AIm High, India

Zoho Corp’s Sridhar Vembu believes the country has the potential and IT talent to be a leader in artificial intelligence innovation, and what’s needed is a strong policy and a national consensus on AI use

- Rohit Chintapali

THE AUDACITY OF ZOHO Corporation’s CEO Sridhar Vembu has always been admired in the corporate circles in India. But his endeavour of leading development from the “local” is nothing short of an enigma. A testament to this is Zoho Corporation’s Tenkasi office, located 630 km from Chennai, which hosts more than 700 employees.

But the Tenkasi office is just one of the five Zoho hub offices that accommodate up to 1,000 employees, while smaller branches or ‘spoke offices’ house up to 100 employees. Under Vembu’s leadership, Zoho envisions each hub office to have a few spoke offices associated with it for infrastructure support and team collaboration.

Zoho currently has five hub offices, including ones in Chennai, Tenkasi, and Renigunta and around 30 spoke offices presently in India. Nearly 2,000 employees are working out of Zoho’s hub-and-spoke offices in villages and Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns, out of which about 1,000 employees have been reportedly hired locally. As part of their rural empowerment efforts, the spoke offices periodically conduct free career awareness sessions in surrounding colleges, as well as upskilling workshops and incubation programmes to identify and hire talented local youth.

Nation-building From The Rural