Driving UAE’s digital ambitions: How HCLSoftware’s XDO Blueprint aligns with Vision 2031

Gulf News: What leadership lesson guided XDO’s design, and how does it mesh with the UAE’s 2031 digital ambitions?

Kalyan Kumar, CPO, HCLSoftware: The XDO Blueprint (Experience, Data, and Operations) emerged from a simple leadership insight: sustainable value happens when Experience, Data, and Operations converge around customer outcomes. We asked what CXOs actually measure — memorable experiences, lean operations, and data intelligence at scale.

XDO stitches these touchpoints into one self-managing engine. In essence, it orchestrates customer journeys, extracts intelligence from every click, and feeds these insights back into operations, security and business processes. In essence, it creates a self-managing flywheel where experience generates data, data enhances operations, and better operations elevate the next experience.

How do you accelerate GenAI rollouts while safeguarding the Gulf’s strict data-governance norms?

We practice “Pragmatic AI” — choosing the right AI for specific use cases while maintaining strict sovereignty controls. Every HCLSoftware product — Unica+, BigFix, Actian Data Intelligence Platform offers deployment flexibility in terms of how customers want to license, consume, and deploy. For example, if a customer requires a private-cloud instance in an Abu Dhabi data centre or a sovereign AWS UAE region, we provide that flexibility. This “Glocal” approach satisfies the region’s strict data-residency and privacy statutes without slowing innovation.

We embed ethical safeguards, too. Our MarTech engine supports native consent-based marketing: individuals can opt in or out at will, ensuring campaigns respect personal boundaries. Combine pragmatic model selection, strict sovereignty controls and built-in privacy tooling, and Gulf enterprises can launch GenAI pilots at F1 speed while remaining fully compliant. It’s about velocity with governance, not velocity versus governance.

What’s your game plan for cultivating local tech talent and integrating it with HCLSoftware’s global teams?

Our goal isn’t just hiring — it’s building and exporting product innovation from the region. We’re establishing the UAE and Riyadh engineering centres for product development, not just localisation, alongside our existing hubs in Morocco and Israel where we run a major cybersecurity R&D hub.

We’re launching a MarTech cloud region with Unica+ hosted on AWS UAE, enabling engineers to code, test, and launch features directly with early-adopter customers. We’re also expanding services teams that already operate with local telcos, ensuring a pipeline where graduate hires can start on support or customisation projects and lean into core engineering tracks.

Integration happens through shared roadmaps, identical DevSecOps pipelines, and cross-border collaboration. Whether an algorithm originates in Noida, Tel Aviv or Dubai, it lands in the same repository, goes through the same automated tests, and ships under the same version number. This federated model preserves local cultural relevance while tapping into our 5,000-engineer brain trust worldwide. Over the next few years, expect to see flagship features — especially in Experience Analytics and Intelligent Operations — born in the Gulf and then exported globally.

Stemming from the Ferrari collaboration, which high-performance leadership habits can Gulf enterprises adopt today?

Ferrari’s exclusivity stems from three habits worth emulating. First, passion and pride in heritage — they guard a 75-year legacy just as HCL next August begins its 50th-year celebrations. Progress should build on origin stories, not erase them. Second, relentless customer centricity — Ferrari obsesses over every fan experience detail - such as the sound, sight, even the smell of the garage. In software, we translate this into deep user empathy, ensuring every click feels purposeful.

Third, purpose-driven excellence — culture, pride, and purpose create repeatable elite performance. During our partnership, their engineers and ours collaborated to reduce both milliseconds and security risks. The lesson for Gulf enterprises here is: honour your legacy, stay laser-focused on customers, and embed purpose so deeply that excellence becomes muscle memory. Do that consistently, and you’ll hit pole position in any sector.

What early wins will signal that HCLSoftware’s new Dubai hub is hitting its mark over the next 12 months?

We already serve hundreds of Gulf customers, so our focus is on accelerating adoption of our newest capabilities. I believe public advocacy is the toughest metric — customers only speak when they see tangible ROI. So, success means additional organisations publicly sharing how Unica+, Intelligent Operations, BigFix, Workload Automation, Uno Platform or Actian Data Intelligence Platform transformed their KPIs over the next 12 months.

We’re also tracking how fast regional firms adopt our soon-to-launch MarTech cloud instance, pilot-to-production conversions on our Intelligent Operations stack, and code contributions from Gulf engineers to global repositories. When regional banks, retailers, and Ministries share transformation stories and the underlying commits bearing Dubai and Riyadh time stamps, we’ll know the hub has become indispensable.

How do you keep global product teams aligned and motivated amid the break-neck pace of AI innovation?

Product development success requires smart scale over raw scale. We maintain small, elite teams and amplify their capabilities through AI co-pilots. Currently, 3,500 AI assistants support our 5,000 engineers, handling code generation, testing, security scans, and support triage. Our goal is achieving 5,000 co-pilots — a perfect one-to-one human-machine partnership.

Every sprint backlog includes a KPI: How many tasks did AI accelerate this week? Results are showcased in monthly “walk the talk” demos — some of which I shared this morning—so teams see immediate payoff. That visibility boosts morale and fuels healthy peer rivalry.

We also ensure alignment through unified pipelines: no matter where code originates, it passes through identical DevSecOps stages, making integrations seamless. Continuous learning is baked in via internal hackathons on pragmatic AI use cases, so curiosity remains sky-high. In short, we motivate by giving brilliant people powerful AI sidekicks, clear outcomes and the autonomy to innovate swiftly—without ever compromising on quality or governance.

How are ESG goals and digital ethics shaping your product decisions for Gulf clients pursuing net-zero agendas?

A “green future” is one of the five macro tech-trends that are top of mind of CXOs. We prioritise pragmatic use over blind adoption. We approach AI implementation pragmatically, evaluating necessity and scale to optimise energy consumption rather than pursuing adoption for its own sake.

Our products are designed with deployment flexibility — customers can choose cloud, on-premises, or hybrid giving customers levers to optimise carbon footprint. For example, our MarTech platform includes native consent-based marketing – that design respects user autonomy and prevents needless data processing, which in turn saves energy. While our Intelligent Operations suite helps customers right-size compute, turning off idle resources and reducing emissions.

Ethical AI guidelines are embedded in product roadmaps: explainability functions, bias monitoring and energy-impact dashboards ship as standard, not add-ons. When customers in the Gulf region aim for net-zero, we give them both the tooling to measure ICT emissions and the freedom to deploy in sustainable zones. The net result is technology that advances digital transformation agenda and ESG targets simultaneously— a dual imperative that boards across the region consider non-negotiable for long-term competitiveness.