NBFC partner, Snowflake as the AI Data Cloud Centre, EY as the Evaluation Partner, and T-Hub as the Ecosystem Partner, and is driven by BYD, with Indri as the celebration partner and Zoho as the Technology Partner. Vahdam India, Vaaree, Natch, and Andamen are the event’s gifting partners.